I'm not talking about healer DPS! Click me!

[KitomiSaitichi]

3 mobs isn't optimal to AoE with Quick Knock or Fire II half the time.
At low levels, you have low MP/no blizzard III and can only put in a few at a time. Sure you are doing 140% DPS on three mobs, 46.6% of Fire I x 3 but.
A healer has to heal more often; you're trading the marginal damage of a healer doing equivalent to 86% damage of Fire I. A tank has to manage enmity more (more flashes or whatever). The melee DPS/tank have to play tetris dodging if the third mob has a cone splash mechanic or an AoE circle silence mechanic. With 3 mobs and below, it's almost always better to have all 4 players focus DPSing a target down at a time and one player tab-targeting out to the next one when the mob is low HP to not waste that extra DMG.

At 8+ mobs, it is just as sub-optimal to be doing large pulls. There's a limit to how much AoE radius the skills can hit the mobs, the tank is busy spamming enmity moves with low damage / positionals to optimize AoEs / prevent party from taking damage and the healer can only put out the highest heals / regens / shields. Moderate pulls of 6 mobs seems to be the best for AoE.

[FunkyBunch]

3 mobs isn't optimal to AoE with Quick Knock or Fire II half the time.
At low levels, you have low MP/no blizzard III and can only put in a few at a time. Sure you are doing 140% DPS on three mobs, 46.6% of Fire I x 3 but.
A healer has to heal more often; you're trading the marginal damage of a healer doing equivalent to 86% damage of Fire I. A tank has to manage enmity more (more flashes or whatever). The melee DPS/tank have to play tetris dodging if the third mob has a cone splash mechanic or an AoE circle silence mechanic. With 3 mobs and below, it's almost always better to have all 4 players focus DPSing a target down at a time and one player tab-targeting out to the next one when the mob is low HP to not waste that extra DMG.

At 8+ mobs, it is just as sub-optimal to be doing large pulls. There's a limit to how much AoE radius the skills can hit the mobs, the tank is busy spamming enmity moves with low damage / positionals to optimize AoEs / prevent party from taking damage and the healer can only put out the highest heals / regens / shields. Moderate pulls of 6 mobs seems to be the best for AoE.

It was a general example.
Yes of course there are certain situations where it's not correct (however, it's always correct to F2 instead of F1 on 3+ mobs even at low levels unless the tank can't keep the hate up or unless you need to burst down a Final Sting or something).

While it may not ALWAYS be optimal DPS wise for every class at 3+ mobs, it's almost always optimal group wise at 3+ mobs. And there's no class in the game it's not optimal at 4+ mobs.
People always seem to forget that every mob you kill early you rob potency from the AoE. So unless you're constantly changing to highest health targets with a single target rotation, it's better to AoE even in the instances you mentioned.

And especially on larger pulls a Healer can DPS even easier because the Tank (also everyone) should be using their cooldowns. Holy+stun X 3 times= profit.
That's when I use Internal Release or Raging Strikes or other cooldowns to burst them all down quicker.

[KitomiSaitichi]

I vehemently disagree.
At low levels, you can pull off 2 or 3 Fire IIs max. If you are paired with an archer, they might also run out of TP. The mobs have such a large amount of HP that you're just better off killing a mob there and then. If you're swapping into ice mode, and the mobs are still at 77% HP, then it's just slower. I personally find my dungeons 20-25% longer as a healer when my group has a tank that only pulls 3 mobs or less each time and the group AoEs than if we all single target for low level dungeons. I also find a lot of people really really slow at tab targeting, so that's a counterarguement against me (even though it's just a 1.5 second delay).

This lets me put in more Stone IIs than Cure IIs if the tank is just same-level geared even with regen on.

In addition, if there's a melee class in the party already, chances are they will be single target DPSing, decreasing the "AoE" benefit as by the time you fit in 3 gCDs, you'll be out of mana and having to transpose (pre-blizzard 3) or the mob just outright dying and the mobs being reduced to 2 leaving you with an 'empty' target bar and cancelling your target cast. You can fit more Fire Is in that same period and tab target when the HP is 16% preventing a DPS loss, scathe also works pretty fine with 10%< HP thrash mob HP.

