What GCD does Gunbreaker want?

Gunbreaker stands to gain the most from raw stats over speed bonuses, so whenever the gear contains mostly good stat types for 2.50, 2.50 tends to be the optimal speed unless a specific piece of content does not line up well for that speed.

Empirically, Gunbreaker has preferred 2.50 in the past three raid tiers and two out of three ultimates.

Faster speeds such as 2.40 are usually easier to prog on because they grant cooldown reduction to your GCD cooldowns, with the tradeoff being an average loss of 1% of your potential DPS if the gearset for 2.50 contains good stat types.

Mid-range speeds such as 2.45 are usually fight-specific selections that may beat 2.50 if the gear for 2.50 is poor or the gear for 2.45 is very good.

How difficult is Gunbreaker to learn?

Out of the four tanks, Gunbreaker arguably has the highest level of nuance for end-game optimization. The baseline rotation is not that complicated, but understanding and learning intuitively how to manage rotational errors will take more effort than some other jobs due to the fact that your primary GCD cooldowns are not simply given to your by your 60 or 120 second buff action, or pooled for use without being associated to a cooldown.

In relation to most jobs in this game, it is not that much more difficult to pick up or master, since most jobs in this game operate on the same principle of building and spending resources every 60 or 120 seconds.

How weave intensive is this job, and can you do a single-weave rotation?

The job is more weave-intensive than other tanks. Some GCD speeds also have ping requirements that you may not be able to meet, such as 2.45 requiring less than around ~50 ping to successfully execute without clipping your GCDs when starting the burst phase.

Single-weave rotations are possible now due to the removal of Rough Divide in Dawntrail. It may prove difficult to consistently execute a single-weave rotation during periods of high tank damage due to the necessity of mitigation usage, but this can usually be accomodated for by shuffling cooldowns/burst timing/mitigation timing around.

Is it worth it to hold No Mercy to secure better GCDs in No Mercy when I don't have Bloodfest?

No, it is not typically a good thing to hold your burst window because it loses potential future uses and places you outside of your party buffs, losing more than you gain by delaying.

In a timeless fight, every GCD you hold your burst phase ends up losing some fraction of a future burst phase depending on GCD speed. This loses more average DPS than the buffed GCD gains, unless you already know how the fight timeline plays out and you have determined that you do not lose cooldown usages from delaying. Even if you do not lose cooldown usages, you may still lose net DPS from the fact that you will push GCDs out of party raid buffs by delaying your burst phase.

How do I recover my rotation if I make mistakes?

The best case solution depends on what the “mistake” actually was. Remember that the basic guide’s priority order for your burst phase is not telling you to follow that as a list, it is a priority. If you can’t do a step in that list, move to the next one. If you can do a higher priority step in that list next GCD, do that one.

An example of a common mistake is delaying Gnashing Fang so that it comes off cooldown at the same position as Double Down in your burst phase. You can place Sonic Break in the place of where Gnashing Fang normally goes, and then move Gnashing Fang or Double Down to the place that Sonic Break would have gone if you had not made that mistake.

It’s fine to delay your burst window by a GCD if several cooldowns become severely misaligned from No Mercy, and the delay would help re-sort your burst actions. We try not to delay because it’s an average DPS loss, but so is running a rotation that is pushing cooldowns out of No Mercy.

Can you die while casting Superbolide?

Superbolide (along with other tank invulnerability actions) were updated to apply immediately upon the server receiving your request to use the action.

This means that the actual activation delay between pressing the button and becoming impervious is half of your ping, because that’s the time it took to send that action request to the server.

With that in mind, it should be effectively impossible to die after you’ve cast the action, but you can still die as you wait for the buff to activate on the server’s end to damage that was already prepared and applied to you at that moment.

What does Tenacity do, and why do tanks tend to minimize its use?

Tenacity has two effects that scale at different rates, with the first effect being a damage bonus that increases your damage by 0.1% per tier (similar to Determination), and the second effect being a mitigation bonus that decreases your damage taken by 0.1%.

The damage reduction scales relatively quickly, which can be valuable in situations where damage isn’t required (which usually isn’t the case, so we don’t prioritize this since our mitigation will cover the fight with or without Tenacity).

The damage boost scales somewhat slowly, at a rate equal to 80% of the tiering rate of Determination. This means that you get less damage boost per stat point invested, albeit not by a great difference.

Since every encounter can be covered by tank and healer mitigation tools without any Tenacity, there’s no reason to sacrifice DPS on best-in-slot sets (or progression sets) and potentially risk missing a DPS check that you could have made by having better stats on your gear.

You shouldn’t avoid Tenacity as a rule, though. It contributes to your overall damage, so if you have higher item level gear that has Tenacity, it’s definitely better than your lower item level gear.