FF 5.X Alternative Raid Buff Alignment and Openers

[Silverquick]

So you’re quoting one boss that either does single or double beam? The attack my be random (barely), but the time stamp for it is still relatively the same so you will always know when it’s happening. And you will always be prepared for it because its position in a fight doesn’t change.

Oh my god really?
You're seriously going to get that petty? Are you just looking for something to argue about?

[ReiMakoto]

Oh my god really?
You're seriously going to get that petty? Are you just looking for something to argue about?

Im not sure why youre calling this petty, youre making outlandish claims about boss design which are being shown not to be true. As for your smn example earlier, these are all things you can adjust your rotation around ie saving a ruin 4 or egi assault, minor adjustment and youre still doing a rotation. To go back even further to your hw dwt example, yes it was bad to cut your dwt short for deathflare, not just because of the 10% up from dwt, but the 10% up from contagion, and also raging strikes every 3 mins, and if you know when the boss is going away then you could very comfortably get in all the ruin 3s under all these buffs, far better than early deathflare just in case it randomly jumps (which bosses dont do)

[HyoMinPark]

Oh my god really?
You're seriously going to get that petty? Are you just looking for something to argue about?

No, I’m simply proving your initial argument wrong, which was that fights aren’t scripted and your rotation is a fight-by-fight rotation (i.e., changes with the fight) because bosses do things in random order. A few bosses have “random” mechanics, but they always occur in such a way that the way you perform your rotation isn’t changed. Let me give you a more in-depth answer now that I’m not half-asleep and distracted.

Fights in this game are highly scripted: you will always know when and where things are happening, and there’s tons of evidence to back this up. It’s actually been a community complaint that one can go “tankbuster is 20 seconds into the fight, first raid wide is at 30—I can use my immunity at 20 seconds and the SCH can just Indom after the raid wide every single time”. Again, I invite you to go look up fight timelines for any Savage, Extreme, or Ultimate. People have been posting images with mechanics plus time stamps on them since Deltascape. Like this one.

Any mechanical randomness tends to be 1 out of 2 different kinds of mechanics (E4S Massive Landslide first versus ATV mode first); but you’re still missing the key point here: your rotation does not change despite this. It doesn’t matter which one Titan does first: my rotation on DNC still flows the same: Standard Finish is still used every 30 seconds; Technical Finish/Devilment every 120 seconds, Shield Samba is still used during Crumbling Down because that’s where my healers wanted it; etc.. The “randomness” does not affect this. And the busters will always be at the same point in the fight. He won’t randomly not do them.

Even a fight like Brawler (your example) or any of the A6S robots will still do their mechanics at the same point in a fight even if it’s Single Beam/Drill versus Double Beam/Drill. That won’t change anything rotation-wise except maybe tank and healer cooldown usage for the buster versus the stack—he’ll always do the one he didn’t do first later, and it will always be at the same time stamp. Here’s a Death & Taxes guide for A6S—if you notice, each phase is broken down with exact time stamps of when the mechanics occur. It never changes despite Brawler’s Attachment randomness. Which was my entire point.

Your base rotation for any job doesn’t drastically change on a fight-by-fight basis. There are niches where you may do something different (e.g., my example with DNC AOEing during Phase 1 of TEA because it’s a gain over single-target), but it will always generally be the same. The most that tends to change is where/when mitigation is used.

Is that explained better?

If you don’t like having your arguments contested, don’t post on a public forum.

I also did not say that... I said this...
"No they actually won't (be consistent/predictable), because damage is not constant, so the Boss mob getting to that transition phase is not constant, either with your timing nor your CDs. It COULD turn out that way... but it also might not."

This is also incorrect with regards to any kind of current content. Bosses now don’t need certain HP thresholds to be reached in order to phase—they phase based on a time-stamp. It won’t matter if you get Titan to 75% or if he’s still at 85% by the time Titan Maximum comes out. At roughly ~3:43, the boss will phase into Titan Maximum irregardless of his HP value. Same for Orogenesis at ~9:49. This has been the case since at the very least SB, where the developers stopped making fights to phase based on HP %. Probably because of the amount of salt that revolved around Zurvan EX back in HW—all you needed to do was push him past 80% to skip the first Soar, which only required one to do a standard opener. When people failed to do something so simple, salt ensued and the infamous “Skip Soar or Disband” came to be.

[Silverquick]

No, I’m simply proving your initial argument wrong, which was that fights aren’t scripted and your rotation is a fight-by-fight rotation (i.e., changes with the fight) because bosses do things in random order.

One problem...
I never said any of the things you just claimed...YOU are the one that said that.

I said THIS...
"... a boss mob can have a random choice of which of its attacks to use. It could be a tank buster, it could be a gaze attack it could be something else. Either way all of those will disrupt your timing, which in turn causes you to alter your rotation to something else."

None of that was about phase mechanics.

