I came back to the game last year after 5 years away. Since coming back, I've been mostly operating using my old saved macro sets, which were made for the 75 era. Those worked fine when I had only a few jobs and limited gear options. But now with 13 level 99 jobs (with 9 more coming sooner or later), and more gear options than I can stuff into even our greatly expanded inventories, I'm reaching the limit of how far I can go within that framework. So I'm finally breaking down and looking into what I can do with Windower, Gear Swap, etc.
One of the things I'm looking at doing is condensing this enormous library of white and black magic spells used by multiple jobs into a manageable number of macro sets. For example, I've read in one of the threads here how you can do something like using a Paralyze macro that casts Paralyze when targeting an enemy, but has Gear Swap cancel and replace it with Paralyna when targeting a player. That's the sort of thing I may very well incorporate into my new setup.
What I'd appreciate some help with is how to do something a little more ambitious and condense the large quantity of elemental spells into a small macro set. Right now, I'm thinking primarily of the nukes for the six main elements. Between the 5 tiers of single-target, 2 tiers of ancient magic, 4 tiers of -ga spells, 2 tiers of -ra spells, and the -ja spells, I count around 84 elemental nukes, most of which are at least situationally useful. I'd like to be able to quickly access at least most of those without having to continuously scroll through either the magic menu or macro pages.
I kind of have a half-formed idea of having a set of six macros (one for each element), and then manipulating variables that would determine which spell is cast. So suppose I had a Tier variable set to 3, a type variable set to "-ga", and hit my /ma "Fire" <t> macro. Gear Swap could look at the variables, cancel Fire, and replace it with Firaga III.
Right now, I'm struggling with how to do that variable manipulation. Ideally, I think I'd like to have a set of macros on the page with my nuke macros. There would be a set of 5 that would be Tier1 through Tier5. Then another set for Single, -ga, etc. But I have no idea what to put into those macros to accomplish my goal.
Am I even on the right track here? Does what I'm looking to do sound feasible? Or is there some other method I should be considering?
On a similar note, I also have this idea of using this macro book(s) for all jobs that use any significant amount of white or black magic. So they'd be my primary books for jobs like WHM, BLM, SCH, and RDM. But then for jobs like SMN or BRD, instead of duplicating all those spells in multiple books, I'd like to do things like have a macro in my BRD book that sends me to the white magic book, and then a macro in the white magic book to send me back to my BRD book. That's easy enough to do. The tricky part is that I'd like to do the exact same thing on SMN, without having separate macros in my white magic book for going back to SMN or going back to BRD. I'd like to have a single MainJob macro that would set me to my BRD book if I'm on BRD, or my SMN book if I'm on SMN. That would then extend to COR, GEO, or any other job where I might want to access that main magic book. Is there something I could do to accomplish this? Maybe having that MainJob macro execute a script, or somehow trigger AutoExec?
One final question. Since I'm going to be doing whole macro book tear-ups, are there any good macro editor options out there? This can certainly be done from within the client, but I'm sure it's going to be a very slow task.
