How to Dragoon Per Second: A DPS Paradigm

Just tried A1 Normal with some of your tips @JackFross and managed 1035.67 dps according to my friend's parser. On a random dummy I now do 1210.30 dps ^w^ Still practicing though, but thanks for your help so far.

Quick question: Whats the DPS range I should be hitting at ilv182 with a Hive Weapon? I'm hitting around 1100 to 1150 on a dummy without food/party buffs.

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Originally Posted by Ninjah2r

@dervy and others from this thread.


Done a parsing vid for around 4 minutes, I mostly parsed myself on 3-3.30 minutes, never went full 4 minutes.
(I usually do better, parsed 1271 w/o partybuff no food no pots at i192 @3 minutes. Computer is kinda old and running camtasia on it + the usual latency made me lag and therefore killed my dps a bit). Hopefully I'll get some tips from you guys on what I can do better or not, keeping up BOTD while doing the 2 GK per B4B really gets tricky for me with all the latency, I even tried just doing my ID-DI-CT combo without weaving anything in to keep up botd at the last second but it didn't work out :c

https://youtu.be/47ng8iSEZ9E

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If it's not rude to ask, can anyone give me feedback/tips on my parsing here? I'm still trying to perfect my 2 GK per 1 B4B, but it's impossible at 2.42 gcd. I still need the helmet so I'll go back to 2.41, but might need 2.39 due to latency.

@Shin: sounds like you're on par. Might be able to push for 1200.

@Ninjah: forgot to mention it before. the video is set to private, so nobody can watch it to help you.

@Dual: Nice! :D Glad I could help! Keep up the good work!

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

It's just in the opener mainly, but a few do line up and can be double weaved later in the rotation. For the opener you want to double weave litany+B4B, IR+BoTD, Leg Sweep+Power surge, Life Surge+GK. You don't necessarily have to double IR+BotD if you aren't using a potion, but since these are both 60 sec cds they'll come up together later in the rotation as well.

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just to clarify. for example it'd be like TT-VT-(litany+b4b)-FT

thatd be an example of double weave right?

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Originally Posted by ErzaScarlet77

just to clarify. for example it'd be like TT-VT-(litany+b4b)-FT

thatd be an example of double weave right?

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Yes, that's double weave, do you even read the first post, there's a video there of Dervy doing triple double-weave there, on advanced dragoon opener, I'd recommend to watch it.

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Originally Posted by ErzaScarlet77

just to clarify. for example it'd be like TT-VT-(litany+b4b)-FT

thatd be an example of double weave right?

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Yes. Here's a thing I made a while ago and posted on reddit. It's been edited with corrections Dervy and others gave me after I posted it there. I think it's all good now.
http://puu.sh/jTQhQ/ec6f6b1021.png

Might help people who don't like walls of text understand the meat of the class.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

@Shin: sounds like you're on par. Might be able to push for 1200.

@Ninjah: forgot to mention it before. the video is set to private, so nobody can watch it to help you.

@Dual: Nice! :D Glad I could help! Keep up the good work!

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It should be fine now, thanks for the headsup!

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Originally Posted by Ninjah2r

It should be fine now, thanks for the headsup!

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Aside from missing that re-up of BotD at one point, it looks pretty good to me. A couple things to note is that your GCD is slow. If you rewatch the opening, most of your GCDs are delayed quite a lot, either due to the way you're pressing buttons or latency or what have you, they're slow. That's a big thing, especially as of 3.0. You might be able to pull off the 2 gsk per b4b at your SS and could just be missing it due to GCD lag on your end.

I'd upload a 3 minute video of myself... But my upload speed won't let me, guess I'll just have to watch someone else's vid and learn from there :(

After some practice, this is my rotation:

https://video-lax3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hv...bc&oe=55EE540F

I've always used BoTD before chaos thrust and I see in your opener it was changed from that to now used before diembowel. What difference does that make?

The biggest change I notice is it allows me a clear and definite time to use my potion, since it's difficult to weave it with anything else, and it gives the potion enough time to affect my 4th combo.

