using cooldown buffs with spells
I've read over most of the materials on the stickies here and the borkweb site and can't really find what I want to do, which makes me believe it's not possible...
can I set up one button with a macro for elemental mastery and chain lightning so it will cast both if elemental mastery's cooldown is up, but just CL if it isn't?
I've read if the first spell is on a cooldown it will cancel the rest, but can you set the cooldown to be a condition and if it fails then cast CL?
Multiple-action macros and no-GCD spells.
What you want to do is possible, as the posters above mentioned. In addition, with patch 2.3, the macro can be even simpler (they removed the requirement of /stopcasting):
/cast Elemental Mastery
/cast Chain Lightning
The tooltip is entirely optional and does not affect functionality, but I'd agree with Jusa in that #showtooltip Chain Lightning is probably the one you want to see.
As for why it works, normally, if you write a macro with multiple spells and the first one fails (due to cooldown or whatever other reason), the entire macro will stop. But this has nothing to do with it failing and everything to do with the fact that most spells trigger the global cooldown. With 2.0, blizzard made sure that any spell that would trigger the global cooldown if it succeeded disallows further spells to be cast. Any spell, item, or ability (trinkets, elemental mastery, nature's swiftness, inner focus, etc...) which do not trigger the GCD can all be put before any spell which would trigger it (just like Zoroaster and Jusa mentioned).