Macro Test Dummies.

Added in the February 12th, 2025 Update.

A few infos, I'll edit as I poke.

• multiple nameless targets (cardians) just outside of the three Jeuno zones, inside the walls (beside the Fields of Valor books)

• no HP bar

• /check as Impossible to gauge.

• take zero damage from everything

• do not award skillups

• HP stays at 100% at all times no matter what (checked with addons after casting Dia III)

• caveat to the above: critical hits still do 0 damage, but appear to lower their HP to 90%. HP stays at 90% until the next action is taken on them, then it immediately jumps back to 100% no matter what (even if it's another crit). Tried with Mighty Strikes, couldn't get it to under 90%

• immune to all resistable debuffs ("Completely resists!" message)

• unresistable debuffs (Dia, Helices, and other guaranteed landings) do take effect and give back an expiration message, but do no damage

• only stay claimed for about ~6 seconds after the last action is performed on them. Name goes back to yellow shortly after disengaging, or after a spell is done casting.

• Jump and High Jump (WAR/DRG) both gave me 0 TP with the normal engaged set, but 85 TP with Crusher Gauntlets and Ostro Greaves, and 32 Store TP in gear (Chango mainhand). Jumping with Ukon instead of Chango (22 STP total) gave me 79 TP each jump. This is basically just Jump TP from gear times Store TP.

• Tomahawk did not let me damage the dummy (/cry)

• Trusts can be called while the dummy has a red name, but the timing is tricky, see below

• they appear to accrue regular enmity, but to shed it immediately after the action that caused it. If you try to call a trust too soon after an action you'll get the "can't call trusts, you have enmity" message, but a second later it goes away, until immediately after the next action

• outside of the 0 dmg and resist everything things, they appear to have floored stats. I can't get accuracy to uncap even with a Blinding Potion (tho I didn't test under level 99), and I am landing way more criticals than ever, which would point to them having really low DEX

It appears that, as the name suggests, they designed these mostly so that players could have available target for ingame <stnpc> macros to work properly.

The thing about "macro timing" does not make a lot of sense to me, because there's no way to discern if, for example, a midcast set effectively swapped in time, since there's no feedback of any sort from the action, it's all zero and resists.

Personal conclusion: so far these appear to be decent-ish targets for complicated gearswap profiles that do a lot of stuff, to make sure the right gear is going up as desired. The problem is that I can also just warp to Xarcabard [S] and have a bunch of mobs at 5 yalms from the HP to test on, while these take an extra zoning and some walk after HP to reach. I guess these don't die, but generally I spend enough time in notepad++ that when I alt+tab to the game the mobs are already respawned, so ultimately the entire thing is a bit meh. The best use appears to be Scholar Immanence skillchains, since you can technically do an infinitely long SC here that way.

I was almost right with my prediction, that damage will be heavily reduced, but SE being SE, made it even worse XD

On the other hand they might simply know their community. If they made that cardian with 99%DT and 100000000HP I can bet people would try to actually kill it and check if it drops something XD

Would have been nice to use them for TP testing. Ah well

Unless you can break latents on them they are completely useless, no skillups, 0 dmg. You can't use them to test anything.

Also I really don't like the name they used and I hope they change it, I wish they could call them just battle cardians or something. At least the name isn't shown unless you target them, but something I always liked about XI is they tried to respect the immersion of the world, they take its lore seriously and don't present themselves as a game.

Fujito seems to treat XI more as a game, and I'm not a fan of that at all and he needs to stop doing that imo.

They went to great lengths to explain everything, to have this deep lore, to make you want to engage with things seriously (they even put effort to explain ambuscade) and then they add "MACRO TEST DUMMY".

Not cool at all.

This is a great point and someone should post it on OF.
Costs them nothing to rename them to something and I'm sure the JP will agree.

Personally I wish they'd also gave real names to AMAN Reclaimers, Validators, Liaison, etc etc... crappy names but at least they're partially in-lore I guess.

To be fair, they did say they were adding 'macro test dummies'. I do not know why anyone would need a specific dummy to test macros, but we probably shouldn't have expected to be able to use them for game mechanic testing in the first place. Typical SE, though.

nice for testing SCH SC macros

Just wish localization had made a typographical error and called them "Macro Test, Dummy!"

Oooh helix debuff lands even though it did 0 dmg, got a helix effect wears off message

I mean, they're not GOOD, but they're not totally useless. What if you're on a low level job, or don't have gear for that job? What if you just need to test that the macro effectively casts the spell (impact), not the efficiency of the spell? You could probably test crit rate, though IDK what dex value they have...

