First off, my genuine thanks to Galvuu, Ramiee, and Ferrinus for the friendly discussion. Not only is it very interesting to read, but pleasant as well, at that warms my Umbral Heart.

Part of what I love about reading this is that I have not devoted even half as much of my brain to topping out BLM's damage as y'all have! What I've generally loved about BLM is that instead of doing a static rotation, I instead "push the button that most wants to be pressed at that time." Generally that's the one that does the biggest damage, but sometimes it's the button I need to press to keep Astral Fire up, sometimes it's the button I need to press to do damage while moving, and sometimes it's both! And I love that.

So when I read through these posts and we're talking about how much of a damage loss there is from doing something like missing a cast or doing a Transpose instead of Despair, I haven't really ever gone down that exact road. Naturally I know there is a damage loss and I try to avoid it, but I haven't ever really bothered to try to quantify it. I'm just always trying to do my best while avoiding my perfectionist tendencies. So it makes me wonder...

Quote Originally Posted by Galvuu View Post
(The crux of it is that you cannot keep the same number of high potency gcds in DT if you "miss" one of your builders- you permanently lose Flare Star. In EW, you can. Swapping one Fire IV for a Paradox on your overall gcds for that 2 min window has no penalty)
Hmmm...so from reading your entire post, I think I might understand you, but I'll say it in the way that my brain thinks about it. Would I be correct in interpreting that the issue here isn't inherently about the mechanics of building up resources, but rather comes down to the loss of damage and how great that loss is? It sounds like you're saying that some losses feel tolerable because the difference in damage between 2 sequence options isn't that much, but there's an estimated guess that whatever the final potency is for Flare Star, it will be significant enough that choosing the sequence that has fewer Flare Stars will result in a more meaningful difference in damage to a degree that feels significant? I hope I'm understanding that right! Let me know!

Quote Originally Posted by Ramiee View Post
This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation
I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

Anyway, I'm enjoying hearing y'all's thoughts on this and trying to follow along. I like learning about your perspectives, and I'm guessing that I probably won't understand every last bit of the detail y'all are putting out there (at least not right away), but I appreciate your putting yourselves out there to try to help me understand the basic gist of it!