Astrologian Guide

[DawnSolaria]

Stop saying spear is useless. Unless you have a bard always mana battering you, spear is always great for lowering CD for LA and CO. Spire, on the other hand, is probably only useful for aoe pulls.

[AlphaSonic]

Stop saying spear is useless. Unless you have a bard always mana battering you, spear is always great for lowering CD for LA and CO. Spire, on the other hand, is probably only useful for aoe pulls.

Waiting for a Spear to hit all your CD is too situational, if you get Spear in those conditions great. If you need to burn CD I don't wait for spear. Using LA at 40% MP just for waiting a Spear is not worth, better use it when you are at 70% MP.

I mean, mathematically it's not even worth waiting 30 seconds for another draw.

Imagine you are at 70% MP (this is the moment you should use LA), there are 3 possible scenarios.

Timeline 1 (normal scenario):
Second 0 -> Draw (not Spear) Use LA and CO
Second 120-> You have LA and CO again

Timeline 2 (worst scenario):
Second 0 -> Draw (not Spear) You don't use LA and CO
Second 30 -> Draw (Spear) Use LA and CO
Second 126 -> You have LA and CO again.

Timeline 3 (perfect scenario):
Second 0 -> Draw (Spear) Use LA and CO
Second 96 -> You have LA and CO again

Unless you get Timeline 3 spear is royal road fodder.

[Parawill]

Imagine you are at 70% MP (this is the moment you should use LA), there are 3 possible scenarios.

Completely disagree.

You can use Luminiferous Aether at 70%, but you are not making most of its cool down by holding it. You should realistically FIRST use Luminiferous Aether (or Shroud of Saints) if you're going to expend equal or greater amounts of MP that it will restore. You should also use it when you know you're spending more MP than your natural in-combat MP regen can recover given that you wont need to expend over 30% of your MP before Luminiferous Aether comes back up. A great way to look at MP is how you would treat your own money.

MP = how much money you have.
Heals = how much money you have to spend.
Luminiferous Aether = how much money you make within a given time (5 ticks) , and how long it takes for you to make your next pay check (120 CD).

So if you had 100 MP and know you're going to spend 20 MP within 5 ticks (15 seconds), use Luminferous Aether to equalize the amount spent to the amount gained. This way you'll sit at around 90% because you will most likely be healing or DPSing while its active.

After your first initial use of Luminiferous Aether, feel free to use it whenever you can, unless you're literally sitting at 90% ~ 100% and aren't dropping below that at all.

And Spear is situational. It doesn't suck when you can use it, but you shouldn't explicitly save it unless its literally in the opening pull to reduce everyone's CDs.

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Here are some tips and tricks in general though. Celestial Opposition extends all buffs you apply by 5 seconds, which includes Light Speed, Luminiferous Aether, Collective Unconscious Buffs, Card Buffs, Protect (lol), Stoneskin (lol), all Aspected Buffs (lol nocturnal) and Synastry.

Synastry lasts as long as the shortest duration amongst yourself and your Synastry target, so in order to keep the Synastry buff on for 5 seconds longer, Celestial Opposition must hit your Synastry target.

Collective Unconscious' Regen & 10% mitigation spell can be Time Dilationed' and Celestial Oppositioned giving it an addition 15 seconds to both buffs. The 10% mitigation buff last 3 seconds, but isn't shown. If you want to argue this, go figure it out yourself--I'm tired of having to prove this time after time because no one wants to be observant of their own skills >_>

Never RR twice unless you really wont gain any benefit from the card, or if you know there is a specific check coming and you have a Spreaded Card ready for that situation. If you get two Spires and literally no one will need a TP song or a Spire (because of downtime or they simply have CDs such as Invigorate and alike).

Never use an Expanded Bole unless you can actually somewhat benefit from it in terms of raid damage. If you come across this situation either RR for Enhanced or click off the Expanded RR buff and just throw it onto your tank.

Try not to Ewer a Black Mage. Black Mages gauge MP values to what they will do next. It's a somewhat simple system, but complex if you don't understand it. All this boils down to is information distortion which can mess-up a Black Mage's rotation Coordinate and communicate before using.

[AlphaSonic]

Snip

I was just talking about an hipothetic case and the usual use of Shroud/LA, if you aren't under 70% MP, most of the time you don't need to use it. Of course if you are going to use a great sum of MP use shrould/LA, I use Shroud at 90% MP at the start of faust extreme just to DPS and I agree about Spear usage. But i find those occasions too situtational to be a useful card. Even if it's good at his job (Spear), it's so situational that it's nearly impossible to use it at 100%.

[Ananolf]

Your MP problems are either gear or skill. It's an illusion.