When I use pot to parse, it isn't really about boosting the number, because like people have said, you can boost it further with party buff and food etc. However, the usage of pot here is to practice on timing and clicking, the opener with a pot. Considering that you have to do mudras and dealing with potential latency, your timing must be good to ensure that your Kassatsu'd Raiton lands with all the buffs and debuff on to achieve maximum damage in your opening.

As a matter of fact I did my usual practicing last night - no food, no pot, no party buff yada yada, same gears, same 3:30 for 3 Huton cycle, 500 DPS. I can't recall the crit rate but it should be just borderline 20%. The 518 parse shown earlier are only with DEX pot, nothing else.

There comes the question of the mentioning of 2.0GCD - I mentioned it because I have given this number to some of my fellow FC mates trying out NIN to improve and they do see the improvement. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot simply calculate the time you need based on tooltip. No, just no, because you have to take into account of different latency and response speed. Put it on paper the numbers may seem sound, but when you put it to the server and human respond speed, no. Each Mudra sign is 0.5s so a Raiton should be done in 1.5s, including the activation, should be under a GCD cooldown. But does anyone of you here actually activates a Ninjitsu under a GCD? I don't, I've not seen any Ninjas do, if you are one of them then congrats. I deal with about 70-90ms ping to Tonberry server, maybe if you live in Japan with some less than 20ms ping you might make it or something. Else, I depend on my 2.0GCD to give me the leeway so that I don't drop my DoT and debuff. I started off with crap skill speed and I was doing crap like 440 on dummy.