message from a player to part of the community about jobs

[Shiwayari]

First off, remind yourself that you are playing an MMORPG with real people in your party, who all value their time and most likely want to play effectively to get the most out of it. I agree it is not a good thing if people get offensive trying to "tell others how to play their job" but being extremely stubborn on the receiving end is just as bad.

While you're playing by yourself, do whatever you want. But playing ineffective to this extend in a group with real players and seemingly refusing to consider any advice that contradicts "your playstyle" is borderline harassment and it would not surprise anyone to see someone like that removed from the party, in any MMO. If you want to play in a group in an MMORPG, you do the best you can output at that given time, no exceptions other than obviously more important circumstances / emergencies. Anything else is being disrespectful of the time of whoever you are playing with.

Now, all of the rotations/playstyles you explained here are mathematically very very far from optimal and have huge room for improvement (math below) and that is an objective matter, not a subjective one. Which is not to say that is a bad thing, anyone is a "bad" player when they start out. The really bad thing is not being willing to learn. Just because you played other games for 20 years does not mean the same things you learned in those apply to this game. In fact, FFXIV is very different to a lot of games in many aspects and you should be open to learn the game itself and not stubbornly apply theories from other games without validifying them yourself or at least seeking advice from other players. The biggest part of this is as simple as reading ALL your tooltips and executing basic math upon them. The game even has a way built in to check your effectiveness all by yourself, all you need to do is teleport to for example Summerford Farms and there you have it, a striking dummy. Take a stopwatch, and test your own as well as other suggested rotations on it for at least 3 minutes and count how many times you reduced its health to 0. You will see a significant difference. If you are not willing to take the time to do that, there are other *cough* tools to make it a little easier; or you can simply listen to advice and reasonable explanations.
If you do not want to do any of those, I'm sorry to say but I don't think you meet the minimum requirements to play together with other people.

This gets more and more important the farther you progress in the game, so you should start being open for suggestions as early as possible. In any serious end-game group, you will be instantly removed if you are holding the party back and are not even willing to listen to advice. That is, if anyone is actually willing to take the time and give you advice, because you are expected to know what you are doing at that point.

Now for the advice/math part on Blackmage, as it seems you are very stuck on your (incorrect) standpoint that your "playstyle" does not need to be improved. First off, in basic dungeons, utilities such as Sleep have extremely marginal uses in this game, mostly because any attack on that slept enemy will wake it up immediately. Sleep does no damage, so all it does is shift the damage the tank would take now to later on. Sadly (imo) there is not a single basic dungeon where a pull of one group of mobs does enough damage to put even vastly undergeared tanks into any danger, assuming your healer is not sleeping on his keyboard. For larger pulls, those are intended to be killed quickly to prevent the tank from dying, and the most effective way to do that is attacking all enemies at the same time, as much as your job allows, thus making sleep completely useless. However, there are scenarios in which sleep can help:
- Your tank just died, while there are still mutliple enemies alive and they threaten to kill your healer. In this case, you can sleep all the enemies and stop attacking, to give your healer time to raise the tank and continue the pull instead of wipe and reset the enemies HP.


How to find an objectively better rotation / applying math

For the math part, as you are THM Lv 24 I'll just be looking the rotation at that level. First off let's look at the effects of Astral Fire and Umbral Ice. First off the most important thing, all damage in this game scales linear with their potency, minus (i think) a variance of +-10%. This can be very easily verified by hitting a dummy with 2 attacks of different potencies and doing some elementary school math.

--Umbral Ice & Astral Fire--

Again, these can be easily gotten by simply reading your tooltips and spending a few minutes on a striking dummy:

For each cast of Fire you will move one step to the right in the following chart:

Umbral Ice / Umbral Ice II > No buff > Astral Fire > Astral Fire II

Similarly for each cast of Blizzard you will move one step to the right in this chart:

Astral Fire / Astral Fire II > No buff > Umbral Ice > Umbral Ice II

Additionally you also have Transpose which does the following:

Umbral Ice / Umbral Ice II > (Transpose) > Astral Fire
Astral Fire / Astral Fire II > (Transpose) > Umbral Ice
No buff > (Transpose) > No buff

so it will always give you only one stack of the opposite elements buff.

Let's look at the effect of these buffs:

Umbral Ice: Fire spells cost less MP and do less damage. Quickens MP regeneration.
Astral Fire: Fire spells cost more MP and do more damage. Ice spells cost less MP and do less damage. No MP regeneration.

Let's quantify these by actually looking at the numbers.

