Quote Originally Posted by whiskeybravo View Post
Unfortunately, this entire line of argumentation can be dismissed for this particular raid tier. There aren't any "phases" to push, fights are 100% scripted. The only mechanics you're skipping are due to a faster clear, and in this regard burst damage is equally valuable as sustained. The only real phase push in current content is in Shinryu, which is pug content at this point. The adds in v3s barely live long enough for more than 1-2 fell cleaves, and the other adds are just used for pad nowadays.
Shinryu has phase skips, Twintania has multiple phase/mechanic skips, you can cut some stuff out of the end of Nael if you push hard enough, etc. The four Deltascape fights may not have actual skips, but the current primal and the new big raid both do. And Deltascape is an anomaly in that regard - phase pushes have been a part of at least two fights in every single previous raid tier, and the vast majority of the Extreme primals.

Regardless, though, phase pushes are just the easiest example to point to of how burst inherently has more utility than sustained damage. There are add burns, as you mention (which are also rare in current content but fairly common historically), and every single fight with enforced downtime is also tilted in favour of burst-oriented classes. Any time when any fight has moments where damage is more important or less important than the average is a fight where burst is more valuable than sustained, and fights that don't have any moments like that are so rare that you can consider them an anomaly, rather than a balance consideration.

To be clear, though: When I say that burst is inherently more valuable, that isn't necessarily to say that it's universally more valuable - only that it is often better, and is never worse (even in your later example of T7/T7S, holding on to your damage to time a phase skip means that you're that much more likely to have a full burst available after you do make the skip).

A comparison: Vengeance is a better 30% mitigation cooldown than Shadow Wall, I think we could all agree. However, if we really want to, we can design a fight where there's only one attack that warrants a 30% mitigation tool, where that attack is used every 180s, and there's no benefit to be gained in healer damage/GCDs by using Vengeance elsewhere. In that instance, Vengeance is no better than Shadow Wall - but it doesn't change the fact that Vengeance is a better cooldown than Shadow Wall, in general.

Furthermore, higher burst can not be inherently easier to optimize than sustained. I really can't believe that would be argued. It's much more difficult to line up small burst windows into even smaller raid utility windows. I don't optimize to that high of a level, but Xeno said he uses 9 different rotations based on party comp? How many does his paladin have?
Xeno "uses 9 different rotations" in the sense that Dark Knight "has 6 different GCD combos" if you start counting Power Slash, DA Power Slash, Souleater, DA-Syphon Souleater, DA-Souleater Souleater, and DA-Syphon DA-Souleater Souleater as separate combos. It's absolute nonsense, exaggerating every single trivially distinct permutation of "Try to get 3-4 Fell Cleaves into every Trick Attack" into some entirely new, esoteric technique that you have to learn. It's his whole schtick at this point: Just spewing a bunch of vague garbage that makes it sound like his favourite class requires a PhD to optimize while ignoring that every single class in the game has a comparable amount of nuance at the high end.

Optimizing burst-oriented classes is always easier than the classes that are "always-on". It's the same difference as being able to do your class's opener, versus being a top-tier, orange-parse FFLogs superstar. How many people can do a perfect opener? Just about everybody who actually wants to give it a try. How many people can actually play their class perfectly from start to finish? Not many.

The difference, when you're not splitting hairs about being at the very top of the skill curve and accept that you're going to lose some potency, is that on a burst class, you have to pay close attention to what you're doing for the duration of your burst, and then you get to basically relax and 1-2-3 until your next burst, because you don't have much to do in between and even if you lose uptime or play inefficiently you're losing a comparatively small amount of your damage. On a 'sustain' class, every single second of lost uptime hurts equally, and there's no point at which you can just 'relax' and chill for a couple GCDs without losing basically just as much damage as you would if you took a snooze during a burst window.