Socials & Macro Forge

What Macros Are (and Aren't)

EverQuest Legends' built-in macro system — officially called Socials — binds up to five slash commands to a single hotbutton. Every macro is a stack of the same /commands you could type into the chat bar by hand: casting, targeting, chat calls, emotes, pet orders, and ability activation.

What socials are not is automation. There are no loops, no conditionals, no reactive triggers. A macro fires once per press, runs its lines top to bottom, and stops. That five-line ceiling is a feature: it forces every button to do one job well.

Creating a Social, Step by Step

1. Open the Actions window and click the Socials tab. The pre-set socials on the first page are worth reading — the manual itself suggests using them as examples for your own.
2. Page past the pre-filled buttons to an empty slot and right-click it once. The Edit Social window pops up.
3. Give it a short name (that's the button label) and pick a text color.
4. Fill in up to five command lines, then accept.
5. Click-and-hold the new button to lift it onto your cursor, then drop it into a hotbutton slot. Press the matching number key to fire it. With ten pages of ten hotbuttons per bar, there's room for a full library.

Baby's First Macro

Every fresh Legends character walks out of the tutorial with a pair of Boots of the Long Road — a clicky item, and the perfect first macro. Make a new social named BOOTS with these two lines, swapping CharacterName for your own name:

Line one targets you, so the click lands on yourself no matter what you had targeted. Line two activates the boots without ever opening your inventory — /useitem works by item name on Legends. Drop the button on your hotbar, press it, and you've just automated your first item click. Every macro in this guide is that same idea, scaled up.

Loadable in the Forge below as "Baby's first macro (tutorial boots)" — just change the name.

The Core Rules

Six constraints define everything about macro design in Legends. Internalize these and every macro in the library below will read like plain English.

Anatomy of a Real Macro: the Fizzle-Proof Heal

The classic teaching example. Assume your heal sits in gem 2:

If the first cast landed, the retry line does nothing — you're already mid-cast. If it fizzled, the retry catches it. That redundant-cast trick appears in nearly every casting macro worth using. Match the pause to cast time plus lag padding: a 1.0s cast wants /pause 15; a 5.0s cast wants /pause 55. (The Forge below calculates this for you.)

Text Substitution Variables

The game replaces these % tokens in chat output with live values. They're the backbone of every good group-communication macro — /g Incoming %T ! announces exactly what you're pulling, every time, with zero typing.

Keep whitespace on both sides of a variable to be safe — some clients need spaces around the token to parse it.

The Slash Command Toolbox

Any slash command can live in a social. These are the ones that matter most, grouped by purpose.

Combat & Casting

Movement & Position

Communication

Pets

Utility & Information

Stances, Abilities & Invocations

On Legends, /doability takes names, not just numbers — and that's the key to macroing the server's signature Stance and Invocation systems.

Every character has one Stance and one Invocation active at all times, gained at level 1. Swapping has a short six-second reuse (stances and invocations run on separate timers), and both systems fall back to a resting default that speeds recovery. Changing stances and invocations mid-combat has a name — Stance Dancing — and because the swaps are plain /doability calls, it belongs on hotbuttons: pair the swap with an announce or an opener and the whole dance step becomes one keystroke.

Stances

Stances trade endurance for combat posture — more damage, less damage taken, evasion, or ranged freedom. Highlights:

Invocations

Invocations shape your spellcasting — speed, potency, resist penetration, or sustain. Highlights:

Stance Dancing: the Toggle Trick

Stack two stances — or two invocations, or both — in one social and the button becomes a switch: each press swaps you to whichever of the pair isn't currently active, any time the six-second reuse is up. One catch: invocations can't be switched while you're casting or singing, so lead the macro with /stopsong (or /stopcast for casters) to clear the way. This example switches both your Invocation and your Stance every time it's pressed:

Set which pair you want active first — subsequent presses switch automatically to the other pair. If you'd rather not interrupt yourself, skip the stop line and time your presses between casts instead.

A defensive variant — swap between Balanced and Evasive while pinning Unyielding for the regeneration, with a heal folded in:

Balanced can easily be switched out for Defensive, or Defensive can be supplemented on additional lines — the pattern bends to whatever postures your class dances between. The /doability mend tail adds a heal (whenever it's off cooldown) into the very act of switching to a more defensive style. And because Unyielding is an invocation, the casting rule applies: depending on your build, lead with /stopsong, /stopcast, or even both.

