Which Fairy IS better?

[shields977]

I use Selene on trash and Eos on boss personaly. With a group that is fully geared, I use Selene all the time.

With a FC group I have been running WP with I summon Selene, pop Cleric Stance and DD the whole time, with the exception of bosses and some larger pulls.

[YuriRamona]

While sure, it increases your healing per MP, is there a difference between a 1000 hp heal and a 1200 hp heal when the tank is missing 1000 hp? What about when they are missing 2000? in either scenario, you're casting the same number of heals. While FI is nice, what you give up to get it is a pretty bad trade-off.

For FC, when would you ever use it? On Titan, Plumes and his Astral Flow are the only magic attacks. Pre-Turn 5, I'm not sure what, if any, attacks are magical.

And for WD, like I had said, it's only really useful if you're trying to solo-heal Titan (or are healing Titan/Garuda with an undergeared partner). The HoT is too small to be depended on in progression content.

Keeping the tank topped off is not really necessary in Coil. It is better to have them floating between 90-95% HP with an Adlo shield up than to overcure and toss that MP down the drain. In the example you gave, it might normally take two Physicks to bump up the tank to full, whereas under Fey Illumination, you might be satisfied with one Adloquium that brings the tank close, but not at, HP cap. Hope that makes sense. (Indeed, we might even be freed to wait 1-2 seconds for the next auto-attack/skill to hit the tank, and cast back-to-back Adloquiums that free up healer time to move around/reposition/cast abilities, etc)

Again, my concern is MP. It is certainly conceivable that Fey Illumination can bridge that gap and allow you to cast less heals, even if it is only for 8 GCDs. For encounters such as Caduceus and Turn 4/5, landing large cures is critical often in the fight, and so is conserving MP.

In terms of Fey Covenant, aren't move such as Ballast, Repelling, and Vacuum Wave magical? That could be useful for ADS.
You do mention that Whispering Dawn is useful for solo heal. So you agree that Eos is not totally sidelined???

[cainejw]

Unless you bring in specific counterexamples or counterarguments, you are contributing nothing to this discussion. Citing yourself as somehow having advanced knowledge of stats does not help. In fact, your lack of substantiated claims along with your self-reference to profession is a contradiction worthy of ridicule.

The counterargument is clear, but I guess you missed it. My counterargument is that we do not know, with statistical backing, which faerie is best in every setting. Rainsford, however, is stating without exception that Selene is the best. Instead of doing that, I'm going to work on theorycrafting the faeries. However, I ran into a problem with FFXIVApp and FFXIVLogRep. The data failed to properly log, likely due to an error on my part.

So far, my work has been to validate Valk's calculator against Scholar, work on ideal rotations based on validating MP recovery information, and investigating the effect of Mage's Ballad on Scholar heals. My next stop is Eos/Selene and then food. All of which is being cataloged in an off-forum guide until the drafting is complete.

If you'd like to examine the draft, I'd love to find a way to share it with you.

[gtasthehunter]

I find Lv47 The Aurum Vale as SCH seems to be a bit hard... i've used both faeries, and they die to fast! Eos for the bosses but still, 1st time failed at the 1st mini boss couldn't get past, then 2nd time made it to final boss but failed! So got WHM to but not sure if want to try again!

What should i used for CM/WP? will be 1st times for both... i keep putting them off...

I've seen videos with primals with 2 SCH but both with Eos< why both the same! Selena and Eos would been good, make Selene use Spell and Skill Speed+ Skills, Skill+ to help with more DPS and Spell+ for faster healing and help if BLM is in party for DPS too...

[GeilLega]

I am vastly happier when I see Selene. Especially with a BLM in the party. My best WP times (which aren't near some of the godly 12s in this forum but are around 16-17s) are always when Selene is out.

100% anecdotal. Feel free to mine data. My theory is that a % of skill and spell speed across the DPS / tank and yourself out of cleric stance > with. I also haven't downed Titan yet, so I've only experienced some of the endgame.

[IceSpear]

I find Lv47 The Aurum Vale as SCH seems to be a bit hard... i've used both faeries, and they die to fast! Eos for the bosses but still, 1st time failed at the 1st mini boss couldn't get past, then 2nd time made it to final boss but failed! So got WHM to but not sure if want to try again!

What should i used for CM/WP? will be 1st times for both... i keep putting them off...

I've seen videos with primals with 2 SCH but both with Eos< why both the same! Selena and Eos would been good, make Selene use Spell and Skill Speed+ Skills, Skill+ to help with more DPS and Spell+ for faster healing and help if BLM is in party for DPS too...

Whispering Dawn stacks so if it was something like Titan with only two Scholars Eos could give them a lot of help.

[Starkbeaumont]

Yesterday in AK I decided to use Selene for once and while she was under Fey Glow her Embrace speed was really fast. It seemed to me like it has a bigger effect on the fairy itself than on the player. Could be just my imagination though. But if it's actually that way Selene would be much stronger on single curing compared to Eos. Guess I have to test this.

[cainejw]

Unless you bring in specific counterexamples or counterarguments, you are contributing nothing to this discussion. Citing yourself as somehow having advanced knowledge of stats does not help. In fact, your lack of substantiated claims along with your self-reference to profession is a contradiction worthy of ridicule.

Mkay, got some good testing done!

In testing Eos vs Selene, I used each faerie once in Coil 4. I did not control either faerie and I kept movement to a minimum. This was to attempt to control for Embrace usage.

Now, a disclaimer is that HPS and DPS is still highly variable in recording. I'm working on trying to validate my logs more readily, but it's difficult to work this unless everyone in my group runs the same parser.

For this work, I elected to use FFXIVLogRep as it records DOTs and HOTs.

