Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[daman4567]

snip

True, but as SS increases, the time shaved off by swiftcasting Fire III decreases. At the same time, the hardcast ogcd time stays the same. At base SS, Fire IV hardcast and (hard)swift + Fire IV are the same potency, but as you get more spellspeed, the hardswift Fire IV becomes less potent. There is a gain from hardcasting swiftcast so you can weave another ogcd, but the same gain could be gotten by weaving swiftcast at another point in your rotation, or better yet saving it for planned movement. The gain in the given example is made even less by Ley Lines and other party speed buffs. I'd go so far as to say that with any Arrow card except expanded, that hardcasting swiftcast is even a loss (I'll math it out later). In any case, it's better to use swiftcast while NOT under the effect of Ley Lines, and even better to use it to get an extra Fire IV in lieu of a Scathe during long periods of movement if you don't have a proc.

[Waliel]

I figure if you get lucky with TC procs while in UI phase then go ham with those. It's always nice to get a chain of 10 TC procs in a row.

Just don't use all of them at once.

In any case, it's better to use swiftcast while NOT under the effect of Ley Lines, and even better to use it to get an extra Fire IV in lieu of a Scathe during long periods of movement if you don't have a proc.

Then again, if you know something like that is coming, you should be saving your Swift anyway.

[MagiusNecros]

Just don't use all of them at once.

I'd use them all at once in large 6-9 nine enemy pulls to have every one dotted all at once and go straight to AoE. Stuff died very very quickly. Otherwise try to save a TC until something Thunder'd goes down to 12 seconds.

[StouterTaru]

I'd use them all at once in large 6-9 nine enemy pulls to have every one dotted all at once and go straight to AoE. Stuff died very very quickly. Otherwise try to save a TC until something Thunder'd goes down to 12 seconds.

Thundercloud becomes a dps loss vs straight AoE spam when the pack gets around 4-5 mobs.

[daman4567]

If you only consider straight potency. Aoe rotation requires a lot of waiting for mp ticks if you are unlucky, or if you have just enough SS that you cast Fire III within one server tick. Once there gets to be around 8 or more enemies, thunder would definitely not be worth it, but if you find yourself waiting for MP ticks during aoe a lot, the breakpoint is probably a bit higher than 4-5 mobs.

[StouterTaru]

If you only consider straight potency. Aoe rotation requires a lot of waiting for mp ticks if you are unlucky, or if you have just enough SS that you cast Fire III within one server tick. Once there gets to be around 8 or more enemies, thunder would definitely not be worth it, but if you find yourself waiting for MP ticks during aoe a lot, the breakpoint is probably a bit higher than 4-5 mobs.

If your Spell Speed is around 900, you won't be waiting on that MP tick, and a thundercloud means your 15 second cycle becomes 18 seconds. At 5 mobs, that's ~780 potency per 3 seconds. Using a thundercloud takes 3 seconds due to server MP tick, for only 710 potency. And that's assuming that the mob is alive for the full 24 seconds.

[Garotte14]

True, but as SS increases, the time shaved off by swiftcasting Fire III decreases. At the same time, the hardcast ogcd time stays the same. At base SS, Fire IV hardcast and (hard)swift + Fire IV are the same potency, but as you get more spellspeed, the hardswift Fire IV becomes less potent. There is a gain from hardcasting swiftcast so you can weave another ogcd, but the same gain could be gotten by weaving swiftcast at another point in your rotation, or better yet saving it for planned movement. The gain in the given example is made even less by Ley Lines and other party speed buffs. I'd go so far as to say that with any Arrow card except expanded, that hardcasting swiftcast is even a loss (I'll math it out later). In any case, it's better to use swiftcast while NOT under the effect of Ley Lines, and even better to use it to get an extra Fire IV in lieu of a Scathe during long periods of movement if you don't have a proc.

So taking the end of my rotation as an example, Fire 1 > Swiftcast > Fire IV > Convert > Fire IV x 2. At Base Spell Speed of 354 under Ley Lines, this rotation has a total potency of 1927.80, (Not including Raging Strikes) and has a total time of 9.84s; equaling 195.91 PPS for those 4 attacks.

