4.0 FFXIV Bard Opener! HD

hihi~ the opener is foes precast at 2s (infusion) - stormbite (bloodletter + raging strikes) - caustic bite (minuet + empyreal arrow) - straight shot (late battle voice) - iron jaws (sidewinder) - heavy shot - heavy shot - heavy shot (bloodletter) - heavy shot - iron jaws (barrage empyreal) - straight shot this is if there is not any clipping, but if you do clip you need to iron jaws earlier to make sure you get both raging strikes + pot on your iron jaws. ----- you need to make sure you delay bv to the second half of your gcd entirely because it will potentially miss at the beginning half of the gcd. this will rarely happen but it does happen on occasion even at my ping which is 25ms. ----- in your opener if you have no sch or drg you should be using your pitch perfect stacks at 3. otherwise you should be using them at 2 with any other crit buff. this is also the same throughout your entire rotation, use 3 if stratagem + litany aren’t up but use 2 if they are both up. make sure both are up on you/the boss before using at 2 otherwise it is a potency loss. ----- after your foes runs out in your opener it is better to use refresh there rather than getting 1-2 extra ticks of the initial foes. it is better because of being able to get the 2nd foes up quicker and getting full duration on it as well. the easiest way to see this is if you go into susano ex and use foes at the start and refresh after opener your mp will be full by the time you get to sword phase. ----- using dots first increases your chances at getting procs. the original argument by aiuri is as seen here: dot (1 tick) dot (2 ticks) ss (4 ticks) ij (6 ticks) vs ss - dot (1 tick) - dot (2 ticks) - ij (4 ticks) dot crits are so ridiculously strong now because they were buffed from 50% chance to proc a reset on crit to 100% chance to proc a reset on crit. this change actually really buffed bard a ton. sadly the job is very rng reliant because of this, but theres still many things you can do in your rotation to make sure you get the most out of your dps! ----- if you clip your gcd in this opener you may have to iron jaws earlier as seen in the first clip. I clipped my gcd with a triple proc pitch perfect and I had to iron jaws early to make sure I got both my pot and raging strikes on my dots. snapshotting dots is extremely important due to being able to essentially get double duration out of your buffs. this is a very common thing on bard specifically because of how broken iron jaws is being able to snapshot both of your buffs at once like that. you should get comfortable snapshotting dots to make sure you can get the most dps. you should be snapshotting stratagem at the start and at the finish of it. crit is way too important at this point in time to where bards dps is based solely off of procs. in paeon, you shouldn’t worry about this too much considering paeon is very weak since any proc past 4 is entirely useless. ----- your general song rotation should