Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

I think BLM will be able to do a 5xF4 rotation and 7xF4 opener in 3.2. I did some experimenting today and was able to stack enough PIE to get it in, at the cost of dropping me below 1k INT. Relevant stats are posted in the video's description.

Proof of Concept here

It should take 15 Piety V materia to get myself to enough MP to insert a T1 after B3 (assuming Dunesfolk base PIE). Assuming YoshiP keeps his promises and crafted gear can compete with raid gear, AND that crafted right-side has 2 regular slots and left-side has 1, you'll be able to fill up your LHS with Piety V, some of your RHS with Piety V, and overmeld SpS to some cap to ensure everything fits in. This comes at the cost of having hardly any space to meld Crit/Det/Twelve forbid we'd need to meld Accuracy. Having done absolutely no number crunching beyond checking how much MP is needed, I think an extra F4 per B4 would be a much larger benefit than a bit of extra damage-boosting secondary stats.

Proof of Concept for 5xF4 seems nice and all, but in practice this means:
- Mandatory use of Swiftcast
- no Thunder, ergo no Thundercloud procs for movement
- Third rotation will fall short due to Swiftcast-refreshed Enochian

All in all an even tighter rotation than there is now due to Enochian timer, which is bad in every case where you have to move. Having no Thunder is worse than the extra F4 since full-ticked Thundercloud procs are stronger than F4.

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Originally Posted by Hontaro

- Mandatory use of Swiftcast

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With enough SpS, it won't be necessary. I did it once without needing to Swiftcast at my current SpS, but you need a perfect MP tick. With melds it will be possible, but still tight. This is only for the 25s Eno, and the one time I got the perfect tick I was able to fit 5xF4 in the 20s.

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Originally Posted by Hontaro

- no Thunder, ergo no Thundercloud procs for movement

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Same as before. The only reason I can't do it now is because I don't have enough MP. For a 30s Eno, it's more than possible to fit one in as long as there's enough MP. After that you would be running on the goodwill of procs as you can't fit one in the 25s rotation. At the end of the 20s, once you're in UI, you could fit another in. So worst case scenario, you lose one hardcasted T1.

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Originally Posted by Hontaro

- Third rotation will fall short due to Swiftcast-refreshed Enochian

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I'd love to show it to you, but I wasn't recording at the time and getting the perfect tick takes ages. However, assume that from my video I don't need to Swiftcast. I then F3 > F4x2 > F1 > F4x3 > F3* > B3. That's around 8 GCDs worth of recast time by the time the final F4 goes off, so in a perfect world you can get them all off.

This is all heavily reliant on being able to meld crafted gear and have the stats it normally provides be on par with raid gear. If it's still inferior statwise, the whole plan falls apart.

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Originally Posted by Aloise

I think BLM will be able to do a 5xF4 rotation and 7xF4 opener in 3.2. I did some experimenting today and was able to stack enough PIE to get it in, at the cost of dropping me below 1k INT. Relevant stats are posted in the video's description.

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I just tried this with 394 Piety and I don't think it's going to be viable, see for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L74GSj6LZpg

Besides that, it feels very restrictive even on a dummy when it does work so in a raid it would be even worse.

What do you do when you go into Blizzard 3 without Swiftcast and you have enough MP to cast Blizzard IV or Thunder but not enough time on Enochian for both? If you do Blizzard IV>Fire 3 you won't have full MP, and if you wait for MP tick after Blizzard IV, you might not have enough Enochian for 5 Fire IVs.

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Originally Posted by Lavitz_

What do you do when you go into Blizzard 3 without Swiftcast and you have enough MP to cast Blizzard IV or Thunder but not enough time on Enochian for both? If you do Blizzard IV>Fire 3 you won't have full MP, and if you wait for MP tick after Blizzard IV, you might not have enough Enochian for 5 Fire IVs.

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The same as before, preserve Enochian and do the best with the rest. Note that if you have to cut a F4 cast, you're falling back to the current rotation. So the "lost" F4 isn't lost compared to what we have now. This is true for any movement that would cut a cast from the rotation. I think you'd get three F4s if you went straight to F3 after B4, and four before Enochian runs out if you delay until you get a tick.

All my assumptions are based off the hope that crafted gear will hold a flame to raid gear. I'm imagining from melds + party bonus you can break 410 PIE, which hopefully will keep you safe even if you don't get a tick after B4 in the B3 > T1 > B4 > F3 at the tail of the 30s rotation. I'd like to imagine we'll have an option between using raid gear to maintain the current rotation and get some more breathing room, or go with crafted gear and get a tighter, riskier rotation that brings in more DPS. I guess I'll see how the cookie crumbles once 3.2 drops.

A buddy shared this with me. Maybe old but come 3.2 AF/UI will now refresh on cast and not hit?

https://i.imgur.com/JNemAV4.jpg

Could be neat.

Yeah I've been thinking about that all day. All possible ramifications I can think of:

- Doing cool F4 X5 openers is probably impossible with Firestarter applying earlier even with pretty crazy SS, it looks like we lost about 1s off our proposed AF time due to that.
- Looks like AF/UI never "drop," so no more ghetto MP ticks. UI should simultaneously be smoother at times but harder overall, it looks like T1 > B4 might fail possibly for two guaranteed ticks. What this means is we have to be super adaptive, holding our press of F3 at times, or switching to the more expensive T2 which we may not always have MP for anyway. Just speculation, no clue if it will really work out like this.
- Gained about 1s for any situation where AF/UI mattered due to earlier AF/UI application.
- No more waiting on AF before we can cast F4 after UI F3. This is more DPS, more Enochian leniency, this is the big buff of all this.

I do worry that F3 > F4 F4 F4 F4 > B3 will become the standard non-Sharpcast rotation ... I've tried some weirdo rotations in the past to see if F4 F4 F1 F4 F4 is truly supreme. While I think it is, currently, I noticed I had almost identical parses with F1 F4 F4 F4 (Firestarter) when I saw the Lucrezia BLM doing that ghetto rotation and still doing okay; F4 F4 F4 F4 would both be definitively higher DPS and would never cause a problem with MP for T1/T2/B4, and would be easy mode as hell. I sincerely hope that does not become a common rotation but I suspect, with testing, it will be proven as good as or close enough that in practice it may even be optimal a lot of the time ... we'll see.

Yeah when I run dungeons I generally already use a lame F1 > F4x3 > B3 > B4 and then repeat for ST rotations. It's really braindead and requires little actual skill after you get used to watching 2 countdowns. Gets boring because with even all the DPS going out with that it feels like I still do not that much damage in the long term with the bloated HP totals everything has in HW content.

Now if they set Transpose and Convert on the same 10 second recast or whatever I could get more proactive and be a little creative. As it stands though HW skills offered don't change the rotation that much at all.

I'm currently testing
F3 > F4x3 > B3 > B4 (when you don't have Sharpcast)
Sharp > F3 > Enoch > F1 > F4x3 > F3p > F4 > B3 > T1 > B4 (when you have Sharpcast)

and tbh, the results aren't that much lower than the current F4x2 F1 F4x2 rotation either.

Edit:
Doing minimal maths results in this:
http://puu.sh/mSm3m.png

F4x2 > F1 > F4x2 is slightly higher. It's just that the triple F4 rotation is much more manageable.