I stated...... that the flow of combat was going to dictate your rotation dependent upon how many of these mechanics (and boss attacks) target you and whether or not the phase transition was based on Boss Mob health and Party DPS output, just as you mentioned in the second part of what you talked about.

That was the very reason you used to have to blow your Deathflare early back then, because you'd hit near that transition point and all the BLMs would kick in their Enochian, your previous 20 second window became a 6 second window before the transition happened.

But it varied because if there weren't any BLMs or the DPS's were just plain crappy, your 20 second window was very safe.


EDIT:

OK then, Dr. Summoner, explain to me in detail what exactly about Summoner's rotation gets ruined if, say, a Gaze mechanic happens. Bonus points if you can point out any of the myriad tools Summoner has to mitigate the issue in the first place.

Fair enough... I'll give you a specific two specific ones.

1. That Gaze Attack, if it hits during the time you're running your Trance and you've only got a good 6 seconds left you my have to blow your Deathflare early... so all of those rotations you meant to do while you were in trance are gone and have to be skipped.

2. A specific mechanic is in the Dun Scaith, you could get tethered to a Hand... which will chase you at super speed unless you turn around and face it to stop it. It will kill you instantly if it reaches you... and it will only stop for a certain period of time even if you face it.
You better kill it quick. So you're probably going to have to blow your Festers on it... they are gone at that point. If these were supposed to be in your rotation at a later time, they're now gone and you're going to have to alter your previously planned "rotation".

[Kabooa]

1. That Gaze Attack, if it hits during the time you're running your Trance and you've only got a good 6 seconds left you my have to blow your Deathflare early... so all of those rotations you meant to do while you were in trance are gone and have to be skipped.

2. A specific mechanic is in the Dun Scaith, you could get tethered to a Hand... which will chase you at super speed unless you turn around and face it to stop it. It will kill you instantly if it reaches you... and it will only stop for a certain period of time even if you face it.
You better kill it quick. So you're probably going to have to blow your Festers on it... they are gone at that point. If these were supposed to be in your rotation at a later time, they're now gone and you're going to have to alter your previously planned "rotation".

1. Just turn around and continue your rotation as normal.

2. Aetherflow abilities can be spent at any time before the next Aetherflow is ready without disturbing the rotation. The 'rotation' is based around the use of non-chargeable cooldowns. You don't lose those because you had to fester the Hand instead of the boss.

[Silverquick]

1. Just turn around and continue your rotation as normal.

2. Aetherflow abilities can be spent at any time before the next Aetherflow is ready without disturbing the rotation. The 'rotation' is based around the use of non-chargeable cooldowns. You don't lose those because you had to fester the Hand instead of the boss.

1. You do realize of course you have to be facing your target for any of those attacks to go off right?

2. You just made my point for me, if they're on cooldown... you can't use them anymore. So you will have to alter your rotation around those missing GCDs. That one mechanic just forced you to use them both and out of order.

[Kabooa]

1. You do realize of course you have to be facing your target for any of those attacks to go off right?

2. You just made my point for me, if they're on cooldown... you can't use them anymore. So you will have to alter your rotation around those missing GCDs. That one mechanic just forced you to use them both and out of order.

1. One of the most basic entries into advanced play is maintaining uptime against gazes. You only need to be facing the enemy for 1 frame on anything that doesn't enforce a stationary animation lock, aka there is no reason to use "Deathflare early" against a Gaze attack as a summoner. The gaze doesn't change the rotation.

2. Fester isn't a GCD?

[ReiMakoto]

1. You do realize of course you have to be facing your target for any of those attacks to go off right?

2. You just made my point for me, if they're on cooldown... you can't use them anymore. So you will have to alter your rotation around those missing GCDs. That one mechanic just forced you to use them both and out of order.

You can turn around turning the gcd cooldown of an instant spell and loose absolutely nothing

If you need to kill an add, you transfer doing your rotation onto the add, its not some great mystery lol, if you need to burn an extra rescourse to not die, youve not "lost" that resource, youve just used it somewhere else.

[Oxdarock]

Thought I'd make an update on my progress with organizing my calculations on the potency of these delayed openers. It's coming along and I have a format and everything, but I've been a bit too busy to stop to work on it. ^^; I hope to make it public at least by early January, in which I’ll have four dps classes finished: NIN, RDM, DRG, and BRD. After that, I plan to update it with the rest of the classes little by little. After a bit more research into buff application delay, some openers will be adjusted slightly or have an extra note attached regarding timings.

On that note, some might have picked up on my challenge to the Balance NIN opener somewhere in this and the tank version of this thread. Well, the short answer is: I failed. Spectacularly, lol! Yeah, both the use of Doton, as well as the GCDs and oGCDs within TA, from the Balance opener provide more damage and more of a boost via TA than what I initially came up with. However, now that I know more about how the Balance NIN opener works, I was able to make adjustments and come up with a NIN opener that still fits within the raid buff timings of delayed openers while only falling short of the Balance opener by approximately 5.5 potency in a vacuum (i.e. solo on a striking dummy). So determining which opener does more damage will rely on raid buff alignment.