In running Selene twice, I received the following information for healers:

HPS:
Selene A - 5m 12s - 329.93 WHM, 376.06 HPS SCH
Selene B - 5m 15s - 277.85 WHM, 302.45 HPS SCH

Eos A - 6m 45s - 277.33 WHM, 423.09 SCH
Eos B - 7m 10s - 583.53 WHM, 592.19 SCH

Average HPS over these is 395.30. Neither Selene heal attempts matched this average HPS. Both Eos runs appeared to match this. This would lead one to conclude that Eos is best for HPS despite Selene's buff.
Total Healed:

Selene A - 5m 12s - 102938 WHM, 117330 SCH
Selene B - 5m 15s - 87523 WHM, 95273 SCH

Eos A - 6m 45s - 112320 WHM, 171351 SCH
Eos B - 7m 10s - 250918 WHM, 254643 SCH

This would lead one to conclude that Eos is better for overall healing, but keep in mind that the time length presents a problem here. Now let's look at the averages healed in each fight, non-crit:

Selene A - 5m 12s - 1225 WHM, 696 SCH
Selene B - 5m 15s - 1234 WHM, 751 SCH

Eos A - 6m 45s - 1314 WHM, 644 SCH
Eos B - 7m 10s - 1228 WHM, 867 SCH

This would present one to conclude that Eos's heal buff may actually help depending on other circumstances including RNG.

Crits:

Selene A - 5m 12s - 1868 WHM, 1041 SCH
Selene B - 5m 15s - 1444 WHM, 1017 SCH

Eos A - 6m 45s - 1685 WHM, 1007 SCH
Eos B - 7m 10s - 2051 WHM, 1203 SCH

Some mixed results, but this one also shows pretty decent evidence that Eos is probably best overall for healing. However, the mixed results mean that, honestly, you can't say that Eos is vastly superior to Selene in healing. There are too many potential confounds here.

For the DPS, I chose to utilize a statistical test to see if Selene improves DPS significantly across the board. The tests ended up showing me that, quite frankly, there's no surefire outcome.

For all fights, only the Monk ended up with significant outcome...and he is the most geared in the raid. The bard ended up the worst DPS due to running Ballad. Other than that, it was mix and match.

Utilizing the logger-given DPS, statistical significance at the .05 level:

Selene A had significance with the Monk.
Selene B with a BLM and Monk.

Eos A had significance with a both BLM, Monk.
Eos B only had significance with the Monk.

Utilizing an attempted corrected DPS by dividing damage done by time of fight:

Selene A had significance with both BLM and Monk
Selene B had significance only with the Monk.

Eos A had no significant outcomes.
Eos B had significance with Monk and BLM.

All of these were tested against the average DPS of each user over 4 fights for 16 DPS measurements.

As a result of my findings, I decided that much more data is going to be needed to actually see which is statistically better than the other. As it stands, and as I've stated, there is no surefire way to know which faerie is better than the other. There are entirely too many confounding variables to test. You simply cannot equalize every single variable. Even with statistically testing Eos for healing, the outcomes are mixed.

The behavior of you and the DPS is much more important than the faerie you use. There will need to be more extensive testing to tell which faerie is "the best," but as it stands right now, either faerie can provide what is needed for both healing and DPSing.

[Teykos]

@cainejw: There's one consistency in your logs that's not being accounted for, given what you've stated.

If you leave Selene completely uncontrolled, she never uses her skill speed buff, at all. Selene requires some manual labor to squeeze out all her benefits. (So I'm curious how the MNK is benefiting from it.)

Also, so far, you've demonstrated that despite Selene having what you are defining as a no surefire outcome situation, both Selene runs are at least 1 min 30 seconds shorter than the Eos run. If that keeps up in your testing, then something is wrong with your conclusion of "no surefire outcome" there.

[cainejw]

Teykos, all but one run was a failure run. Eos B is a success run. We did approximately 6 runs, 4 of which turned out to be solid logs, 1 was a dummy log, and 1 had some really odd outcomes leading me to remove it as it was a third Eos log.

I also recognize that the operationalization leaves much to be desired. Frankly, you're never going to get a fully clean log for statistical comparison. If one DPS dies anytime during one fight but does not in another, the log is compromised. If the log misses or mislabels one attack, it's compromised. If one healer switches up their actions (Selene to Eos, for example) then the logs are compromised. If Fey Glow hits magic and Fey Light doesn't hit melee, again, compromised.


There's no good way to test the faeries in a vacuum with a full raid team. As that is the case, I am attempting to leverage the central limit theorem in my favor in hopes that the width of the data gathering equals out the confounding variables. As a sample has more iterations, it will appear more normative in nature. Sadly, the first round did not have lots of data.

Now, as you mention Fey Light, you are correct. That had not occurred to me. However, this only highlights the fact that the likely largest single contributor to DPS/Healing is not a faerie. It is not gear. It's not food. It will be the individual player and how they leverage their own characters. After that, I'm willing to bet that gear is the second largest factor in numerical outcomes. After all, we have two BLM and the lesser geared BLM, who was better rested and ready for the raid, did more DPS than the better geared BLM who was tired.

If you think that you can ensure that every DPS stays alive, that all of the buffs apply to everyone, healers never change their rotation, tanks never lose enmity, healers always have the exact same amount of MP, positioning is always the same, gear never changes between fights, foods are always up, buffs are always the same, AND that the exact same amount of energy level from each player is put into each run every single time...then please, give your hand at this.

Otherwise, I do apologize that I cannot give you a perfectly isolated, controlled experiential recounting of Eos and Selene. Instead, I can attempt to give Scholars experiential, non-theoretical, numbers-driven, non-simulation information. That information at this moment says both faeries are useful in differing situations.