Quote Originally Posted by Urielparadox View Post
You didn't really add anything new except telling him the break point for aoe vs single target and you obviously didn't read anything the person who posted before you stating the same thing you did, by about 30min earlier. Also you spouted of the T2> T3 by using the incorrect and improper logic that I warned against in my post and gave no reason for why this faulty logic is superior.
The reason people use Thunder II is because it's assumed you always use a Thunder after Blizzard III in a single target rotation. Thunder II extends the Umbral Phase with just enough time for you to get to full mana and no more. It is also a good length by the next Umbral Phase unless you get a Firestarter like every other Fire I hit and maybe a Thundercloud proc.

Thunder fits nicely into the umbral phase. To effectively use to dot length of Thunder III, you'd need to use it in the Astral phase, otherwise you clip it and it loses its potency advantage. Thunder is just there to add some dps to the Umbral Phase and allow for Thundercloud procs. If you took it out to utilize Thunder III's full duration as a dot, you'd be losing more Fire I time because now your Thunder is out of sync with your regen phase AND you need to scathe or something while regening mana which I don't think is a better use of your time.

The regen time is a given for BLM. Using thunder makes it productive. As soon as thunder doesn't sync up with it, then you still have that regen time to fill in for and now your thunder is taking up fire time. That's not optimizing the fire time.

If you do thunder every Umbral anyway, then Thunder II is better because Thunder III will get clipped 99% of the time. The .5 second cast time is not worth the 10 potency. That's the argument, not the dot duration since focusing on the duration runs into problems I mentioned above.