DRAGON KICK ROTATION BABYYYYYYYYYYY RIP to a legendary rotation. Also, shout out to SCH, whom, from the unlock of Art Of War, up to LVL 54, Art of War spam with autos is a higher damage output than casting Ruin!
I heard about it at the start of ew and then tried it out in the current tier (completely missing why it went extinct). It kinda sucked for the most part but I did parse blue in crafted gear once so if you don't want to learn monk properly you can pull it off for the meme while only griefing a little ^^ Might go back into pf once Ive got my bis on sam and see if you can push it to purple at least
I feel like an overlying misconception in general for ffxiv is unlike a lot of mmos I’ve played, where you’re like actually building your character and your abilities and can customize and stuff, the only real expression in play style in ffxiv is, *what* job you play. Ffxiv doesn’t have alternate abilities or choices or anything, you put on a job stone and it gives you those abilities, there’s generally only one proper way to the job. Obviously that doesn’t mean liek you need to use the balance and play the most optimal rotation just to play the job, but there’s one core gameplay loop for every job and deviating from it just leads you to playing the job wrong. Some people might not like that about the game, but as someone who likes to play optimally, and would end up trying to look up what’s the best skills to pick and yatta yatta. I like that the game just goes, these are your skills, use them all.
Indeed, even if we had had options, the vast majority of players in MMOs tend to fluctuate towards using meta builds anyway, so FFXIV just handing you effectively the meta build, by only offering that, might ultimately be just the same!
It was funny when the paradox mage came up. When it became big, the PLD got his little rework and during the figuring out stage of PLD there was this one possible rotation that involved more hard casting then the paradox BLM rotation. So PLD would have been a more casting caster then a BLM.
I said that on the short, but I'll repeat that here for the new viewers. Dragon Kick rotation also serves perfectly well for people that want to level up Monk, but don't want to ever play Monk in any kind of challenging content. DK rotation severely reduce the mental stack needed to play Monk, and is "close enough" to a normal rotation output that it will serve you well in dungeons and normal raids/trials.
I'm glad to hear that 😅. I also saw the short and learned about DK rotation from that. My main reason for avoiding monk was doing the right moves at the right time. Previously I had altered my rotation to get rid of True Strike and replace it with another Twin Snakes to cut down on the buttons I was pressing and limit myself to fewer positionals. After I learned DK rotation though, it was so much easier to handle. Video had me worried I was just griefing in dungeons this whole time.
@@das-grza it's not even close to 30, maybe 5%. Noticeable yes, but as I said, doing that rotation correctly will put you ahead of almost anyone you encounter in roulettes. And it's a lot more than doing the proper rotation when you don't know how it works.
@@Th3hUnT3R1 he literally gives you potency differences on screen. my bad i generalized 6k and 4k. I'll be accurate with it now, the difference is actually 22.6 percent. which isnt "maybe 5%" Im a monk main and its very noticeable when someone uses a rotation that became way worse when crit scaling changed.
While not an alternate rotation: Speed Summoner. Its entire point is you put on a bunch of spellspeed gear, prioritizing determination and then direct hit in terms of other stats wanted. The goal is to access your big summons faster than a normally geared summoner. If you manage to max out your speed, demi-bahamut and demi-phoenix are only around a 50.40 second cooldown. What this does is cause the summoner to turbo drift, where they even start outpacing their own swiftcast they normally would use for ruby rite or slipstream. The main benefit of getting access to the actual summons faster is is that each summon has a large potency attached to it. Also its a canon aspect of summoner. As the original person who founded summoning in the allagan empire, sought to perform summons faster, eventually uploading their consciousness to a computer because their human body was holding them back. Now the main downside, aside from drifting, is: If you mess up your rotation, you lose a gcd. As aside from slipstream and the two ruby rites, the summoner is mobile. And since your on a tight clock, you feel that loss much more than a normal summoner who messes up their rotation. If you die during a fight? That weakness hurts, not only due to the downtime, but because your stats are reduced and your attacks become far less impactful as a result.
Ice Mage is a great example why you read the tutorials. I remember when i read that i tested the dmg of both sides (which was not as easy as one would like since i had no clue where to find target dummy and monsters were either too weak to see all the numbers to compare them or too strong for fragile body of a bm.
As someone that used to main Black Magd that ice mage rotation that’s hilarious. Completely against what is even remotely what you should be doing, but I can’t fault someone for thinking it’s better to conserve MP. Bless those who play that way.
Probably wouldn't even affect anything below extremes and savage raids anyway, which a majority of the people don't even attempt so I can see why it became a thing.
@@Avalanche272_Actually it was pretty obvious because Flare and Fire 2 have higher natural potency than ice aoe spells and Astral Fire enhancement. Black Mage with proper rotation could shred mobs within few seconds in the big pull while Ice mage could take over a minute to do that; and most Ice mage tend to use single target spells only and Foul won’t be available until 70. More casual the content is, more noticeable the difference in performance is. It just there are so many weird rotations newbie black mage come off like spamming Fire 3 to no end; insisting using lv 20 rotation even at high level dungeons. Ice mage is the most iconic of the bunch.
Another reason for ice mages in certain content is likely because some people expect a more typical Final Fantasy elemental resistance and think "oh, this mob is made of fire/is typically weak to ice in other Final Fantasy games" and run ice thinking it'll do more damage.
There was a meme-y rotation for monk in the back end of stormblood. It was called Tornado Kick rotation. At the time, tornado kick would consume all stacks of greased lightning (a stacking buff which increased skill speed) to perform a fairly high potency attack. Now usually you would never use TK outside of finishers or extended downtime but late in stormblood it was discovered to be a small potency gain to perfectly time your snap punch with a fists of wind double gap closer. (Monk had 3 “fists” fire was usually the only one used for the 5% damage increase. Fist of wind only increased movespeed but it did change how monk’s gap closer worked at the time). Timing a TK and weaving a fist of wind change with a snap punch meant you got immediately back to 2 greased lightning and it was overall a small potency gain.
That was the intended rotation, rather than a meme one. Double TK opener was standard and you'd TK any time you had shoulder tackle available to give you a GL stack under fists of wind, plus you'd always try and get at least one in Riddle of Fire, and Perfect Balance let you use 1-2 TKs during its duration depending how it lined up with other cooldowns.
For RDM, I've optimized rotations for 2 targets in addition to your normal single or AOE rotations: Lv60 and below: Verfire/stone -> Verthunder/aero if you have lingering procs, then spam Verthunder/aero II -> Verthunder/aero Higher levels: Verfire/stone -> Impact if you have lingering procs, then spam Jolt II -> Impact So in these 2 target situations, you can quite literally turn into a Thunder/aero Mage at lower levels and a Netural Mage at higher levels. It's an interesting contrast. Acceleration is always on Scatter/Impact for 2 targets, but always more worth using on a larger group of enemies.
The Bootshine additional damage increase is gained from skills that raise crit hit rate (e.g chain strategy), added in version 6.2, not your gear. Bootshine always deals more damage if your gear has more crit hit rate, both before and after 6.2. Guaranteed DIRECT HIT skills gain additional damage from your gear's direct hit rate.
That is fair, that is a mistake on my part! I've had difficulty testing this myself, but you are right. However, dragon kick rotation wasn't better before the change either, as you said 😊
I'm SO glad I watched this cause I was using Doton on bosses, my reasons for doing so is that I saw other ninjas doing it so I figured it was the correct thing to do and I logic'd that a stationary AoE DoT would be good single target damage since it can be stepped out of. Honestly this would have been avoided if they reworked DoT tooltips, right now they only say the potency per tick and duration with no mention of when ticks happen or what the full potency of the DoT is.
Very true! In fact, the placed AoEs like Doton also fail to mention that they hit once on placement, and *then* dot every 3 seconds. It could make it a lot easier if it was clear how much potency it did! I'm glad bringing it up helped you!
@@CaetsuChaijiChyeah I knew Doton was worse but I didn’t know since they didn’t mention the tick refresh rate. And if you assume it’s 1 sec it’s suddenly way bette.
You sort of touch on it, I think Icemage rotations come from the fact that the other major RPG, World of Warcraft, has a class that looks very very close to BLM, the Mage, and in WoW if you select Mage you have to choose specs between Fire, Ice, or Arcane. So when you flop over to 14 and pick up the Job you feel like is close to your WoW main class, you think in that game's methodology.
There is actually one instance where Doton outdamages Raiton for single target. It is between the levels 86-89 when you have Nozuchi but are missing Raiju. In this specific levels, Doton still does 20 less damage, but you also get 1 trigger of Nozuchi from Phantom Kamitachi which brings it over Raiton by 30p. Once you get to 90 though, this is no longer true, since Raiton gives you access to Raiju which vastly outdamages anything you can do in 1 filler GCD.
I do wish Black Mages could choose which would do more damage, deep down. I personally find the ice cooler, even if I know the rotation and how it's played. I'll go find an animation swap.
POV: You have 30 buttons, the game tells you to play Simon, but you want to have fun and not relive the last two minutes of your life for the next 5 years
Single target doton ninjas pain me the most. Like you said raiton has a higher straight up potency and plays into buffs better and with raiju at 90 the gap between single target doton and raiton increases even further. Another niche thing is that doton is 3 mudra to use which could possible loose you a few gcds and ninki over a course of a fight. Also at 90 because of raiju 2 target doton is worse than raiton as well.
Fun fact, I did clear 12s with dragon rotation via training, the dps los is so unnoticeable that only via analytics they saw that I was "trolling" It's fun and absolutely Randome but you can stack with the party on the rare of the enemy at all times. The only position you have to hit is rare.
Since this channel tends to reach a more casual audience (which is absolutely not an issue, quite the opposite actually) I feel the need to step in and correct you, because misinformation will never help anyone. About the Midare Setsugeka and Bootshine tooltips : while your statement about better gear meaning even more damage than usual on those abilities is true, it's only due to their innate 100% crit component and how the crit stat works and NOT the added text in the tooltips about critical rate increasing the damage. This type of abilities were problematic for quite some time because raid buffs that would increase critical rate (like dragoon's battle litany and scholar's chain stratagem) would do nothing to them. That's why SE added this new component to these skills, that way these abilities actually get something out of every raid buffs in the game. This was also applied to warrior's inner release and inner chaos, which also got the same treatment in regards to direct hit. Trust me, coming from a warrior main who used to raid with a scholar + dragoon team comp, I know what I'm talking about.
This is true 😊 I had a misunderstanding that the adjustment (stated in the tooltips) also considered crit rating from your stats, which is untrue. Indeed, the addition is specifically to make raid buffs more helpful in this case. 😊 Its my mistake that I didn't bother to look deeper into it, I didn't do so because I already knew beforehand that even without the details of this specific nuance, the iceman / dragon kick rotations would still be inferior, as you need an impossibly high amount of crit stat to make up the difference! 😅 Thank you for the correction!
