The Black Mage Rotations

[Youmu]

Regen is on the same global tick as DoTs (3 seconds). There's no real way to game it.

You can, sort of. It ticks every third Eorzea game clock tick. Not too hard to time up.

[PessimiStick]

You can, sort of. It ticks every third Eorzea game clock tick. Not too hard to time up.

It's every game clock tick (1 Eorzean minute), but since almost nothing you do is a multiple of 3 seconds, you can't actually do anything useful with that information.

[ShinryuReishiki]

How about Flare - Transpose - B2 - B2 - Flare - Flare - Transpose - B2 - B2 etc., etc. aoe rotation?

Once you have the timing down, that does seem better. On a single target (Not that you ever would), using Flare instead of Fire III would be close; slightly extra cast time for slightly more damage, but as soon as it's more than one enemy, Flare takes the lead. The only downside is, as you stated, the increased cost of a mistake. A mistimed first Flare could make the second Flare either a full cast time or nonexistent. It is pretty easy to do consistently, though.

This makes me think of using Mage's Ballad for Blizzard III > Flare > Flare... I've done no testing to see how useful it actually is or isn't, but it certainly is fun to have a near constant stream of Flares to complement Holy spam.

[PessimiStick]

Replacing F3 with Flare is a lot of risk for marginal gain. UI3 Flare is 182 potency, and the cost of a miss is that you stand around twiddling your thumbs for 5+ seconds doing 0 damage, and never getting out your 468 potency Flare at all.

Edit: Played around with this some more, and assuming you're not lagging it's actually fairly safe. The timing is really awkward to get HASTE on both Flares, but getting the mana tick is pretty controllable. I'll probably run WP with double Flare and see if it works as well as on dummies. I was parsing ~435 DPS over 3.5 minutes against 3 targets. That had some hardcasted second Flares in it, so theoretically it should be higher if you time it perfectly, but I'm still working on that.

[ShinryuReishiki]

It may not work for everyone, but personally, I use a monosyllabic word as a counter for the timing. As soon as I see the tick, think/say "one", Flare -> Flare. Once I started doing that, I haven't had any issues getting the quick casts on both every time.

[Youmu]

It's every game clock tick (1 Eorzean minute), but since almost nothing you do is a multiple of 3 seconds, you can't actually do anything useful with that information.

Why I said sort of. You can start your 4 second flare cast right after a tick and ensure you can transpose for tick immediately afterwards, but this implies you stop casting to wait for the tick... so very situationally useful

[Waliel]

On a side note, there was a bug that caused players to be able to use flare twice in a row, but that will be addressed.

Well... there goes that. I will miss triple Flares with Convert. I hope we can still do F3 -> Flare.

[MouriceWayne]

nice guide here. Used the AOE for WP Speed runs! thanks for the guide

[xyaie]

im sure im worst mage US, but apparently mages can ignore twin's fly by swoop things? i imagine mana wall? (seems like it would be 2 out of 3 swoops on one of the phases?)

[Youmu]

im sure im worst mage US, but apparently mages can ignore twin's fly by swoop things? i imagine mana wall? (seems like it would be 2 out of 3 swoops on one of the phases?)

Yes, I usually pop manawall on second set of divebombs, as added insurance against mess ups. If you dont get hit by divebombs, you can go burst the next snake adds and tank a few hits before tank has agro back, since it should still be up.