AoE (Everyone, not just BLMs)

So I've come to the realization after capping bard, then BLM, and approaching the PLD cap, that the typical 1-2-3- Mark version of dungeons in this game is dreadfully sleep inducing. Ever since I started on Black Mage, I realized the potential for AoE damage in dungeons when there are alot of enemies. And ever since I started tanking, I realized I can control how many enemies my party is fighting at once.


On my Bard i typically ignored Quick Nock (and every other TP wasting AoE ability), but after BLM and PLD I can't help but notice how useful AoE abilities are, especially any one that's spammable with at least 100 potency. When you factor in crit rate, Burning Arrow, River of Blood procs and a 110 Potency AoE skill, Bard is a pretty amazing AoE class when you combine all of their skills into your AoE rotation.


In dungeons where all players cooperate, it just makes for a much smoother, engaging, and dare i say faster dungeon experience, regardless of level. There's nothing more fun than gathering up a huge amount of enemies and having everyone just go crazy with the killing. It takes a bit more team coordination since everyone involved needs to know their class better, but the payoff is worth it imo.


I wish more people (read - tanks) would become privy to this. Even team comps like Dragoon + Pugilist has the capability to abuse the power of AoE damage spreading -- there are no target caps, and every enemy added to the group is a drastic DPS increase overall. I die inside everytime I see a caster starting their rotation with sleep.

I heard so much whining about not using sleep on my black mage. can't they seem I'm busy aoeing?

I try to tell people Sleep is just a panic button if the Tank is about to die or has already died, which should never happen with a typical mob setup. It's completely useless otherwise, Tanks are designed to take damage and we have a dedicated healer...


The only time i'd endorse it is if they sleep the enemies and the healer then switches to DPS to burn 1v1. But even that is pretty dumb because Holy/Shadow Flare+Dots is far stronger than any 1v1 crap they could come up with alone, and i'd rather them use that if anything.

One thing I've noticed is that sleep is prevalent in lower level dungeons maybe because new players see the skill that they just acquired and they think they need to use it and this mentality carries all the way over to the end game? For my last 3 Qarn runs on my summoner, I tried using bane to spread my dots and in all cases it turned out to be a bad idea. It seems many tanks at lower levels seem to just flash/overpower once and focus on "1" target. So yeah its quite frustrating for me cause my dps as a summoner is severely hampered when I can't spread my dots around.

On a more positive note, one of my proudest moments as a blm was when running WP with my fc and the tank gathered up all the mobs from the start to the first boss and I proceeded to pop RS and mega int pot with triple flare and they died in about 10 secs. Good times :P

I open up nearly every dungeon by telling the DPS "It's ok to AoE"

I don't know why more tanks don't do this.

Well sleep for some groups can be useful up to Brayflox.
* Can be
As you get to higher levels enemies are immune anyhow.
Aoe is great and comes in hand when you want to get dungeons done quickly.
Wipe all enemies i say, lol

I enjoy CC and focusing one or two mobs at a time***. I feel like a minority these days. When I tank, I tell mages it's ok to sleep things.



***things can be a bit faster ideally in aoe groups but A) at lower levels most classes don't have very good AoE yet and B) most PUGs stink and it's easier for them to focus 1>2>3.

AoE is nice, but only if you have a good tank. Otherwise, it could get ugly quick. You would think that at the higher levels, and running AK, WP, ect..., you would see more good tanks but it's not always the case.

Running as PLD I wish I would see more WHMs spam Holy. That spell is Godly and dungeon running is so much smoother. Right now I think I see about half the WHMs using it running WP.

Regardless, I love AoE. I do wish BRD had stronger AoE. BRD has fast AoE but it eats TP quickly. Thank goodness for cross class abilities. ;)

True.
Actually doing aoe is depending a lot of the tank.Sometimes i want to cry when i see a warrior loosing the aggro to 2-3 holy.I've got aswell in my FC 2 BLM with allagan weapon.They do some really nasty damage with Flare and it completely destroy packs really quickly.But for i don't know what reason,sometimes the tank is going single target combo instead of aoe .I don't get it o_o

Bard's aoe is not that bad, but you do need to pop some cold down with it.

If the tank and heal knows what they are doing, then YES PLEASE ... but I seem to be plagued by bad luck and douche tanks so I prefer a more steady pace (read not snail slow there)

AOE's are bad if there's below four mobs. Three and below is where you will kill them faster if you stick to the single target rotation (mostly due to firestarter). This coming from a BLM that likes to AOE.

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Originally Posted by Kirinichibon

I enjoy CC and focusing one or two mobs at a time***. I feel like a minority these days. When I tank, I tell mages it's ok to sleep things.

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Originally Posted by AmyNeudaiz

I open up nearly every dungeon by telling the DPS "It's ok to AoE" I don't know why more tanks don't do this.

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I'd be happy either way. You're both RIGHT. The wrong answer I see all too often is split dps :( or some AoE and some CC at the same time ><

dam if you sleep and dam if you dont. Did Aurum yesterday, tank liked to pull tons of mobs when I say tons I really mean tons, so after a couple of wipes because well obviously too much is too much, I started to sleep, systematicaly and I mean this systematically ALL targets asleep were woken up, that was just plain dumb, so I stopped sleeping, the healer said that I should think of sleeping, which shows he wasnt lookign at what was happening, to which I answered that the moment peopel stop waking who I sleep just for the hell of it...they didnt even see I had slept them, so maybe being aware of what is happenign around you may be a good start...if a BLM sleeps is also to make life easier for all..if a BLM freezes may be also for his convenience to have all targets in one place to use the *brasier*(cant remember english name) or just allwo a group of targets to take some damages while attacking others eh?....just me though

Mei

An interesting thing i have thought about for a while is how much a blm can abuse sleep.
1)Tank pulls "sleepable" mobs and pulls them back down the main path of the dungeon.
2) blm follows and sleep nukes all of them
*the only ppl on the mobs enmity list are the blm and tank*
3) the blm and tank then proceed to run away from the slept mobs.
*mobs aggro will drop after a certain distance is met between player and enemies*
4) once the blm and tank runs out of mobs proximity, the mobs aggro will drop and will resume to re position itself to where it was originally at.

