Pulling as PAL

[Novak_04]

When you say 3+ do you mean "three OR more" or "more than three?"

"3+" means 3 or more. Think about it mathematically: 3+0=3, 3+1=4, 3+2=5, etc. Since we're talking about discrete objects (countable), we can only consider positive integers. It wouldn't make sense to have -1 enemies. Thus, 3+ means 3 or more.

[NocturniaUzuki]

In general, 3 enemies is the magic number where you want to use your Aoe instead of single target as it is more damage. Every class follows this rule.

As a healer main, I would encourage tanks and DPS to question this rule.

From a potency point of view, yes, if you're doing 3+ mobs, you will, mathematically, do more damage.

However, as tank, you will also take more damage for longer. This in turn means that the healer has to waste significantly more casts on healing instead of DPS, which in turn reduces the actual mob clear time.

If you're doing 3 mobs, I would focus on single-target, while stunning/binding one mob to reduce incoming damage so the healer can DPS more. Depending on the money type and their HP, you may want to do the same at 4 mobs. I generally start looking at AoR by default past 5. But really, if you have a poor or new tank/healer, do single groups of mobs and single-target everything. If you have experienced players, just do max pull size. There are likely not going to be too many situations where you go in half measures.

[NocturniaUzuki]

"money type"

Phone autocorrect. The bane of my forum literacy.

[Phoenicia]

As a healer main, I would encourage tanks and DPS to question this rule.

From a potency point of view, yes, if you're doing 3+ mobs, you will, mathematically, do more damage.

However, as tank, you will also take more damage for longer. This in turn means that the healer has to waste significantly more casts on healing instead of DPS, which in turn reduces the actual mob clear time.

If you're doing 3 mobs, I would focus on single-target, while stunning/binding one mob to reduce incoming damage so the healer can DPS more. Depending on the money type and their HP, you may want to do the same at 4 mobs. I generally start looking at AoR by default past 5. But really, if you have a poor or new tank/healer, do single groups of mobs and single-target everything. If you have experienced players, just do max pull size. There are likely not going to be too many situations where you go in half measures.

I can almost swear, this game either has healers that never want to heal (Stone IV mages) or healers that want to ONLY heal (the famous "Healers shouldn't DPS" cure 2 spammers).... No in betweens.

In reply to you, yes and no... In vacuum, yes, you want the bigger threat addressed first. CC things that cause more damage while you kill the big one with annoying CC? CC the big one while destroying the small adds that can rip through the tank? But in reality, no such scenario exists in the game. It is either: kill boss, or kill "trash".

First of all, talking in vacuum/bubbles is just that, "talk". The guidelines that experienced players put down are there for a good reason: To guide people based on their experience. And so far, the rule of: 3 or more mobs = AoE, is a VERY tried and tested rule. Granted the following:

- Knowledge of your damage in-take based on equipped gear and available CDs. Do you have my invulnerabilities and/or self heals? etc.

- Your group's DPS: What classes are they? Is it a double NIN(lol) that suffer heavy on resources in AoE, or double casters where their AoE has the same damage/GCD as their ST rotations? What's their gear? What's their skill level? Do they know their AoE buttons and Aggro dumps? or are they gonna rip aggro off you on that 1 mob even though they are doing less DPS than your autos alone because they are only hitting 1 mob without Diversion? etc.

- Your healer's ability: Can they DPS? Do they AFK? or worse, are they the Cure 2 spamming types? Do they know their AoE stuns/slows? Do they help you mitigate with E4E and Soils/Regens etc?

- Knowing what you are about to face. Most of the time, however, if there's a "pack" of mobs they have similar health. So Not AoEing them is simply and intentionally prolonging the encounter and stretching the duration of which the tank is taking damage. Instead of you know, AoEing the whole pack to kill all 3 withing 30 seconds where Rampart and Sentinel/Shadowwall/Vengeance cover all of it instead of 1 minute where you have 30s where you try to fill with "weak CDs" like Anticapation.

Of course knowing these things should be the number 1 deciding factor of "how big to pull". Good tanks aren't ones that stay in Deliverance 24/7/30/360... They are the ones that know how to balance the damage they take against the damage they can dish out. So in turn, they do not pull over what they (or their healer/DPS) can handle.

TL;RD: AoE in this game is as irrelevant as it can get. If you can AoE, it is 99.999999% best to be just AoE'd down. But feel free to read on.

As far as dungeons are concerned: Anything that is threatening also happens to be immune to stunning/binding with other weak mobs that die very fast. And stunning a mob that dies by the time your BLM gets back to Umbral Ice after a double/triple Flare, SMN has dropped a Death Flare, RDM gets 30 mana and uses manafacation, MNK to finish Riddle of Fire, BRD to finish a Mages Ballad phase, etc.. is simply wasting GCDs on CC instead of damage, which beats your whole "more casts on healing instead of DPS". The only thing happening here is trading healing GCDs for CC from your actual DPS instead of your healer. Especially that Flare is a 514.8 potency spell as opposed to your ~200 (Used BLM because of their Sleep, and ignoring all the complications of juggling AF/UI to cast said sleep). Really ironic when healers are never using GCDs to heal these days and are just precasting Regen/shields before a pull and try to throw a very well-timed Bene/ED.

