Top DPS Openers by class for FFXIV

[Trufflepig]

Thanks again man. I wouldn't have expected 30 potency to be that big of a deal, though I can see it adding up. I've gotten into the habit of just alternating Eye and Path to make the rest of the group's life easier (Less aggro generation and a hand to the healers for AoE. Figured it would let the Sch DPS for longer by taking the edge off of the WHM) but I can see how that is a bad habit to fall into.

To be honest I didn't think that it would be *that* tight considering we'll be heading into the content with a raid item level of rough 203-205 instead of 185ish. Really that bad in there eh?

[Neko]

Yeah it's awful. Even now when you watch Xeno or other groups with it on farm for months, it's pretty common to witness several wipes before a clear. 1% of the playerbase has cleared A3s and a fraction of that has beaten A4s. Here is a recent parse of ours. It's a horribly designed fight, I'm doing 900ish tank dps and the thing still dies a few attacks shy of enrage. It's an 11 minute nonstop barrage of one shot mechanics and everyone has to know how to move, when and exactly where or they will murder the raid... except you can't trust the screen because of the inherent lag. So you have to memorize all the reaction & movement of everyone else, go to your spot and not derp your rotation anywhere or we all die.

When you finally get all the mechanics down the real killer is finger pointing because you're 15% short when enrage hits. So then it's combing over and over and over and optimizing, painfully scraping dps out of holes you didn't know you had. 10 dps here, 5 there (I too used storms' path liberally, then had to progressively trim it off). To put it in perspective we never even encountered an enrage on any other boss T1-T13, hell we usually skipped phases accidentally while learning. It's such a bizarre massive jump from A2s to A3s in dps reqs, it's not a gradient it's a massive cliff made out of the dried up tears of thousands of shattered statics. So many just hit the point where they can't improve, brickwall headsmash it for weeks then turn on each other or burnout quit.

Then you get to do it all over again in A4s, which has an even higher dps requirement... but luckily less movement. I think 4 is not more difficult but after 3 it's just too big a mouthful and time commitment for most of us, so the clear rate is microscopic.

Yoshi has addressed this because the raiding community collapsed on the smaller servers as people migrated to the few bigger ones, yet the clear rate is still faaaar below expected. It's not like ffxiv is full of potato-brains either, a lot of of people have old heroic wow (now mythic) raid clear exp.

tl;dr 30 potency difference is peas and carrots til A3s, then you have to channel your inner tax collector

[ecastle2]

Here is a recent parse of ours.

That one is actually a decently fast kill the fight has a 13 minute enrage so we came in under by a minute and 20 seconds. We did like 6600 DPS on that kill when you really only need 6100 group DPS but yeah still stupid high. We were struggling even in 203+ gear for a while. A4S is just as bad you need like 6700 DPS over I think 15 minutes I forget when enrage is. Needless to say they are fights you probably aren't overgearing for a while.

[Trufflepig]

That is nuts. Can't wait to check the place out. I haven't really been into a fight that pushes a really hard DPS check since Vaelstrahz back in Black Wing Lair.

Thanks for all of the inputs. Now that I'm back from my short visit to Diablo III, I've gotten them all plugged into the first page.

Except for Nemu's link to the Ninja page. I haven't gone and read that yet since I don't play one. I'll get to it soon.

[Eilri]

This is the dragoon rotation I use...I don't know if it's the best but it works well and appears to be better lined up than the one you posted!

http://i.imgur.com/p0CQEfA.png

[Athoen]

This is the dragoon rotation I use...I don't know if it's the best but it works well and appears to be better lined up than the one you posted!

http://i.imgur.com/p0CQEfA.png

Look at the "With Potion" rotation. It is identical except the person in your link is switching Blood for Blood with Internal Release. IR should be second because it is a 15s buff whereas B4B is 20s. Popping IR first will result in having one or two GCD and two OGCD attacks not being buffed by both B4B and IR at the same time near the end of the opener when you're hitting Thrusts and Dragonfire, Spineshatter, and depending on SS your Geirskogul.

[Trufflepig]

Nice! I was actually planning to go looking on reddit later to find that same image. I've seen it and similar before and think they're really useful for quick references. I'd never have noticed the B4B vs Internal Release disparity either, but that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to find & address in this post. Such a small swap to the common opener, but definitely squeezes out some extra juice.

At the moment I have a pretty big blind spot when it comes to all of the melee DPS classes. The only one I have at cap is Warrior and every time I go back to work on Dragoon, Monk, or Ninja I end up hating the DPS queues and missing Fell Cleave.

[Ayuna]

I noticed there is none for MCH. Seing as nobody ever publishes anything about how to MCH, I thought I would link my opener. Many hours have been spent working out, tweaking and testing this wildfire opener both by myself and talking with some other good MCH players (Yes, there are a few of us!) If anybody ever wants help getting to learn MCH and wants some help with it, hit me up in-game (Ayuna Arulat) I'm always willing to teach

MY MCH OPENER: http://ffxivrotations.com/3zj
(Also pretty much what you do whenever wildfire comes back off cool-down, give or take a few buffs that may or may not be up at that time.)