Looking for Ninja Tips

[GeminiXIV]

Back again with another question. For all you Ninja (or just Melee DPS) how do you manage uptime in A11s? I started learning it about a week ago and my DPS just starts to crash right before the 1-8 number phase.

There seems to be an incredible amount of downtime with Optical Sight and 1-8 number mechanics yet I know people can easily maintain high DPS over the entire fight. Should I be risking it more during Optical Sight or try to sit on cooldowns abit longer until I can start attacking again?

[DBlind]

Tl;dr: I hold my CD's during Opticals, do 4-5 full openers with them and think about TA timings for when they most benefit the group

First of all, if you can, pick your "Big Orb" position as close to the boss as possible. I'm the only melee in my group atm so my position is 1 o clock.

During the first Optical you have three choices: take one hit and finish your full opener (now with Echo its even more feasible), play it safe and just look for the safe spot and lose a lot of uptime (like I do, I'm a coward most of the time) or be a badass ninja warrior and run circles around the boss keeping 100% uptime during Shiva pattern. If you do it wrong you'll likely get hit by two blasts and die.

At least before Echo you could get three Trick Attacks off before Lapis phase. One with your opener, the second just after the Bait Optical (need to hold your mudra for this) and the third after Limit Cut. After my opener, I save my CDs to the mini burn phase before Lapis. Too much running around to make good use of them before that imo.

For the Numbers Limit Cut you want to go with the two-point system if you want to maximise dps to the absolute max since you can prep your Slashing and Suiton even by hitting the boss when it appears. I'm personally not that good so I just make sure Ive got 70 seconds of Huton and that I can start with a full opener since there's about 30 seconds in between the boss coming back and it turning into a ship.

I hold onto my CDs during Lapis, well maybe not Internal Release since it comes back if used right away, so I can do another full opener right after the orbs are down. You dont gain much by killing the orbs super fast, but burning the boss does skip the Plasma Shield during Pyretic phase so it wont get a damage buff.

Just before the Pyretic phase ends you want to hold onto your CD's again since its going to jump at... 44% or something. After landing you can finish a full opener again before GA-100 hits, and after that its again running away from Opticals and here I personally would focus more on not wiping the raid, especially if youre new to the fight. Second Trick Attack will be after the Bait Optical, and third will be up just before the final Number mechanic finishes. Then you need to decide if you want to Trick the boss or the EDD add.

Of course the timings will change with differences in group DPS, that wall of text was me a slightly-better-than-average ninja doing it with a slightly-better-than-average-group pre-Echo. If you skip Lapis for example everything changes.