Originally Posted by
Taim Meich
Regarding AoE rotations: The more Flares, the better, the least time spend in UI, the better. So, putting this into practice, there's two very close rotations DPS wise you can do:
1. Fire III > Swiftcast Flare > Transpose > (Fire III as soon as the first MP tick occurs > Flare > Transpose)*n
2. Fire III > Swiftcast Flare > Transpose > (Fire III as soon as the first MP tick occurs > Fire II > Flare > Transpose)*n
The first one will have some downtime between waiting for Transpose to be up and waiting for the MP tick, but will fit more Flares per time unit. In the second one, the Fire II allows for Transpose to be up every time, but makes the Flares come slightly slower.
In theory, the second rotation should have enough time to complete before Transpose being up (3.5 s Fire III + 3 s Fire II + 4 s Flare + 0.5 s Transpose = 11 s), but since the time spent waiting for the MP tick counts towards the Transpose cooldown, it's usually up 1-2 seconds before Fire II finishes.
I've parsed both rotations on the Coerthas training dummies for a while, and the results are so far inconclusive, as the DPS results, using ACT, still vary too much from test to test (about 5-10 minutes doing the rotation each test). I guess it's because of the small sample (4-5 data points on the central dummy, 3-4 data points on the sides dummies per Transpose), so I'll have to keep trying, to see if they even out at some moment.
What seems clear to me is that, all the time spent using Fire II more than what's strictly necessary to wait for Transpose is lost DPS because a single Flare will already do more damage than 2 Fire IIs.