Quote Originally Posted by Mikey_R View Post
Would you rather be able to adjust your rotation to suit the fight, or, having the fight force you to change the rotation and then you having to play a less optimal rotation for the rest of the fight?

I'm pretty sure most would rather be able to adjust their rotation to suit the fight. If I use Gnashing Fang slightly earlier, I can get it out before the boss jumps and still have it align with the buff window. Before the changes, Gnashing fang might have come off of cooldown and it just drifts with no way to adjust. I know which on I would prefer.
These are one and the same. Adjusting a rotation to suit the fight accounts for the downtime, you build a rotation around it. There have always been ways with fights that have downtime to fix your rotation from the drifting and lack of carts to return it once more to the usual optimal rotation. To me, no good gunbreaker would sit on a rotation that's just less optimal forever, if you know what you are doing you know that you can re adjust your rotation and get everything back on track. You either sacrifice a bit of your own dps to re algin everything with the parties buffs for their sake, or if going for your own numbers, realign your timers with your own buffs and ignore the party. Maybe you need to burn an extra cart ahead of time that you normally wouldn't in order to fix everything, etc.

You mentioned using Gnashing at different timings earlier, you could do that with the old rotation too. Does no one remember bursting earlier during p12s p1 so that you can just barely finish gnashing before she leaves for adds phase? In fact, optimal buff timing was also 0s in that fight too, so it perfectly aligned with our own (gnb's) burst. If you are with a random group you simply experiment with bursting on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even clipping NM before your 1st gcd, until you find the groups average killtime such that you end on burst, this was one method I used to obtain pinks. Examples like this and more exist, it's not somehow possible now thanks to the changes, it was always possible. This was part of the skill expression of the job.

I think its very reasonable to like some parts of the changes and not like others, but people in this thread cannot see nuance. I dislike that the burst is handed to you for free now, but dots being on a shorter timer is nice and same for lionheart being on a 1minute so the job is a bit less of a slave to crit variance.