BLM's Blizzard 4 needs a potency buff

[Rongway]

This thread misses the point of Blizzard 4.

...

Blizzard 4 is there because BLM needs another skill to use during ice phase to fulfill server ticks. The dev team saw this, and gave them a low damage utility spell in that slot.

This is a good point, but according to Rongway's math, it looks like the short rotation is still better than casting Blizzard IV in the scenario you described where you need another GCD to hit that second tick. I would wager a guess that given the cast time and GCD of Blizzard IV, it would likely be better to just wait a little longer before starting the Fire III cast than it would casting Blizzard IV beforehand.

Just to be clear, Fire III > 3x Fire IV > Despair is far worse than a Blizzard IV rotation. However, a macrorotation with fire phases consisting of 4x, 4x, and 3x Fire IVs still comes out ahead of always casting Blizzard IV.

The best practice would probably be to use Blizzard IV and 6 Fire IVs on the rotations where you don't have Polyglot (roughly every third rotation). In this case, you need to make sure you use Fire and get the extra Fire IVs; Blizzard IV with only 4x Fire IVs is worse than skipping Blizzard IV and only getting 3x Fire IVs.

[LeonKeyh]

Just to be clear, Fire III > 3x Fire IV > Despair is far worse than a Blizzard IV rotation. However, a macrorotation with fire phases consisting of 4x, 4x, and 3x Fire IVs still comes out ahead of always casting Blizzard IV.

The best practice would probably be to use Blizzard IV and 6 Fire IVs on the rotations where you don't have Polyglot (roughly every third rotation). In this case, you need to make sure you use Fire and get the extra Fire IVs; Blizzard IV with only 4x Fire IVs is worse than skipping Blizzard IV and only getting 3x Fire IVs.

Got it, so if you're aware enough, making sure to cast Blizzard IV whenever missing a tick is better, but if you're not paying attention to the ticks and just casting a strict rotation then the short rotation ends up correcting itself due to tick timing and the difference between rotation DPS every 3 cycles (i.e. the DPS loss on a 3x Fire IV phase doesn't fully negate the gain from the previous/next 2 4xFire IV phases). I figured that was how it ended up working out, but didn't know the full math. Thanks for the clarification.