I enjoy that you're pointing out why the proper rotation is how you're supposed to play, but depressing because that this is the only way to play you, I and everyone else must play it.
On the bright side, instead there's "Hey if you wanna play a class like X, you should check out X class" usually. If you like dragon kick monk, you may also enjoy playing bard as intended.
Here's a bit of lore to Iceman Samurai, this atrocity was born right after the Kaiten removal, aside from everyone being extremely angry, the math nerds in The Balance discord in sam_lounge did some test and due to Midare potency getting gutted we could potentially be in SB sam grounds.
It is absolutely crazy that the game doesn't explain what do Astral Ice or Umbral Fire even DO. Yes, you get the stacks and they make the other cost no MP, cool - but nowhere does it say that they also multiply the damage of their element! Thank you for mentioning this, I actually learned something big from these cursed rotations!
I'm glad you learned something from the rotations! ^^ Just to be sure there isn't a misunderstanding, of course, the Umbral Ice effect doesn't boost the damage of Ice magic :D
they DO say that in the tooltips tho. Ofc not numerical values, but it literally says that fire spells do more dmg under astral fire. Even NPC's in the job quest mention it. People just cant read man
@ich3730 the text dump tutorial that appears at level 2 also says so. Part of the problem is that they decided to not include the actual amount of damage bonus at all. Honestly, 40/60/80% sounds like a ridiculously high amount of damage bonus, and would be much easier to accept if the game just said it 😅
@@ich3730 Look, decades of gaming have taught us all that lore effectiveness is one thing and the gameplay mechanics and raw numbers another. Nobody can be faulted for not knowing about the increase if the tooltips themselves don't say that. I don't have BLM leveled to max, it's the one job I'm currently slowly leveling now - and this lack of mechanical clarity is very confusing. I legitimately looked at the Fire and Blizzard spells and was like "ok so they have the same potency, what's the catch". The Aspect Mastery trait tooltip says only that when under its effect, casting the opposite magic will be for free. Nothing about the stopping of MP regen for fire, nothing about increased damage for fire (and the significant increase at that!) - leaving out the main thing about doing damage, really! It would only take an extra sentence for this kind of important detail! Why isn't it there, instead of an Active Help window that pops up at level 2 that you dismiss just as every other help popup? Why does only THM/BLM have it so that a major part of their core mechanic cannot be parsed outside the tooltips like with other jobs? In short, I am glad about a video like this because it actually taught me something that the game only briefly mentioned among the 52 other new character pup ups that are easily dismissed with a press of ESC button.
@@thesunthrone Elemental Gauge The Elemental Gauge indicates whether you are under the effect of Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, and the duration of their effects. Casting Fire spells grants Astral Fire, which increases the power of Fire spells in exchange for their increased MP cost. Casting Ice spells grants Umbral Ice, which decreases the MP cost of Ice spells and greatly increases the speed with which MP is recovered. If maximum stacks are accumulated for either Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, there will be no MP cost for spells of the opposite element. That's copied from the job gauge tutorial, it appears once when you first unlock the gauge, and can be reviewed -with updated info from later level talents- at any time from the skill/spell list It says right there that fire spells are stronger, while ice facilitates MP recovery I do agree that they should show the actual values, and the resulting potency increase should be shown in the fire spells tooltips. But to say that the game never tells you about Astral Fire increasing damage, is just wrong.
Just behind the single target Doton NJNs, no Higanbana SAM and no Thunders BLM are two styles I notice the most in roulettes. Even a good friend of mine was like “SAM has a DOT?!” when I gave her brother some rotation feedback. On a slightly unrelated note, it would be cool if BLMs could reverse the mechanics of their fire and ice spells like SMN/SCH can change their pet appearances. Swap Freeze with Flare and add a new effect for an ice-themed Despair.
You're a highkey genius following up this video after the bad tutorials vid. People not understanding their job because the tutorials are bad, more often than not, is the biggest reason you run into people who stubbornly refuse to play their jobs properly.
Thank you 😁 on the meta thing, it seems some people are also stubbornly choosing to do things differently to be different intentionally 😅 which is quite funny! 😆
One "other" thing to note about Iceman Samurai was that during Asphodelos, just before Kaiten, was killed Shinten had a potency of 270. So during the time Kaiten was dead, and Shinten's potency per kenki had been normalized Iceman was the most usable meme style one could play and while you still didn't do a whole lot under buffs, due to bonus crit scaling on guaranteed crits not being added yet, it allowed for maximum flexibility in your gear since you basically didn't care what you wore and just took the highest iL stuff since you didn't have strict speed requirements for looping. Though you still would end up in situations where you go into a looping rotation anyway because unless you never used Kasha, you would always eventually outpace Hagakure's cooldown and Jinpu will fall off. Also Meikyo did not automatically give you the Shipu and Jinpu buffs till a bit after Endwalker released. So you always had to do a full rotation at some point to maintain buffs. I do remember once upon a time I saw a log of only Iceman Samurai and they still purpled. Where that log is, I can't remember and the source I saw it from is also gone.
Actually, 6.1 both removed kaiten, added guaranteed crit to Midare Setsugekka, and weakened shinten to 250 potency 😊 6.11 buffed Midare Setsugekka to 640 from 600 potency though, which is very significant! Meikyo shisui was also upgraded to grant the buffs with the combo finishers in 6.0. I decided to look these things up to be sure, but I did know this about meikyo shisui because I made a samurai guide before the kaiten removal 😁
A mistake I made when I started is that I used flare in single tatget since it had a high potency. I didn't understand at the time that casttimes are also important. I learned not to do that once I got fire 4 and despair though.
For a long while BLm didn't want to actually 0 out on MP since they didn't get the aspect mastery for 0 cost opposite element casts until shadowbringers; and flare was only used back then on groups. Now with cost free ice/fire swaps from early levels, flare with fire stance boosts (even without the fire 2 casts for enhanced flare) still has a potency near fire 1 and fire 3 and could be used on single target as a finisher before you get despair; it lets you get a feel for the full fire rotation upon learning fire IV until you get Despair, the only issue is flare has a slightly longer cast time over despair and you really need to make the most of sharpcasts to get all your casts in fire stance without losing Astral fire
@@craigfunk3453 I totally forgot about running out of mana! Standing around after transpose and waiting for that first mana tick is certainly not good for your rotation.
@@brucewayne1777 for a general rotation, despair and flare are your final fire spells you use (you can cast them with as little as 800 mp) For flare AoE you caat fire II until you're low on mp, then cast flare for early levels. Once you get umbral hearts and the trait so they reduce flares cost while you have at least 1 heart, you build up 3 hearts, cast fire II 3 times at most (stance shift and spend 2 hearts) then flare twice
Oh I love learning about those absurd rotation and silly stuff in the game. I'd like to point tho, I think you made an error during infinite paradox with the sample sequence on screen at 14:16. You counted amplifier as a GDC but it's an oGCD and should have been placed in between umbral soul and sharpcast so the rotation goes smoothly without clipping. Sorry, I committed myself to BLM and WHM as my duo-mains and couldn't help but point out this when I saw it :D otherwise, hugely great content as always, I will rejoin the cult as soon as possible too (am broke lmao), didn't see google cancelled my subscription >:( this is unacceptable! you deserve more support and love and I've been spreading your teaching being a mentor in game and leading people to your channel for references.
Thank you so much, raziel_louis! Glad to hear from you again! And thank you so much for the support, do make sure to care for yourself first! 🥰 Amplifier is not assumed as a GCD. It is early weaved after umbral soul under the potential assumption that transpose might not have been available in the early weave anyway. However you are absolutely right I could as well had weaved it with sharp cast! 😅 I'm not sure why I didn't! Thank you for highlighting it! 😄
@@CaetsuChaijiCh oh I see, well this is king of hard to put on a rotation sheet. Transpose do like to act funny from time to time with how it align itself, funfact: depending on your latency, you cannot late weave manafont without clipping, this is due to the fact that the mana restoration is late in the animation and might not have taken effect before the gcd is available again. Also, this made me think that, when you're trying to master BLM, weaving a sharpcast (or anything else) right after a fast Fire III or Blizzard III to transition between AF and UI feels similar to a Ninja ending it's Ninjutsu in a rabbit to me and I find that really funny!
@antizombiepasbeaux that is a very good point! It also makes me think of weird latency glitches where you can weave swift or triple cast and then hard cast a spell due to latency causing the buff to not yet be present!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh now that's interesting :3 My BLM instinct immediately though of some ways it could be abused lmao but none are viable and are just adjustments for someone who has such latency
Maybe savage has just warped my mind, but if doing the standard fire rotation compared to spamming ice really did only give you a 5% damage increase, I’d still always be going for it. Like idk maybe it’s just me, but when I’m in savage/ ultimates, I feel like I need to take advantage of every single minor potency increase I can, until the only thing I can improve is just, erm get luckier and crit more lol.
I would do the same personally, but I can probably imagine it would be a lot harder to sell an Ice Mage that really really want to just use Ice, if Fire Magic only beat it by 5%! ^^
I’ve been dropping single target Doton since HW. I assumed that since every other class with a DoT wants to keep it rolling that NIN was the same way. Great video.
Thank you! I'm glad my video could clear it up! It actually used to make sense (although it was awkward) to single target doton, but with endwalker they intentionally made it a dps loss in general 😊
When I was levelling up Samurai, I actually connected the dots for the Iceman Samurai Style, but since I didn't hear anyone talking about it in guides, I figured that it wasn't that good.
I was surprised by how close the Iceman rotation is to the proper rotation in power. It does really feel like the real dealbreaker on it is the guaranteed Critical Hit from Midare Setsugekka, so it could easily be missed!
Ice mage is great for very low-level FATEs, before all those statuses and weird symbols kick in. Most of the time, the mobs will die in x casts (typically 1 or 2) of either element's spell - so why not stay in Ice and just not think about mana? (Hopefully the argument 'but it worked at level 4!' isn't deployed to defend this 'rotation' at level 90.)
That is very specific indeed! On the other hand, if you do a few hunt log targets in the thaumaturge list, you'll be leveled past that point in no time! And in fact if you do that, you might actually level up fast enough at first (I say might!) that you get your mp back before it even runs out at all! 😂 But you are right that if the enemy is dead in two blizzard 1s or fire 1s, then it of course makes zero difference which one you choose! 😅
lol theres only one way a character plays, one way to stack materias in, no real differences in my warrior to someone elses warrior, and rotation is rotation. there is genuinely no variation of any kind unless you just swap jobs, to basically achieve the same exact results with incredibly minor differences.
This is an unfortunate result of having no customization on jobs, that ultimately, there will be a most effective way to play the specific combination presented ^^'
Sadly, that's just how it is in MMOs. There is the optimal way and then the rest, because the games are always about getting the boss HP down to zero - and so all ways of getting there are math problems. The only difference really is how many bells and whistles developers bolt onto their systems and how needlessly complex they make the math for it.
