Moving beyond, or How I realized I Wasn't as Good as I Thought

[MatthiasS]

Today, I ran Turn 5. Nothing major, I'm in Final Coil. I joined on my Black Mage, like I do, and remembered most of the fight pretty well. I did...ok. Screwed up a couple runs (not all on me, by any stretch), but after two wipes, cleared without dying. A fellow Black Mage commented my rotation was "odd". This puzzled me. I thought I was on the standard BLM rotation.


Nope.

Turns out I panic under pressure, and botch my rotations. I asked the other player, and was given some tips (including the BLM thread, which is really useful), that I'll surely use, and has already helped my DPS on the practice dummy noticeably. This doesn't help the root problem, though, so I have some questions for other DPS. I've been BLMing since summer of last year, so I should have my rotations down.

Question 1. How do you avoid rotation errors in "hard" content, while managing mechanics you may or may not have down perfectly? This comes up in EX Primals as well. I've cleared them all, and farming Shiva and Ramuh are no problem, because I learned them with everyone else. Ifrit and Titan, though, are pretty much only run for pony farms now, and though I've cleared, I haven't run the fights enough to memorize them. Pony farms don't want a derpy BLM, they want quick, flawless runs.

Question 2. There are clear parties, and farm parties. What about when you've cleared, you know the fight enough, but still make errors from time to time? I want to help others clear, but I get hesitant because I've only cleared a few(under 5) times myself. Sometimes I want to farm, but people can get really upset if you die, or worse, wipe, a farm group.

Question 3. Hypothetically, if parsing were to be allowed by the Terms of Service, would you recommend parsing? Do parsers note what spells you cast when, so you can see when you dodged, forgot what you were doing, and recast Thunder when you should have been on Fire 1?

Lastly, tips in general? In single player games, I can practice hard content all day long, fail as much as I need to till I've mastered it. In FFXIV, my failures affect other players, who are losing time. Its a weird situtation to want to improve, but being reluctant to make others sit through the improvement process. Before you suggest "Practice party in PF", very few people want to sit through "I want to become flawless in older, nearly irrelevant content."

[Skeith-Adeline]

1.) Practicing your rotation on a dummy long enough will eventually engrave the rotation deep enough in your mind that it'll be second nature. Dealing with new mechanics and your rotation isn't an immediate thing you remedy. It'll take practice and trial/error.

2.) Personally, I wouldn't join Farm parties if you error a ton; however, everybody makes mistakes from time to time, so simple errors shouldn't be anything to shy a person away from partying. Make your own PF if you're worried about others.

3.) Most people who use Parsers only use them for charting DPS, HPS, Crit Rate, Accuracy etc. Some persons do have audible notifications for certain abilities but, that's... You'll grow much stronger if you build your own awareness and not have to wait on a machines notification.

Lastly, as I noted, make your own PFs. You have the freedom to dictate what you want in the PFs description. Yea, people don't want to join practice parties, but it's something you have to work with.

[Sleigh]

Question 1. How do you avoid rotation errors in "hard" content, while managing mechanics you may or may not have down perfectly? This comes up in EX Primals as well. I've cleared them all, and farming Shiva and Ramuh are no problem, because I learned them with everyone else. Ifrit and Titan, though, are pretty much only run for pony farms now, and though I've cleared, I haven't run the fights enough to memorize them. Pony farms don't want a derpy BLM, they want quick, flawless runs.

For #1, that's actually the hardest part of DPSing once you have the knowledge/rotations you need. The simplest remedy for it is to just play a lot on the job in question, and you will either eventually come to memorize through repetition when to use CDs on near auto-pilot, or will eventually just have the experience required to keep your cool.

I would say BLM is generally the easiest to be rotation error free in real fights though, compared to other classes with strict timers and who have to distinctly change it up when switching targets. It's actually a small part of why I favor BLM as raid leader, it's the easiest DPS to let your eyes look at mechanics/health bars/call outs without losing anything. Typically the difficulties of the class don't come from rotations at all, and are completely involved in movement and other select choices, some advanced and some more obvious. That said you can't training dummy to practice how to BLM in real fights (well, beyond having it down at the core of course), you have to just go in and do it and see what your problems are then study what other BLMs do or figure it out in practice.

Lastly, tips in general? In single player games, I can practice hard content all day long, fail as much as I need to till I've mastered it. In FFXIV, my failures affect other players, who are losing time. Its a weird situtation to want to improve, but being reluctant to make others sit through the improvement process. Before you suggest "Practice party in PF", very few people want to sit through "I want to become flawless in older, nearly irrelevant content."

If you're looking up rotations and actually trying you're probably not bringing most PF groups down.

Also you really don't have to be flawless to succeed in FFXIV. Being completely flawless is for when you want to push yourself as much as possible for your own purposes, not for meeting FFXIV DPS checks. Don't be too hard on yourself, you're probably doing better than you think.

[Kitfox]

It's like driving a car. When you first start learning driving, all your attention goes to handling the car, you can't really concentrate on the traffic and you have a teacher reminding you of everything. After you've driven for a long time, you don't concentrate on the car anymore and instead look at the traffic and anticipate what's happening.

After doing a rotation your rotations a lot, it becomes automatic like that. It's also a good idea to practice messing up on purpose on a dummy and figure out ways to get back on track, so it doesn't faze you when it happens in live fights.

