RDM - What am I doing wrong if anything?

[Furious]

It depends if I am puging or not. If I am with a pug group I don't because I don't know or trust the tank enough to have the agro. I have pre-casted too many times with pugs to have me take the agro immediately because the tank wasn't fast enough. If it is with friends then sure, I will do it. Most of the time I play though it is with PUGs because my life is too busy for a static.

My definition if optimal is different then yours. Optimal means doing the right rotations with right mana tick management. Prec-cast has nothing to do with optimal. For example, performing 3.0 and 4.0 mix perfectly. Pre-cast has no bearing on that.

As for the guy I put on ignore, I can't take the words of a July 2017 joiner seriously, so good troll attempt.

Edit: This is the last time I am responding here because I just don't give two fucks anymore whether you guys agree with it or not. Chester Bennington's death hit me hard then expected, so I have to go deal with those issues.

If you didn't care, you wouldn't post. You said the wrong thing, got called out, and have kept reiterating wrong things to follow. You play your way, but don't come into a thread asking for advice and give wrong advice, then get shitty when people tell you you are wrong. It isn't a matter of opinion, what you are saying is wrong.

Not precasting is a dps loss. Not standing in melee range when you can do so is a dps loss. Not being in melee range because you don't know the fight is your own failure, and a dps loss. In every fight so far in stormblood there are significant portions of the fight where you can and should stand in melee range, even if it wasn't a dps loss not to do so, so that you can control where mechanics land (ie: raisen kaikyo), or so you can get aoe healing. Every time I see a blm setting up leylines in Africa on a section of a fight with no reason to be at range I roll my eyes.

Verthunder/ is 300 potency and since you seen to think you aren't bad at the game, I'm going to assume you have diversion up on the pull in a pug. So, you generate 300 potency of enmity in the hardcast/dualcast verthunder+aero.
Shield Lob is 840 potency worth of enmity (it has a 7x enmity multiplier), shield oath is a 2.7x multiplier. A single shield lob in shield oath generates 2268 potency of enmity. Paladin weapons are 97 physical damage (susano sword), susano rapier is 131 mdamage, so your 300 potency multiplies to around 405 potency relatively.

405 (for a veraero AND verthunder) vs. 2268 (for a single shield lob). If the pld is good, they will precast holy spirit into the shield lob, for an extra 1080 enmity on that first gcd.

The other tanks have equally generous single gcd ranged aggro.

If your tank is literally body pulling.. yeah.. maybe you shouldn't precast. Even if your tank is pulling in DPS stance, they will STILL have more than double your first gcd threat with their first gcd threat.