Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

There is a delay. If you press a skill during the GCD of another skill, it will be queued, causing it to be activated the instant it is possible. If you press a macro during the GCD of another skill, nothing will happen, it will not queue. The action will only come out if you press after the previous GCD has fully completed. You will, no matter what, lose a fraction of second each time you choose to use the macro over using the skill manually. This doesn't sound like much, but in practice, this tiny amount of time adds up.

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Originally Posted by luckystrikes

I believe you misinterpreted my original macro. The macro does not cast B4 then B3 in a sequence. It cast either B4 or B3 depending on what conditions are up...one action only. This way I do not need two separate buttons on my hot bar for both actions. I fail to see how this results in a lost any time whatsoever. Do you care to explain?

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This is exactly like the trend going around where some DRGs macro Fang and Claw with Wheeling Thrust. My sentiment is the same here as I was to those DRGs, it is a DPS loss because no command queuing.

I say go for it, if you manage to get higher numbers with than without the macro, but it would be optimal to learn to play without one. It's not that huge of a loss to delay skills for 0.1s every 25 seconds or whatever. You lose, what, 2-3 spells in a 10 minute fight?

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Originally Posted by Waliel

I say go for it, if you manage to get higher numbers with than without the macro, but it would be optimal to learn to play without one. It's not that huge of a loss to delay skills for 0.1s every 25 seconds or whatever. You lose, what, 2-3 spells in a 10 minute fight?

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If you're fighting optimally and not moving.
Actual DPS loss approximately zero.
You can't queue B4 anyway because you have to wait for UI to be up.

And you can queue with macros, I did it yesterday with my manawall and manaward cast. I pressed the macro before it was done casting F4. It cast my macro'd spells without me having to hit the macro button again. It also cast both even though I moved in between casts of manaward and manawall which I wasn't sure it was going to do.

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Originally Posted by Waliel

I say go for it, if you manage to get higher numbers with than without the macro, but it would be optimal to learn to play without one. It's not that huge of a loss to delay skills for 0.1s every 25 seconds or whatever. You lose, what, 2-3 spells in a 10 minute fight?

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Probably doesn't apply with blm and cast times but as a monk main that 0.1sec is huge. I can have a skill qued and start to dodge an aoe and it still goes off as I run out of range and I'm back on the boss before my gcd refreshes. Someone with a macro would lose an entire second if not more and each time it occurs cause they would need to dodge before their gcd was ready.
Anyway I'm here to learn more about blm. I have a static member that could use some improvement but I don't know the first thing about blm so I got it to lvl 60 and now I'm trying to grasp it

Let me put this into perspective for those who favor macros. You cannot queue macros unless something changed in the last two minutes (I just personally tested something we've known for two years, just to be sure), and I doubt it will ever change as it seems a design philosophy. Assume (correctly) you can't queue macros but also assume (incorrectly) that you can somehow macros non-queued with zero GCD loss, hitting that button on the first frame possible and it registering.

We play in an environment where we are eternally out of sync with the world, the enemies, and other players. We are always ahead of others on our screen, where the world pulses on a 3s universal server tick. Some of the byproducts include ...

- You can literally walk through other players without passing vital debuffs because positioning doesn't update in real time. Anyone who's moved 1s before someone got to their spot in T2, T12, or A3S knows exactly what I'm talking about.
- You "die" 1-2 seconds before you die, and no healing can save you. In fact, attacks are snapshot to such an effect that if you don't have a CD up 1-2 seconds before an attack lands, you're taking full damage.
- Benediction, Hallowed Ground, even some attack buffs can literally go off without taking immediate effect. You can attack after a buff without the buff applying to said attack.
- You can constantly slidecast ridiculous distances because the game isn't updating right. You can walk through instant death orbs in A4S and take two before dying because you are not recognized as dead before the second orb hits you.
- If you are not standing in a server tick item during the pulse, you won't receive its effect. Oh you put Soil up 2 seconds before Gigaflare cast? Let's hope the tick happens before then! Oh you wanted that Collective set of 150 potency HoTs, but you only walked in and out of the bubble? Too bad, no soup for you.

You can't queue up pots in this game, a non-macro, and it takes about .1-.5 seconds of mashing to activate your pot. Even using WTFast, with 30ms ping, I can't pot precisely when I wish to pot unless the game is ready for me to pot.

Now, knowing all of the above, why on earth would you ever (even if somehow you could without any delay activate a GCD macro) play in "real time" in FFXIV? If queueing didn't exist, this game would require you to literally jack into their servers with ethernet cables to even stand a chance. Moral of the story is, don't mess with GCD macros, unless you just really don't care.

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Originally Posted by Sleigh

You can constantly slidecast ridiculous distances because the game isn't updating right.

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I wish that was true for me after we got our new shiny EU servers. Only thing that seems to matter is the last 0.5 seconds. Start moving before that and everything gets interrupted in 0.1-0.2s. Are you looking away from Thordan during the 0.1s window when your cast goes down to its last 0.5 seconds? Too bad, cast interrupted even if you turn back with 0.4s remaining.

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but in the initial post, there's 3 openers compared in an image. Is there any reason this one isn't?

quelling+sharp
Fire III
ley+enoch+rs
Fire I
potion
Fire IV
Fire IV
Fire IV
Fire III [proc]
swiftcast
Fire IV
convert
Fire IV
Fire IV
Blizzard III
Blizzard IV
Thunder I

It looks like it'd be a strict pps increase over the 6 f4 opener proposed in that image ( http://i.imgur.com/dhwdO0N.png ) with no real changes done to it. Just curious if there's any reasoning behind not considering it, or if it's already been considered elsewhere and I haven't dug it out of the 95 pages of this thread.

Thanks!

No one should do B3 > B4 > T1 unless they have to, that's an error, especially in the opener. You are tossing away Enochian time for the next rotation, possibly a lot. Also Leylines post-F3 really doesn't get you anything because it probably saves you less time used after F3 from an additional spell cast under Leylines than it takes to raw cast (roughly .5s or so), and the sooner it's off CD, the better, since lining up the third Ley + RS + Sharp can be a bitch.

But yes the whole Swiftcast > F4 > Convert thing wasn't really thought of at 3.0 launch AFAIK. Everyone thought it was double weave or you're wasting, even though Convert is almost never used on CD. I think I wrote it down a couple months later and no one seemed to pay attention to it, but it has become common place these days that I see. Probably because the best A3S opener that I know of has it mandatory.

There are actually slight modifications that can be done to every opener in that list, IMO. Aikaal doesn't play anymore so that's why they're still as they were when created I believe, though they're good enough regardless.

There's something I don't understand about the sharpcast opener. If you get a F3P why do you swift cast flare and not fire 4 . They are both instant cast with swiftcast but fire 4 is stronger than Flare and you can still convert do another fire and switch, I really can't wrap my head around why flare is stronger.