Do you think the devs intended multi-flare blm?

[NyneAlexander]

There's a reason why I said average rotation.

And please keep that nonsense over there. I mentioned downtime and I explained it. Blizzard 3 > whatever the hell you want to do here > fire 3 is your downtime on DPS. If you can't understand that then please say you don't understand it or aren't willing to instead.

Easy buddy. This is how stupid forum fights start. No need to be rude. Just cause I didn't agree with your description of "average rotation" or downtime, doesn't mean I don't respect your opinion or am unwilling to discuss it. No need to be so defensive.

The bottom line is "whatever the hell you want to do here" can make or break a blm's dps in a sustained fight. Thats what I was getting at.

I say 6 minutes for a couple simple reasons.

1. Its a nice number for 2 and 3 minute CD's, so the next decent timeframe would be 9, and the next ideal timeframe would be 12 minutes.
2. Its true that most of the important fights now take closer to 10-14 minutes... But then the issue becomes constructing a situation to sustain MNK, DRG, and BRD for the entire 12 minute parse WITHOUT breaks, which these long fights tend to have.
3. And then the other fun part, finding enough "equally" geared and skilled... highly skilled... people for this test, AND getting them to go at it for 12 minutes, without messing up or going braindead. =)

That said, this kind of test is really for 2 types of people. Theorycrafters, and the Combat QA/Dev team. We're the former, so if you can find the people to do it, all on the same server, same group, same data collection methods and cross-checking the data... By all means go to town.

But really, this "should" be SE's job, not ours.

PS.
I am having flashbacks to RIFT, where I was a Warrior main, and the entire theorycrafter community did spec and rotation checking for the warrior dev... Then he'd buff or nerf... mostly nerf... each spec and subclass until there weren't any outliers. Not "balance", there were a lot of specs that simply sucked. But of the small handful of builds that worked, they were all "fairly" balanced, mostly thanks to us, the players.

Ok I totally see what you mean here. And you're right, that after a 6 min test of this nature, we will probably see blm come out at the bottom. What concerns me is if the majority of the community took this test as gospel, we'd see people saying that the marginal difference in dps between top and bottom is negligible, and that us blms don't have much to worry about. When the reality is because these numbers grow further apart over time, we have plenty to worry about.