Saying that infinite paradox is only a small loss is wrong ever since they buffed Fire IV potency by 10. You should almost never use it at this point, especially not with umbral souls, which made it completely useless (apart from mobility) even before the buffs to Fire IV. The proper rotation that was used in EX1 (and that parsed 89, which isn't that good for an extreme) didn't use umbral souls at all. It basically boiled down to B3->PD->Transpose->PD->Despair->B3 (and continue from there while upkeeping thunder as extra fillers for movement / mana ticks, and spending F3Ps for extra movement.) PLEASE don't do this in actual content, it's no longer even barely viable with Fire IV buffs.
I think it depends on your level of play. If you're just looking to clear, *Mechanics > DPS*. Infinite paradox BLM looks like it sacrifices DPS in favor of making mechanics easier which I think is fine until enrage is the wall... though I also find that enrage is only a wall if you have 8+ deaths every run. I wonder what kind of parse IP BLM gets anyway. I will admit that making Infinite Paradox your entire rotation and not just a crutch to lean on every now and then will prevent you from improving which puts you in a world of pain if you ever need to improve.
@@fluffyfang4213 Infinite paradox completely destroys damage at this point, and if learning mechanics is your focus, you should just stop DPS if you don't have the resources to move. You should be coming up with a proper rotation plan for your fight while learning the mechanics, instead of using a crutch. Two triple casts and swift cast + xenos + procs are MORE than enough mobility for ANY fight, even if you're not utilizing nonstandard rotation.
That is a fair point. I also do realize that Umbral Soul is basically a nothingburger of an action, so even if you were to use the infinite paradox for movement for some reason, Umbral Soul would moreso be an indicator something went terribly wrong. I did indeed mainly point to it being possibly viable for excessively long movement situations, which are rare anywayy, and would normally assume you had already done everything else you can I would think ^^'
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I just don't want to see new people think that the "rotation" is actually viable and learn that instead of learning the fundamentals of the job. Obviously, you can play however you want, but I think it should be noted that this is basically just a meme rotation, that never was actually good.
@@rcki6058 You never really want to rely on a crutch and while the ultimate goal is to have a rotation you do consistently for a given fight, I think there's benefit in having a reliable plan to adjust to when things go sideways. I figured you really don't want to take stock of which cooldowns are up at some random point in your rotation/fight before running around like mad to adjust for something else going wrong. But you're probably right. I came at this mostly from progging as WHM where adjusting gradually becomes the main source of difficulty and that's when you want to conserve resources because when it rains, it pours. So I see "more mobility and spend less resources" and I figure there has got to be situations where that's useful even at the cost of DPS.
Well, I guess what this truly proves is that A strategy, even if not the best one, is still better than maybe no strategy! Since we don't know how hard the randoms were trying! 😁
Okay, but... Ice Mage is *really* funny. And I live for the funny. Also, I feel like these exceedingly cursed (albeit incredibly funny) rotations only really negatively affect high-end content like Savage raids.
I see so many Doton puddles thrown down against bosses. If I have a chance, I try to explain that Raiton is stronger, but rarely do I get a reply to that. I guess since my job icon isn’t the swirly Shuriken, my information about ninja can’t be right 😂
I admit, my kneejerk reaction would be to inspect your character to see your job levels. Like, I'd expect you to be 90, but if we're doing content together, confirming that is only 2 mouse clicks away.
@@fluffyfang4213 Ninja was actually my first ever 90. My rotations are definitely not super optimal, but I know enough to know Raiton is stronger when you add Raiju
I also see some here and there and when ive leveled my NIN i also did it sometimes. Its still in the muscle Memory since it was actually the Norm back then that you prepull Doton then Hide and Reset your Mudras. But like he said in the Video its not anymore and also you mentioned it, Raiju exit these Days.
@@DantoriusD Yeah. Though doing the math, even all 7 hits from Doton(placement and the 18 seconds) don’t reach the 650 potency of Raiton, even without Raiju
Its unfortunate, because the reasons they are using Doton can be many, so you might just not be able to cover the specific thing they think makes Doton good on a single target ^^'
stormblood i was the speed sam. my logic was if midare (720 +50% w/kaiten at the time)was my biggest attack what if i crank it out as fast as possible. Also i Kaiten every Kasha/Gekko cause back then they were 440 potency and i refused to use shinten cause i figured with the -10% to slash resist off Yukikaze it'd level out the damage. i def popped off for a few months edit: higanbana when it wore off is where i'd get the extra kinki for guren on top of every 5 left over from post kaiten weaponskills.
wrt Single Target Doton, one thing you didn't mention is a misunderstanding of how DoT ticks work. When I've asked some Doton Ninjas why they do that, they'll give me the answer "1440 > 650". In case that's hard to figure out, 1440 would be the full potency of Doton if it ticked 18 times. Once per second. And this is understandable because in many other MMO's, DoTs tick once per second.
That is an interesting point. This never occured to me, since I come from a solid background of WoW (and some other MMOs), and the older MMOs I started with, often had DoTs tick every 3 seconds, sometimes every 2 seconds, so from my perspective, I would never be sure what the tick rate is without testing, when the tooltip neglects to mention it at all! But you are right, that would absolutely make Doton stronger! ^^
The only issue is only 1 skill thats not on BLU, deals damage in that 1 second tick rate and thats MCH's flamethrower. For BLU its phantom flurry and apokalypsis
just as a little addition to the cursed BLM types that people do to troll since I've ran into this the other day in a dungeon roulette: The "Never use mana BLM" style apparently also exists... you cast B3, then F3 and then you repeat that nonstop. All your B3 and F3 casts are super fast (like 1.5seconds iirc?) so with slidecast on top of that you have pretty much movement as good as a RDM and B3+F3 don't cost any mana if you cast them while the opposite element is active... Obvious downside being that your spells do no damage. Doing Firespells while in Ice reduces their dmg by like 60% or some crap like that (?) and same for Icespells while in Fire...
Indeed, umbral ice 3 reduces fire damage by 30% and astral fire 3 reduces ice damage by 30%, and since they only have half the cast time (but not half the gcd), you don't really get the full benefit of them casting quickly 😅 I've actually seen this black mage type, and the weirdest was that they started the dungeon by using stuff like triple cast and fire 4 on the first pull. And then only after proving they knew what to do, they resorted to that 😂
I like the *idea* of Iceman Samurai (or maybe just the name, idk), but after giving it a go, it just feels weird to actually use compared to the intended play style
honestly the fact that iceman samurai and dragon kick monk don't work just tells me how good the developers are at balancing around the numbers, especially because of how close the potency of the non-traditional rotation is to the traditional rotation
i'm not a high end player, couldn't care less for precise min-maxing optimizations, so i will unapologetically use dragon kick and/or paradox rotations for ease of use. On Monk, it helps me have less modifiers to access my skills since 2 of them are basically gone, so it's easier to pay more attention to the fight vs the hotbars; on Black Mage, I'll slide into partial paradox rotation for movement, emergency or just recovery when I sometimes mess up the "proper" one. I think the existence of these, although not optimal or whatever, speaks for how well the jobs are designed, you have options and can adapt to situations more easily compared to other jobs.
This is very possible, although while I don't remember the potencies exactly off the top of my head, I would think it would be an even bigger difference back then? Just in raw potency rather than the Guaranteed Critical Hit detail? I wonder...
I think the problem with those meme rotations is that they are big brain strats used situationally by high level players but then lower skills player see them do it and they think it's a thing you can do all the time.
It’s been a while since I played Ninja. Had no idea about this. Well, you helped one player optimize an off job a little more. I play lots of monk though and that Dragon Kick rotation is CURSED. The closest I come to that is alternating Bootshine and DK with perfect balance to get that solar nadi. Which I think is intended but I don’t look too deeply into these things.
Indeed, bootshine dragon kick alternation is the strongest sequence in perfect balance, and you typically only deviate from it if you need to for the other nadi 😁 I'm glad my video helped you! 😄
@CaetsuChaijiCh yup. Instead of using ANY other globals. You could spam Impulse drive from positional to do more dps than the regular filler string. This is only good 1-around 45 though
Let me see If I understand this right. Filler Rotation is basically a period when all your skills are on cooldown so you have a simplistic combo to keep on using until they all pop back up?
Yeah something like that! For some jobs, its mostly just a period where you have nothing else, so you use your weaker attacks to fill. On other jobs, your fillers produce resources needed for when all the cooldowns are back to burst with!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh it's cool knowing that it is a thing one could get a good practice with because the problem with Samurai is maintaining Kenki and Iceman seems a really decent strat if you can recognise when to reactivate your buffs and bursts and how much potency would you be willing to sacrifice to balance out doing mechanics and not getting greedy so that feels like a must have in practice..
I must admit, I go iceman rotation for a few loops during filler when pug circumstances or other unforeseen events ruin the otherwise static rotation of sam. Not much difference from a "perfect" run.
Hi! Just a quick thing. In current gear, Boot w/ form bonus and leaden = 507.16 pot, and crit Dragon Kick = 523.52 pot. DK spam is as effective as ever. I suspect you misinterpreted the patch that changed Battle Litany and Chain Strategem (to increase the damage of skills that would otherwise be unaffected by its buff like midare and boot), as increasing bootshine damage outside of buffs, which isn't the case. The loss is primarily in the burst windows you're forced to do (which have similar amounts of boots under buffs), and the lack of boots across the fight, which have the lessened TFC effect which you noted.
Indeed, I've had some issues figuring out for certain whether the crit rate from gear further amplified guaranteed crits, but as you said, it does not. However, even without this, dragon kick rotation falls slightly behind a proper rotation on average (again, only looking at filler since proper burst windows are sort of needed!)
I hope you don't mean the ones that ONLY use melee? I have fortunately never seen that, but that sounds nightmarish! I actually did cover a really weird optimization trick with Zwerchhau, regarding Red Mage and melee, although it is rarely helpful, in this video on silly optimization tricks: ruclips.net/video/NhDgNCHRe2c/видео.html
No please, I’ve been playing black mage for two years and only recently know what I’m doing in a NORMAL rotation. Dear god don’t make me go back to the learning mines.
