Rotation Term Help

[Rongway]

If a rotation is a sequence of abilities, then an opener is a special rotation that, on top of the usual abilities, will apply a bunch of cooldowns in order to give you a solid boost to your damage output for a brief period. Since it burns a bunch of cooldowns, it can't be done for every iteration of the rotation.

So a segment of the BLM single target rotation might go

Fire III > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire > Fire IV > Fire IV > Blizzard III > Thunder II > Blizzard IV

and this sequence is a functional unit that is repeated throughout the fight with few modifications. However, once every three minutes, a BLM's cooldowns line up in such a way that he can instead use the following extended version, which would be called an opener or opening rotation if used at the beginning of a combat:

Ley Lines > Thunder II > Sharpcast > Fire III > Enochian > Fire > Raging Strikes > Potion of Int > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire III > Fire IV > Fire IV > Blizzard III > Thunder II > Blizzard IV

and if you compare the original sequence to the extended sequence, you can see it's an extension of the original rotation to capitalize on the buffs that can only be used once every few minutes.



Openers tend to include a lot of damage increasing buffs, such as Trick Attack and Battle Litany, and lots of off-GCD abilities, like Ricochet and Sidewinder; and so when multiple DDs' openers line up right, such as at the beginning of the fight or after certain phase changes, everyone's damage can skyrocket. This is one of the reasons for using openers as openers; such a rotation on its own can be an increase of 5% or 10% in the middle of a fight, but when everyone's going ham at once, their collective damage can go up by much more than that for that period.