Quote Originally Posted by Sleigh View Post
You must have a different definition of raid DPS than me. Raid DPS, or rather effective raid DPS (case in point, A3S's add phase where sacrificing some personal DPS = higher boss DPS) is still the most important thing, pre, mid, and post progression. You shouldn't care about personal DPS that hinders the raid, that should never be your goal unless you're just fflogs chasing.
I worded it poorly, but the essential thing is that pushing cooldowns around and having fewer overall casts of your buffs is a net loss in raid dps for the fight. If you can safely shift a cooldown to bolster your dps (and by extension the raid's dps) while still meeting every check in the fight, there's really no reason not to. If you're in a group where the hand of pain check is still difficult, and you staunchly refuse to shift your B4B to that spot so you can clear the check consistently, you're being a shit. On the flip side, if your raid dps *is* high enough that you consistently clear that dps check without you holding B4B for it, you shouldn't hold it. You're sacrificing raid (and personal) dps to pad a check that you already clear with ease.

And the add phase B4B - If I get the same amount of casts of B4B and BL in the final phase as any other dragoon (including having B4B come off cooldown ~5-10s before the second hand spawns), why should I be holding my buffs and hindering my own performance on the fight overall? It doesn't change the outcome, doesn't make the fight any harder to clear, it just boosts overall raid dps by padding my own numbers higher.

Using Battle Litany at different times only boosts raid dps if you stack your buffs there, and my group has proven without a doubt that holding buffs to coordinate BL at a certain point gives a net DECREASE in raid dps compared to everyone just doing their thing. One raid night in A4S, we decided to try and boost our third leg dps by coordinating all cooldowns and potions to be used after the dolls are fed and everyone is in full dps up-time. We were consistently 7% to 10% slow on the leg. We reverted to our original strategy (where I open on the leg with BL+B4B+IR+BotD+Potion before the add spawns) and we killed the leg 7+ seconds fast on every attempt without changing anything else in the strat. Maybe it was us being shit? Maybe it was because we limited ourselves to 1 Trick Attack on the leg instead of our usual 2? I dunno. Really turned me off on the idea of sacrificing personal dps for raid dps when that happened.