Black mage main here: for anyone reading this, Infinite paradox was already at least 5% worse than the standard rotation and ever since F4 got buffed it's only gotten worse. For all the effort you spend learning how to do the full infinite paradox rotation, you could have learned how to play properly, or even used proper nonstandard for greater DPS and mobility.
aka these are the meme combo but actually can get you to 99 parse yes for the mnk i did that and somehow i got like the number 1 most damaging in P8 which is dumb
as a NIN main, it's always really horrible to see where other people put their mudra on their hotbars and keybinds edit: ahahaha how cursed is the BLM paradox thing, it's insane enough that I want to learn how to get it working
So i was a single target Doton Ninja for a while because no one had ever explained the nuances of the jutsus to me but i at least felt that something was up because I'd have to use just about every mudra to keep it up. I assumed it was just one of those "the class plays awkward at an older level thanks to reworks" kinda things before someone explained it to me. Not quite Ice Mage but i didnt know that the cast times for Fire 3 and Blizzard 3 are halved in Umbral Ice 3 and Asteal Fire 3 respectively because like absolutely no where in the game ever mentions it except for the floating tooltip for each skill *ONLY* when you are in the respective phases. Until like level 64 (I was in Bhardem's Meddle ehen I learned this) I thought you had to use Tranpose to switch elements every single time. I literally learned it mid pull by accident when either I hit one of the buttons or hovered over them and noticed the cast time was way shorter. My DPS spiked dramatically mid dungeon.
The halved cast time thing for Black Mage is mentioned in Aspect Mastery III, which you learn at level 35. However, given that it is a trait - making it easy to miss - and Aspect Mastery II at level 20 ONLY had the +1 stack effect, it is very easy to assume Aspect Mastery III is just that again right? It is quite awkward, because to put the information somewhere you will see it, Fire 1, 2, 3 and Blizzard 1, 2, 3 would have enormous tooltips!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I mean literally all it needs is just a line on Fire 3 and Blizzard 3 mentioning the cast times. I also believe there's an issue where it never mentions that Fell Cleave also reduces the cast time of Infuriate by 5 seconds whereas the tooltip for whatever the AoE skill is does. I only know that Fell Cleave does that from noticed the CD for Infuriate jumping when I use it
@IosLocarth the reason it should be noted on all the spells that interact across the elements, is because af3 makes *all* your ice spells take half the time to cast, even if it really only matters for some of them. The same applies for ui3 and fire spells 😊 The reason it is like that for warrior is because the fell cleave interaction is stated on the trait enhanced infuriate learned at 66. As inner chaos and chaotic cyclone are not listed in the trait (for whatever reason), they have to mention the same interaction separately. It isn't always consistent with traits and tooltips though, let's not forget that black mages fire starter and thundercloud procs are traits too, they just get embedded on the relevant actions as well 🤔
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I don't think the infuriate trait mentions Fell Cleave or Inner Chaos. I believe it only mentions Chaotic Cyclone and Steel Cyclone iirc. I can't check at the moment though so I'm not sure
@IosLocarth enhanced infuriates description written word for word: "Reduces Infuriate recast time by 5 seconds upon landing Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone, Fell Cleave, or Decimate on most targets." It is quite fascinating that it mentions inner beast and steel cyclone since they haven't been accessible alongside enhanced infuriate since shadowbringers released 😅
I basically never play ninja, so I thought doton did more, thankfully - as I rarely ever touch ninja, no one has experienced my single dotons in hard content
I have watched that video, in fact I have made a video inspired by it, about why it is OK to suck at ffxiv! 😁 I just don't think it is quite the same in this case with the ice mage 😅 although you are right they are making a choice!
The ninja one hurts me so much. There are so many reactions now at 90. Ive definitely accidentally used doton inatead of a different muddra but i can't imagine doing that on purpose.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh It's bad enough being fully optimal and keeping the positionals right. But 'then' we're forced to do 6 different combos? Anyone who hits high charts as a monk definitely knows what they're doing
@@ImPersonNation It's definitely not for the faint of heart. But if they streamlined the combo they'd probably have to retool the entire class, because that's where the entire class complexity lies and what makes it unique from other melee rotations. I'd rather they removed or reduced the positional requirements if they were to reduce its complexity
Ah, ice mage. When I first tried THM back in StB when I tried the trial period, I was one of those. When I went back in EW I actually, yknow. Knew about the ice mage memes, and avoided annoying the people I played with. Very easy newbie trap if you aren't familiar with how ffxiv does elements (ie it doesn't, really, not for players).
Similar note to rotations, I've been watching Mrhappy's class retrospectives and... yeah the game is in a better state than it was. I'll take this weirdness over the 2.0 and 3.0 normalcy.
The infinite paradox is absurdly ridiculous in its own right. My explanation might not have been the best either I will admit, so I don't think you are dumb 😊 The general idea is to use instant spells and tools that give you instant spells to avoid casting. The specific express purpose is to not stop to cast. This is mainly done through maximizing the amount of casts of ice paradox you can, since it's one of the only reliably available instant spells black mage has 😅 But it is a very weird rotation, so don't worry about it if it doesn't really make sense to you!
When it comes to BLM I combine two different play styles that of a quick Cast BLM and a Paradox BLM I alternate between High Blizzard II and High Fire II this lets me keep on the move a bit more while throwing out spells at a faster rate because the cast time is cut by a fair amount when alternating cast and casting paradox and xenoglossy when they are available so that the enemy gets pelted by spells and my MP never runs out either
It works better the less speed you have because you need at least 2 GCDs per Transpose, and as Transpose has a cooldown of 5 seconds, this can be difficult to make work consistently at higher speeds. Similarly, slower speeds gives more time for things like Triple cast, Sharpcast and Polyglots to regenerate to keep it going! ^^
@@CaetsuChaijiCh maybe I stink at black mage but I didn't really notice a difference between it and spamming fire 4. I probably just stink at black mage
Infinite paradox is generally weaker than a normal rotation, and it's specific value is in being usable while moving. However, as others have pointed out, optimally you'd much rather use your limited mobility options as needed instead of relying on infinite paradox, although, it would be much better than doing nothing if you find yourself having to run!
The infinite paradox one is definitely something that is viable as you said for high mobility phases. Usually people meme on BLM for high mobility phases and say "oh poor BLM will loose all dps now that its just moving" and if you know how to switch between normal rotation to infinite paradox, you can show them that its not the case. Definitely worth learning if you love BLM and know how to do the normal rotation by heart already.
IT IS NOT VIABLE. Good BLMs utilize all of the different non standard lines for extreme movement situations, however, even this is not required since you'll always have enough movement resources even when playing fully standard BLM, with all of your procs and triple / swift casts. Non standard provides better movement WITH additional potency gains, meanwhile infinite paradox deals consistently less damage than even the standard rotation, while only being a small bit more mobile (when compared to standard using the same resources that you'd need for infinite paradox). Infinite paradox WAS and IS only a meme, and is ALWAYS worse than regular BLM, unless you have completely misused all of your movement resources, but in that case you should work on your fundamentals instead of learning this super clunky, low damage rotation.
Nothing will ever top dk monk in 6.0. Those idiots on the dev team frontloaded potency too much on the earlier combo abilities so it actually was giving up nothing but the boot shine crit which you could still get obviously.
that's how every game with competitive aspects works. people will always boil down the optimal way to play something, no matter how complex, because video games are based on numbers and therefore something WILL be the mathematically best option. but that doesn't stop you from playing as wrong as you want, almost everything in this game outside of week 1 savage or ultimates is forgiving enough for an ice mage or a zero damage healer, you just need to accept that if you're gonna play a class the opposite of how it's designed to be played, some people will probably get annoyed and that's fine
@@rainyglow The one way around it is by adding more RNG to your rotation (through proccs for example), that way the optimal order of pressing buttons isn't as set in stone as it is atm. But I think they're hesitant to do so because it makes the class' performance inconsistent and hard to balance around, and also increases the cognitive load on players (potentially reducing the complexity they can put into boss mechanics for fear of overloading). As I see it, this is the mechanical divide between WoW and FFXIV design philosophies in a nutshell, WoW places the a large portion of complexity into reacting to randomness within your own class whereas FFXIV places almost all of it it in memorisation, coordination and proper movement/positioning. Edit: Not saying FFXIV should try to be more like WoW, just using it as an example of what adding more RNg can look like
![[April Fools] God Tier Black Mage: Paradox Mage and the Paradox Opener](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3vv1kGCL-LI/mqdefault.jpg)
I do really like that you give an explanation for how these cursed rotations first got developed
Some of it might be a guess, but I hope it still gives some insight! :D Thank you!
DRAGON KICK ROTATION BABYYYYYYYYYYY
RIP to a legendary rotation. Also, shout out to SCH, whom, from the unlock of Art Of War, up to LVL 54, Art of War spam with autos is a higher damage output than casting Ruin!
Indeed! Art of War is a gain on 1 as we say!.. At least for a while!
I heard about it at the start of ew and then tried it out in the current tier (completely missing why it went extinct). It kinda sucked for the most part but I did parse blue in crafted gear once so if you don't want to learn monk properly you can pull it off for the meme while only griefing a little ^^ Might go back into pf once Ive got my bis on sam and see if you can push it to purple at least
I feel like an overlying misconception in general for ffxiv is unlike a lot of mmos I’ve played, where you’re like actually building your character and your abilities and can customize and stuff, the only real expression in play style in ffxiv is, *what* job you play. Ffxiv doesn’t have alternate abilities or choices or anything, you put on a job stone and it gives you those abilities, there’s generally only one proper way to the job. Obviously that doesn’t mean liek you need to use the balance and play the most optimal rotation just to play the job, but there’s one core gameplay loop for every job and deviating from it just leads you to playing the job wrong. Some people might not like that about the game, but as someone who likes to play optimally, and would end up trying to look up what’s the best skills to pick and yatta yatta. I like that the game just goes, these are your skills, use them all.
Indeed, even if we had had options, the vast majority of players in MMOs tend to fluctuate towards using meta builds anyway, so FFXIV just handing you effectively the meta build, by only offering that, might ultimately be just the same!
It was funny when the paradox mage came up.
When it became big, the PLD got his little rework and during the figuring out stage of PLD there was this one possible rotation that involved more hard casting then the paradox BLM rotation.
So PLD would have been a more casting caster then a BLM.
Oh yeah I remember seeing that. People were messing around with a LOT of Holy Spirit hard casting at that time! ^^'
I said that on the short, but I'll repeat that here for the new viewers.
Dragon Kick rotation also serves perfectly well for people that want to level up Monk, but don't want to ever play Monk in any kind of challenging content. DK rotation severely reduce the mental stack needed to play Monk, and is "close enough" to a normal rotation output that it will serve you well in dungeons and normal raids/trials.
100% true, you can shit on 95% of players in roulettes with that
I'm glad to hear that 😅. I also saw the short and learned about DK rotation from that. My main reason for avoiding monk was doing the right moves at the right time. Previously I had altered my rotation to get rid of True Strike and replace it with another Twin Snakes to cut down on the buttons I was pressing and limit myself to fewer positionals. After I learned DK rotation though, it was so much easier to handle. Video had me worried I was just griefing in dungeons this whole time.
@@Th3hUnT3R1 you think you can buuuut not really. dropping 30 percent of your dmg is very noticeable.
