FF 5.X Alternative Raid Buff Alignment and Openers

[Oxdarock]

Because you never, under any circumstances, delay your buffs in your opening burst. There is no inherent reason to sit on damage for the first 15 seconds of the fight, and there has never been a scenario where players hold their bursts for 15 seconds. The sooner you get bursts out, the sooner your burst will come up to be used again. Buff alignment gets manipulated during a fight—be it in the middle or the end—not at the beginning.

I'm not sure what's up with this absolute mindset that there's no reason to ever delay raid buffs, especially when you can ask the question, "What reason is there to use raid buffs early?" to which the answer would be in order to get an extra cast of an ability in overall, due to kill times and/or fight mechanics. Then you say that it's find to hold all buffs at the end, which seems to go against that. In fact, it literally seems to be the same as what I'm proposing here with lining buffs up in the beginnings. What about fights like E2S, which has no downtime? In a speed run where you have a general idea of the kill time, sure, maybe using all buffs early makes sense and get you an extra cast. But when the amount of time most buffs are held is 3 GCDs, how often is that gonna happen?

You are still incorrect with DNC—again not counting for the fact that you’ve delayed Flourish in both of your proposed openers by a significant amount of seconds, thereby wasting your Technical Finish burst window on unnecessary, random proc chances because you want to Cascade > Fountain immediately after your opening Standard Finish as opposed to setting up Technical Finish immediately (which, in and of itself, reduces any sort of delays on your major damage dealing skills during your only burst window because you won’t have random Reverse Cascade/Fountainfall procs that you don’t want to overwrite). The optimal opener includes all Flourished procs, all Saber Dance procs, and the Standard Finish within the TF time frame without pushing any of them outside of the buff window in the opener. Your openers, by comparison will likely push your Flourished procs out of the burst window, meaning lost damage because they will not be buffed by Technical Finish’s +5% straight damage. I’ve already explained this to you—you do understand the concept of losing damage, yes? By losing damage, that makes your proposed openers subpar. An optimal opener wouldn’t result in unnecessary losses of damage, or of important skills falling outside of your major burst window.

I'm sorry, but it's still not sinking in. Everything within the Tech Finish window is no less than 300 potency for every move, yet you're insistent that this is a definite loss? How? Aside from the first Fountain, everything else in the TF window is a Flourish proc. So long as the two 350 GCDs make it within TF, you're just moving two 300 potency GCDs down the rotation. You don't lose any potency. And if even the 350 potency GCDs get pushed out, that's most likely because you get a lot of SD procs, which take priority with TF over Flourish procs and is actually a good thing. Some I'm at a complete loss when you say that not using all the procs gained by Flourish within TF due to random procs of Cascade -> Fountain and or SD procs is an absolute loss.