Rotation explanation for a noob range DPS

[Sylkis]

1.
-4 man dungeons are very lenient, so even if you stand there and do nothing you won't fail. Not doing a rotation is somewhere between not doing anything and doing a rotation, so although you won't fail, people will get annoyed. It also expends extra resources for tank/healer as the mobs aren't dying as fast.
-When you get to harder content, not doing enough damage within a certain amount of time means the boss will instantly kill the party so you must have a good rotation at this point.

2.
The naming of spells is more confusing then they claim*. Fire 3 isn't more powerful than fire 2 or fire 1, they each have different uses (same for blizzard). For example (comparing to Fire 3):
-Fire 3 is better than the other skills when you want to switch from Umbral Ice to Astral Fire, because it gives you 3 stacks regardless of what you have. If you casted fire 1 from Umbral Ice, it would just nullify that instead of giving you Astral Fire. Transpose would only give you 1 stack of fire.
-Fire 2 is better than Fire 3 or Fire 1 when you have 3 or more enemies together and you want to hit them all (99% of the time you do). Fire 2 would do 100 potency to each enemy while Fire 3 does 240 potency to one enemy.
-Fire 1 is better than Fire 3 if you have 3 stacks of Astral Fire, because it has a lower cast time (so similar damage over time vs Fire 3) but also MP cost and gives you a chance to proc a free Fire 3.

There are several rotations because each rotation performs differently under different situations. The rotations you see assume certain things like you not needing to move, the target won't move, there is only 1 target etc etc. They are generalised rotations. You can stretch it a bit for different situations when the general rotation doesn't fit as well.


*(They said they put numbers like fire, fire 2, fire 3, fire 4 instead of the traditional suffixes fire, fira, firaga, firaja to make it less confusing for people new to the series, but it makes it more confusing because the spells aren't related like the numbers - 4 isn't better than 3/2/1. Treat them as all different spells)