@@das-grza it's not even close to 30, maybe 5%. Noticeable yes, but as I said, doing that rotation correctly will put you ahead of almost anyone you encounter in roulettes. And it's a lot more than doing the proper rotation when you don't know how it works.
@@Th3hUnT3R1 he literally gives you potency differences on screen. my bad i generalized 6k and 4k. I'll be accurate with it now, the difference is actually 22.6 percent. which isnt "maybe 5%"
Im a monk main and its very noticeable when someone uses a rotation that became way worse when crit scaling changed.
While not an alternate rotation: Speed Summoner.
Its entire point is you put on a bunch of spellspeed gear, prioritizing determination and then direct hit in terms of other stats wanted. The goal is to access your big summons faster than a normally geared summoner. If you manage to max out your speed, demi-bahamut and demi-phoenix are only around a 50.40 second cooldown. What this does is cause the summoner to turbo drift, where they even start outpacing their own swiftcast they normally would use for ruby rite or slipstream. The main benefit of getting access to the actual summons faster is is that each summon has a large potency attached to it.
Also its a canon aspect of summoner. As the original person who founded summoning in the allagan empire, sought to perform summons faster, eventually uploading their consciousness to a computer because their human body was holding them back.
Now the main downside, aside from drifting, is: If you mess up your rotation, you lose a gcd. As aside from slipstream and the two ruby rites, the summoner is mobile. And since your on a tight clock, you feel that loss much more than a normal summoner who messes up their rotation. If you die during a fight? That weakness hurts, not only due to the downtime, but because your stats are reduced and your attacks become far less impactful as a result.
Remember, say no to STD's (Single Target Dotons)!
🤣🤣 Now that's a good one! I will try to remember that!
Ice Mage is a great example why you read the tutorials. I remember when i read that i tested the dmg of both sides (which was not as easy as one would like since i had no clue where to find target dummy and monsters were either too weak to see all the numbers to compare them or too strong for fragile body of a bm.
As someone that used to main Black Magd that ice mage rotation that’s hilarious. Completely against what is even remotely what you should be doing, but I can’t fault someone for thinking it’s better to conserve MP. Bless those who play that way.
Probably wouldn't even affect anything below extremes and savage raids anyway, which a majority of the people don't even attempt so I can see why it became a thing.
@@Avalanche272_Actually it was pretty obvious because Flare and Fire 2 have higher natural potency than ice aoe spells and Astral Fire enhancement. Black Mage with proper rotation could shred mobs within few seconds in the big pull while Ice mage could take over a minute to do that; and most Ice mage tend to use single target spells only and Foul won’t be available until 70. More casual the content is, more noticeable the difference in performance is. It just there are so many weird rotations newbie black mage come off like spamming Fire 3 to no end; insisting using lv 20 rotation even at high level dungeons. Ice mage is the most iconic of the bunch.
Another reason for ice mages in certain content is likely because some people expect a more typical Final Fantasy elemental resistance and think "oh, this mob is made of fire/is typically weak to ice in other Final Fantasy games" and run ice thinking it'll do more damage.
There was a meme-y rotation for monk in the back end of stormblood. It was called Tornado Kick rotation. At the time, tornado kick would consume all stacks of greased lightning (a stacking buff which increased skill speed) to perform a fairly high potency attack. Now usually you would never use TK outside of finishers or extended downtime but late in stormblood it was discovered to be a small potency gain to perfectly time your snap punch with a fists of wind double gap closer. (Monk had 3 “fists” fire was usually the only one used for the 5% damage increase. Fist of wind only increased movespeed but it did change how monk’s gap closer worked at the time). Timing a TK and weaving a fist of wind change with a snap punch meant you got immediately back to 2 greased lightning and it was overall a small potency gain.
That was the intended rotation, rather than a meme one. Double TK opener was standard and you'd TK any time you had shoulder tackle available to give you a GL stack under fists of wind, plus you'd always try and get at least one in Riddle of Fire, and Perfect Balance let you use 1-2 TKs during its duration depending how it lined up with other cooldowns.
For RDM, I've optimized rotations for 2 targets in addition to your normal single or AOE rotations:
Lv60 and below: Verfire/stone -> Verthunder/aero if you have lingering procs, then spam Verthunder/aero II -> Verthunder/aero
Higher levels: Verfire/stone -> Impact if you have lingering procs, then spam Jolt II -> Impact
So in these 2 target situations, you can quite literally turn into a Thunder/aero Mage at lower levels and a Netural Mage at higher levels. It's an interesting contrast.
Acceleration is always on Scatter/Impact for 2 targets, but always more worth using on a larger group of enemies.
The Ninja segment was torture to watch, fantastic video
I can't begin to explain how hard it was to actually DO the rotation too! xD
The Bootshine additional damage increase is gained from skills that raise crit hit rate (e.g chain strategy), added in version 6.2, not your gear. Bootshine always deals more damage if your gear has more crit hit rate, both before and after 6.2. Guaranteed DIRECT HIT skills gain additional damage from your gear's direct hit rate.
That is fair, that is a mistake on my part! I've had difficulty testing this myself, but you are right. However, dragon kick rotation wasn't better before the change either, as you said 😊
I'm SO glad I watched this cause I was using Doton on bosses, my reasons for doing so is that I saw other ninjas doing it so I figured it was the correct thing to do and I logic'd that a stationary AoE DoT would be good single target damage since it can be stepped out of. Honestly this would have been avoided if they reworked DoT tooltips, right now they only say the potency per tick and duration with no mention of when ticks happen or what the full potency of the DoT is.
Very true! In fact, the placed AoEs like Doton also fail to mention that they hit once on placement, and *then* dot every 3 seconds. It could make it a lot easier if it was clear how much potency it did!
I'm glad bringing it up helped you!
@@CaetsuChaijiChyeah I knew Doton was worse but I didn’t know since they didn’t mention the tick refresh rate. And if you assume it’s 1 sec it’s suddenly way bette.
When I heard the term "Dragon Kick Monk" I didn't realise quite what was in store....
The minute the rotation came on screen I cackled so loudly
When you just really like kicking! 😁😁
You sort of touch on it, I think Icemage rotations come from the fact that the other major RPG, World of Warcraft, has a class that looks very very close to BLM, the Mage, and in WoW if you select Mage you have to choose specs between Fire, Ice, or Arcane. So when you flop over to 14 and pick up the Job you feel like is close to your WoW main class, you think in that game's methodology.
That is very likely yes! And just in RPGs in general too, it is quite common! ^^
There is actually one instance where Doton outdamages Raiton for single target. It is between the levels 86-89 when you have Nozuchi but are missing Raiju. In this specific levels, Doton still does 20 less damage, but you also get 1 trigger of Nozuchi from Phantom Kamitachi which brings it over Raiton by 30p. Once you get to 90 though, this is no longer true, since Raiton gives you access to Raiju which vastly outdamages anything you can do in 1 filler GCD.
That is a very interesting detail! I had never considered that, and I feel I normally look into those kinds of weird nuances in leveling! Thank you!
I do wish Black Mages could choose which would do more damage, deep down. I personally find the ice cooler, even if I know the rotation and how it's played. I'll go find an animation swap.
POV: You have 30 buttons, the game tells you to play Simon, but you want to have fun and not relive the last two minutes of your life for the next 5 years
Single target doton ninjas pain me the most.
Like you said raiton has a higher straight up potency and plays into buffs better and with raiju at 90 the gap between single target doton and raiton increases even further. Another niche thing is that doton is 3 mudra to use which could possible loose you a few gcds and ninki over a course of a fight.
Also at 90 because of raiju 2 target doton is worse than raiton as well.
Kinda lame that they made doton end on hide though, it was great for pre-boss pulls because tenchijin has 2 charges
Fun fact,
I did clear 12s with dragon rotation via training, the dps los is so unnoticeable that only via analytics they saw that I was "trolling"
It's fun and absolutely Randome but you can stack with the party on the rare of the enemy at all times.
The only position you have to hit is rare.
That is very true, and you can probably even circumvent it with true north most of the time if you really want to!
Since this channel tends to reach a more casual audience (which is absolutely not an issue, quite the opposite actually) I feel the need to step in and correct you, because misinformation will never help anyone.
About the Midare Setsugeka and Bootshine tooltips : while your statement about better gear meaning even more damage than usual on those abilities is true, it's only due to their innate 100% crit component and how the crit stat works and NOT the added text in the tooltips about critical rate increasing the damage. This type of abilities were problematic for quite some time because raid buffs that would increase critical rate (like dragoon's battle litany and scholar's chain stratagem) would do nothing to them. That's why SE added this new component to these skills, that way these abilities actually get something out of every raid buffs in the game.
This was also applied to warrior's inner release and inner chaos, which also got the same treatment in regards to direct hit.
Trust me, coming from a warrior main who used to raid with a scholar + dragoon team comp, I know what I'm talking about.
This is true 😊 I had a misunderstanding that the adjustment (stated in the tooltips) also considered crit rating from your stats, which is untrue. Indeed, the addition is specifically to make raid buffs more helpful in this case. 😊
Its my mistake that I didn't bother to look deeper into it, I didn't do so because I already knew beforehand that even without the details of this specific nuance, the iceman / dragon kick rotations would still be inferior, as you need an impossibly high amount of crit stat to make up the difference! 😅
Thank you for the correction!
I enjoy that you're pointing out why the proper rotation is how you're supposed to play, but depressing because that this is the only way to play you, I and everyone else must play it.
Yeah, it is an unfortunate result of the jobs not having any customization to their rotation. There will always be a "best way" as a result :/
On the bright side, instead there's "Hey if you wanna play a class like X, you should check out X class" usually. If you like dragon kick monk, you may also enjoy playing bard as intended.
Here's a bit of lore to Iceman Samurai, this atrocity was born right after the Kaiten removal, aside from everyone being extremely angry, the math nerds in The Balance discord in sam_lounge did some test and due to Midare potency getting gutted we could potentially be in SB sam grounds.
Thank you for adding the extra background to it! It makes a lot of sense! 😊
I vaguely remember blizzard 2 being a melee range spell too 💀
This is true, this was changed in endwalker! It actually also used to have a completely different icon!
Please, I finally managed to forgot theses dark days of Doing AOE as a BLM
Love your videos man, not many people are making regular discussions of in-depth 14 topics like this
Thank you! I'm really glad to hear that! :D
It is absolutely crazy that the game doesn't explain what do Astral Ice or Umbral Fire even DO. Yes, you get the stacks and they make the other cost no MP, cool - but nowhere does it say that they also multiply the damage of their element! Thank you for mentioning this, I actually learned something big from these cursed rotations!
