Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[Lavitz_]

Any reason why everyone is going for 4 minutes now? Wouldn't 3 or 6 be better for BLMs since it lets you stop when Raging and Ley Lines come off cooldown? It doesn't make sense to me, unless it's just to be more comparable to physical DPS who run out of TP around 4 minutes.

[Sleigh]

Any reason why everyone is going for 4 minutes now? Wouldn't 3 or 6 be better for BLMs since it lets you stop when Raging and Ley Lines come off cooldown? It doesn't make sense to me, unless it's just to be more comparable to physical DPS who run out of TP around 4 minutes.

Well, for BLM it's smoother to wait a bit longer than 3m because it's best to have a full, fresh Enochian rotation for RS + Convert + Leylines (maybe you can do that if you Enochian rotation 3 of first minute? IDK, never tried).

IDK, definitely don't want 3m sharp, you would literally get one RS and be at the low-point of your DPS. Same for a lot of classes with big CDs at the 90s mark. 6m would be very unrealistic, most TP users can't even make it to 4m without going out of TP so it wouldn't serve much purpose. I think around 4m is just that happy medium.

[Ferrasper]

I don't plan to do any 8 heavy man content yet since I just hit 60 on my BLM, but would the damage be decent enough for expert runs to F4 then F1 to keep AF3 up instead of F4x2 and have a chance for it to fall off?

[Aikaal]

From what I've seen, it tracks the players that use TP. If they have bad TP management then they'll underperform. I could have ended it at 3 minutes but I'd rather set my conditions to everybody since BLM can go indefinitely. As far as I know, only Ninjas have TP issues. They have the lowest TP regen cooldowns and ironically have Goad they can't use on themself.

[Kuroyasha]

From what I've seen, it tracks the players that use TP. If they have bad TP management then they'll underperform. I could have ended it at 3 minutes but I'd rather set my conditions to everybody since BLM can go indefinitely. As far as I know, only Ninjas have TP issues. They have the lowest TP regen cooldowns and ironically have Goad they can't use on themself.

Party Member : Goad Please

Ninja: Sure *goads*

*2:45 sec later*

Ninja: TP please

*bard/mch gives no tp*

*inches closer and closer to 0*

Ninja: *thinks to himself* "*sigh* fine i'll bottom out til invig comes back >.>"

[Cynfael]

As a new 60 BLM, I think I've pinpointed my greatest challenge being the fight against my ingrained habit of wanting to use procs ASAP following my next hard cast as a fireweaving tool. When I screw up my rotation, it's almost invariably because I allowed an active proc to throw off my timing when I would have done better by allowing it to fall off or waiting to use it.

The rotation itself is not really more difficult to execute than the old one was, but the handling of procs combined with the shift to monitoring and maintaining both Enochian and AF/UI is definitely a bit of a shift in play style.

[raisetheglass1]

When my Enochian timer gets tight and I'm forced to follow my Blizzard 3 with an immediate Blizzard 4, I sometimes find myself sitting in Umbral Ice with about 60% mana and 20 seconds on my Enochian timer. I'm tempted to go straight into Fire 3, but more often than not I find myself shifting into Astral Fire before the mana tick. I'm trying to figure out what to do with this time, and I have a two options:

Fire 4 > Blizzard 3 > Blizzard 4 > Thunder 1 > Fire 3

This might be the next best choice, but the problem with this option is that usually because of a Thundercloud proc that I had to rush Blizzard 4 in the first place, so the Thunder DoT is still up and ticking.

Fire 4 > Blizzard 3 > Blizzard 4 > Blizzard 1 > Fire 3

As far as I can tell, I should either cast Blizzard 1 or Thunder 1, and the answer about which is better to cast has to do with how many ticks I there are left on my Thunder DoT. Can anyone give me advice on what to do in this situation? 40 potency x 5 tics (15 seconds for 1 tic every 3 seconds) = 200 potency > Blizzard 1 at 180 potency?

Im guessing the essential question here is: 'How many ticks of Thundercloud/Thunder 3 = Blizzard,' because otherwise Thunder 1 would be better than Blizzard 1. Is the answer 40 potency x 5 tics (15 seconds for 1 tic every 3 seconds) = 200 potency > Blizzard 1 at 180 potency? The tooltip for Umbral Ice 3 doesn't say that it decreases the damage / potency of ice spells so that should be correct, right?

[Sleigh]

The pure cut-off where Thunder is better than B1 is 6s left on any Thunder or less, in terms of potency.

30 initial + 40 per tick, 4 ticks = 160 + 30 = 190.

However, pure potency isn't all there is, it's also about getting that chance for Thundercloud, and my personal cut-off is 9s, or basically one more tick of clipping.

[Xenitan]

The pure cut-off where Thunder is better than B1 is 6s left on any Thunder or less, in terms of potency.

30 initial + 40 per tick, 4 ticks = 160 + 30 = 190.

However, pure potency isn't all there is, it's also about getting that chance for Thundercloud, and my personal cut-off is 9s, or basically one more tick of clipping.

That's actually the mathematically correct one:

Quick and dirty study on thunder

[Kerii]

The rotation I've been sticking with lately is:

Leylines+B3 -> RS+F3 -> F4x2 -> Sharp+F1 -> F3(fs) -> F4x2(or if timing permits 3). I weave Thunder spells in when I have the time or if enochian falls off for some reason. I realize this might not be the most dps optimal, but I've been able to refresh enochian in as little as 5s if the fight permits. I currently have my f3's with a swiftcast, but I'm considering removing it in favor of having it for emergency B4's or double flares if enochian falls off. I'd also point out that I don't play with a static or a parser, so this is from raw content running experience. When my cd's aren't up I use the same rotation. If there's heavy movement I won't refresh enochian just to have it fall off.


(I wasn't aware that the rotation had been updated since I last looked at it. I'll make changes to my opener.)