Fight mechanics are the same way. If you know a fight in and out so that you don't have to concentrate on the mechanics, it's a good playground to practice getting better at your rotations/positionals/movement what have you, since you have more room to pay attention to those things.

[OneWingedSora]

1. Be abit reckless and take risks when dealing with mechanics. This is a quote from Bokchoy, a friend of mine:

Some of the best players in the game have one characteristic in common: They are reckless.

When learning a fight, they will do dumb ass things and take dumb ass risks, taking extra damage, sometimes killing themselves or the entire party in the process. And for what? Maybe to get a couple extra GCDs of damage in? They're not afraid to make mistakes and they'll often get punished for it.

Sounds like a bad thing, right? So, why does being reckless make them good players? It's because they constantly push their limits. A player will never know where their limits are until he crosses them.

Take Titan EX for example. During the final phase, Titan drops three rows of bombs, the last row being "the safe row". If the safe row is on the opposite from Titan, melee has to step away from the boss and lose DPS. Then you got the one crazy guy who stays in melee range and tries to get off all his positionals while dancing and weaving through the consecutively-exploding bombs and 5-way Landslide. The first several times he tries this, he'll get hit, maybe he'll die for it and get yelled at by the party. Eventually, with enough practice, he masters it and can now say "fuck the safe row" and stay in melee range and land most of his positionals regardless of where the bombs and landslides land. He thinks of every little optimization he can make, and that's why his DPS is untouchable.

Every class in every boss fight has these little tiny optimizations like this that only the radical thinkers will discover. Then when learning time is over, he can turn his reckless switch off, apply everything he's learned and absolutely crush the boss.

Average players only know the safe and conservative play. The best players expose themselves to danger for small advantages, make some mistakes and learn from them. They know where their limits are because they've already crossed all of them.

Don't be afraid to get that extra cast off before avoiding a mechanic. Memorize the fights and plan for every mechanic.


2. There are two ways of screwing up mechanics. A. You are clumsy or B. You are greedy with DPS. If it's the former, then you just need to keep doing those fights over and over till you get more comfortable with them. If it's the latter(Casting between double plumes on Titan EX, Casting between Earthshakers on T13, etc.) then keep trying over and over till you get the hang of it. Making mistakes and learning from them for the sake of improving your DPS is a good thing.

3. I wouldn't recommend using parsers for Audible Notifications for mechanics/abilities, build your own awareness like Skeith Adeline said, it will make you a better player overall. However, if you are using parsers to keep and eye on your DPS to know if you are making improvements or not, then yes, I would say go for it.

[MrCookTM]

Question 3. Hypothetically, if parsing were to be allowed by the Terms of Service, would you recommend parsing?

While using a parser is technically against the ToS (because it's a third party tool, not because it's a parser per say), SE even admitted themselves multiple times that they won't do shit against people parsing as long as they don't use the numbers to harass other players. Basically every world/server 1st/2nd/3rd etc. kill video has visible dps meters in the UI, and instead of banning the players, they congratulate them in the next live letter and/or on the forums. ^^

Honestly, parsers are the single best way to improve your game, especially as a dps job. If you are a pc player and able to use one, use it to improve yourself. I would kill to be able to parse myself, but instead I need my static/fc mates to parse me because I'm on lolps4...

[Arkenne]

Well, it could help you as a BLM to consider ther AF3 and UI3 just the same as MNK GL3 stacks.
If you can measure a moment in which the boss will become immune, casting a B3 or F3 to reset your timmer might be better time wise than to let it drop and start over. After all, F3 and B3 have half time when the oposite is up.
On the same logic, if you moved around a lot because AoEs, try to wave between fire and ice every time the timer is under 3 seconds to keep the stacks up.

As a BLM, dummies will only help you practice the Fire waving, really.
Or if you wanna experiment how many shots you can throw before changing to UI. Or which Thunder you can cast while in UI. If its good to cast a B1 before casting a F3 to return to AF3. Or simply to practice a double, triple or quadra flare rotation.

Parsing isnt bad a thing to test yourself, but BLM is illsuited for it, since their strongest point for single target is RNG based. Unless you are trying to check your AoE potency, practicing your Fire Waving would be your best bet.

[Jim_Berry]

FFXIV is my third MMO, and it comes off as a struggle. Because we have to use proper rotations, a small hiccup lowers our damage. Personally, I just do my own thing.

It just always bother me when I'm keeping damage consistant without full rotations, it's look at as a carry. This is the only MMO I played when DPS roles were centric to winning, meaning no matter how high your iLv, you still need everyone to participate. In a game such as DC Universe for example, two DPS can carry a raid while others focus on little things.

[Altijacek]

That post about reckless DPS is solid gold. Wish more people thought like that. In t7 as monk I would pop featherfoot and bloodbath when circle blade came out and would hope to dodge. I told my healers not to waste mp healing me because I still had my stoneskin and bloodbath plus second wind was enough to get back up. If I dodged somehow, I procced haymaker, which, if you don't need to refresh stacks, buffs, debuffs, or dots is a DPS increase (and a TP gain). If I didn't dodge, hey I was never off my target still increasing my DPS and healers didn't even need to touch me. Start telling other people this strategy and they're like, "that's stupid just play it safe."

[ArtificialxSky]

Absolutely nailed what it means to chase excellence. It's encouraging that there are players out there that share my values--the amount of discouragement from most players gets to be a bit much at times.