BLM: A mini-guide for effective DPS

[Prismo]

My suggestion for using Thunder only applies when you hardcast it, it should be understood that T3 should be used for thundercloud procs. Guess i'll edit the post a bit..

It is my understanding, and what Snow was pointing out, that the level of the Thunder that procs the Thundercloud directly effects said Thunderclouds potency. That and Thunder III's longer duration (thus more opportunity to proc cloud) are seemingly the arguments for Thunder III rather than II.

[Rbstr]

An instant cast Fire 3 has a 2.5 sec recast, so you're simply replacing a fire 1 cast with a fire 3, from the perspective of averaged DPS. The only difference is the fire 3 is cast at the beginning, rather than the end of the 2.5s cycle. You still do two spells in 5s.

My suggestion for using Thunder only applies when you hardcast it, it should be understood that T3 should be used for thundercloud procs. Guess i'll edit the post a bit..

I don't think you understand the tool tip. Assuming it's not wrong for some reason: A proc generated by a thunder 1 cast will have 240 potency, regardless if you cast t1,2or3 for the proc.

[Elemia]

It is my understanding, and what Snow was pointing out, that the level of the Thunder that procs the Thundercloud directly effects said Thunderclouds potency. That and Thunder III's longer duration (thus more opportunity to proc cloud) are seemingly the arguments for Thunder III rather than II.

Having spent some time on a Lvl 50 training dummy, I noticed no difference between a thunder 3 thundercloud proc'd from a thunder 1 and one from a thunder 3

[Hystify]

It is my understanding, and what Snow was pointing out, that the level of the Thunder that procs the Thundercloud directly effects said Thunderclouds potency. That and Thunder III's longer duration (thus more opportunity to proc cloud) are seemingly the arguments for Thunder III rather than II.

Maybe I should clarify this. The different tiers of thunder do not affect the thundercloud proc in any way. The only difference is, as you've said, Thunder II has 1 more tick, and Thunder III has 2 more ticks.

That aside, the way thundercloud procs works is, when you get a thundercloud proc, you can either consume the proc for an instant Thunder, Thunder II or Thunder III.
If you use a Thunder to consume the proc, your Thunder instantly does 240 potency of damage + applies a 18 second DoT on the target.
If you use a Thunder II to consume the proc, your Thunder II instantly does 295 potency of damage + applies a 21 second DoT on the target.
If you use a Thunder III to consume the proc, your Thunder III instantly does 340 potency of damage + applies a 24 second DoT on the target.

That's why thundercloud procs should only be used for Thunder IIIs.

The argument here is not really about what tier of Thunder to use for thundercloud procs, but rather which tier of thunder to hardcast during the regen phase.

For me, my theory is that Thunder has a shorter cast time and reduces the chances of clipping the DoT. The shorter cast time, which over the course of a fight, lowers the time you spend in regen phase and increases your uptime in the burst phase (which is the primary source of a BLM's total damage). Also, if you're thinking that by using Thunder, the DoT might drop off before you return back into UI3 to refresh it, its actually not an issue. If you're spending so much more time in AF3 (probably due to lucky streak of Firestarter procs), then it actually outweighs the downtime of Thunder, as a Fire in AF3 already does more damage than a whole cast of Thunder or even Thunder III that ticked for its full duration. This is due to fire spells doing extra 150% damage from 3 stacks of AF. (mentioned this in an earlier post)

However, some other people prefer to use Thunder II or III, for a myriad of reasons. There's nothing wrong with that, and you still will be able to do decent DPS, as long as the main idea of utilising procs and using F3/B3 to switch between AF3 and UI3 is there. I've seen some other lvl 50 BLMs still using Transpose to switch between states (true story), and that's when you'll be able to see a big difference in DPS as compared to other BLMs playing the optimal way.

[Hystify]

I don't think you understand the tool tip. Assuming it's not wrong for some reason: A proc generated by a thunder 1 cast will have 240 potency, regardless if you cast t1,2or3 for the proc.

I think you need to understand the fact that tooltips can be inaccurate, but log parsers and numbers from in-game event logs do not lie.

Before raising an argument from tooltips derived from a website, have you done any testing in-game or read the tooltips?

I just explained how thundercloud works in the above post. For reference's sake, I'll copy my post from the other BLM thread.

The tooltips for the individual Thunder spells are inaccurate. Or rather, you would want to focus on the tooltip for thundercloud:

Grants a 5% chance that after each damage over time tick inflicted by any Thunder spell, the next Thunder, Thunder II, or Thunder III will add its full damage over time amount to its initial damage, have no cast time, and cost no MP.

If you test it in-game, you would find that it actually holds true.

When you get a thundercloud proc, if you mouseover the tooltips, you would see that the first line of the tooltip changes to Deals lightning damage with a potency of 240/295/340, respectively for T1, T2 and T3.

Further testing on dummies also shows that a Thunder III thundercloud proc does more damage than a Thunder thundercloud proc. In my case, Thunder III does around ~750 dmg, whereas Thunder only does ~500 dmg.

If you're still doubtful, feel free to test it out in game yourself.

[Elvine]

Need an opinion from anyone. Firestarter proc. Do you use it everytime it's up? Not saying to cancel your current fire 1 cast to do it(Thanks SE for having the proc on hit instead of on cast) but instead of the next cast being fire 1 would you cast fire 3 instead? I was recently called a noob and that I'm losing dps because when I get my proc instead of using fire 1 on the next cast I'll cast fire 3. I was told that's "wasting dps because I'm standing there" afterwards.

I believe using it right away for the extra burst would even out that split second that your're "standing around."

I don't think you understand the tool tip. Assuming it's not wrong for some reason: A proc generated by a thunder 1 cast will have 240 potency, regardless if you cast t1,2or3 for the proc.

Please go to a dummy and parse to see that you are incorrect about this.

[Prismo]

/snip

Well I stand corrected on thunder not effecting cloud procs. Knowing that now I can't see any reason to go for 3 over 2.

[rzr22]

As a newbie BLM reading this post, I'm curious, what's the optimal rotation to start a fight?

[Cinge]

Very interesting about tool tips being wrong. Will be even more interesting if SE either fixes the tool tip to match what happens in game or vice versa. I would bet the latter, since they most likely didn't design it to use a lower rank hard cast and then the higher rank for procs.

[Syknus]

I hate to de-rail a thread, but can anyone help me with this? (forum limit prevents me from making another thread in a different sub forum)

I currently have a macro to mark "ignore1" and set target to focus, along with a macro to sleep focus target.

I know it can be done, but I am unsure how to change that second macro to check first to see if I have a focus target set (and if so, cast sleep on that target) and if no focus target is set, to cast sleep on current target.

Any help?

tldr: How do you make a macro to:
sleep focus target
if no focus target, sleep current target.