Originally Posted by
Byrth
So, this morning I made a group to do 5/5/5 Cirdas Skirmish II on my DNC. Our party was DNC, NIN, MNK, SMN, WHM, RDM (the people on LS at 9AM EST playing the jobs they were already on). I did damage, kept NMs debuffed heavily, Waltzed when appropriate, and stunned Bugard (who was the only one I found I could reliably stun). I ended up parsing first with 33.4% of alliance damage (including skillchains). The NIN was 33.0% (also including skillchains), and the rest was MNK (26%?) and the Avatars (~7% combined?). It worked. We beat the Caturae boss and cleared something like 6 floors, but had to use our keys with a Cairn up (probably to warp to the last floor.) If I had gone with a more traditional setup instead of making an intentionally sub-ideal group (DDs that can cap delay with Haste II + Haste Samba) for the sake of getting my DNC some playtime, it's possible that we would have also beaten the last floor.
A few other things of note:
* The NIN just reactivated after something like 4 months. I don't think he has any upgraded relic yet (though he has a 119 Nagi). He is not used to focusing on skillchaining yet, which is unfortunate because his 6k Blade: Hi-s would have made some really pretty double darknesses and he easily could have outparsed me.
* I ate Sharkfin Soup. I'm pretty sure the other melees were either eating RCBs or nothing. As a consequence, I was the only melee with capped hit rate.
* The SMN had Nirvana.
* Our Mistmaw kills averaged about 90 seconds, meaning that the proposed Step changes would allow me to average of -14% Defense Down instead of the average -11.3% defense down that we currently enjoy. That extra 2.7% Defense Down costs me another 30 TP and ~8 seconds of JA delay.
* The Caturae took us about 5 minutes to kill (our first encounter). In this situation, the extra levels would have been worthwhile. You have to understand, however, that you will eventually reach the annoying situation of being forced to maintain Dazes in exchange for a single Finishing Move, which will further gimp your damage. Now it'll be a much larger penalty to let your debuff wear off. It's not 30 seconds to re-cap it. It's 1.5 minutes.
As far as the proposed Dancer changes, you can see how the Step changes would have been impotent/useless above. If I'd had Contradance, I probably would have used it a few times when Waltzing, as I indicate in the OP. The issue is that neither of these changes address any of the real problems with Dancer, and you can see that the Step changes will largely have no impact at all.