Melee DPS

[Seabhacgra]

I see where you are coming from.. I have a mix of Edengate, Augmented Faceted and my main weapon is now Augmented Deepshadow and I have NO skillspeed materia on anything and still when I pop shifu I push down to about 2.07.. guess that will come up with more deepshadow gear. Sorry for this turning into a Samurai chat but I'm trying to maximize it now and I'm still baffled on how to make my AOE rotation smoother. If shifu and Jinpu drop off due to a slow tank puller I end up spending the first 8-12 seconds of a trash mob renewing those buffs and by then sometimes the pack is half health.. any suggestions?

[Eliadil]

I see where you are coming from.. I have a mix of Edengate, Augmented Faceted and my main weapon is now Augmented Deepshadow and I have NO skillspeed materia on anything and still when I pop shifu I push down to about 2.07.. guess that will come up with more deepshadow gear. Sorry for this turning into a Samurai chat but I'm trying to maximize it now and I'm still baffled on how to make my AOE rotation smoother. If shifu and Jinpu drop off due to a slow tank puller I end up spending the first 8-12 seconds of a trash mob renewing those buffs and by then sometimes the pack is half health.. any suggestions?

For AoE rotation I mainly just apply Shifu then Jinpu, it gives me two sen, that I spend on Tenka followed by the Kaeshi variant, as well as a Guren thrown into the mix and they get a bit under half health at this moment. When you aoe as a sam, things tends to die fast because... Well you hit hard. Don't be surprised by that, it happens a lot ;p Even just a Tenka Goken can deal some heavy damage, I often deal roughly 40k on targets with it, and you get it up really often.
And right now the dungeons are a bit easy for the current ilvl, with the next one it will probably require a bit more time to get through trash packs, because it will actually require higher gear. Things die fast now, but it will change soon with the release of new gear/content.

If the tank pulls each small pack individually tho I often don't bother with the AoE rotation, as 3 targets are often dead quicker by using your single target rotation. A usefull tip that I cannot recommend enough is to be sure you're always starting by applying the Shifu buff first. Speed is more important than damage, and by having Shifu up first you'll get to Jinpu faster

As for the 2.07 GCD... Yeah, sam gear has a lot of trash SkS stat, but it does disappear when getting to higher ilvl, although you need a lot of edengrace gear to completely get rid of it, so unless you do a bit of savage you won't be able to obtain the desired SkS cap I think. Don't fret too much over it tho, invest in DH and Crit like I said, you should be good to go anyway for dungeons/alliance raid/EX primals where BiS doesn't matter as much.

[SpeckledBurd]

As for AoE, they are all good choices. Dragoon is the strongest but even Ninja can be a straight monster once you learn all the ins and outs. If you're wanting to get your feet wet without feeling too overwhelmed, I'd go with Dragoon or Samurai first.

Based on the current Data from Expert Dungeons at least, Samurai actually has the highest AOE potential of the Melee followed by Dragoon, then Ninja, and Monk as the lowest, but the actual performance difference between all of them in AOE is so small as to be negligible.

From what I've gathered playing roughly the four jobs :

Monk is the easy to learn/easy to master melee, limited in its gameplay, that kinda rotates and repeats itself, but it does decent damage and has some nice utility to bring to the party.
Brotherhood is really good to boost physical damage, and boost your own damage as well by giving you a lot of chakra proc, and Mantra is a 20% group healing buff. The job works fine but the over-reliance on positionnals can make it clunky sometimes, and downtime is your worst enemy as you can take forever to build back your ressources if you're not carefull.

I wouldn't exactly describe Monk as easy to learn/master. It's defined by Non-linear combos rather than the 1>2>3 combo steps the other jobs use, so to some it can be a bit harder to wrap their heads around compared to the other melee when it comes to just doing the basic GCD rotation. Doubly so when combined with how positional heavy it is. For some people it can actually come off as intuitive because of that compared to a more straightforward rotation. Another thin to note is most of the jobs post level 54 toolkit is just downtime loss mitigation skills that don't work well so once you've got Elixir Field the job pretty much stops evolving. Also side note, Mantra was also recently nerfed to 10% healing, so while it's a nice additional benefit to the job it really isn't anything game changing.

[purgatori]

If the tank pulls each small pack individually tho I often don't bother with the AoE rotation, as 3 targets are often dead quicker by using your single target rotation. A usefull tip that I cannot recommend enough is to be sure you're always starting by applying the Shifu buff first. Speed is more important than damage, and by having Shifu up first you'll get to Jinpu faster

Does this apply to all (melee) DPS, or just SAM? I have always adhered to the < 2 = single target, > 2 = AoE rule, but I have lately noticed that my DRG seems to eat through 3 enemies quicker with her single-target rotation (in fact, in some dungeons I'm not even able to get through he full rotation before they're all dead) than her AoE.

[Eliadil]

Does this apply to all (melee) DPS, or just SAM? I have always adhered to the < 2 = single target, > 2 = AoE rule, but I have lately noticed that my DRG seems to eat through 3 enemies quicker with her single-target rotation (in fact, in some dungeons I'm not even able to get through he full rotation before they're all dead) than her AoE.