I'm glad you learned something from the rotations! ^^
Just to be sure there isn't a misunderstanding, of course, the Umbral Ice effect doesn't boost the damage of Ice magic :D
they DO say that in the tooltips tho. Ofc not numerical values, but it literally says that fire spells do more dmg under astral fire. Even NPC's in the job quest mention it. People just cant read man
@ich3730 the text dump tutorial that appears at level 2 also says so. Part of the problem is that they decided to not include the actual amount of damage bonus at all. Honestly, 40/60/80% sounds like a ridiculously high amount of damage bonus, and would be much easier to accept if the game just said it 😅
@@ich3730 Look, decades of gaming have taught us all that lore effectiveness is one thing and the gameplay mechanics and raw numbers another. Nobody can be faulted for not knowing about the increase if the tooltips themselves don't say that. I don't have BLM leveled to max, it's the one job I'm currently slowly leveling now - and this lack of mechanical clarity is very confusing.
I legitimately looked at the Fire and Blizzard spells and was like "ok so they have the same potency, what's the catch". The Aspect Mastery trait tooltip says only that when under its effect, casting the opposite magic will be for free. Nothing about the stopping of MP regen for fire, nothing about increased damage for fire (and the significant increase at that!) - leaving out the main thing about doing damage, really! It would only take an extra sentence for this kind of important detail! Why isn't it there, instead of an Active Help window that pops up at level 2 that you dismiss just as every other help popup? Why does only THM/BLM have it so that a major part of their core mechanic cannot be parsed outside the tooltips like with other jobs?
In short, I am glad about a video like this because it actually taught me something that the game only briefly mentioned among the 52 other new character pup ups that are easily dismissed with a press of ESC button.
@@thesunthrone Elemental Gauge
The Elemental Gauge indicates whether you are under the effect of Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, and the duration of their effects.
Casting Fire spells grants Astral Fire, which increases the power of Fire spells in exchange for their increased MP cost.
Casting Ice spells grants Umbral Ice, which decreases the MP cost of Ice spells and greatly increases the speed with which MP is recovered.
If maximum stacks are accumulated for either Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, there will be no MP cost for spells of the opposite element.
That's copied from the job gauge tutorial, it appears once when you first unlock the gauge, and can be reviewed -with updated info from later level talents- at any time from the skill/spell list
It says right there that fire spells are stronger, while ice facilitates MP recovery
I do agree that they should show the actual values, and the resulting potency increase should be shown in the fire spells tooltips. But to say that the game never tells you about Astral Fire increasing damage, is just wrong.
Just behind the single target Doton NJNs, no Higanbana SAM and no Thunders BLM are two styles I notice the most in roulettes. Even a good friend of mine was like “SAM has a DOT?!” when I gave her brother some rotation feedback.
On a slightly unrelated note, it would be cool if BLMs could reverse the mechanics of their fire and ice spells like SMN/SCH can change their pet appearances. Swap Freeze with Flare and add a new effect for an ice-themed Despair.
You're a highkey genius following up this video after the bad tutorials vid. People not understanding their job because the tutorials are bad, more often than not, is the biggest reason you run into people who stubbornly refuse to play their jobs properly.
"I don't meta-game". Bro, your job is literally intended to play that way, it's not a "meta".
Thank you 😁 on the meta thing, it seems some people are also stubbornly choosing to do things differently to be different intentionally 😅 which is quite funny! 😆
One "other" thing to note about Iceman Samurai was that during Asphodelos, just before Kaiten, was killed Shinten had a potency of 270. So during the time Kaiten was dead, and Shinten's potency per kenki had been normalized Iceman was the most usable meme style one could play and while you still didn't do a whole lot under buffs, due to bonus crit scaling on guaranteed crits not being added yet, it allowed for maximum flexibility in your gear since you basically didn't care what you wore and just took the highest iL stuff since you didn't have strict speed requirements for looping.
Though you still would end up in situations where you go into a looping rotation anyway because unless you never used Kasha, you would always eventually outpace Hagakure's cooldown and Jinpu will fall off. Also Meikyo did not automatically give you the Shipu and Jinpu buffs till a bit after Endwalker released. So you always had to do a full rotation at some point to maintain buffs.
I do remember once upon a time I saw a log of only Iceman Samurai and they still purpled. Where that log is, I can't remember and the source I saw it from is also gone.
Actually, 6.1 both removed kaiten, added guaranteed crit to Midare Setsugekka, and weakened shinten to 250 potency 😊
6.11 buffed Midare Setsugekka to 640 from 600 potency though, which is very significant!
Meikyo shisui was also upgraded to grant the buffs with the combo finishers in 6.0. I decided to look these things up to be sure, but I did know this about meikyo shisui because I made a samurai guide before the kaiten removal 😁
A mistake I made when I started is that I used flare in single tatget since it had a high potency. I didn't understand at the time that casttimes are also important. I learned not to do that once I got fire 4 and despair though.
For a long while BLm didn't want to actually 0 out on MP since they didn't get the aspect mastery for 0 cost opposite element casts until shadowbringers; and flare was only used back then on groups. Now with cost free ice/fire swaps from early levels, flare with fire stance boosts (even without the fire 2 casts for enhanced flare) still has a potency near fire 1 and fire 3 and could be used on single target as a finisher before you get despair; it lets you get a feel for the full fire rotation upon learning fire IV until you get Despair, the only issue is flare has a slightly longer cast time over despair and you really need to make the most of sharpcasts to get all your casts in fire stance without losing Astral fire
@@craigfunk3453 I totally forgot about running out of mana! Standing around after transpose and waiting for that first mana tick is certainly not good for your rotation.
tbh I levels black mage to 90 and I still don't know when to use Flare or Despair. There's a reason I don't run it in high end content.
@@brucewayne1777 for a general rotation, despair and flare are your final fire spells you use (you can cast them with as little as 800 mp)
For flare AoE you caat fire II until you're low on mp, then cast flare for early levels. Once you get umbral hearts and the trait so they reduce flares cost while you have at least 1 heart, you build up 3 hearts, cast fire II 3 times at most (stance shift and spend 2 hearts) then flare twice
Oh I love learning about those absurd rotation and silly stuff in the game. I'd like to point tho, I think you made an error during infinite paradox with the sample sequence on screen at 14:16. You counted amplifier as a GDC but it's an oGCD and should have been placed in between umbral soul and sharpcast so the rotation goes smoothly without clipping. Sorry, I committed myself to BLM and WHM as my duo-mains and couldn't help but point out this when I saw it :D otherwise, hugely great content as always, I will rejoin the cult as soon as possible too (am broke lmao), didn't see google cancelled my subscription >:( this is unacceptable! you deserve more support and love and I've been spreading your teaching being a mentor in game and leading people to your channel for references.
Thank you so much, raziel_louis! Glad to hear from you again!
And thank you so much for the support, do make sure to care for yourself first! 🥰
Amplifier is not assumed as a GCD. It is early weaved after umbral soul under the potential assumption that transpose might not have been available in the early weave anyway. However you are absolutely right I could as well had weaved it with sharp cast! 😅 I'm not sure why I didn't! Thank you for highlighting it! 😄
@@CaetsuChaijiCh oh I see, well this is king of hard to put on a rotation sheet. Transpose do like to act funny from time to time with how it align itself, funfact: depending on your latency, you cannot late weave manafont without clipping, this is due to the fact that the mana restoration is late in the animation and might not have taken effect before the gcd is available again. Also, this made me think that, when you're trying to master BLM, weaving a sharpcast (or anything else) right after a fast Fire III or Blizzard III to transition between AF and UI feels similar to a Ninja ending it's Ninjutsu in a rabbit to me and I find that really funny!
@antizombiepasbeaux that is a very good point! It also makes me think of weird latency glitches where you can weave swift or triple cast and then hard cast a spell due to latency causing the buff to not yet be present!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh now that's interesting :3 My BLM instinct immediately though of some ways it could be abused lmao but none are viable and are just adjustments for someone who has such latency
Maybe savage has just warped my mind, but if doing the standard fire rotation compared to spamming ice really did only give you a 5% damage increase, I’d still always be going for it. Like idk maybe it’s just me, but when I’m in savage/ ultimates, I feel like I need to take advantage of every single minor potency increase I can, until the only thing I can improve is just, erm get luckier and crit more lol.
I would do the same personally, but I can probably imagine it would be a lot harder to sell an Ice Mage that really really want to just use Ice, if Fire Magic only beat it by 5%! ^^
I’ve been dropping single target Doton since HW. I assumed that since every other class with a DoT wants to keep it rolling that NIN was the same way. Great video.
Thank you! I'm glad my video could clear it up! It actually used to make sense (although it was awkward) to single target doton, but with endwalker they intentionally made it a dps loss in general 😊
When I was levelling up Samurai, I actually connected the dots for the Iceman Samurai Style, but since I didn't hear anyone talking about it in guides, I figured that it wasn't that good.
I was surprised by how close the Iceman rotation is to the proper rotation in power. It does really feel like the real dealbreaker on it is the guaranteed Critical Hit from Midare Setsugekka, so it could easily be missed!
but iceman rotation is a meme rotation... you are delaying midare and also delaying shoha
Ice mage is great for very low-level FATEs, before all those statuses and weird symbols kick in. Most of the time, the mobs will die in x casts (typically 1 or 2) of either element's spell - so why not stay in Ice and just not think about mana?
(Hopefully the argument 'but it worked at level 4!' isn't deployed to defend this 'rotation' at level 90.)
That is very specific indeed! On the other hand, if you do a few hunt log targets in the thaumaturge list, you'll be leveled past that point in no time! And in fact if you do that, you might actually level up fast enough at first (I say might!) that you get your mp back before it even runs out at all! 😂
But you are right that if the enemy is dead in two blizzard 1s or fire 1s, then it of course makes zero difference which one you choose! 😅
lol theres only one way a character plays, one way to stack materias in, no real differences in my warrior to someone elses warrior, and rotation is rotation. there is genuinely no variation of any kind unless you just swap jobs, to basically achieve the same exact results with incredibly minor differences.
This is an unfortunate result of having no customization on jobs, that ultimately, there will be a most effective way to play the specific combination presented ^^'
Sadly, that's just how it is in MMOs. There is the optimal way and then the rest, because the games are always about getting the boss HP down to zero - and so all ways of getting there are math problems. The only difference really is how many bells and whistles developers bolt onto their systems and how needlessly complex they make the math for it.
Saying that infinite paradox is only a small loss is wrong ever since they buffed Fire IV potency by 10. You should almost never use it at this point, especially not with umbral souls, which made it completely useless (apart from mobility) even before the buffs to Fire IV.
The proper rotation that was used in EX1 (and that parsed 89, which isn't that good for an extreme) didn't use umbral souls at all. It basically boiled down to B3->PD->Transpose->PD->Despair->B3 (and continue from there while upkeeping thunder as extra fillers for movement / mana ticks, and spending F3Ps for extra movement.)
PLEASE don't do this in actual content, it's no longer even barely viable with Fire IV buffs.
