Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[Yeowood]

I realized with editing my post I can actually show the math, so here goes.

	3 mobs	4 mobs	5 mobs	6 mobs	7 mobs	8 mobs
F3	168	168	168	168	168	168
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
B3	168	168	168	168	168	168
Freeze	300	400	500	600	700	800
Total	2796    3616   4436     5256  	6076  	6896
18s DPS	155	201	246	292	338	383

This beats the F2 x 2 -> Flare rotation but needs full MP. That means we actually need to compare it to this:

F3 -> F2 x3 -> Flare -> Transpose

	3 mobs	4 mobs	5 mobs	6 mobs	7 mobs	8 mobs
F3	168	168	168	168	168	168
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
F2	540	720	900	1080	1260	1440
Flare	1264	1591	1872	2106	2340	2574
Total	3052    3919    4740    5514    6288    7062
18s DPS	170	218     263	306	349	392

This is about the same time frame assuming roughly 3.1s for F3, 2.6s for F2/Freeze, 3.5s for Flare, and the worst case 3s for Transpose's server tick, so I just used the 18s total estimate. Actually the Flare rotation is slightly faster, but it probably evens out considering you will cast F3 in UI3 for the Freeze one.

I think the theory is sound because thinking about it, you gain 234 potency on Flare for each mob past the 5th, versus 180 for F2 and 100 for Freeze, which should eventually cancel out the big initial Flare bonus, but it certainly needs more than 8 mobs. I'd do the math to figure it out myself but I'm real bad at formatting these tables. For the rotation AFTER you Flare, yes the Freeze one beats out the Flare rotation, but you'd have to Blizzard 3 from UI1 and wait for a server tick, which seems suboptimal. You also have to consider, as more enemies die, Freeze gets worse, so if you expect anything to die within 18s and drop the total amount of enemies below the magic number, you should do Flare anyways.

But at a certain point, Freeze should actually be better! It just needs a lot of requirements that aren't likely to be met (enemy #, UI3, enemy durability).