This depends on the job I think, not every melee has the same power when it comes to AoE rotation. I remember back in Stormblood you basically never used AoE as a Sam because of the falloff damage as well as the heavy PT cost. Now, using AoE on 3/more targets is good, although if you're fully geared, I think it's generally quicker to use the mono rotation on three enemies.

iirc Monk needs a lot more mobs in order to deal optimal damage when using AoE. I remember on the Balance Discord there's often optimization discussions for AoE tools. I recall that on Eden 1 Savage as a Sam there's a moment where it's better to use a Tenka Goken rather than using Midare on a meteor.

It's all very situationnal and you just have to know how much damage your single target rotation deals, as well as your AoE one. For Dragoon I think it depends if you're in BotD or LotD. LotD seems to be the moment where you'll AoE on three targets, BotD seems better to use single target. Although if your autocrit is available it might change calculations, getting an autocrit on your last AoE spell (coerthas thing... Can't remember the name) can be really powerfull.

I think tho that it's pretty similar, you don't use your AoE rotation when there's only two mobs, three depends on your class, more is always AoE.

[Seabhacgra]

Does this apply to all (melee) DPS, or just SAM? I have always adhered to the < 2 = single target, > 2 = AoE rule, but I have lately noticed that my DRG seems to eat through 3 enemies quicker with her single-target rotation (in fact, in some dungeons I'm not even able to get through he full rotation before they're all dead) than her AoE.

Like several have said, I think this depends on the job. I know when I'm playing my Dancer I can AOE very fast, very easy,.. no need for buildup much. On my Samurai I'm noticing single target is better on 2-3 mobs where as anything 4+ I definitely want to AOE.. Primarily because Samurai has a slower build up to AOE than other classes... so if I try to AOE on 3 mobs.. they are often dead before I get to my AOE rotation. Generally speaking in most cases 2 mobs is single target, 3+ is AOE, but it's job dependant.

[Seabhacgra]

Based on the current Data from Expert Dungeons at least, Samurai actually has the highest AOE potential of the Melee followed by Dragoon, then Ninja, and Monk as the lowest, but the actual performance difference between all of them in AOE is so small as to be negligible.

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

[Eliadil]

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

Because in expert dungeons now tanks often do the biggest pulls possible, so there's a ton of trashmob to aoe. Definitely worth to AoE there, and even tho the buildup is big, once you've passed it you'll be the one clearing the trash pack in a few GCDs.

Don't forget that we basically have a 540potency AoE every 5 GCD
While the other AoEs may not be as strong as Dragoon's, you technically have more raw damage by this spell alone, and I'm not even counting the Shifu/Jinpu buff, which makes your AoE 13% stronger AND faster

[Yandere-chan]

I see where you are coming from.. I have a mix of Edengate, Augmented Faceted and my main weapon is now Augmented Deepshadow and I have NO skillspeed materia on anything and still when I pop shifu I push down to about 2.07.. guess that will come up with more deepshadow gear. Sorry for this turning into a Samurai chat but I'm trying to maximize it now and I'm still baffled on how to make my AOE rotation smoother. If shifu and Jinpu drop off due to a slow tank puller I end up spending the first 8-12 seconds of a trash mob renewing those buffs and by then sometimes the pack is half health.. any suggestions?

You should always be trying to either be at one of the SKS breakpoints or .01 gcd faster to allow for errors, latency, or mechanic wiggle room. What SKS tier you go for is personal preference, but it's always better to be at a proper tier. 2.07 is a proper tier to be at though so you should be fine. The faster you get, the more optimal it will be to freestyle as needed so long as you have a strong understanding of how Samurai operates. This starts being more relevant at speeds around 2.00 gcd though. At 2.07 you mostly want to stick to rotations, going for 2.06 if you want more wiggle room.

To keep your abilities aligned, assuming you haven't had to make adjustments due to phase shifts or mechanics (I prefer to ad hoc til it falls back into realignment since it's the most natural for me), you can use a Gekko combo into Hagakure for 2.07~2.06 after your first two Midare rotations following the standard opener. For 2.14~2.13, you would do a Yukikaze combo into Hagkure instead. If you are using a non default opener via having sen pre-charged, you'll have to adjust accordingly or opt to trade them into kenki with Hagakure. If I have full sens, meditate stacks, and kenki pre-available, I actually like going into Jinpu first to have all my pre-available ogcds + Midare hit with the extra 13% dmg since the ogcd abilities don't benefit from Shifu and allows you to have a greater number of Ikishotens (and possibly Guren/Sensei), perhaps leading in with Gyoten or Shinten to avoid wasting kenki generated from your initial two gcds (although if you could ever lead in with Seigan, this would be the most ideal).

[Yandere-chan]

That's interesting,.. considering Samurai is a slower AOE build up than the others due to having to get up Shifu and Jinpu and then roll into the AOE.

This is greatly mitigated by building your buffs on mobs following the tank (sprint helps), as well as building up kenki during the gathering process too. If you have no prep time for whatever reason (maybe the mobbing phase in Copy Factoy?), I actually like to use Meikyo Shisui to put Shifu and Jinpu on. Normally this isn't a good idea, but if the mobs are going to die fast, which they should, you have no time to build it normally, so just buffing up right away is better since you'll get way more out of your powerful ocgd abilities like Guren, Kaeshi: Goken, and Kyuten. You never want to be manually putting on Shifu and Jinpu though after a large number of mobs are already together. You lose at minimum 4 aoes, and that's with skipping the Sen finishers, with at 8+ mobs, is a huge potency loss.