Dancers - When do you use Devilment?

I'm curious as to when other Dancers use Devilment, before or after Technical Step/Finish. Personally, I've been basing the decision on Esprit and Feathers. If I have little/none, like at the beginning of a fight, I will use Devilment BEFORE TS to boost the odds of getting a crit TS. But when I have Feathers and Esprit built up, I have been using Devilment AFTER TS to try to fit as many things into the window as possible. I'm not sure about what is optimal play. It just seems like a waste of 5ish seconds of Devilment to crank out TS if it means you lose the buff before you can work through all your Feathers, Saber Dances, Flourish Procs. Saber Dance being oGCD would help so much, IMO....

What do other people do? Does anyone have hard data about optimal use?

Last I saw, the best opener is to use Devilment before Technical Step, and that's when I've been using it in general. It is rather fun seeing ~110k damage Technical Finish direct crits.

Yeah I feel the same lol, it's awesome to see 6 digit damage.

I haven’t done the maths, but I figured that getting Devilment boost on Flourish procs would be more overall DPS than Quadruple Technical Finish.
Though if you get a direct critical hit on Finish, it very well could end up being stronger, but I can’t say if that would make up for the 3/4ish GCDs where Devilment ticks down but you aren’t outputting any damage.
And since I’m not able to check what the GCD potencies are, I know you’d have to deal around 1500+ potency worth of damage in those 3/4ish GCDs, which I’m not even sure a Dancer could do without some super luck with Sabre Dancer

Honestly though, I’m terms of ease-of-use in rotation I find it slots in the GCD between Standard and Technical Finish perfectly, then you can use Flourish after Technical Finish and go straight into using all the procs / Fan dance etc

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Originally Posted by Connor

I can’t say if that would make up for the 3/4ish GCDs where Devilment ticks down but you aren’t outputting any damage.

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A Quadruple Technical Finish is still more potency per second than flourishes. At 1500 potency over 7 seconds (~214.3 pps), and your top three Flourishes being worth 475(Fountainfall), 425(Reverse Cascade), 425(Bloodshower) totalling 1325 potency over around 7.3s (~181.f pps), so it doesn't matter that it seems like you're not doing any damage during that time. Note: The 50% * 150 + 25% * 200 potencies of Fan Dances are included in each of the Flourished attacks' potencies.

The real difference between using Devilment before Technical Step or using it after Technical Finish is that if the QTF doesn't dhit and doesn't crit, it turns out that using Flourished attacks could have been better, because some subset of the attacks could have dhit or crit. Technical Finish is basically putting all your eggs in one basket; if it direct-crits, it's beautiful. If not, any one of the Flourished attacks direct-crit'ing might have made up the difference.

Before technical step

Any good DNC guide already?

Lately I'd line things up so I could go Flourish, Technical Step, Devilment, and then just dump everything I could into the enemy. You should have time for a single weave after each dance. Also, as we get progressively better stats and Critical Hit begins mattering more and more, we're going to be leaning toward using Devilment after Technical Step anyway.