Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[IllyriaKnotfred]

Kime No'raya, he's logged out on DRG on lodestone atm though. I asked him why he doesn't go for spell speed and he said that the timing on foul is much better at lower spell speed thresholds and once you get used to your rotation taking a certain amount of time you can work around that fact. Now I'm not claiming its the best way to go, just pointing out that it is perfectly possible to produce good numbers without a ton of spell speed which in turn allows your other stats to go higher.

Hopefully i can catch him when he logs on his BLM ^_^. Well hes obviously doing something very right if hes in the 90 percentile.

[Kabooa]

Hopefully i can catch him when he logs on his BLM ^_^. Well hes obviously doing something very right if hes in the 90 percentile.

Most of that comes down to timing cooldowns for what you need.

Though I imagine the lower spellspeed makes certain mandatory breaks, such as during Cata and Hali less punishing, as Spellspeed pushes ahead with high uptime (Mo' spells per timeslot). In those scenarios, hitting much harder is better than hitting much faster, as your GCD windows are longer, but that's irrelevant during a period where you're not using as many, and hitting harder would pull ahead.

[Ferrinus]

It makes sense that low spell speed BLM builds put out a lot of dps because they let you do proportionately more 5xF4 rotations, but low spell speed feels sooooo baaaad. I hope they eventually buff B4 to make 6xF4 superior.

[IllyriaKnotfred]

Kime No'raya, he's logged out on DRG on lodestone atm though. I asked him why he doesn't go for spell speed and he said that the timing on foul is much better at lower spell speed thresholds and once you get used to your rotation taking a certain amount of time you can work around that fact. Now I'm not claiming its the best way to go, just pointing out that it is perfectly possible to produce good numbers without a ton of spell speed which in turn allows your other stats to go higher.

They have their lodestone blocked?

[Thela]

They have their lodestone blocked?

No? but he's logging out on every job but BLM recently it seems heh. Yesterday was DRG now its SCH

[IllyriaKnotfred]

Dunno. Searching that name shows nothing unless I'm blind

[TsuKoj]

His logs show only 1 90%+ run while most are between 30-75 in everything except exdeath. I did catch him on blm earlier and he had 942 ss, which is still low. It would seem the low spell speed is holding him back on o1s-o3s where there's minimal downtime, and he's doing well on exdeath which has a lot of phase transitions. And neo-exdeath is just terrible for blms.

Edit - here's his lodestone. He's in blm atm. http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...cter/11945075/

Edit 2 - he's up to 1124 ss now.

[Galvuu]

Speed in practice is a very delicate thing.
There's unquestionable numbers that let you pull out certain things which help with rotations. I know that at 1750ish (there's a tier around here... 1751? 54? Something like that) I can do my normal B4 opener on Halicarnassus and, as I go into AF, do F4x3 (with Triple)>F4>F(get Firestarter from Sharpcast). This means that I'll keep AF through Spellblade Holy no matter what and have the Firestarter to position for the protean wave Waltz right after. I can also do one more spell before she scrambles my position if I do get tagged with Spellblade Holy.
Another example, I can consistently get a Fire off before Squelch, and a F4 before the last Forced March p2. I know I was always missing these with 1500.


There's many little things like these which you only notice with heavy practice. The fight must be so incredibly scripted that there's this kind of consistency between runs.
Jacking up CH and DH should yield almost as much dps (they have an interesting joint dps gain curve, those two), but speed always has this kinda advantage (and buff clipping). You just need to find a good number that works for you. That 1750ish is working fine for me, so I don't feel the need to get more if it means taking a hit to int/other secondaries.

[qivis]

If you refreshed Thunder with a proc through Fire-phase, when is it worth to recast/clip the Thunder-dot in Ice-Phase, too, althoug it is still on the target?

[Alkimi]

If you refreshed Thunder with a proc through Fire-phase, when is it worth to recast/clip the Thunder-dot in Ice-Phase, too, althoug it is still on the target?

There's probably exact maths for that but I'm not sure what they are. Personally if there's 10 or more seconds left after I've cast Blizzard 4 then I go straight to Foul.