SAM rotation | DPS

[Nominous]

Immediately, if you use Meikyo how you are in the video, you'll drop buffs every time (outside of the opener). I'll hit you off with notes and maybe I can get you a video showing what I do, but I'll drop a link to a thread for you that you might enjoy as well. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...S-Guide/page23


- First glaring mistake at about a minute in. You have Hagakure available, but use Kaiten-Midare instead. Use Hagakure here, and keep a close eye on your Hagakure cooldown. Sometimes it won't be available right as you hit 3-Sen, but it will be available for use in the middle of an upcoming combo. For example- Yukikaze (in this example, charges your 3rd/final Sen)>Hakaze>Shifu (Hagakure)>Kasha. That gives you about a 2 GCD (depending on your GCD, 4-5 second) buffer to make sure you aren't just sitting on Hagakure. --As a side note, in the average 10 minute fight, you could lose potential overall casts of Hagakure by letting it sit on cooldown for 5 seconds every time it comes up. Lost casts means instead of like, (arbitrary number) 5 Hagakure's total, you may have only managed 4 Hagakure's total because you let it sit too long, too often. That's just lost DPS on the table.

- You lost your buffs due to using Meikyo Shisui in the middle of a combo, before you applied the buff from said combo. Weave Meikyo as your oGCD after Gekko, Kasha, or Yukikaze. The only other time you use it differently is for AoE, generally speaking.

- Minimal, but important mistake: Don't double-weave oGCD if you don't have to. The more you do that, the more you eat into your GCD. For some Jobs, BRD for example, you kind of have to because things sit on GCD for unacceptable amounts of time if you don't (lost overall casts). Or on other Jobs because of buff stacking for burst/lining up with other raid buffs. Basically, eating into the GCD is a cost, but the benefit is greater than the cost. SAM doesn't really benefit or have a significant reason to do it other than in their opener, or mid-fight where you basically have another opener available. A good example of when you do this is 2:56 into the video. Hagakure>Shinten>Hakaze. You can see how long it takes you to get Hakaze to register, and you want to avoid that problem like the plague.

- General Kenki management. There's nothing inherently wrong with waiting to use Shinten, as there's no real cooldown/potential lost uses outside of overflowing your gauge or missing buffed shintens (trick/pot/balance, etc). However, managing your Kenki is extremely easy and will lead you to less worry about overflow from things like Hagakure. You can use a Shinten any time you hit 35 Kenki without worry. Your next combo will always leave you with enough Kenki to use Kaiten for whatever purpose.