They're extremely niche and pretty worthless for most things, but not totally without purpose. I definitely wish they would've allowed more things.

They sold them as a feature of the update and they are bad, and they could have made them good very easily. Even showing dmg numbers would have made them useful to test ws sets, and people would waste hours farting around on them.

My view of Fujito is he is a "press and hold A button to show respects" kind of guy, when Matsui was a "lower your head to pay respects" guy. They are both the same thing, but one demands you take the game seriously and the other does not and totally ruins immersion.

The name is a small thing itself, but if it happens enough he will ruin how people view the game. When you simply view XI as a game like fortnite or candy crush, it holds up far less well as a 22 year old ps2 game. It holds up far better when you take it seriously as a living breathing world called Vana'diel. Baffling they don't seem to get that.

He did a similar thing with Aegis lockstyle too, annoying asf.

They're not bad at all. They're not what we hoped for, but they do have uses, niche as they might be, and it's something that we did not use to have before. Their use is minor and not what we hoped for, but they're far from useless: two dudes on Scholar just now appeared at mine and started casting.


Joke relic weapons had been a thing far longer than Regis existed.

Joke weapons are perfectly fine, turning a prestige item into one is not.

You don't make a joke out of things people put hundreds of hours into obtaining and devalue them. This isn't about Aegis itself (inb4 someone says I made one in 5 mins), but the principle of taking a prestige item and making an almost identical joke version for everyone.

Better than nothing...I guess. It's a nice concept and we can hope they expand on it (probably not).

I just use Locus Dhamel as a punching bag

The UNM one is also great for Skilling up stuff.

I agree. There was much potential here and it was squandered. We are not surprised, we are used to it. It's a running joke. Look forward to it.

They could've done this in a lore-friendly way. Call them Jeunoan Cardians instead of Macro Test Dummy. They could've made them different levels, from Jeunoan Cardian Very Easy to Jeunoan Cardian Very Difficult (or JCVD, which might occasionally attack you back, heh).

C'mon, SE, have some fun with it.

I'd suggest "joker of coins/cups/batons/swords"

If there was a cooldown reduction for abilities while engaging those dummies people could practice more complicated stuff like SCH 1hour or BLU 1hour.

Ooh, hey, remember that crabsmithing guild apron they released a few years back as a login point item? They should make a matching shield...

Very good, but brick. no hit back!

Kinda hard to test macros on these when you can't get tp for ***can't see damage changes based on gear swaps etc. I know they didn't make them for more but I wonder how realistically difficult it would be to improve them and make them better for more things.

Changes I would like to see to make them useful.
*Add more of them, a lot more, in multiple zones.
*Allow damage. Give them the stats of real mobs sans HP which can be whatever unobtainable number they want with massive regen to make it functionally immortal.
*Can have differing levels of test dummy for each zone. Starting with lvl 0 dummies in Saruta, Gusta and Ronfaure all the way to ilvl 150+ in end game zones.
*Or alternatively, make it so you can change the level of the mob from a selection menu.

This is starting to sound like content. Make a little room in the mog garden that allows field actions, put a dummy in it with 1,000,000 HP and 1,000,000/tick regen, then let players trade soul plates of a mob to an NPC in the room to set the stats of the dummy to the stats of the mob. Much as I'd love to add "and permanently unlock that stat set for future use", I'm imagining the ridiculous amount of data that would need to be stored on the player to track their bestiary, or on the NPC to have it keep every monster's stats on file. Lot less overhead to imprint one set of stats on a soul plate.

Be really cool if they could relax the damage cap on the dummy so we could then see the real numbers we'd be putting out if 99999 weren't the limit. Might be useful information to have, let people tweak sets that are too heavy on WSD or PDL when they could get away with some STP or something instead.

I wouldn't rule out further improvements to the idea, anything they roll out is always barebones at first even during better times. I think they basically took the training dummy from FFXIV and said, let's do that. Well SE, take it a step further and turn it into Stone, Sky, Sea where you can gauge your readiness to take on certain content.

So SE has access to backend data and tracks all sorts of stuff, even if we never see it. I recall back during one of the anniversary months, there was a moogle that showed you interesting stats (how much damage you've dealt, taken, how many times you've died etc). I know these dummies are vanilla and I don't ever expect them to take these to another level, but my dream idea would be if they used these as a springboard to a new Mannequin quest that you can oufit into your Mog Garden or something with REAL value. The new Mannequin ccould behave similar to the Test Dummies, but closer to a simulator, where you are now able to control all sorts of variables to test things out in a real scenario. Attributes/attack/def/eva/geomancy resistance/debuffable/buffable/HP/resistances/absorbs etc. Track damage/damage over time, etc, and allow you to save certain parse data to the dummy. Then you can switch gear/variables and perform another test, and then compare the two sets to see differences in damage. Basically give players the ability to simulate battle scenarios in their free time. Super unlikely to happen, but the potential is certainly there if they cared enough to expand on it.