Omitting the Swiftcast and saving it, doing Fire 1 > Fire IV > Convert > Fire IV x 2 brings the time to 10.27 with the same potency, and a PPS of 187.71. So that is 0.43s longer and 8.20 PPS lower. And remember this is at 354 SS under LL.

Now using the exact same formula with 1005 SS, the rotation with Swiftcast is 8.92s with a PPS of 216.12. Without the Swiftcast it is 9.31s with a PPS of 207.07; making it 0.39s longer and 9.05 PPS lower.

So, while you are correct in that as SS increases, the time shaved off decreases, the PPS does not. And adding almost 700 SS only reduced that 0.04s. Weaving convert under a swiftcasted Fire IV will always be a gain, unless we're maybe looking at upwards of 3000 SS. You are always going to save close to a half second by using swiftcast on a Fire IV as long as you're weaving convert afterwards. Hell, I even Sharpcast > Fire 1 > Fire IV > Firestarter > Swiftcast + Fire IV on a regular basis if I know I won't need SC for 60s.

My only point is, you should be using Swiftcast in your opener. You should be building your opener around each fight anyways, and if you need to adjust to save SC for another purpose, then thats fine. But you shouldn't say its a loss to use SC because thats just not the case.

[daman4567]

My only point is, you should be using Swiftcast in your opener. You should be building your opener around each fight anyways, and if you need to adjust to save SC for another purpose, then thats fine. But you shouldn't say its a loss to use SC because thats just not the case.

I think the only fight now that you can safely use swiftcast in your opener is a3s (never been to/seen savage 3 or 4, but I'm assuming they are at least as movement demanding as normal mode). I see your point in the pps though, but pps isn't really the unit that decides your dps over a fight. As it has been mentioned before (unsure if it was in this thread or not) gaining .5 seconds here and there doesn't translate to a dps gain unless you gain another spellcast because of it. That is to say, time gains from swiftcast need to be "locked in" by either giving you an extra cast or pushing another cast's damage under your buffs. On the other hand, using swiftcast to move while using Fire IV instead of Scathe, the gains are immediately "locked in" because you gain around 450 potency from it. Also, using Aetherial Manipulation to move is made more efficient by swiftcasting a spell, but there we're getting into the marginal time gains again.

For example, in A6S against Blaster, you're required to move around 20-25s into the fight, which means you'll need something to help you move. Aetherial Manipulation is out, because it's likely you will either die or have to move again, since all your possible targets will still be positioning themselves during the safe window to move across the platform. Also, the inital total uptime on blaster is only around 40-50 seconds total, so there isn't much of a chance to accumulate gains and make the swiftcast in the opener worth anything. In this case, the best dps increase for swiftcast would be to use it to move for mirage baiting or, if you were able to use a proc for that, use it to pop an extra fire IV on Blaster right before he flies up.

In A5S it might be more useful to have swiftcast in your opener, if you are saving cooldowns. If you don't push first prey, and if you don't get targeted for it, then using swiftcast while the boss is big could possibly be a dps loss, as you push all your subsequent casts up by .5s. This has the potential to make a cast hit for less damage, by hitting earlier and falling under the boss's vuln down. Aside from that, there's also the first bomb's away, which might require a lot of movement, and if it does that also falls under the same problem as positioning mirages in a6s, where you might not be able to rely on Aetherial Manipulation to get you there since the possible targets are still en route there as well.

Swiftcast does increase the pps of the opener by a significant amount, and I was surprised at the numbers you came up with so I rethought my headmath. The numbers are close enough that rounding error on the cast vs recast times might be affecting it, but as SS increases, the pps gained increases because of SS's scaling is more than linear, but the percentage of pps gained should go down because of the constant time it takes to hardcast an ogcd. From your numbers, the percent gains are 4.368% at base SS and 4.370% at 1005 SS, but this could be skewed by the fact that cast and recast times are rounded. I don't know how SS interacts with longer cast times, but assuming that the longer times decrease by .01s at a time, just more often than the gcd, then 1005 SS might be above a point where the gcd decreased but the cast time of Fire IV didn't decrease, which would increase the value of using swiftcast on it. Of course, I might be wrong about how SS works, but the theory should hold. That being said, as SS increases the potential % gains from using swiftcast will decrease in general, because as you fit more casts in normally, an extra one cast will become less and less of a percentage of your total dps.