Splitting JA timers

[Babekeke]

Well this seems to be a fairly firm "no thanks" to splitting the timers on these terms.

The majority vote seems to be keep spirit/soul on the timers they are, swap merits to spirit/soul, and raise jump/high jump back to their original timers.

Or just leave them adjoined.

[ManaKing]

The big issue I've had with DRG since they added the new jumps is that they are just better than the originals. They become less attractive when your pet is dead, which will happen if you are fighting anything serious. And then you are left with no real choices. Jump and High Jump don't really offer anything outside of Spirit and Soul Jump when your wyvern isn't present except some pre 75 gearing choices that add significantly smaller TP gains VS full strength Spirit and Soul Jumps.

So you split the JA timers AND you penalize Spirit and Soul Jumps. What are DRGs actually getting out of this? Spirit and Soul Jumps were capable of placating DRGs because they offered a direct improvement over what they had originally, and it was very much needed because other jobs were getting much farther ahead. The other jobs are still outclassing DRG, and this solution doesn't offer DRG any sort of direct improvement, unlike plenty of jobs new SP abilities.

For this kind of a change to be valued, Jump and High Jump have to be improved significantly. You could also not increase the recast timers on Spirit and Soul Jumps and keep merits affecting them. Not to mention, can we even use both of our SP abilities together effectively? It really doesn't looks like that is the case, which once again, WAR beats us out hard. Why bring a DRG when you can bring a WAR?

No matter what, DRG needs changes if you expect people to play it in high end content because presently it loses too much when it doesn't have a Wyvern and it loses even more when a mob is strong VS piercing, like Undead are.

[Cair]

Dragoon already struggles to keep up with other DD, and can't even come close without the use of a Mythic weapon (you're looking at 40% less damage output without). Don't bring it down even further. The proposed changes would be a very unwelcome nerf. Leave it how it is, or if the timers are separated, leave Jump and High Jump with the higher recasts. Allow merits to affect both.

[Calysto]

while i'd like to have all jumps available, this change would not be good...

why do you have to make it so bad for us seriously ?
drg can't even keep up with other 2 handed (drk/sam/war) with wyvern.
we may gain a bit more tp with the jumps(i'm not even sure given sam is sam, war has double attack and retaillation and drk got absorb tp)
their ws can easily do twice what our bests do.(got camlaan's 90 and caped stardiver, with ws sets. can't come close to thoses jobs ws damage.)
of course, wyvern's damage is far from making up for the difference.
without wyvern it's not even worth looking.
yet sam and war can tank to some extent, drk has enfeebles.
all thoses jobs have buffs.
drg only defensive abilities are evading hate and a 1 mn recast heal.(in a damage dealer situation).
we don't have any buff of our own(not counting useless circle <.<).
we HAVE to keep our wyvern alive not only so it help a little with damages, but because not having it would hurt our damages even more.
(i'm not sure what would cost the most, the loss of the wyvern damage by itself or the loss of OUR damages by spirit/soul jumps).

yet what you offer is nothing but a nerf...
where is your "balance" ?

[Caketime]

Balance is playing Canasta behind the couch with Jesus and Garfield.

[Ophannus]

DRG is highly competive in non Legion situations. I've parsed second or third in PW or in many VW parties with 99 Rag's getting equal buffs, with average stardivers doing 2-3k+ etc. The problem is once you get rid of temp items, DRG falls behind in the buff department. While DRK can Souleater/LR for huge buff to their WS, DRG has no self WS buff without /WAR and DRG can't /WAR in Legion since we lose Hasso/Third Eye. Since DRK has LR, they don't need Berserk so they get to enjoy Hasso without worrying about losing out on much Attack. Obviously WAR doesn't lose Berserk since it's their ability so they benefit from /SAM fully. SAM has Hasso and Third Eye natively so they /WAR is an obvious choice. DRG is the only 2handed job that must choose between an attack buff subjob or /SAM and for endgame we have to use /SAM unless it's in VW where Atmacites/Temps make up for Store TP/Hasso.

