Connecting the DoTs: A Summoner Guide

[Havenchild]

For Bio's delay basically as long as you wait until 6.5 o'clock on the GCD meter (more, like 7 o'clock, if you have high spell speed) you'll be okay. Fester itself is nigh-instant.
I will also say that you never need to do those "quartets" of abilities. It is not that necessary to use Fester on cd and have to blow Ruin II for it...why would you waste mana that way for no reason? You should, unless needing to fit 2 festers under Raging (and during the opening set of festers to get second aetherflow out quicker), only fester while casting Bio, or swiftcasted Shadowflare. I also feel its just confusing. While technically speaking the entire SMN rotation is completely static, its just much more intuitive and easier to react to your DoTs ticking down and the fester cd. Its not very difficult to figure out that its coming off cd 2 GCDs out, and take quick stock of your dots.

You get 60 seconds for an ability that has 10 sec cd...you could literally wait 40 seconds and still get all your festers off prior to aetherflow getting off CD. Esp on multitarget fights where you have to multidot, this will save you a ton of mp if you drop Ruin 2 from your rotation except to get CDs off and for movement that you can't stutter from.

I know you mentioned the whole pros/cons of it, but the autoattacks lost from this is such a minor part of your dps and I feel its kinda putting reliance on overgearing to power through a fight without running out of mana with excessive Ruin II. I'd rather not casting Ruin II be espoused as the default, rather than the other way around.

I'm also unsure if stuttering is actually a dps increase thing, from my experiments it works best if you're lagging, which means well, you're lagging and losing dps XD

All in all though, its an interesting guide.

At current there is no fight, where MP is an issue post Ruin I / Ruin II MP change. This means that even doing a rotation that uses an expansion of Ruin II, you will not run out of MP easily. In using the latter rotation as a mainstream you are highly likely to be sitting on vast amounts of MP, that should instead be turned into DPS. This is also based off of current 2.55 match durations. Should there be moments where your MP is running tighter than normal, I would recommend you switch between the two rotations accordingly. At most, if at all , you will need one Energy Drain to bait a late Aetherflow, which is still an overall DPS increase when we're talking a full duration. This is using examples of T10 / T11, two none stop fights with no downtime.

The quartets mainly focus around environments where you are about to Fester in a given 10 seconds. Taking your example where you wait a full 40 seconds to then blow all your Festers, you will then fall in line with what I'm refering to, of casting 4 abilities per Fester cast. Should you not have Fester or in fact wish to save MP from less usage of Ruin II, then Ruin I, given a non-interrupted casting sequence where you delay your Festers is superior for MP management.

Of course, this is not factoring anything like Ballad, Piety or Downtime as very rarely does a SMN get a Ballad in the first place (it shouldn't) and Piety is not too often melded. Downtime itself is a standalone universal regenerator while Ruin I goes positive on MP regen per cast.