General thread update: according to a friend of mine who parses, I'm now at least solidly netting 1k dps minimum in full shield oath in i260.

My static... are probably not going to keep me around for much longer, for a variety of reasons unrelated to my fervent desire to use sword oath, so there's that.

Our blm does not pull stupid crazy aggro levels, honestly. A friend of mine who plays smn and sch can hit ridiculous numbers that make me weep blood on smn and he definitely has quelling.

I've started practising the general rotation while in shield oath, so when I start hopping it'll be second nature, but using FoF after fast blade then CoS after riot blade has really helped me keep aggro a lot better than the previous rotation I was using. It's surprising how much of a difference it makes!

I'm probably going to be running 9s and 10s with mostly members of my fc from now on, so I may be stuck in shield oath for a week or two while our totally fresh ast gets used to the mechanics in both floors, but I'm confident that moving forward I'll be able to really push my dps, my stance dancing and work on fine-tuning my cooldown usage. That, and I levelled WAR to 60 and have been practising the rotation for that, so as soon as I get the axe from zurvan I should be ready to jump into high-end content on that, too.

Thanks so much to everyone for all your tips!