Is Everyone Playing BLM wrong?

[DubiousDisk]

"Side note I am 85 right now"

Immediately everything you're saying is invalid, because you're missing both Enhanced Sharpcast, and Paradox, which are incredibly important to your opener and overall rotation.

Like everyone is saying, please for the love of GOD, cap BLM before you say anything, or better yet, join the Balance Discord, share your rotation, and watch them immediately tell you why you're incorrect in every way.

[Xander_Diabolos]

"Side note I am 85 right now"

Immediately everything you're saying is invalid, because you're missing both Enhanced Sharpcast, and Paradox, which are incredibly important to your opener and overall rotation.

Like everyone is saying, please for the love of GOD, cap BLM before you say anything, or better yet, join the Balance Discord, share your rotation, and watch them immediately tell you why you're incorrect in every way.

Enhanced Sharpcast gives ability to proc Thundercloud an additional time.
Paradox I listed predicted changes to rotation.
People don't have to be 90 to make a good point. Lots of things I'm talking about I have been doing since Heavensward release. Recent changes just brought me to the forums.

Do you have the discord link?

[Xander_Diabolos]

Enhanced Sharpcast gives ability to proc Thundercloud an additional time.
Paradox I listed predicted changes to rotation.
People don't have to be 90 to make a good point. Lots of things I'm talking about I have been doing since Heavensward release. Recent changes just brought me to the forums.

Do you have the discord link?

So... funny thing happened... I joined Discord and found this...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...h.n62znhrbg8uc

Under "Intermediate" Under "Double Paradox" includes not only using "Transpose" to get MP back, but also using it to chance proc for Firestarter.
"Standard + 3xF4 Double Transpose F3P [N76]" Is more what I was looking at. In fact the document outlines everything I have been saying with additional ideas.
Transpose, Sharpcast, Paradox is a good addition to guarantee a Firestarter proc... but will have to do some math to verify which way I like better.

I do find it funny though it goes from "watch them immediately tell you why you're incorrect in every way" and "everything you're saying is invalid" to "Intermediate Non-Standard BLM Guide".

[Ferrinus]

So... funny thing happened... I joined Discord and found this...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...h.n62znhrbg8uc

Under "Intermediate" Under "Double Paradox" includes not only using "Transpose" to get MP back, but also using it to chance proc for Firestarter.
"Standard + 3xF4 Double Transpose F3P [N76]" Is more what I was looking at. In fact the document outlines everything I have been saying with additional ideas.
Transpose, Sharpcast, Paradox is a good addition to guarantee a Firestarter proc... but will have to do some math to verify which way I like better.

I do find it funny though it goes from "watch them immediately tell you why you're incorrect in every way" and "everything you're saying is invalid" to "Intermediate Non-Standard BLM Guide".

Replacing Blizzard III with Transpose is a sometimes food. In 6.0 it gave you a very marginal bonus in exchange for being extremely MP tick sensitive, restricting your movement even more than normal, and requiring you to have several instant cast procs lined up in order to make sure you didn't clip any GCDs. (Doing hardcast Despair into Transpose into umbral Paradox, for instance, slows you down by the ~0.7s of Transpose's animation). As of 6.08, in which Fire IV, Fire III, and Blizzard III have all been buffed, using Transpose instead of Blizzard III to enter Umbral Ice is less of a marginal gain, and might not be one at all.

Like I said, the really worrying thing about your gameplay is that you're apparently hardcasting Fire III in the middle of your astral cycle. That's an extremely bad idea, even if you're defraying its cost with your last umbral heart.

[MyakotApelsia]

So... funny thing happened... I joined Discord and found this...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...h.n62znhrbg8uc

Under "Intermediate" Under "Double Paradox" includes not only using "Transpose" to get MP back, but also using it to chance proc for Firestarter.
"Standard + 3xF4 Double Transpose F3P [N76]" Is more what I was looking at. In fact the document outlines everything I have been saying with additional ideas.
Transpose, Sharpcast, Paradox is a good addition to guarantee a Firestarter proc... but will have to do some math to verify which way I like better.

I do find it funny though it goes from "watch them immediately tell you why you're incorrect in every way" and "everything you're saying is invalid" to "Intermediate Non-Standard BLM Guide".

Im not pro at blm at all, however:

The purpose of using transpose lines is to try to cut weaker spells out of rotation (Read: Ice spells). However, what you propose, especially when not taking into account existence of paradox, can be summed up with "I like this spell animation".
Fire 3 is NOT a spell you spam. Its a spell that you use to either shift to fire, when you are doing normal lines, or to be sharped in fire to jump to AF3 without losing potency in ice phase.

Hell, look at any guide for lvl 80, there is no paradox in those, and there are NO rotations that involve overusing fire 3, because its not the ability that fills that purpose, F4 is, with F1 refresh.

Its like saying "Oh you know, i spam ice spells because numbers are same but it doesn't use mana", without taking in account other factors.

Also id imagine people that are on balance have pretty good math skills and test their stuff before releasing them into the wild.

Here's pretty good blm optimisation overview, that explains transpose lines pretty nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oitfdOPiqpw
---
Funny how title reads "people are playing blm wrong", even tho its base (or standard i guess) rotation is probably what developers had intended for job. And what it was for 2 expansions already. That is to say, its good to have nice skill ceiling like this.

[FurstBlumier]

Alright I'll take the bait:

To give an idea why the whole appraoch is wrong, consider spamming Fire III vs Fire I. According to you spamming Fire III is better because 260 > 180 before any modifiers. Clearly you can see the problem now.

