The Black Mage Rotations

[Darkstarz]

Its not stat weights, its the effect of your skill choice on your average damage. The higher your average damage, the higher the damage bonus you get from your criticals on average. When you're using nothing but fire3/flare/blizz3, your average damage skyrockets, because you're not spending time hitting mobs for 450-600 blizzard2 or fire2s, you're just flaring. All your calculations don't take this into account.

tl;dr - Crits mean more for flares than they do for blizzard/fire2s. The PPS should reflect that.

If your looking solely at dmg on flares sure, crit is the way to go, what you dont take into account on the "big picture" is Cast times.

Bigger numbers does not equate to higher dps, Fire 3>Flare>Blizz 3 would be less damage than the "normal" Aoe Rotation due to Cast times and waiting for that mana tick after a flare.

[Vortok]

What you said:

I ignored the single-target DPS because it doesn't really have any impact on overall clear speed.

Essentially what I heard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Y-ua3WBi4

Damage doesn't disappear into thin air, even single target damage during aoe situations. Pretty much every class that isn't a Holy spamming WHM has some extra single target damage while doing aoe. If applied properly (depending on number of targets/situation, like someone was saying) it can make a difference, which should be enough to matter when you're talking about a 10% difference in BLM rotations.

Shouldn't be too hard to add the + xx dps to single target on top of the aoe dps.

[PessimiStick]

What you said:


Essentially what I heard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Y-ua3WBi4

Damage doesn't disappear into thin air, even single target damage during aoe situations. Pretty much every class that isn't a Holy spamming WHM has some extra single target damage while doing aoe. If applied properly (depending on number of targets/situation, like someone was saying) it can make a difference, which should be enough to matter when you're talking about a 10% difference in BLM rotations.

Shouldn't be too hard to add the + xx dps to single target on top of the aoe dps.

Clear speed is dependant on *every* mob dying. It's incredibly unlikely that the small handful of ST skills you use will change when that happens. You're nuking 7-10 mobs at a time, with RNG crits on AEs and whatnot. I usually tab to the highest target when using F3, but I'm fairly certain I could just tunnel on one mob and the overall pack clear speed would be different by like 1 GCD at most (and I wouldn't even bet on that).

[Youmu]

Everyones missing my point, and I'm just unsure of how to properly explain it. Ill come back to this tomorrow after I've had some sleep.

[Borfin]

Everyones missing my point, and I'm just unsure of how to properly explain it. Ill come back to this tomorrow after I've had some sleep.

What you're saying is "During a burst phase, crit has a larger impact". While this is true and may make sense for certain encounters where Flare burst is key to eliminating threats to the party, it is not the same as "Crit provides a greater effect because these spells hit harder".

Always remember what you sacrifice to buff that burst phase.

[xyaie]

What you're saying is "During a burst phase, crit has a larger impact". While this is true and may make sense for certain encounters where Flare burst is key to eliminating threats to the party, it is not the same as "Crit provides a greater effect because these spells hit harder".

Always remember what you sacrifice to buff that burst phase.

hmm, still not sure i agree with this. even during a burst phase, a 40% increased chance to do 50% more damage vs 20% more damage would net the same result. While it would be amazing if the increased crit chance lead to every flare critting, it would be horrible if it lead to every blizzard critting and no flares critting vs flare simply just doing 20% more damage. All and all, on average, the total damage done (if you were to do this same burst phase 1000000 times) would be the exact same between these 2 situations.

[PessimiStick]

hmm, still not sure i agree with this. even during a burst phase, a 40% increased chance to do 50% more damage vs 20% more damage would net the same result. While it would be amazing if the increased crit chance lead to every flare critting, it would be horrible if it lead to every blizzard critting and no flares critting vs flare simply just doing 20% more damage. All and all, on average, the total damage done (if you were to do this same burst phase 1000000 times) would be the exact same between these 2 situations.

And in the real world, 20% increased damage would be the better choice almost always, because then you *know* when things are going to die, rather than leaving it to RNG.

[PessimiStick]

If you think flare gets better than any other spell because of crit, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of math.

[KamikazeMan]

For AoE I like to use:

Fire III > spam Fire II till low on MP > Flare > Convert > Flare > Hi-Ether > Blizzard III > start combo again, minus Flare.

[PessimiStick]

For AoE I like to use:

Fire III > spam Fire II till low on MP > Flare > Convert > Flare > Hi-Ether > Blizzard III > start combo again, minus Flare.

That rotation is awful in comparison, FYI.