Utsusemi ==> Haste

been wondering. when making a haste swap macro to lower the recast time for utsusemi, is it enough that you have the haste gear on when you start casting your shadows, or does it have to stay on during the full time it takes to cast them? Anyone got an example macro that could help me understand?

It has to be on when the spell actually casts, which is usually when you would see the animation. You might not sometimes though because of swapping gear and Utsusemi Ni's very low cast time.

so basicly it has to be on for the full casting time? i.e Utsusemi: Ni got a spellcasting time at 1.5 sec so macro would look like this then?

/equip head "Walahra Turban"
/ma "Utsusemi: Ni" <me>
/wait 1.5
/equip head "Optical Hat"

just as an example

You could do it that but I suggest doing /wait 2. I don't think decimals register (outside of Windower), the game just truncates /wait 1.5 as /wait 1. Obviously, /wait 2 gets around this problem.

This holds true of all spells,

The damages, mp cost (items used in shaddows case), recast timer are all decided at the point the spell 'happens' this is normally around 65% through the casting animation. It is the gear you are wearing at that point that affects the recast amongst other things.

You can see it when you nuke as blm, the mob takes the damage around 65-70% on the casting bar.

This is why some blms dump on fast cast gear (loq earring and rostrum pumps) for the first 50% of the casting time, and swtich into nuke gear there after. This can save quite a lot of time on the long casting time spells

So you haste gear only needs to be equiped between 64% and 66% on the casting bar. Realistically that would be impossible to time with Ni, and still hard to do with Ichi.

So most people would macro the haste gear in at the beginning of the Ni cast, and maybe put a 1-2 wait on the gear swop in Ichi so:

/ma "Utsusemi: Ichi" <me>
/wait 2
/equip head "Walahra Turban"
/wait 1
/equip head "Optical Hat"

That should reduce the time that you are wearing the 'wrong' gear. You may need to play with the timings (my nin is 37, so didn't have to deal with this), but the theory is sound for my RDM and BLM.

HTH