-- Amount of MP regenerated per tick (every 3 seconds) --
Astral Fire / Astral Fire II > 0 MP
No buffs > 2% of max MP
Umbral Ice > 32% of max MP
Umbral Ice II > 47% of max MP

-- Fire spell potency--
Astral Fire II > 150%
Astral Fire > 135%
No buff > 100%
Umbral Ice > 90%
Umbral Ice II > 80%

-- Ice spell potency --
Astral Fire II > 80%
Astral Fire > 90%
No buff > 100%
Umbral Ice > 100%
Umbral Ice II > 100%

-- Fire MP cost --
Astral Fire II > 200%
Astral Fire > 200%
No buff > 100%
Umbral Ice > 50%
Umbral Ice II > 25%

-- Blizzard MP cost --
Astral Fire II > 25%
Astral Fire > 50%
No buff > 100%
Umbral Ice > 100%
Umbral Ice II > 100%

Note these numbers may not be 100% accurate (verfiy on a dummy yourself), but are sufficient to prove the point. Also note that without any buffs, your maximum MP would allow for 10 Fire casts. The MP cost of Blizzard without any buffs is a third of the MP cost of Fire without any buffs. Furthermore, Fire, Blizzard and Thunder all have the same casttime. Now all we have to do is build a rotation and add numbers together, simple. Let's take the rotation you suggested, which you said you use because you do not run out of MP. Let's assume an optimal situation (this depends on when you actually cast, since server ticks, i.e. MP regen, can fall in different places because the cast times of Fire/Blizzard are shorter) in where you do never run out of MP by following the rotation your suggested which I slightly simplify to:

Fire Fire Blizzard Blizzard

and then repeat. Let's read the tooltips and note that Fire and Blizzard have a potency of 180 so we can apply numbers from above. Let's say we can cast 16 spells, then we get the following potencies.

180 * ( 1 + 1.35 + 0.8 + 1 +
0.9 + 1 + 0.9 + 1 +
0.9 + 1 + 0.9 + 1 +
0.9 + 1 + 0.9 + 1 ) = 2799

Note the first set of 4 spells have different potencies because they start without buff while the next sets start with Umbral Ice I. We get a total of 2799 potency for an avarage of 174.9375 potency per spell. Let change the rotation a little and try this:

Fire Fire Fire Blizzard Blizzard Blizzard

180 * ( 1 + 1.35 + 1.5 + 0.8 + 1 + 1 +
0.8 + 1 + 1.35 + 0.8 + 1 + 1 +
0.8 + 1 + 1.35 + 0.8 + 1 + 1) = 3339

This time we get 3339 potency over 18 spells for an avarage of 185.5 potency per spell. This is already 185.5 - 174.9375 = 10.5625 more potency per spell than the rotation we tried before. That is already over 6% more effective. But wait, it can get better, by far. (I gave you all the tools and numbers so im not going to write all the single potencies now, you can check that yourself.)

Let's consider this rotation:

Fire Fire Fire Fire Fire Transpose Blizzard Thunder Blizzard

and repeat. Let's analyize that first.
1) We said you can fit a maximum of 10 Fire spells in before running out of MP. After the first Fire, the MP cost doubles, so you can only fit in 4 more Fire's for an MP cost that would equal 9 Fire without Astral Fire. The next fire cannot be cast as that would put us at 11 Fire's worth of MP, which our maximum MP does not allow for.

2) Transpose takes no time cast. It transforms your Astral Fire into Umbral Ice, which means instead of 80% of the potency for the next Blizzard, you will get the full 100%. For the "cost" of using Transpose, which is instant.

3) Blizzard is 180 potency. Thunder has a total potency of 270 including damage over time (DoT's also tick every 3 seconds, like MP regen). You first want you MP back fast, so you cast Blizzard to get to Umbral Ice II. We said this buff regenerates 47% of your maximum MP every 3 seconds, so you have to "wait" for 2 ticks to go back to full MP. So what is the best you can do in this time? Well, Thunder has 90 potency more than Blizzard, so that is the way to go. Now the rest is a matter of server timing, if you are "unlucky" and your MP is not full yet, the best choice you have now is a last Blizzard before your MP is full again and you can repeat the rotation. Let's assume you get "unlucky" every time and just repeat the exact same rotation. Keep track of your buffs and potencies and we get a total of

5337 potency / 24 spells. Which is an avarageof 222.375 potency per spell. This is over 19.87% more effective than the (Fire Fire Fire Blizzard Blizzard Blizzard) rotation.

Note that sticking to this rotation full time is also not the best option, as i already pointed out with differences in MP ticks. It also changes dramatically at higher levels. Please ask fellow BLM's or read a full on level 60 guide if you are intrested. Assuming a dungeon run takes 30 minutes and you do roughly a third of all damage, you just completed the dungeon 2 minutes faster by changing a really simple rotation that only uses 3 spells. Times 4 players, you just saved 8 minutes of human lifetime.

Now I leave to your imagination how big the difference is at level 60. In short: If you think you can play you own ineffective "playstyle" while having a responsible role in your party, please stay away from MMOs.
As you can see above, we used nothing but * and +, i.e. simple elementary school math to vastly improve your efficiency. This is true for most of the game, the basics of any job are very intuitive, the details is what is harder to master, but anyone can play decent if they try. If you don't like the playstyle that the game intends for you to play, I suggest you try a different job and not hold others back because you feel entitled to be stubborn. Thank you.