In anything bigger than a dungeon (8-mans, 24-mans, BA) you have multiple tanks that can split add duty and EVEN MORE DPS to AoE sh*t down. And even bigger LB bars for much stronger and bigger AOE LB effects.

Instead of worrying about only what you're using in 1 pull, you should take into consideration what happens if you do split the pulls.

Most Resources are limited time-gated. Even ones that are generated by other means (Guage or w/e). So packing in as many enemies into these resources is much more efficient. Tank CDs (that reduce damage), DPS CDs (that burn things faster) and even your healing CDs that help you NOT cast healing GCDs follow this rule.

In any set of 3 minutes, you have 1 sentinel usage, 2 ramparts, 1 Bulwark and 50% chance of having Hallowed Ground. In these three minutes, pulling 15 mobs and killing them while your VERY strong cooldowns are up, i.e. Hallowed(10s), Sentinel(10s), and Rampart(20) for a total of 40s of enemies' damage not existing/cut by half is MUCH more efficient than pulling them in 3 sets and tanking only half of them with CDs and the other half at 100% damage in-take. (Pulling 5 mobs with a rampart is as if you're taking damage from only 4).

For DPS it's also the same: In 3 minutes, a BLM has 3 triples casts, 3 swiftcasts, 2 Leylines, and 1 convert (used to throw in an extra Flare). Combining TC+SC+Convert+Ether, they can do a quadra-Flare once, is it not better to hit all 15 instead of... 5? Actually for BLMs to ever justify Fire 2 usage they need 7+ mobs, otherwise they skip to Flare. On 15 mobs, 2x Fire2, 4xflare is guaranteed to remove anything with 300k or less health.

Even as a healer, by using CDs like Star, Lightspeed, ClericS, extended balance and abusing Celestial Opposition for an AoE stun to help tanks mitigate (by extended regen/defensive effects on tank where you can literally forget about healing your tank for the next 40 seconds because of 20k/tick regens) and extend your own beefed up DPS to burn down said 15 mobs with half-cost semi-instant Gravities, you can be much more efficient than simply splitting pulls/resources. Again, using 2 minute CDs where if you split said pulls, you won't halve said beefed up phases on half of those packs.

[NocturniaUzuki]

I'm not sure how much of that was a reply to me, and how much was a reply to the topic of pulls in general.

All I'd want to add is that end-game content is not the only thing in existence. It's unfortunate that they have long since ditched the effectiveness of CC abilities. So while I'd agree it's always better to AoE if you're able, I'd disagree that AoE is necessarily faster when you have a small group. Particularly in low level situations where CC is still very much viable. Rather than knocking down the big threat first (which usually has higher HP), it's easier and faster to CC the big threat and wipe out the weaker ones while the big one is out of commission. So, for example, in Brayflox in a pull of two Comet Chasers and an Ash Drake, I'd stun/bind a Comet Chaser, single-target the other Comet Chaser then kill the first Comet Chaser while stunning the Ash Drake whenever it's not casting, then finally kill the Ash Drake. This would ensure minimal healing necessary in that situation. Obviously, it's more ideal to just do a mass pull, AoE, and have done with it, but if for whatever reason your healer refuses to heal, and your DPS is overall a bit slow (so the tank can't survive the pull without heals), this is one solution to minimizing damage taken. Others include allowing non-casters to tank mobs to split the damage and thereby removing the need to heal.

A lot of these strategies are things I use in DPS-only or Healerless runs of old dungeons. Hence they are rather foreign to main stream dungeon running. However, they are still useful in conventional runs.

Anyways, your average pug group is not going to be optimizing trash dungeon runs. In fact, I often feel like I'm the only one who actually takes optimization seriously in old leveling dungeons...

[Phoenicia]

Snip,

I was talking in general as a reply to what you said.

Your example of Brayflox, if you have a BLM and you're not a PLD (the only job that can't AoE in any form at that level, not even multi-DoTing), the chasers die before the BLM finishes 1 fire phase which is 12 seconds or 4 fire 2 casts. CC and Binding only stretches your tanks' only 2 CDs they have (Rampart and Anticipation). But then again, you're counting odd cases where a rule can be put into question (even though it still applies) instead of proving that the "rule" shouldn't be a rule.

DPS-only and healerless runs are odd-cases and are in a category similar to BLU.

I wasn't even talking optimization, I'm just talking logic. AoEing 2 packs with 1 set of CDs is always better than splitting the packs and not have the CDs for one of them simply because it's easier on heals (or whatever role). Kind of like if you have a truck that can load a metric tonne, and deliver a shipment, why take 2 500 kg shipments and use twice the fuel, twice the time, and twice the effort only because "it's easier to load/unload the 500 kgs in 1 sitting as opposed to the tonne" where the only "twice effort" needed is putting in 1000 kgs instead of 500kgs in 1 go.