Meet WoA's Dyna-officer

That's right! I've been given the (dubious?) honor of leading Dynamis runs for WoA (Whisper of Abaddon). In previous incarnations of the LS we had more players and a fair share of leader-types. Some better than others, but we did well. Kawas and Boostuning used to lead Dynamis, and recently it's been up to Helly for the most part. Before the recent Dynamis - Xarcabard I must have done something right to inspire such confidence!

It must have been because of how awesome I am that I was picked. You know, my rugged manliness and all. Though it's probably because Tipira trusts me. Thanks Tipi!

We now have a pretty accurate list of everyone's jobs. I color coded it to make several categories of jobs and then rearranged the columns so the job types are grouped. It gives a very good overview of who will likely be coming on which job. I don't mind leading the actual run, but setting up the alliance seems like a hell of a chore. I can never again complain about it not being optimal since I will (in all likelihood) be calling everyone's jobs. Something I'd like to try:

RDM and BRD in DD pt focussed purely on buffing
Using this awesome spread sheet you can give a pretty accurate estimate of your melee damage output. When I put in my SAM's gear and target Greater Colibri (Lv 82) I come out to about 34,37 damage per second. Now add Haste, Victory March and Minuet4 and let it recalculate..*beep* *boop* *bleep* 58,84 DPS! That's more than a 70% improvement. Now, in a party with 4 DD's this is like adding 2,8 DD's. Check again and you can reach even more DPS if you replace the Minuet4 with a Madrigal2. Now I don't know where the typical accuracy of our DD's is in Dynamis, but I'm willing to bet they don't always use food and so Madrigal will probably help more.

A while ago (no more than a few months) I believed that a single bard in a merit or exp PT was like adding a pimped DD to the group but with the added benefit of refresh for the healer and a chain puller. This damage calculator sheet has shown me how dramatic a single Bard can improve a group's killing potential. One shouldn't forget how important hasting the DD's is here. A RDM in a DD party would be less likely to slack off if they realized how much extra damage they were providing.

Crowd tank
I've mentioned this before. I believe that improving our killing speed and crowd management will let us "beat Dynamis". For crowd management the sleepers play the most important role. However, if left to their own devices, they will kick the bucket eventually. (I just used two idioms in one sentence!) Introduce someone to take all the damage and attention from the crowd and all of a sudden sleepers need only press a macro when they see something move. Did they waste their AoE sleep on a single woken up mob? No problem, then next few that wake up won't be coming after them anyway. Tarutaru are so fragile.

There are several ways to do this. Two things are key:

1. Building hate on multiple targets.
2. Survive multiple targets stomping you in the face.

Hate-wise you can choose to cure the Sleeper so you get on all the mobs' hate lists. From there you can spam hate generating spells on yourself (barspells and cure cheats). AoE sleeps have surprisingly low Enmity values. This means a crowd tank only needs to cure himself for 250 HP to overcome the cumulative enmity form a single Sleepga(1 or 2). Of course he should gain and maintain certain amount of VE so that he doesn't lose his small CE margin in one hit. Still, it doesn't take a large amount of MP to accomplish this. Blue Mage has AoE spells that don't wake up targets, even as a sub (Sheep Song). This is an easier way of getting on the crowd's hate list. However, the range of most of these spells is pretty limited.

In order to survive, the crowd tank needs to go all out "turtle". PLD seems a good choice for their cure spells, high HP and high defense. They can sub RDM for barspells, Phalanx and Stoneskin. WAR sub works fine with defender. BLU sub works better IMO because of Cocoon and it's the obvious choice if you have a SCH to Accession Phalanx/Stoneskin you. They should probably use an Earth/Terra Staff and not skimp on defense food. RDM/BLU or BLU/WAR could do this too. Blue mage has an amazing access to defensive measures. They can wear all the good PDT gear that RDM can and they have native access to Cocoon which leaves their subjob open for something like Defender or Sentinel.

I'm not naive enough to believe these things are magic pills that will fix everything. It still requires a certain amount of player skill and for everyone to play their part. More importantly, it requires the right people with the right jobs to be available. *catious optimism*