This isn't a lockout as this does not require a boss force field wall thingy to close off pursuing enemies.
It can be done anywhere in the dungeon.
All it requires is some room to run and a blm or a whm.
Really easy to master but has very little room for error as u only have 2 chances as the timer for sleep will be too short by the 3rd time it is cast.
But anyways, AoE abilities r pretty helpful as of the reason y they nerfed Holy.

I'm guessing you're talking about using aoe in pre-50 dungeons? most people spam aoe in late game dungeons.

Problems with aoeing lowlevel dungeons: Several classes have no aoe at that level. Had a tank pull several groups of mobs and told us to aoe. I responded telling him "we are lancers, we don't have an aoe skill"
Next problem is hate generation. PLD sucks before shield oath at getting hate. AOE spells will rip mobs right off of you even with flash spam.
The healer might not have all his skills. Removing damage by focusing down individuals can stop you from having pointless wipes to trash mobs.

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Originally Posted by Mephistopheles

AOE's are bad if there's below four mobs. Three and below is where you will kill them faster if you stick to the single target rotation

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For me (as a DRG) this is very true. BRD its even worse.

Three mobs or less its just not TP or time efficient to AoE. If anything, it slows you down to AoE 3 or less enemies.

4+ is definite AoE territory. But, yeah, the tank has to be able to handle the AoEs.

this will be a long reply so bear with it and sorry for the lack of grammer and spelling errors as its not my strong point

this is a mixed bag of nuts thread aoe pulls depend on a few things

party compelation

war tank scholar 2 blm nuke fest
pally whm 2 mnks take first few pulls slow see where your party is sitting

now is this absolute hell no i have tanked wp with 2 monks and a whm i am a pally and we speed ran it in bout 15-20 mins woulda been faster but i had a call lol oops my bad

party skill

this is the part that pisses people off yes skill no not talking gear lev or dps big pulls involve watching your agro managing mana avoiding aoes proper cc timming and working as a team this is skill and something that not all players have and yes this includes myself at times as well we all start having to learn

level of content

this is the most important what level content is the group doing as abbilities for each class are honestly poorly done in the game as the game is ballenced in tiers and partially for pvp and pve at current max levels early tanking for example aoe agro is a bit harder to hold as if you team is not aoeing and decideds to focus they will rip off you each time healing early on is fairly limeted to mid level dps some classes dont get a decent aoe till mid level

in the end it is the tanks decission how to move through content the more comfy the tank is the faster he/she will be going

and to deffend other tanks who dont aoe pull it really isnt the mentality of tanks in ff14 to aoe pull that comes from games such as eq wow ect where battles are alot faster paced ff14 is slower combat as it still sticks close to the old turn based style combat system they used to use

you may disagree with that statement but its pretty true i was speed running wp before they did the tomb change to it cause it used to be a printing press for tanks and healers to just print gill fast cues and so many items that sold for good gill used to make 20-80k gil a run in there before the nerf back in the day

now with that said when i was speed running wp in a pug people where shocked that a pally could aoe pull like that this was before the changeds to emity gain since those days when people started seeing a few tanks start speed running and aoe pulling the tanking sceen changed slowly and now there are more tanks who do it

but at the end of the day it aoe comes down to simply put

can your tank hold agro

can your healer keep em up

can the dps push out enough damage to drop the mobs before the healer is mana burnt and the tank dies

if your dung is running smooth boost the tanks moral suggest pullling more see how it goes and if it failes find a ballence and help out

moral of the story use your better judgment

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Originally Posted by Mephistopheles

AOE's are bad if there's below four mobs. Three and below is where you will kill them faster if you stick to the single target rotation (mostly due to firestarter). This coming from a BLM that likes to AOE.

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Three mobs or more and you should be using Flare.

Even on 2 Mobs Flare is a significant increase in DPS(260 potency x1.8 x 2 for 4 seconds compared to 150 potency x 1.8 x 1 for 2.5 seconds)

Using Fire2 on anything below 4 or 5 mobs is a waste, however.

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Originally Posted by IAmPotent

Three mobs or more and you should be using Flare.

Even on 2 Mobs Flare is a significant increase in DPS(260 potency x1.8 x 2 for 4 seconds compared to 150 potency x 1.8 x 1 for 2.5 seconds)

Using Fire2 on anything below 4 or 5 mobs is a waste, however.

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Flare is the exception, due to its high potency and limited use, not the rule. You could probably Flare single-targets and not have major DPS issues (I'm not a BLM, so I'm just basing off Flare's potency and knowing some BLM critting Flare over 2K)

ALL AoE (Flare and sometimes Holy, thanks to its potency and Stun, being exceptions) is bad below 4 mobs. Its just not efficient compared to single-target on 3 or less mobs. I'm also not counting Bane here, just because its, well, something else entirely (Bane all the things, please)