Quote Originally Posted by Suzuka196 View Post
would it not go faster if i am tanking, we could rotate through mobs instead of people trying to spread the damage and let the tank get more damaged, so... i think t he dps controls the dungeon, not the tank or healer: dps each mob > tank takes less damage> healer doesnt need to HEAL as much and can focus on helping the fight, not standing around with glowing fingers (how i feel as a healer)
Here's an example with numbers.

Let's say you have a Lv30 BRD as one of your DDs.

Venomous Bite has a total potency of 340, and Windbite has a total potency of 360. Once those are up, the primary GCD attack is Heavy Shot, which is 150, with a 20% chance of forcing a crit on the next Straight Shot, so let's say for every five Heavy Shots, they get a 200ish potency Straight Shot.

BRD30 total single target potency per eight GCDs: 1650


Now let's say you pull a group of three mobs.
If you DoT each of them and then use two Quick Nocks (110 per target per GCD), you do 3 x (340 + 360 + 110 + 110).

BRD30 total AoE potency per eight GCDs: 2760
(this is a 67% gain over the single target potency)


Now let's say you have a Lv30 WHM as your healer. At Lv30 in a 3 mob pull, a healer should realistically need to heal at most once every three or four GCDs, but for the sake of argument let's say that when all three targets are alive, the healer heals every other GCD, so in eight GCDs this WHM can do single target DPS of 230 (Aero) + 3 x 200 (Stone II). Total 830. Assume that killing targets allows the WHM to nuke more, up to 8/8 GCDs: 230 + 7 x 200 = 1630. This is maximum gain of 800 potency per eight GCDs. This is less than the 1110 potency the BRD would have gained from AoEing. If there were two BRDs, the party would be doing at least 1420 potency less than they could.

This is almost another whole single target BRD's worth of damage!


The difference only gets larger as levels go up and standard pull sizes get bigger. Consider a Lv70 BRD with six targets. By 70, BRD gets upgraded DoTs, Caustic Bite (570) and Stormbite (670). Instead of crit Straight Shot, they get Refulgent Arrow (300). Again, using the same eight GCD timing, the single target DPS would be 570 + 670 + 6 x 150 + 300 = 2290. And let's say for AoE, he uses Stormbite on each target and then fills the other two GCDs with Quick Nock, for 6 x (670 + 110 + 110) = 5340. This is 133% more damage than single target. And we haven't yet even started considering the bonus damage they get from the bajillion oGCD Rains of Death.

Some other jobs' potencies (GCDs only, not normalized across jobs):

(Lv30 single target vs Lv30 AoE(3 targets))
RDM: 2055ish vs 2400
BLM: 2142ish vs 2946ish
MNK (6 GCDs): 1242 vs 1472

(Lv70 single target vs Lv70 AoE(6 targets))
RDM: 2280ish vs 4800ish
BLM: 3222ish vs 8404ish (slightly complicated)
MNK (6 GCDs): 1242 vs 2470


tl;dr: It's definitely faster for DDs to spread DoTs and AoE things than to focus all attention on one target at a time, so tanks should AoE liberally as well to maintain enmity on everything.