I think it depends on your level of play. If you're just looking to clear, *Mechanics > DPS*. Infinite paradox BLM looks like it sacrifices DPS in favor of making mechanics easier which I think is fine until enrage is the wall... though I also find that enrage is only a wall if you have 8+ deaths every run. I wonder what kind of parse IP BLM gets anyway.
I will admit that making Infinite Paradox your entire rotation and not just a crutch to lean on every now and then will prevent you from improving which puts you in a world of pain if you ever need to improve.
@@fluffyfang4213 Infinite paradox completely destroys damage at this point, and if learning mechanics is your focus, you should just stop DPS if you don't have the resources to move. You should be coming up with a proper rotation plan for your fight while learning the mechanics, instead of using a crutch.
Two triple casts and swift cast + xenos + procs are MORE than enough mobility for ANY fight, even if you're not utilizing nonstandard rotation.
That is a fair point. I also do realize that Umbral Soul is basically a nothingburger of an action, so even if you were to use the infinite paradox for movement for some reason, Umbral Soul would moreso be an indicator something went terribly wrong. I did indeed mainly point to it being possibly viable for excessively long movement situations, which are rare anywayy, and would normally assume you had already done everything else you can I would think ^^'
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I just don't want to see new people think that the "rotation" is actually viable and learn that instead of learning the fundamentals of the job.
Obviously, you can play however you want, but I think it should be noted that this is basically just a meme rotation, that never was actually good.
@@rcki6058 You never really want to rely on a crutch and while the ultimate goal is to have a rotation you do consistently for a given fight, I think there's benefit in having a reliable plan to adjust to when things go sideways. I figured you really don't want to take stock of which cooldowns are up at some random point in your rotation/fight before running around like mad to adjust for something else going wrong.
But you're probably right. I came at this mostly from progging as WHM where adjusting gradually becomes the main source of difficulty and that's when you want to conserve resources because when it rains, it pours. So I see "more mobility and spend less resources" and I figure there has got to be situations where that's useful even at the cost of DPS.
I remember seeing a couple reddit posts where someone went and did some parsing playing ice mage...
And they were parsing higher than randoms. :/
Well, I guess what this truly proves is that A strategy, even if not the best one, is still better than maybe no strategy!
Since we don't know how hard the randoms were trying! 😁
Dragon kick will forever be my story content rotation. Never touching the endgame.
If you are seeing this comment friday evening, Caetsu is currently on stream for a few hours ! Come and say hi or talk about the video!
A little mix up in the posting schedule, thats my bad!
Okay, but... Ice Mage is *really* funny. And I live for the funny.
Also, I feel like these exceedingly cursed (albeit incredibly funny) rotations only really negatively affect high-end content like Savage raids.
I feel blessed to have never met an Ice Mage in my roulettes...
Oh just because I made this comment Ill have one in my expert roulette
I will wish for your continued good fortune 😅🙏
I see so many Doton puddles thrown down against bosses. If I have a chance, I try to explain that Raiton is stronger, but rarely do I get a reply to that. I guess since my job icon isn’t the swirly Shuriken, my information about ninja can’t be right 😂
I admit, my kneejerk reaction would be to inspect your character to see your job levels. Like, I'd expect you to be 90, but if we're doing content together, confirming that is only 2 mouse clicks away.
@@fluffyfang4213 Ninja was actually my first ever 90. My rotations are definitely not super optimal, but I know enough to know Raiton is stronger when you add Raiju
I also see some here and there and when ive leveled my NIN i also did it sometimes. Its still in the muscle Memory since it was actually the Norm back then that you prepull Doton then Hide and Reset your Mudras. But like he said in the Video its not anymore and also you mentioned it, Raiju exit these Days.
@@DantoriusD Yeah. Though doing the math, even all 7 hits from Doton(placement and the 18 seconds) don’t reach the 650 potency of Raiton, even without Raiju
Its unfortunate, because the reasons they are using Doton can be many, so you might just not be able to cover the specific thing they think makes Doton good on a single target ^^'
I think this is my favourite premiere
The "oh right premiere" premiere! 😅😕😅
stormblood i was the speed sam. my logic was if midare (720 +50% w/kaiten at the time)was my biggest attack what if i crank it out as fast as possible. Also i Kaiten every Kasha/Gekko cause back then they were 440 potency and i refused to use shinten cause i figured with the -10% to slash resist off Yukikaze it'd level out the damage. i def popped off for a few months
edit: higanbana when it wore off is where i'd get the extra kinki for guren on top of every 5 left over from post kaiten weaponskills.
wrt Single Target Doton, one thing you didn't mention is a misunderstanding of how DoT ticks work. When I've asked some Doton Ninjas why they do that, they'll give me the answer "1440 > 650".
In case that's hard to figure out, 1440 would be the full potency of Doton if it ticked 18 times. Once per second. And this is understandable because in many other MMO's, DoTs tick once per second.
That is an interesting point. This never occured to me, since I come from a solid background of WoW (and some other MMOs), and the older MMOs I started with, often had DoTs tick every 3 seconds, sometimes every 2 seconds, so from my perspective, I would never be sure what the tick rate is without testing, when the tooltip neglects to mention it at all!
But you are right, that would absolutely make Doton stronger! ^^
The only issue is only 1 skill thats not on BLU, deals damage in that 1 second tick rate and thats MCH's flamethrower. For BLU its phantom flurry and apokalypsis
just as a little addition to the cursed BLM types that people do to troll since I've ran into this the other day in a dungeon roulette:
The "Never use mana BLM" style apparently also exists... you cast B3, then F3 and then you repeat that nonstop.
All your B3 and F3 casts are super fast (like 1.5seconds iirc?) so with slidecast on top of that you have pretty much movement as good as a RDM and B3+F3 don't cost any mana if you cast them while the opposite element is active...
Obvious downside being that your spells do no damage. Doing Firespells while in Ice reduces their dmg by like 60% or some crap like that (?) and same for Icespells while in Fire...
Indeed, umbral ice 3 reduces fire damage by 30% and astral fire 3 reduces ice damage by 30%, and since they only have half the cast time (but not half the gcd), you don't really get the full benefit of them casting quickly 😅
I've actually seen this black mage type, and the weirdest was that they started the dungeon by using stuff like triple cast and fire 4 on the first pull. And then only after proving they knew what to do, they resorted to that 😂
No mention of Armor crush Ninja, where the only combo you do on Ninja is Armor Crush?
I don't think I've seen this one, but completely removing Aeolian Edge from the rotation would certainly be unoptimal ^^'
My machinist rotation comes down to "doing whatever I want to do"
I like the *idea* of Iceman Samurai (or maybe just the name, idk), but after giving it a go, it just feels weird to actually use compared to the intended play style
honestly the fact that iceman samurai and dragon kick monk don't work just tells me how good the developers are at balancing around the numbers, especially because of how close the potency of the non-traditional rotation is to the traditional rotation
i'm not a high end player, couldn't care less for precise min-maxing optimizations, so i will unapologetically use dragon kick and/or paradox rotations for ease of use. On Monk, it helps me have less modifiers to access my skills since 2 of them are basically gone, so it's easier to pay more attention to the fight vs the hotbars; on Black Mage, I'll slide into partial paradox rotation for movement, emergency or just recovery when I sometimes mess up the "proper" one.
I think the existence of these, although not optimal or whatever, speaks for how well the jobs are designed, you have options and can adapt to situations more easily compared to other jobs.
I very much agree! ^^ Having something to fall back on is always great!
As a Ninja main, if I'm not savage raiding, I just eat the rabbit if I botch a mudra rather than cast a single target doton.
Somehow, the rabbit is less embarrassing! 😅
I'm pretty sure iceman came about during 6.0, before the removal of kaiten and when midare wasn't a guaranteed crit.
This is very possible, although while I don't remember the potencies exactly off the top of my head, I would think it would be an even bigger difference back then? Just in raw potency rather than the Guaranteed Critical Hit detail? I wonder...
DANGGG shoulda listed the cursed prepull IR warrior opener from what was it, P3? I just heard about it bc I main sge but it sounded so funny to me
ik its not a rotation proper just opener but its still funny af
I actually spoke about this a while back in this video: ruclips.net/video/acBb89Th9b8/видео.html
I hope you enjoy! ^^
@@CaetsuChaijiCh oh hell yeah thank you!
I think the problem with those meme rotations is that they are big brain strats used situationally by high level players but then lower skills player see them do it and they think it's a thing you can do all the time.
This is very very possible yes!
It’s been a while since I played Ninja. Had no idea about this. Well, you helped one player optimize an off job a little more.
I play lots of monk though and that Dragon Kick rotation is CURSED. The closest I come to that is alternating Bootshine and DK with perfect balance to get that solar nadi. Which I think is intended but I don’t look too deeply into these things.
Indeed, bootshine dragon kick alternation is the strongest sequence in perfect balance, and you typically only deviate from it if you need to for the other nadi 😁
I'm glad my video helped you! 😄
Dont forget the okd Impulse drive rotation from stormblood and before!
I do recall Dragoon had an absolutely insane rotation way back! ^^
@CaetsuChaijiCh yup. Instead of using ANY other globals. You could spam Impulse drive from positional to do more dps than the regular filler string. This is only good 1-around 45 though
Let me see If I understand this right. Filler Rotation is basically a period when all your skills are on cooldown so you have a simplistic combo to keep on using until they all pop back up?
Yeah something like that! For some jobs, its mostly just a period where you have nothing else, so you use your weaker attacks to fill. On other jobs, your fillers produce resources needed for when all the cooldowns are back to burst with!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh it's cool knowing that it is a thing one could get a good practice with because the problem with Samurai is maintaining Kenki and Iceman seems a really decent strat if you can recognise when to reactivate your buffs and bursts and how much potency would you be willing to sacrifice to balance out doing mechanics and not getting greedy so that feels like a must have in practice..
I must admit, I go iceman rotation for a few loops during filler when pug circumstances or other unforeseen events ruin the otherwise static rotation of sam. Not much difference from a "perfect" run.
RIP Prepull Doton
Hi! Just a quick thing. In current gear, Boot w/ form bonus and leaden = 507.16 pot, and crit Dragon Kick = 523.52 pot. DK spam is as effective as ever. I suspect you misinterpreted the patch that changed Battle Litany and Chain Strategem (to increase the damage of skills that would otherwise be unaffected by its buff like midare and boot), as increasing bootshine damage outside of buffs, which isn't the case.
The loss is primarily in the burst windows you're forced to do (which have similar amounts of boots under buffs), and the lack of boots across the fight, which have the lessened TFC effect which you noted.
Indeed, I've had some issues figuring out for certain whether the crit rate from gear further amplified guaranteed crits, but as you said, it does not. However, even without this, dragon kick rotation falls slightly behind a proper rotation on average (again, only looking at filler since proper burst windows are sort of needed!)
