The timing sequence for Damage Reflect for Empress Cygnus.

We largely decided to go crash -> bind because it let the DS leave the orb skill (dark meta?) on without worrying about the passive attacks accidentally triggering DR. This was a HUGE pain when the glitch finally got fixed.

Pig/stun is occasionally an issue, but we run with a DrK and Pally so the odds of both getting pigged are pretty low since myself and the bish are pigs 95% of the time. One of my buff macros is now Pig 4 lyf. After we killed her a few times and really got the patterns down we just crash or bind first depending on convenience.

It's a small matter of preference, really either works if done properly.

Technically, whichever hits first will allow full use of dark meta orbs to be used on her. So order isn't big deal really. If you bind/crash whenever she does an attack, that's a 100% guaranteed success, can't mess that one up ever really (exception of CD issues). If she does a DR buff and you go and use crash/bind afterwards well that's kinda your fault for being impatient. To put it simply, she attacks slow so make use of her slow attacks and bind/crash when she actually does something. Bind has a huge range, so it never hurts to stand back and wait until the right time to cast it, crash however has limited range and the only time you really care about the range issue is when she uses too many tornado + flame DoT attacks and you gotta run back to heal yourself.

The only real problem I've ever had was when our timing sometimes goes out of sync and we forget when the next effect CD is worn off, like for instance using bind every 1min, which sometimes we bind too early and it would actually "miss." When the miss happens, it doesn't even matter if you used crash or bind, if the party wasn't paying attention and thought your skill worked (most people won't even bother watching that your skill missed) they would've kept attacking until they potentially killed themselves and/or you.

edit: well you can scratch off the 1st paragraph of mines really, its kind of like what you said already. When it comes down to how few people and if it ever only comes to just 1 crasher and 1 binder, I'd suggest bind > crash mostly for v2 summon. Just to get that CD kicking in and so nothing goes wrong save for the person using it at the same time as DR buff or after DR buffs appears which shouldn't happen usually unless you messed up the first time.