I had a dungeon where this was an issue where the tank couldn't kept aggro decently because of a lack of flash spam. Even flash only merely sustains aggro pre-cyclone, requiring at least a savage blade or so. If they're spamming flash just to barely maintain aggro, then that means more downtime recovering mana (if the run intervals are short, or after a pull and just before the boss)- they can't start riot blading since the DPS are trigger happy usually more often than not. This is less of a problem for warriors and dark knights since they also damage AoE.

Post-cyclone/shield oath non-paladin, or higher levels 40+ I would agree with you that Fire II is always efficient in group-play and pre-40 I would agree if everyone was down ilvl-synced and everyone had AoE skills with high damage and unlimited MP/TP/perfect aggro holding. I also agree if we're talking about the flame thrash thrash mobs in Satasha. However, some tanks are inexperienced, some tanks are undergeared (I had to heal one that was taking 50% damage per boss strike in Brayflox), some DPS just AoE on 2 mobs too or don't even rotate correctly, and I can contribute as .4 to .75 of a DPS when I have more uptime in cleric stance thereby trading higher marginal gains in reducing mob clear times in the specific case of 3 mobs per pull - therefore fire IIing on 2 mobs is not always optimal DPS wise in group play when these factors are considered.

I'm not really talking about Holy, Fire IV or dungeons of those sorts since I haven't experienced it yet, but gear-wise, enmity is much easier to keep, heals are less needed and crowd control is much stronger, so fire II isn't as much of an issue for tanks.

Personally I haven't had issue holding aggro on fire II happy thaus but it's less of a relaxing dungeon when I have to tab target to savage blade a single DPSer target and rotate flash at the same time. Maybe I'm just biased because I want to DPS as a healer instead of just having this awkward 1.8 second delay before I cure I to not overheal or having to ram some cure IIs after 2 hits of ticks, leaving no time for cleric stance - unless I want to see the tank panic at 10% HP everytime or maybe I just experience time dilation when I see the mobs HP dropping sooo slowwwwwwwwwwwwwww and correlating it to meaning the dungeon experience being wantonly unbearable and wondering why we can't just kill 1,1,1 in 9 cooldowns instead of AoE-AoE-AoE-AoE-out of mana-single target-target-Fire III-AoE-AoE-oh a target died already- woops lost target- tab single target-single target-single target-single target-single target- single target (on a BLM)

Anyhow my experience more often than not. 1 mob will die faster because of a HP difference even if everyone did AoE, but its just usually to someone puting DoTs on one target first, or the tank focus targeting one first, so really, I vouch for single-target for 3 mobs. Everytime. Just simpler, less stress, and perceives to be faster for me. Pre-holy, pre-shield oath, pre-nice moves. 4-10 mobs, AoE away. Although, do factor in the mana recovery downtime if the run interval if short. Also, the DPS better not start single-targeting DPS/AoEing on the first shield lob/axe throw, or the tank has to run back and provoke it off - requires a patient and nice DPS that understands when the pull ends (usually when DK does his/her circle or paladin flash while in position). If the AoE is supremely slow cause of bad DPS gear or because we're playing dancing chairs avoiding AoE cones and having our casts interrupted, then big pulls in low level dungeons with a lack of decent skills are not really beneficial in the time department.

[FunkyBunch]

I vehemently disagree.
At low levels, you can pull off 2 or 3 Fire IIs max. If you are paired with an archer, they might also run out of TP. The mobs have such a large amount of HP that you're just better off killing a mob there and then. If you're swapping into ice mode, and the mobs are still at 77% HP, then it's just slower.

You can always pull off 4 Fire IIs minimum (before you get F3) unless you're terribly, terribly undergeared.
And it may not seem like you're killing them faster, but you are. There is no way it is ever faster to do F1.
You will always be able to cast AT MOST one more F1 than F2, no less, because F1 is 80% the cost of F2 at every level and because there's never a time you could cast 10 F2's.
180 potency vs 300 potency
180x5 is 25% less than 300x4
Even if you're only getting 3 F2's you're still doing 900 potency vs 720 potency with 4 F1s.

This doesn't count the fact that with F2 you have 3 times the crit opportunities per cast.

If the mobs are dying at different rates, it's because the players aren't properly rotating their targets which is not the AoE players fault. And the AoE player should switch to single target at 2 mobs. (unless they're a dragoon and then they should be DoomSpiking still anyway)