Any plans to repurpose Jump and High Jump?

Jump and High Jump are rarely used except during Spirit Surge, in which case they're slightly less useless than using Spirit Jump and High Jump. High Jump has its occasional use when a Dragoon needs to shed hate and Super Jump isn't up, but Jump is still pretty useless. There's more gear out now that grants Jump TP Bonus, the problem is that all of the TP Bonus gear still doesn't make up for the fact that: 1) Spirit Jump still generates more TP and 2) Spirit Jump delivers a critical hit with a Wyvern. Maybe Jump needs a bit more tweaking to make it situationally better than Spirit Jump, perhaps giving it a high chance of delivering a 'Stun' effect(extremely accurate but short duration like Weapon Bash).

Also the effect of High Jump during Spirit Surge seems rather pointless. When fighting current content, it seems like most NMs in Delve or Incursion are either immune to the effect of TP removal, have a high rate of Regain, or can use special attacks regardless of TP. Prior testing shows that the amount of TP removed when using High Jump during Spirit Surge is 1:10(or what used to be 1:1 under the old TP mechanism; in other words 200 damage will remove 2000 TP). In situations where an NM is readying a TP move, if I High Jump them with Spirit Surge active and deal 2,000 damage, I would expect that all of the mob's TP is erased, yet the TP move still activates for some reason.


Also maybe create a JA similar to "Spontaneity/Warrior's Charge/Assassin's Charge/Manawell//Perfect Counter", all of these JAs are like 1-time use or short duration SP abiities with long recasts. Spontaneity is like a one-shot Chainspell and Manawell is like a one-shot Manafont. The JA for DRG could be called "High Wind", that when used allows the next Jump to have a shortened recast like a one-shot "Fly High", or maybe let it enhance the power of the next Jump, not unlike FF14's "Power Surge". It could add a bonus to the next Jump used; when Jump is used after High Wind, damage is increased 250% (making its raw damage potential stronger than Spirit Jump even accounting for the crit). When used with High Jump, the recast duration is halved. When used with Spirit Jump, defense is ignored. When used with Soul Jump, it becomes 100% accurate. An alternative suggestion is to split the Jump timers. Having them share timers would make sense if all Jumps were situational useful, but Spirit and Soul Jump really are the most useful about 99.9% of the time over Jump and High Jump. The only situation right now where High Jump is useful is in a 6-man party with a Paladin tank against a mob that can potentially kill me in a single TP move. Under the conditions where I am fighting such an opponent and I am generating more hate than Super Jump can shed or the Paladin can handle THEN High Jump is useful. But these situations are extremely rare(like fighting a battle with a PLD+Melee DD setup where the mob has hate-resetting TP moves).
Splitting the timers would preclude having to adjust the power or mechanics of any of the jump abilities in my opinion. Another option is a charged timer like Scholar's strategms or Corsair's Quickdraw. Allowing us to stock up to 5 charges of Jumps with a 45s time on Jumps. This would allow us to mix up our Jumps, perhaps making Spirit and Super Jump require 2 charges and Soul Jump requiring 3, so we can decide whether 2 Jumps for 2 charges or 2 Spirit Jumps for 4 charges. This coupled with an increase to Jump's damage bonus would create situations where using 2 Jumps would deal more raw damage than 1 Soul Jump but provide less TP.

Although we have a pet, compared to SAM WAR or THF, DRG has very few JAs and no 'stances', so having a JA to boost our capabilities once in a while in a pinch is nice. Although DRG got a huge boost from the +Attack/Haste/Defense with Wyvern present a few patches ago, DRG still suffers greatly when we die with a full HP Wyvern and lose our Wyvern for upwards of 20 minutes. So to have some JAs to use to enhance ourselves so we aren't completely crippled by not having a Wyvern would be great.

Also while I have your attention, any plans at the moment to increase Wyvern breath damage now that accuracy and charge time have been addressed? A good start would be to change the formula to use MAX HP instead of Current HP would be a step towards bolstering breath damage. Right now, with breath+ gear it does ~450, a nice 25-30% boost to this so it deals ~600-650 damage would be optimal given DRG's weapon skills are comparatively weak(20% penalty on drakesbane! WHY? Why would Drakesbane be too strong to deserve an update in power yet Tachi: Fudo/Victory Smite/Resolution got an upgrade to power?)

Ophannus, I don't always agree with you but you hit the nail right on the head in this post. The issues above are really the only things left that need to be fixed for DRG.