Stone, Sky, Sea basically was dps check to see if you were ready to do savage raids (this was in Heavensward, no idea how it evolved since then). One of the behind the scenes things they track and design around is content level. So, knowing you were ready to attempt Delve, or Ambu Vol1, or Omen, whatever... that would great information to give new and returning players. As it works now they just get carried or buy clears to skip progression and are often unprepared for what comes next. Would people use such a thing and attempt content suitable for them? Who knows.

This is mostly for new/returning players or someone trying out a new job, to ensure their macros are working properly without any risk. Probably should have added to the game 20 years ago. Wasn't expecting them to be useful to veteran players who already have ways to test things.

Judging by how FFXI players skip or miss the intentional design behind certain things, I don't think it would be primarily used for this purpose. I think the best that you could hope for is that it gives players a controlled environment that they can manipulate to test their battle strategies in a more practical setting, the goal being players can do more tests and have more confidence in their gear choices before heading into battle.

I don't need to know if my macro works or not, i can HP to Kamihr Drifts and pull a tiger or raaz and see if it does. What I want to know is, if using Mpaca's Staff at R17 with Set A is better than using R15 Marin Staff +1. I want to know if using Raetic Rod +1 under [insert situation here] is better than using [insert a second situation/variable here]. I want to know if using WSD+6% is better than STR+# on WS A vs WS B. How do I know if my JSE+1 neck is better than using [this other non RPable piece]; I shouldn't have to ask "at what augment rank does <piece> beat <beat>? It's stupid. Currently, Players have to come to the forums to get answers to things, and a lot of times, you get "it depends on what buffs you use (sam roll, pdl+### etc). There's so much augmented gear, at varying levels, it's impossible to eyeball which pieces are superior to others. And most players don't have the confidence in picking gear options for themselves because, outside of just being familiar with stats and gearing in general, the game doesn't tell you what's better than what, and people don't like choosing, they want to be told. Now if people could check in-game for themselves? That would be a plus. It's also hard to know how hard your macro (helix, for example) is going to hit on Ongo with whatever buffs before going into the fight, because Tigers or Raaz' don't have comparable stats.

The game is old, I get it, but it does a horrible job of helping players (even veterans) make choices. Everyone has to use external tools to get answers, but the game could easily provide at least some assistance to players in-game. Just MO

What risk? You can test your macro by pulling any adoulin monster and summoning a trust tank to hold it while you fire away. This feature being for new/returning players? How many people new do they think will use this feature? I don't see any reason why something like this can't also be tailored for veteran players.

Also, what are the alternative ways for veteran players to test things on their own? I'm curious. Because every test I see from veteran players comes from having to set up the most specific scenarios on mobs with known stats and having to get hours of data to make a conclusion (i chose level 7 rabbits using sam sub and removed my str merits etc etc). Or they go to a spreadsheet and calculate it with math (which works, but its external). There is no test method for veteran players that is satisfactory from an in-game perspective, the players just happen to be smart enough to account for all variables when doing tests, but that doesn't mean the game provides that to them.

I don't disagree with you, but that was clearly their intention to make this for those who may feel it is a risk going out somewhere to test macros. We know the enemies out there don't pose a risk, but a new player might not know that. And veteran players have been testing things for years in all kinds of ways, which is why we know as much as we do. SE wasn't going to make it any easier to figure out the game from these, because if anything it would just be used to optimize and make content even easier.

Silly rebuttal. Their own model is about optimizing our character and making content even easier?

MLing from 0-50: you get stronger, kill stuff faster, take less damage, heal more, get access to higher subs/stats, abilities = easier

RPing your gear: you get stronger, kill stuff faster, take less damage, heal more = easier

Making a Prime Weapon: You run the exact same route for 6 months, getting more proficient with muscle memory and you learn to anticipate the exact flow of battle. 200 times. It gets easier. Then you finally make a weapon so strong that it makes everything prior to having one easier.

Repeating a Gaol boss repeatedly until you beat it. Same as above, replace the number 200 with however long that takes.

The game is an MMO, all older content over time will inevitably "get easier"; it's not supposed to last for all time. That's why they make new content over time to challenge new players. Gear creep alone makes things easier.

Do you honestly believe that giving players the ability to test if Heishi Shorinken/Kunimitsu Blade:Ten is stronger than Heishi Shorinken/Hitaki Blade:Ten is going to "make things easier"?