Samurai Discussion

[jack891]

just curious as to how many of you have extended your openers into full blown rotations?

the first few of my own I tried ran into issues between the 2-3 minute marks where buffs wudnt line up, not having the right amount of sen to refresh the dot or being 2 GCDs either side of the dot (clipping)
its not as easy as using hagakure on cooldown to pump out more shintens, I am however finally sitting on a 4 min rotation where things are lining up better. its not optimized yet tho, il work on that another day

[Herokoon]

Keep us posted on anything you have past the 3:30 minute mark, and yes I am seeing a lot of similar issues with some of the rotations conceived on Reddit within the last week, with this newest iteration of the opener, I plan to see if I can follow the structure of optimal kenki consumption, and kaiten midare if and only if I have my DoT upkeep, and if Hagakure wouldn't be a better substitution at the time. I'll post the opener with rotation here when I'm finished.

[Sai-Kon]

With regards to rotations, I have run numerous opener simulations and I have come down to 2 builds: First one is the same as Daioh's. The second one I came up with beats the first opener slightly in terms of potency/time and abuses the fact that Iaijutsu does not break combos:

Hakaze (5K) - Yukikaze (15K) - Hakaze (20K) - Jinpu (25K) - Iaijutsu (25K) - Gekko (35K) - Hissatsu: Shinten (10K) - Hakaze (15K) - Shifu (20K) - Kasha (30K) - Hissatsu: Shinten (5K) - Hakaze (10K) - Yukikaze (20K) - Hagakure (80K) - Meikyo Shisui (80K) - Yukikaze (90K) - Hissatsu: Guren (40K) - Gekko (50K) - Hissatsu: Shinten (25K) - Kasha (35K) - Hissatsu: Kaiten (15K) - Iaijutsu (15k)

As you can see, it abuses the fact that I don't use the first SEN right away. Instead I get Jinpu first to buff the damage of Higanbana and then I cast it slightly before we get the 2nd SEN. This opener has slightly higher overall DPS gain over Daio's but it is surely not perfect since it suffers from certain shortcomings.

[Sai-Kon]

Final Remarks: While abusing small stuff like delaying Higanbana slightly so it gets buffed by Jinpu is definitely a step in the right direction, I firmly believe that we have to look a bit outside of the box while theorycrafting. Let me elaborate: It is no secret that the biggest inflation of DPS happens during the first 30 or so seconds when all CDs are thrown to the boss. To that end, we must take into accounts the big CDs (Battle Litany, Trick Attack etc) and try to line up our hard-hitting abilities during that window because the initial DPS gain/inflation will end up being way higher than it would have been otherwise. For instance, my rotation has higher potency/time than Daioh's. However, my rotation suffers from the fact that it only utilizes Higanbana in the first 10-15 seconds when BL or TA will be up, while Guren and Midare come way later into the opener and they will most likely not be buffed by these CDs (unless communicated otherwise with your team).

[Sai-Kon]

Moreover, while looking at other dps classes' rotations and how high burst they have in their openers to inflate the DPS numbers, for instance a 9x Fire IV BLM opener, I have a strong suspicion that Higanbana's DoT will most likely be buffed by Hissatsu: Kaiten so that we can keep up with the rest DPS-wise. While simulating SAM openers I was always getting that feeling that something is missing from our rotation, something does not feel as smooth. In some simulations where I assumed that Higanbana's DoT is affected by Kaiten, the opener felt more fluid and the DPS higher (which is how it should be given that we only have 1 DoT).

Last but not least, another important thing to consider is the slashing debuff and whether we have a member in the team like WAR who can apply it for us early so we can opt for an opener starting with Jnpu buff/combo, which is comparatively superior to Yukikaze combo buff wise and potency wise (despite Yukikaze being a 2-part combo).