[Xander_Diabolos]

Alright I'll take the bait:

To give an idea why the whole appraoch is wrong, consider spamming Fire III vs Fire I. According to you spamming Fire III is better because 260 > 180 before any modifiers. Clearly you can see the problem now.

Pre-60 or when level capped I did/do spam Fire to get Firestarter Procs. You can't really spam Fire III (cast 2 times with Astral Fire boost due to 4k mp cost)

Fire III, Fire III, Fire III
vs
Fire III, Fire, Fire, Fire III, Fire, Fire, Fire

The biggest issue with casting Fire III 3 times would be how short the rotation is... you wouldn't have anything to do in between waiting for MP to come back other than cast Thunder which you cast 10 seconds ago. Also that wasn't counting how many free Fire III's you would get with Firestarter Procs. So yeah Pre-60 spamming Fire after the first Fire III is better than "spamming" Fire III... no doubts 100%.

I am using Fire III to extend the duration of Astral Fire to get an additional Fire IV and dropping Blizzard III in exchange for a spot to cast Xenoglossy. So I feel it is fundamentally different.

If you are talking Spell Speed
I could see an argument for taking 25% longer to cast Fire III that does 17% less damage (Compared to Fire IV), but I am also casting a Fire III instead of a Blizzard III while the Fire III has the 80% boost... and the extra Astral Fire time gives me enough time to cast another Fire IV.

If you are talking MP usage...
I am using more MP, but staying in Astral Fire for longer to cast more spells... not less. And doing Despair with more MP left is wasting that MP.

Fire III, Fire IV, Fire IV, Fire III, Fire IV, Fire IV, Fire IV, Despair
Free, +800, +800, +2000, +1600, +1600, +1600, All
Total 800, 1600, 3600, 5200, 6800, 8400, (1600 left)

What I am hoping for is something more like this:
"Thunder III's DOT is increased by spell speed (up to 15.4%) so you want to stack spell speed anyway and at 2651 spell speed and level 90 Fire IV's casting time is 2.36 at max spell speed. With 15 seconds of Astral Fire.. 15/2.36= 6.35 and you will always have time to cast 5-6 Fire IV no matter what. If you cast 6 Fire IV (2400 MP for 1-3 and 4800 MP for 4-6) then use 2800 MP on Despair (wasting 1800 mp essentially), but it is worth it for 6 Fire IV followed by a Despair. Despair's casting time is 3.0 seconds so you want to Triplecast on last "Fire IV, Fire IV, Despair" to make sure it gets off without issue."
https://www.akhmorning.com/allagan-s...eed-stat-tiers

At that point the only way I could argue would be to look up how much spell speed is possible and how much crit damage you would lose by prioritizing spell speed.
Thank you for giving an example, but could you clarify a bit more?

[coffeecutie]

low effort bait didnt even level ur job to 90(takes a handful of dungeon runs to do)

[Ferrinus]

Fire deals 180 potency over a 2.5s cast, which is 72 per second. However, it can proc Firestarter 40% of the time, which, even when simply thrown in Astral rather than used to swap, is 260 over 2.5s. If you do a weighted average you see that Fire has an actual potency per second of 78.4.

Fire III deals 260 potency over a 3.5s cast, which is 74.3 per second.

This isn't even getting into the problem of Fire III consuming over twice the MP of Fire. If you're going to refresh Astral, you should always do it with Fire, not Fire III. There are also some issues with never using Blizzard III but they're less egregious than this mistake.

[Cyanamists]

Alright fuck it I'm bored enough at work to bite.

Let's just assume(like you are)that no buffs are in play minus passive buffs from BLM itself and include in:
Astral fire: halves ice spells cast time at 3 stacks
Umbral ice: halves fire spells cast time at 3 stacks
First and foremost, you can get 6 Fire IVs in the standard rotation and the despair, you're assuming that people despair at 6k mana(800+800+800+1600 for the four Fire IVs + the rest for despair) which is just flat out wrong.

Alright second cast times. Okay so standard rotation vs OP: the post assumes we're coming in from a blizzard 4 and not standstill with a 2.5gcd across the board.

Fire3
Standard: 1.75s cast
OP: 3.5s cast(because OP never gets 3 umbral ice stacks with transpose)

Fire IV x2 for both: same values(5s)

Astral fire refresh
Standard: N/A triplecast + Fire IV(2.5s recast)
OP: 3.5(Fire 3)

Fire + despair
Standard: Fire IV + despair(2gcds = 5s)
OP: Fire IV x3, despair (4 gcds= 10s)

Blizzard
Standard: Blizzard 3 + Blizzard 4(1.75s+2.5s=4.25s)
OP: Transpose + 2x Blizzard 4s or paradox/xenoglossy (5s total)

Thunder:same values(2.5s)

Total time spent before repeat
Standard: 21 seconds
OP: 29.5 seconds

For every 3 OP rotations, we have 4 standards

Take P1s as the golden dummy fight since theres absolutely 0 downtime at hmm I think 8:30 is pretty generous for kill time, that's 510s. Standard as listed would be 24.28 repeats, OP would have 17.28, just toss out the decimals and go with 24 standard vs 17 OP.

Now lets put in OPs calculated potencies and multiply by the number of repeats.

Standard: 5732 x 24 = 137,568
OP: 7410 x 17 = 125,970

Look at that, OP scuffed standard rotation even loses out versus the rotation they posted. OP can't even compare both because the proposed standard has 8.5 seconds left, that's 3 full gcds the OP is just willfully cutting out.

Please go back to the drawing board and come back when you have something that works, otherwise learn the standard opener, your level 90 parties will thank you later.