If DRG had it's own form of Hasso that increased Attack/Attack Speed or made us Ignore Defense so our lowish Attack Value mattered more, we'd be more competitive. As it is now Stardiver is an amazing WS--but DRG lacks the Attack and job abilities to make it useful on high level targets. WAR and DRK both have several JA's to enhance the strength of their WS. Bloodrage/Warcry/Restraint/Last Resort/Souleater/Scarlet Delirium etc/=. DRG has not a single ability to enhance our WS, you know why? Because the Wyvern was designed to use an Elemental Breath after each WS. Elemental Breaths on non-NMs do fantastic damage to bridge the gap. I can go into Abyssea, pop a 4k Drakesbane and my Wyvern will do a 450 damage breath attack after it. That 400 breath is supposed to bridge the gap between a 4k Drakesbane and a 4.5k Ukko's Fury fully buffed. Now on NMs(specifically newer NMs post WoTG), these new NMs have HEAVY resistance to breath damage. This was probably done to preemptively shoot down any attempts at cheesing the mob by exploiting spells and WS that do low, albeit consistent damage over time and ignore physical and magical defenses i.e Atonement, BLU Breaths, Wyvern Breaths, Chi Blast, Spirits Within. This also negates the Wyvern's usefulness almost fully, as Wyvern Breaths go from doing 300-350 damage to regular mobs outside of Abyssea at 99, to about 20 damage on NMs. Literally 20-50. And make no mistake, that's unresisted. 5/5 Strafe does not help because it's not a resist, these NMs simply have "Breath Damage Taken-90%" or something. This is painful, as a Wyvern will hit these high level NMs for 50-65 damage but deal 20-50 damage from a Breath. Since DRG uses WS a lot in a Legion scenario(Fully buffed Marches+Haste), the Wyvern's damage is so terrible because instead of actually meleeing(which does 60-65 damage) they stop and delay their attacks to charge up a Breath attack which actually does LESS(20-50) than if they just melee'd. This is why I advocated a JA pet command for DRG to inhibit their breath attacks and strengthen their attack speed and damage/attack ratings. If a Wyvern never used a Breath unless you activate smiting/restoring breath, it would feasibly hold on to its TP, which means Spirit Link becomes another JA to grant us TP, another useful tool.

Instead of splitting Jump timers, how about focusing on

1a) Giving DRG a stance, or self buff ability that increases Attack by a large amount.
1b) The ability could also increase Attack Speed slightly, less than Hasso, like 5% or so.
2a) Replace Critical Defense Bonus traits with just the first tier of Critical Attack Bonus. Just one tier is fine.
2b) Attack Bonus III at 99.
3) Make Gungnir's Defense Down 25% and replace/overwrite Angon.
4) Make Angon start at 25% and scale up to 30% with AF2+2 hands to make it competitive with Tourbillion/Ageha(only if these get fixed, DRG spends gil to use this JA and merit points as well, this ought to be the best Defense Down ability, especially for its recast otherwise)
5) Pet command to restrict AUTO BREATHs from Wyvern; speeds up Wyvern Attacks by 15-25% and strengthens Wyvern's Attack Power(Not STR, not DMG. ATTACK)
6) Remove the Attack Penalty to Drakesbane. Have you seen how powerful Resolution is? Have you seen how powerful Tachi: Shoha is? Drakesbane has such a low base Critical Hit modifier at 100% TP that removing the Attack Penalty from it won't make it anywhere near as powerful as Ukko/Resolution/Shoha. Drakesbane is basically a slightly stronger Penta Thrust with a 5% chance of critical at 100% TP if they removed the Attack Penalty, but it will at least give us another decent WS to use endgame.
7) Don't split Jump timers unless you buff up Jump and High Jump TP or damage considerably.
8) Either reclassify Wyvern Breaths into another damage category or ease up NM's resistence to breaths. Honestly the only jobs that even use Breath damage are BLU, DRG and sometimes PLD. These are 3 jobs that could USE enhanced damage versus NMs and yet they're crippled. Having BLU use Breath Attacks actually gives them an avenue to deal unique damage versus endgame NMs yet this was never explored, even though they have many pieces of gear that Enhance Breaths(Mavi Tathlum; Mirage Keffeyih) and dozens of Breath spells. Paladins wouldn't mind being able to Atonement certain NMs when they aren't getting buffed. Is a PLD doing a 500-700 Atonement every once every few minutes that terrible when DRKs and WARs are busting out 4k Resolutions every 8 seconds?
9) Give us a final Jump that shares a timer with Super Jump. There's already an animation for it in the .dats files and it APPEARs to be a damage version of Super Jump(comparable to Freya's Jump in FFIX). The player Jumps up like Super Jump but in this case is still vulnerable to damage even though the animation shows them off screen, then the DRG charges up energy and throws their lance down causing heavy damage followed by the Dragoon landing and pulling the lance out of the target) ( Animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv13Cm2YCpQP)

[Mirage]

Please do not by any means lower the frequency of Soul Jump and Spirit Jump. The TP gain from those two jumps is very important.

[Ophannus]

I realized that if they reduce 2hours to 1hour and then we can merit them down to 30minutes, we'll most likely see Call Wyvern be changed to a 10minute timer. They also reduced Circle abilities and Breaker abilities to 5 minutes recently. I think they're changing the JA timers to reflect the faster pace of battle. If they think having 2hrs on a 30min recast is ok, I'm sure they'll reduce Call Wyvern to a 10min recast, which I think is a good compromise.

[Sekundes]

It's been said by many but just to reinforce that idea... I'm not okay with the current conditions for splitting jump timers. Drg needs a buff, not a nerf... I honestly don't see it as a problem to just separate jump timers with no changes in the recast as drg is already behind most DD's.