Okay guys, I'm no stranger to mix/max topics when it comes to endgaming raid and progression content in the MMO world, but I'm just starting to really dig in when it comes to my Bard in FFXIV (currently at just under ilvl200).

For the most part, I think my rotation is fairly clean but I am really choking on the Wanderer's Minuet factoids.

First off, I'll say that like most people I hate the concept of cast times on a nimble class like the Bard. It's asinine. I hate it. Many people hate it. It's not as bad as what the Ninja job did to the amazing Rogue class, but still really stupid from a fun/enjoyable perspective. Okay, cool, got that out of the way.

So I'm open minded to using WM as long as I can prove that it's worth my time and annoyance. Like many other games, you can kinda snoop into the other bards you run with to get a sense of what they're doing. The problem I'm having is that I see most bards running Alex normal keep it active permanently, which in some situations is fine if you can park yourself in one spot for, say, 80% or more of the time there. But if you're constantly dancing the AOE, I'm really having a tough time seeing how the 30% buff beats out the auto-attack+DPS while moving.

Most comments on here lately are "If you don't have WM up all the time you suck, go home." which seems a bit odd. Honestly I haven't hooked up my parser to really get some field results one way or the other, and I know I need to. But am I wrong in thinking that WM is a situational buff? It works awesome for AoE DPS, and if I can position myself in a static location, I can almost feel that BLM cast snoozefes--I mean, I can see it's got an advantage.

So, not wanting to get into the later Savage floors and eff it all up for my teammates, I'm trying to get a real honest no-BS explanation of when WM is best to use, and what the actual net DPS benefit is really going to be (so I can use that as a guide for my own parsing).

If anyone has a link to someone that shows their math, that would be ideal.

One last item I want to ask, and this is embarassingly noobish to ask... but does Foes do anything for the BRD skills? They're not considered magical damage, right? This is mostly helping push the BLM/SMN DPS I assume?

Thanks in advance. Hope I get some really useful info.