Quote Originally Posted by Keyln View Post
This is true if and only if all of the enemies in a group have the same HP, which in actuality, is not always the case.
I see what you're saying, now, but in the vast majority of circumstances in this game (like, for every 1 where this is false, there exist at least 8 where it is true), large groups of mobs either have similar enough health that (all things equal) they'll die on the same hit or they're spawned by a boss and thus obviously have less health than the boss mob, but similar health to each other.

Looking at damage per mob totally does work, but when trying to compare two different methods on their efficiency in killing a large group of enemies, it's much more beneficial and telling to compare the total amount of damage each rotation can dish out in a given period of time to the mob group. Unless you're running outdated content, there's no area in the game where a full spam of Doom Spike alongside a BLM using optimal AoE rotation will kill the mob before the dragoon hits zero TP, unless the BLM wastes his Raging Strikes on a triple flare, rather than saving it for the burst opener on the boss (or you're with a WAR/DRK who's doing high dps AS WELL AS YOU TWO and a healer doing the same). And, in the situation where your AoE is NOT killing mobs, looking at the damage it's dealing on a per-enemy basis doesn't tell you as much as looking at the total damage you did in those 10 gcds.

The reason I disagree on the "damage-per-mob" approach is just that it skews heavily toward single-target dps, unless you divide that by the amount of mobs present, in which case it becomes literally the exact same thing as just comparing total damage dealt, just multiplying AoE rather than dividing the single-target.

Basically, you can't at all compare HT>IDC4>IDC4 with 4 gsk/min to HT>RoT>DSx8 in a "per-mob" or "total-damage" potency examination unless you modify *both* of them to examine the situation more thoroughly. Saying DS is 160 potency per mob per gcd while the base rotation (H>IDC4>P>TTT4) is (not including buffs) ~280 potency per mob per gcd completely ignores the fact that, if there are two enemies, your 280 per mob is only doing 280 per gcd whereas my 160 per mob is doing 320 per gcd.


The reason why I put in a per second basis is that the use of TP and the regeneration of TP do not follow the same time scale.
Yeah, same reason I did it in my calculations earlier in the thread. Just as long as you are aware that the rotations don't last exactly that long, since discrete numbers don't operate nearly the same way as continuous ones. It's only really useful to give ratios of TP consumption and regeneration between different methods. It's very important to note that, while you regen 20 TP per second, you do NOT regen 70 TP in 3.5 seconds, you regen it in 6. I would actually think it'd be interesting to examine a 0 TP scenario and compare waiting for 2 ticks to pop a 120 TP skill (Death Blossom) vs using the TP as it comes back for your base rotation. Which would *actually* be stronger? Comparing pps here doesn't tell nearly the whole story.



And what FunkyBunch says is completely true.

If you're gonna fall into the H>IDC4>IDC4 rotation (which you should after a time to conserve your TP), you should always be cycling to whatever has the most health remaining OR doing a H>IDC4>TTT4 to chunk out a large amount of health from a priority target, like something that does annoying status ailment aoes.