Carraway's Guide to the New Archer: 1.18 and Beyond

[Penguin]

I never claimed to have tested anything extensively. I posted facts in response to claims that the Bleed/proc effect of Bloodletter was unimportant.

• Bloodletter does up to 570 damage on the end of bleed with the combo.
• Bloodletter does DoT damage.

Based on those I drew my conclusions. If this is a place to discuss the class how about you genuinely discuss it and stop with the "I know better than you because I said so" nonsense.

Ok than so going back to the discussion of whether it is better to use Bloodletter in a rotation to maximise the damage at the end of the bleed effect or if its better to use it whenever it comes off cooldown during the moogle fight.

I pretty have to go with using it whenever it comes off cooldown still.

Why? because the only moogle that the damage effect has a major effect on over the initial hit + dot effect damage is the PLD/GLA moogle, this is 1 moogle out of 8 that appear during the fight and generally most LS's tactics involve killing this moogle last and ignoring it for the majority of the fight.

Also due to the hectic nature of phase 2 and the possibility of the group doing it being comprised of 4-5 archers coordinating any kind of rotation to me atleast seems overly complicated and of very little benefit to overall party dps.

If you are going into an encounter that is comprised of mostly or all high defense enemies where the damage difference between the initial bloodletter hit and the damage at the end effect is significant than yes i 100% agree staggering/rotating bloodletters would overall give a higher group wide damage output.

If you notice that bloodletter has currently been on the target for 15-20 seconds and your bloodletter is about to come off cooldown than yes you should be using your own judgement and holding off bloodletter for those 10-15 seconds to maximise damage if at all possible.

If you want to overcomplicate an already hectic and complicated encounter to gain a very fractional dps increase or possibly even dps loss than go for it.

And again if you don't like the way carraway writes his guides than don't read them and go write one yourself, i would personally be extremely interested in your ideas of a perfect archer rotation, just remember to post lots of numbers and pictures so someone doesn't come tell you that you are talking crap.

Edit: Also a small little edit, considering the fact the bloodletter debuff also doesn't have a 100% proc chance unless you could somehow boost a stat to where bloodletter always procs you will be required to plan for when it resists, in a 15 minute fight this can quite easily happen 10+ times which complicates the staggering/rotation even more.

I don't know about other LS's but to me the most simplistic tactic is generally the best tactic to go with, overcomplicating things generally causes problems and causes things to takes much longer to complete.

Also you interrupted my Gundam marathon with this dumb crap so thanks for that!

[Murugan]

Ok than so going back to the discussion of whether it is better to use Bloodletter in a rotation to maximise the damage at the end of the bleed effect or if its better to use it whenever it comes off cooldown during the moogle fight.

I pretty have to go with using it whenever it comes off cooldown still.

Why? because the only moogle that the damage effect has a major effect on over the initial hit + dot effect damage is the PLD/GLA moogle, this is 1 moogle out of 8 that appear during the fight and generally most LS's tactics involve killing this moogle last and ignoring it for the majority of the fight.

I'll make it simple because you are fixated on my "staggering" which was merely an attempt to appease your need to never interrupt your timers.

WARNING: I'm going to suggest you neglect your timers situationally (hide your children)

Even with 30 seconds of DoT, in all likelihood you would rarely have to wait long enough for it to develop into a serious problem in your overall damage. Again I won't user whiskerwall as that is too obvious, I'll use Pukna Pako the Tailturner as an example because he is where I have the best bloodletter testing on*.

You encounter a Bloodletter effect on Pukna and your Bloodletter just became available:
Instead of using Bloodletter combo, and depending on the length of time the bloodletter DoT has been on the mob you:

• A. Use Piercing Arrow>Gloom Arrow anyways, then continue on rotation as if you fired bloodletter, coming back to it later.
  Dealing ~365+310= 630-680 damage for piercing/gloom.
  Wasting 20 seconds of your Bloodletter's potential timer, or in other terms 25% of a single Bloodletter's initial damage.
  Bloodletter would have likely done ~350-450
  450*25%=112 damage of a Bloodletter lost
  
  
  B. Use Heavy Shot+Light Shot (+light shot if necessary)
  Dealing ~350+240= 560-590 damage (with an additional ~240 damage every 4 seconds afterwards).
  Wasting 5 seconds of Bloodletter's potential timer (+4 for every light shot after that). Or in other terms 6.25% (+5% for every light shot after that).
  Bloodletter would have likely done ~350-450
  450*6.25%=28 damage lost (-22 damage for every extra light shot)

Now we both know you can't shoot 5% or a quarter of a Bloodletter, so you might say "well maybe that means player A does one less bloodletter the entire fight" but in response I'd say "maybe they will have the exact same number of bloodletters" and probability would be in my favor.


*I'd have used Pukla Puki the Pomburner as it seems to have the lowest defense, but this rarely ever happens in our attempts because we blow him up first with generally no one using bloodletter since we kill him using Barrage (if timed right pre-buffed 50 seconds prior to AF), QK combo, and if necessary WV combo (as well as Howling Fist combo, Whirlwind Combo, Thundaga etc. but I know you only are interested in using archers so that probably won't matter to you) saving the Bloodletter combo for Pukna. We generally have the 1st phase moogles killed long enough to recoup our timers, gain 3k TP and prebuff in preparation for 2nd phase. So it is basically a fresh beginning.

Also due to the hectic nature of phase 2 and the possibility of the group doing it being comprised of 4-5 archers coordinating any kind of rotation to me atleast seems overly complicated and of very little benefit to overall party dps.

If you are going into an encounter that is comprised of mostly or all high defense enemies where the damage difference between the initial bloodletter hit and the damage at the end effect is significant than yes i 100% agree staggering/rotating bloodletters would overall give a higher group wide damage output.

If you notice that bloodletter has currently been on the target for 15-20 seconds and your bloodletter is about to come off cooldown than yes you should be using your own judgement and holding off bloodletter for those 10-15 seconds to maximise damage if at all possible.

If you want to overcomplicate an already hectic and complicated encounter to gain a very fractional dps increase or possibly even dps loss than go for it.

It's not complicated, and the fight isn't too hectic to look at a mob and determine its DoT's. It is a perfectly reasonable request to make at endgame that people not unnecessarily overwrite timebomb DoT's, anyone who has done endgame with similar abilities (Vanguard comes to mind) will have likely been doing this for years.

The DoT doesn't stick that often anyways. If it's sticking 100% for you please tell me your secret. This is not a full time burden that requires on the spot calculus, you simply have to have some limited awareness of the fight.

In other words you have to not actively ignore it in favor of your absolute devotion to the rotation.

As for the DoT sticking, it would be interesting to test whether PIE or some other stat affects it, and exactly what its rate is. However since no one has made a parser which tracks Bloodletter damage I would have to go line by line through the log to calculate proc percentage.