Quote Originally Posted by RachaelMarie22 View Post
With a bit of practice and after a while you don't even notice the camera change it really does become second nature clicking off as aoes appear and that and on to new mobs etc. Keep at it!
This is pretty accurate. It's super janky at first, but becomes pretty easy once you get the hang of it. That said: learning when to turn my lock-on off and on is the bit of progression/learning that takes me the longest, personally. You rarely need to use it to avoid AoEs, too, actually. Most of the time, you can just spin around the boss to avoid them. If you do a melee-friendly A7S weight strategy, for instance, you never need to drop Lock-On to dodge.

You'll have to drop it for the corner set, though;;
Quote Originally Posted by Tenured View Post
I see, I don't have mercy stroke yet, and some people were telling me it'd help a lot. They also said it's best to save buffs for the dummy as well. Would this help in my attempts? I've tried saving them but I can't notice a big difference. Maybe I'm just not doing it right.
Mercy Stroke is not a major boon to your damage. You should have it, but it's not gonna make or break you.

And, holding buffs and such will help maximize a three-minute parse, but when looking to actually maximize your dps and such, you want to practice NOT holding things. At your gear level, you should be able to down the A7S dummy (in a halfway lucky parse) without using any minor optimizations. You should theoretically be able to also kill the A8S dummy (I cleared it for the first time wearing this.) if you optimize for 3 minutes, but I wouldn't worry much about that.