Seeing everyone talking about Doton made me miss shadowflame.
Can't believe you didn't speak of the infamous melee red mage...
I hope you don't mean the ones that ONLY use melee? I have fortunately never seen that, but that sounds nightmarish!
I actually did cover a really weird optimization trick with Zwerchhau, regarding Red Mage and melee, although it is rarely helpful, in this video on silly optimization tricks: ruclips.net/video/NhDgNCHRe2c/видео.html
they just want to play fencer lol
No please, I’ve been playing black mage for two years and only recently know what I’m doing in a NORMAL rotation. Dear god don’t make me go back to the learning mines.
Black mage main here: for anyone reading this, Infinite paradox was already at least 5% worse than the standard rotation and ever since F4 got buffed it's only gotten worse.
For all the effort you spend learning how to do the full infinite paradox rotation, you could have learned how to play properly, or even used proper nonstandard for greater DPS and mobility.
aka these are the meme combo but actually can get you to 99 parse
yes for the mnk i did that and somehow i got like the number 1 most damaging in P8 which is dumb
as a NIN main, it's always really horrible to see where other people put their mudra on their hotbars and keybinds
edit: ahahaha how cursed is the BLM paradox thing, it's insane enough that I want to learn how to get it working
So i was a single target Doton Ninja for a while because no one had ever explained the nuances of the jutsus to me but i at least felt that something was up because I'd have to use just about every mudra to keep it up. I assumed it was just one of those "the class plays awkward at an older level thanks to reworks" kinda things before someone explained it to me.
Not quite Ice Mage but i didnt know that the cast times for Fire 3 and Blizzard 3 are halved in Umbral Ice 3 and Asteal Fire 3 respectively because like absolutely no where in the game ever mentions it except for the floating tooltip for each skill *ONLY* when you are in the respective phases. Until like level 64 (I was in Bhardem's Meddle ehen I learned this) I thought you had to use Tranpose to switch elements every single time. I literally learned it mid pull by accident when either I hit one of the buttons or hovered over them and noticed the cast time was way shorter. My DPS spiked dramatically mid dungeon.
The halved cast time thing for Black Mage is mentioned in Aspect Mastery III, which you learn at level 35. However, given that it is a trait - making it easy to miss - and Aspect Mastery II at level 20 ONLY had the +1 stack effect, it is very easy to assume Aspect Mastery III is just that again right? It is quite awkward, because to put the information somewhere you will see it, Fire 1, 2, 3 and Blizzard 1, 2, 3 would have enormous tooltips!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I mean literally all it needs is just a line on Fire 3 and Blizzard 3 mentioning the cast times. I also believe there's an issue where it never mentions that Fell Cleave also reduces the cast time of Infuriate by 5 seconds whereas the tooltip for whatever the AoE skill is does. I only know that Fell Cleave does that from noticed the CD for Infuriate jumping when I use it
@IosLocarth the reason it should be noted on all the spells that interact across the elements, is because af3 makes *all* your ice spells take half the time to cast, even if it really only matters for some of them. The same applies for ui3 and fire spells 😊
The reason it is like that for warrior is because the fell cleave interaction is stated on the trait enhanced infuriate learned at 66. As inner chaos and chaotic cyclone are not listed in the trait (for whatever reason), they have to mention the same interaction separately.
It isn't always consistent with traits and tooltips though, let's not forget that black mages fire starter and thundercloud procs are traits too, they just get embedded on the relevant actions as well 🤔
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I don't think the infuriate trait mentions Fell Cleave or Inner Chaos. I believe it only mentions Chaotic Cyclone and Steel Cyclone iirc. I can't check at the moment though so I'm not sure
@IosLocarth enhanced infuriates description written word for word:
"Reduces Infuriate recast time by 5 seconds upon landing Inner Beast, Steel Cyclone, Fell Cleave, or Decimate on most targets."
It is quite fascinating that it mentions inner beast and steel cyclone since they haven't been accessible alongside enhanced infuriate since shadowbringers released 😅
I basically never play ninja, so I thought doton did more, thankfully - as I rarely ever touch ninja, no one has experienced my single dotons in hard content
The only time I use Yukikaze and Hagakure is for filler to align my rotation with 60 second rotations.
(some hardcore sweaty SAM raider main) "iT7s nUte Op7imAL" lol
its so cursed i love it
The first kind of ice mage you describe isn’t making a mistake; they’re making a choice. Watch Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft by Folding Ideas.
I have watched that video, in fact I have made a video inspired by it, about why it is OK to suck at ffxiv! 😁
I just don't think it is quite the same in this case with the ice mage 😅 although you are right they are making a choice!
The ninja one hurts me so much. There are so many reactions now at 90. Ive definitely accidentally used doton inatead of a different muddra but i can't imagine doing that on purpose.
My 1.93 SAM lets me use a rotation that doesn’t use hagakure at all.
Heh. tbh in the old msq roulette i would sometime ask permission to ice mage
Beh but if we not try in a savage...
3:52 it's 'this' reason that Monk is so fucking annoying! Just reduce the DoT's timer to match the damage buff!
Haha, that would certainly make even the proper rotation much easier too! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh It's bad enough being fully optimal and keeping the positionals right. But 'then' we're forced to do 6 different combos?
Anyone who hits high charts as a monk definitely knows what they're doing
@@ImPersonNation It's definitely not for the faint of heart. But if they streamlined the combo they'd probably have to retool the entire class, because that's where the entire class complexity lies and what makes it unique from other melee rotations. I'd rather they removed or reduced the positional requirements if they were to reduce its complexity
Ah, ice mage. When I first tried THM back in StB when I tried the trial period, I was one of those. When I went back in EW I actually, yknow. Knew about the ice mage memes, and avoided annoying the people I played with. Very easy newbie trap if you aren't familiar with how ffxiv does elements (ie it doesn't, really, not for players).
That is a great way to put it! 😂
"yeah players don't get to choose to be specific elements!" 😂
Similar note to rotations, I've been watching Mrhappy's class retrospectives and... yeah the game is in a better state than it was. I'll take this weirdness over the 2.0 and 3.0 normalcy.
Yeah, back in the day, jobs just had more random stuff, which sometimes led to absolutely ridiculous rotations in the name of optimization ^^'
I simply cannot follow your explanation of Infinite Paradox BLM despite watching this segment 3 times over. Am I dumb?
The infinite paradox is absurdly ridiculous in its own right. My explanation might not have been the best either I will admit, so I don't think you are dumb 😊
The general idea is to use instant spells and tools that give you instant spells to avoid casting. The specific express purpose is to not stop to cast. This is mainly done through maximizing the amount of casts of ice paradox you can, since it's one of the only reliably available instant spells black mage has 😅
But it is a very weird rotation, so don't worry about it if it doesn't really make sense to you!
DK monk is better if you ignore reality and how numbers work
When it comes to BLM I combine two different play styles that of a quick Cast BLM and a Paradox BLM I alternate between High Blizzard II and High Fire II this lets me keep on the move a bit more while throwing out spells at a faster rate because the cast time is cut by a fair amount when alternating cast and casting paradox and xenoglossy when they are available so that the enemy gets pelted by spells and my MP never runs out either
iid rather have fun and do something different then sit there and spam the same button over and over in a row like a robot
Usually you'd hope the most fun way to play Is also the most effective way to play, but of course that wouldn't be true for everyone 😅
Infinite paradox... does it work better with more or less spell speed?
It works better the less speed you have because you need at least 2 GCDs per Transpose, and as Transpose has a cooldown of 5 seconds, this can be difficult to make work consistently at higher speeds. Similarly, slower speeds gives more time for things like Triple cast, Sharpcast and Polyglots to regenerate to keep it going! ^^
@@CaetsuChaijiCh maybe I stink at black mage but I didn't really notice a difference between it and spamming fire 4. I probably just stink at black mage
Infinite paradox is generally weaker than a normal rotation, and it's specific value is in being usable while moving. However, as others have pointed out, optimally you'd much rather use your limited mobility options as needed instead of relying on infinite paradox, although, it would be much better than doing nothing if you find yourself having to run!
The infinite paradox one is definitely something that is viable as you said for high mobility phases. Usually people meme on BLM for high mobility phases and say "oh poor BLM will loose all dps now that its just moving" and if you know how to switch between normal rotation to infinite paradox, you can show them that its not the case. Definitely worth learning if you love BLM and know how to do the normal rotation by heart already.
IT IS NOT VIABLE. Good BLMs utilize all of the different non standard lines for extreme movement situations, however, even this is not required since you'll always have enough movement resources even when playing fully standard BLM, with all of your procs and triple / swift casts.
Non standard provides better movement WITH additional potency gains, meanwhile infinite paradox deals consistently less damage than even the standard rotation, while only being a small bit more mobile (when compared to standard using the same resources that you'd need for infinite paradox).
Infinite paradox WAS and IS only a meme, and is ALWAYS worse than regular BLM, unless you have completely misused all of your movement resources, but in that case you should work on your fundamentals instead of learning this super clunky, low damage rotation.
"in ooother RPGs it is allowed for a Mage to choose an element to specialize in"
Really trying to avoid saying World of Warcraft lol
I mean, many rpgs tend to do this, but you are right that wow is a very very strong example here 🤣
what am i watching? ._.
Nothing will ever top dk monk in 6.0. Those idiots on the dev team frontloaded potency too much on the earlier combo abilities so it actually was giving up nothing but the boot shine crit which you could still get obviously.
Why is blm cursed
I think the free form feel of the job just leads to a lot of opportunities to misunderstand, or free style, making it seem very cursed 😅
because it starts on a high floor and has one of the highest ceilings in terms of job difficulty as it depends on the encounter
This is why I hate this game. There’s no variation. Do it the right way or don’t play
that's how every game with competitive aspects works. people will always boil down the optimal way to play something, no matter how complex, because video games are based on numbers and therefore something WILL be the mathematically best option. but that doesn't stop you from playing as wrong as you want, almost everything in this game outside of week 1 savage or ultimates is forgiving enough for an ice mage or a zero damage healer, you just need to accept that if you're gonna play a class the opposite of how it's designed to be played, some people will probably get annoyed and that's fine
@@rainyglow The one way around it is by adding more RNG to your rotation (through proccs for example), that way the optimal order of pressing buttons isn't as set in stone as it is atm. But I think they're hesitant to do so because it makes the class' performance inconsistent and hard to balance around, and also increases the cognitive load on players (potentially reducing the complexity they can put into boss mechanics for fear of overloading).
As I see it, this is the mechanical divide between WoW and FFXIV design philosophies in a nutshell, WoW places the a large portion of complexity into reacting to randomness within your own class whereas FFXIV places almost all of it it in memorisation, coordination and proper movement/positioning.
Edit: Not saying FFXIV should try to be more like WoW, just using it as an example of what adding more RNg can look like