Abilities

Any active skill can be fired by name the same way: /doability kick, /doability Taunt, /doability Bind Wound, /doability Feign Death, /doability Mend, /doability Lay on Hands, /doability Sneak, /doability Hide, /doability Forage, and so on. Names must match the in-game spelling. The numbered form (/doability 1–10) still works for slotted abilities, but names are self-documenting — six months from now, /doability Taunt still tells you what the button does.

Full listings: Stances & Invocations and the Active Skills section of Skills on the EverQuest Legends Wiki.

A Macro Library by Role

Battle-tested patterns. Every one of these can be loaded straight into the Forge below — pick it from the template scroll and adjust names and gem numbers to fit.

Puller

One line, endlessly useful. "Incoming %T" tells the group something; "incoming mob" doesn't.

Main Assist / DPS

Hard-code your tank's name, or leave /assist bare to assist your current target. On Legends, assisting turns auto-attack on by default — /assist off toggles that behavior if you'd rather it didn't (it's the Attack on Assist setting). The double-assist variant lets you see the MA's target without swinging:

Buff-on-Tell (the raid buffer's best friend)

/rt targets whoever last sent you a tell, so people queue up buffs just by messaging you.

Pet Opener

Pet Heal

/pet target snaps your target to your own pet instantly — no clicking around mid-fight — and the usual fizzle catch does the rest. The same lead line works for pet buffs and pet-only utility spells.

Melee Ability Spam

Names beat numbers here — the macro documents itself. The numbered form works too if you prefer slots.

Stance & Invocation Toggle

The whole combat posture on one button — each press swaps to the other stance/invocation pair, the heart of Stance Dancing (see Chapter V). Invocations can't switch mid-cast or mid-song, hence the /stopsong lead (use /stopcast for casters, or time presses between casts). Keep /pause out of toggle macros; pauses make the button appear to malfunction.

The defensive counterpart — Balanced ↔ Evasive with Unyielding pinned for regen and Mend folded in, so switching defensive also heals whenever Mend is off cooldown (swap Balanced for Defensive to taste; choose /stopsong, /stopcast, or both to lead, per your build):

The Tutorial Boots Button

The boots every character brings home from the tutorial deserve a permanent button. Target yourself first so the click always lands on you, no matter what you were fighting — just swap in your own name.

Bard Corner

Bards live and die by macros more than any other class — and on Legends, they get the best of both eras, because /melody works here. /melody 1 2 3 4 repeats the songs in those gems, in order, indefinitely, until you stop it — no more manual double-tapping to keep a twist pulsing.

One catch: pressing a melody macro a second time stops the melody. The fix is to lead with /stopsong — every press then restarts the melody from the top, so it casts reliably no matter how many times you mash it:

One press starts the twist and the swinging, and pressing it again simply starts the rotation over. Melody also does your fizzle-catching for you — a fizzled song just gets retried on the next pulse.

Then there's the smart version. /queuemelody 1 2 3 4 5 plays the same rotation, but instead of marching strictly in order it automatically plays whichever song will expire soonest. The point is maximum buff uptime: songs that got missed or skipped — stuns, fizzles, restarted melodies, anything that forces the rotation to reset — get priority instead of waiting their turn. It pairs perfectly with the /stopsong lead: even though every press restarts the melody, the queue immediately re-prioritizes whatever lapsed.

Single-song buttons still matter. Melody shines for a fixed rotation, but your twist changes constantly with mez targets and mob resist types — for manual control, keep one song per button with a classic fizzle catch:

A fully manual multi-song twist is also still an option when you want precise pulse timing on a fixed set:

The item-clicky button. Another real Legends pattern — stop your song, target yourself, click an item by name:

Also bind a dedicated stopcast key in the keybind options: a /stopsong macro line can't cut a song until most of the cast bar has run, but a bound key can cut it anywhere.

⚒ The Macro Forge

Build a social exactly as the in-game Edit Social window would — then let the Forge validate the rules, preview the hotbutton, simulate the chat output, and export the finished macro.

Design Principles, Distilled