I will say that I did come up with an adjustment for the Balance NIN opener regarding the Huton and Doton timings. Assuming they haven't been updated and are still 11.5 secs and 7.5secs pre-pull respectively, you can actually wait till about 7-8 secs pre-pull to use Huton and 4 seconds to use Doton (3secs if you can manage it and still use Suiton in time). Here’s why:

Doton works similar to most DoTs in that damage goes out every 3secs, give or take. So if it’s used 7.5 seconds pre-pull, you’ve already lost 2 of the server based ticks (surprisingly, moves like Doton and Salted Earth hit one extra time within the first second after being used, plus the first server tick) and might possibly lose a 3rd if the boss isn’t dragged in quick enough. If used at 3-4 seconds pre-pull, you’re guaranteed at least 6 server based ticks (7 if you’re lucky), while still having enough time to use Hide (which now restores 2 charges of mudra, something I completely overlooked) and prep Suiton before the pull begins. Naturally, since the time you can use Doton pre-pull is shorter, Huton can be use a bit closer to the pull as well in order to possibly earn yourself an extra Aeolian Edge down the line before refreshing with Armor Crush.

So that’s where I am regarding organizing my calculations. Look forward to it and until then, Happy Holidays! \o/

[HyoMinPark]

One problem...
I never said any of the things you just claimed...YOU are the one that said that.

SaberMaxwell said,

It's not really a thing to disagree on. Every fight in this game is scripted down to the letter, including Ultimate. Trash pulls are variable because of the tank, but beyond that? The boss will always buster at the same time, mechanics will always happen at the same time, and heals will always be needed in the same places barring avoidable damage being taken.

Read carefully the bolded part.

Then you replied with,

No they actually won't, because damage is not constant, so the Boss mob getting to that transition phase is not constant either with your timing nor your CDs. It COULD turn out that way... but it also might not.

You are incorrect here. Starting with Stormblood, boss phases/transitions occur at set times, not HP values. It doesn’t matter what your damage is: you could have Titan at 99% HP and he will still go into Titan Maximum at ~3:43 into the encounter. Every time. Without fail. Your CD timings will not change because his busters will be at the same time irregardless of Massive Landslide first or ATV mode first. He won’t randomly throw it in at a random time stamp or do a random AOE right before Crumbling Down to call for extra healing; each phase has their mechanics set in set-in-stone intervals that never change.

You also stated this in another post,

That also is not true... a boss mob can have a random choice of which of its attacks to use. It could be a tank buster, it could be a gaze attack it could be something else. Either way all of those will disrupt your timing which in turn causes you to alter your rotation to something else.

These quotes are implying that these fights aren’t scripted; because you’re saying right here that there is a likelihood that bosses (read again: BOSSES) will deviate from their set rotation, but they don’t.

There are very few fights that have an illusion of RNG mechanics (E2S final phase, E4S Phase 1), but each of these “variations” (E2S Cycles, E4S Massive Landslide/ATV) have set rotations that they still follow without fail. Mitigation and healing cooldowns are determined the minute you see the first variation you’ll get (because bosses always do A Pattern followed by B Pattern in any fight with variations like this—never the same twice in a row). DPS rotations hardly change at all: you will still burst at the same time, use your GCDs/oGCDs at the same time, etc.. These things do not change. The only things that will likely change are defensive/mitigative oGCDs (e.g., Addle, Shield Samba, Troubadour, Tactician, Mantra), but even those will always have set intervals where they will always be used (e.g., your group wants Samba for Crumbling Down, you will always use it there; no variation).

You brought up Brawler—he may have 1 out of 4 types of Attachment, but he will always use Attachment at the same intervals in a given pull (i.e., at the same time stamp). He will never repeat any of the Drill or Beam attacks after he uses them. There’s very little that one would have to change in one’s rotation outside of mitigation, which wouldn’t affect GCD rotations since tank cooldowns are all oGCDs. And these rotations are all planned regardless of this variance: if it’s Single Beam buster, tank will use X cooldown every time; if it’s Double Beam group split, healer will use Y cooldown every time.


Damage in boss fights is consistent. They AOE at the same time, tankbuster at the same time. There is very little variance, especially now because there is no such thing as phase-pushing bosses anymore. That went away over two years ago. ShB even removed Crit Autos from the bosses, so you don’t have to worry about random crits. This game is incredibly scripted in nature, and to imply that it’s not implies you have very little understanding of encounter design. At least with regards to anything recent/relevant.


Not to mention, the thread itself is about someone presenting suboptimal openers; not rotations. Openers in a fight never vary barring RNG-based classes like BRD, DNC, RDM, and AST (because of Divination). But SMNs always use the same opener in a fight; BLMs use the same opener; DRGs, NINs, SAMs, MNKs, all use the same opener; tanks all use the same opener.