For those of you that don't feel like reading his epic tome.. here is the shorthand:

1. Our low lvl jumps need to be improved / tweaked
2. If they aren't improved the timers need to be split
3. DRG Needs some kind of self buff or stance and always has, so that it is effective on its own (without a wyvern)
4. If we die we are useless for 20 minutes
5. Healing Breath formula needs to be reworked after the increase in breath speed
6. Drakesbane wasn't touched in the WS update and it should have been

I think the Devs have done some great things for DRG recently but the job still needs a ton of work. I'm in a much better spot as a mythic DRG but I'm in the minority when it comes to actual playerbase. The job has been poorly designed for years so I hope they keep tweaking it to try to make it better. It is, after all, one of the most iconic jobs in Final Fantasy history*– It deserves to be treated better.

Healing Breath formula doesn't need to be reworked itself, however, equipment that adds Wyvern HP+% needs to be changed to straight-up direct Wyvern HP. The Percent takes a few seconds to calculate, so even with /equipsets or macros, it will never be factored in the equation fast enough. Changing Vishap Brais to +250 HP or something would be better than the +23%.

A JA that gives +15% Attack 5% JA haste that lasts for 2 minutes, 5 min recast would be a great job ability, the trade off is it can only be used WITHOUT a wyvern. This will prevent people purposely killing the Wyvern to benefit from a strong buff, but simultaneously allow Dragoon to be not be worthless when we get one-shotted by a TP move within 30 seconds of using Call Wyvern.

The development team needs to FIRMLY understand this: no matter how many measure you take to increase Wyvern survivability Dragoons will always lose their wyverns due to no fault of their own due to 1) A slow cure. 2) Doom/Death spells(we can't use Holy Water on our Wyvern and Spirit Link is once every 90seconds, some Mobs use Doom more often), 3) Being one-shotted by an extremely powerful attack that deals more than our Max HP(Arrogance Incarnate/Ravenous Wail). None of these situations can be helped by increasing a Wyvern's defense or HP and is contingent on the Dragoon being KO'd(which KO's the Wyvern) and thus despite Steady Wing/Spirit Link, we cannot help but be disadvantaged for 20 minutes.

The +20% att/+20% Def/+10% haste is extremely powerful but in many cases we lose this boost extremely quickly and then we don't get a 'second chance' for quite some time. Perhaps let us shorten the recast time via job points(originally you said the developers would allow us to shorten recast with Merits but this never came to fruition). Most events are 30-40min, with such a fast paced battle system as now, can 20min job abilities really be justified? SP abilities were shortened to 1 hour, can't Call Wyvern be shortened to 10 minutes given that there's a higher prevalence of Doom/Death/severe damage aoe than there was at 75? 20min abilities should be shortened to 15 or 10 minutes.
Even "Circle" abilities used to be 30 seconds and 10 minute recast but were reduced to 3min duration 5 minute recast, why not Call Wyvern too? No matter how much defense/magic defense/HP/evasion/-Damage Taken%/Regen/Stoneskin, you give them, if the Wyvern dies to 'Death' or 'Doom' or the Dragoon dies to a 2900 damage Arrogance Incarnate or 8920 Ravenous Wail or within the first 5 minutes of a battlefield or Incursion, we're completely crippled, our DPS is reduced by like 65%.


The bonus for keeping our Wyvern alive does not need to be strengthened, the penalty for LOSING the Wyvern needs to be REDUCED(either by giving us a few new JAs, retooling Jump and High Jump, or shortening the Call Wyvern recast, or allowing Spirit Surge to be used without a Wyvern, in which case when used, a Wyvern is called in an enhanced state for 60 seconds like 'Rouse Wyvern'.

A well geared Dragoon with a Wyvern does maybe 5% more DPS than a MNK DRK or WAR, in actuality when parsed, but when the Wyvern is defeated, our DPS drops by more than HALF. This is a terrible trade-off.

I think the biggie is the call wyvern. Drg is the ONLY pet job that cannot just send in the pet. Also throughout its history it's the only pet job where the primary DPS source is the player, not the pet. and I'm cool with that (granted with the nerfing to other job's pets that is no longer the case, my summoner hits harder than my avatars for melee and that is deeply disturbing). What that meant is that wyverns are the only pets that actually are required to have 2 or more sources feeding the mob TP for it to even function (the wyvern and the master for those with issues counting), and wyverns, even with all the defensive work from SE still die faster than other pets because of it. Now, with how much of the job's contribution being centered in the wyvern we simply cannot absorb that loss, nor can our parties (granted, Spirit link means we are the only pet job that can frequently heal our pet for free and the only job that can get buffs onto our pet with Empathy). Without our Wyvern we are there to Angon, that's pretty much it. Something is seriously wrong with that picture if you ask me. We need a means to recall the wyvern quicker than 20 minutes, even if it's in a weakened state or something. I don't really think there's any disagreement on that. I play all 4 pet jobs and I wouldn't be complaining it's unfair for Dragoon to have faster pet recall. As a beast I do think it's unfair we can zone and not lose our pet, but that's about it.