Quote Originally Posted by Garotte14 View Post
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.