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.

[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).