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Originally Posted by LiquidSwordz

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It's up in the OP and in the image I linked one page back. As Dual said, it opens a space for Potion and is the optimal way to perform the opener. Every other time you should use BotD before CT or FT. Or, if you're NOT using Potions, just use HT>BL+B4B>ID>IR>Dis>BotD>CT>continue as usual for the optimal no-potion way to do it as far as I've seen/played with. You theoretically *can* put PS with BotD there and Jump after CT but it requires some pretty ace timing and ping to pull it off without delaying your FaC/WT GCD or losing potency. It's doable, just harder than it needs to be.

Also, Dual, your new link isn't working for me. D:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?sto...&ref=bookmarks

Maybe this one will work? Fb is weird with off site sharing lol

One question I have is, I notice that by combo 4 when I use GK I only have 11 or so seconds to finish my fifth combo, cutting it really close where the OP says I should have 3 to 4 seconds to spare. I no longer have that macro and my skillspeed is 635, any idea why I'm cutting it that close?

You do let your GCD get delayed quite a bit, particularly when you are using abilities (oGCD) in between your weaponskills (GCD). Forget about Geirskogul optimization for the moment. The GCD should always be rolling. Weaponskills account for an order of magnitude more DPS than any individual attack ability does. Delaying the GCD by half a second loses you more than twice as much potency/time as delaying Jump by 2.5 seconds.

Buff abilities might be an exception, but then it gets more complicated.

I've seen plenty of dragoons, even ones who should know way way better, including myself, mess this up. But in your footage it's a persistent problem and I'd suggest ironing that out.

I'll see what I can do to expedite the process. I had some ideas but maintenance is killing it for me lol

Thanks for the critique ^_^

Hmm, I'll watch Dualgunner's video when I get home.

Are you having high ping constantly?

Because that's what killed my GCD/Weaving part :(.

Also yes, basically what others have said, you need to keep the GCDs rolling and always rolling unless mechanics tell you not to.
GSK optimization comes second, as the DPS increase from utilizing 3 GSK per minute isn't on par with optimizing the GCDs rotation.

Trying to push BfB and Battle Litany between the first two feels the slowest and sometimes BfB won't go off even though I hit it. I don't feel any real latency but I always seem to either be too slow for the clock or abilities refuse to go off D:

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Originally Posted by JackFross

Aside from missing that re-up of BotD at one point, it looks pretty good to me. A couple things to note is that your GCD is slow. If you rewatch the opening, most of your GCDs are delayed quite a lot, either due to the way you're pressing buttons or latency or what have you, they're slow. That's a big thing, especially as of 3.0. You might be able to pull off the 2 gsk per b4b at your SS and could just be missing it due to GCD lag on your end.

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Yeah I noticed, the lag(120ms)/2.42 gcd atm is killing me and making me go nuts lmao. I'm mashing buttons asap to get them activated as fast as they can :C

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Originally Posted by Ninjah2r

Yeah I noticed, the lag(120ms)/2.42 gcd atm is killing me and making me go nuts lmao. I'm mashing buttons asap to get them activated as fast as they can :C

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I feel your feel even at 2.4 gcd lol

We latency problem child needs to find a rotation that fits us best it seems lols

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Originally Posted by Dualgunner

I feel your feel even at 2.4 gcd lol

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You don't actually seem to be suffering from lag though. You wait too long to hit your skills. You let animations finish before tapping the next skill and are a hair slow on swapping around to hit the different things. Don't delay. You can queue skills to go in order if it's like within 1s of when they'd be available. I'm gonna try and record and post up a video of myself doing a dummy thing today if I can get it working but yeah. You just gotta practice those hand motions and get the skill popping on muscle memory.

All these videos seem to have people mashing skills and I tend not to.

I could actually hit the buttons faster, especially near the beginning, but there are times where the skill won't activate despite my having pushed the button.

The same with certain gcds, it feels like they get stuck. My character is still animating the last skill and the game acts like I'm not pushing the next gcd for a fraction of a second.

Pushing buttons too fast is risky because of how latency acts - there may be times where the animation lock activates but the skill is canceled halfway, clipping your GCD and resetting the UI indicator of combos as well. Sadly, there's hardly a solution for that except for praying you got the right timing or you didn't get shafted too much for waiting.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

I'm gonna try and record and post up a video of myself doing a dummy thing today if I can get it working but yeah.

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Please do would help us out good. I'm playing as fast as I can going full mozart on my keyboard but nope, can't break that 1300 dps mark. I parse 1250-1260 with just the partybuff @ 3 minutes (i193, body, trousers, helmet).

And for the brevvs having the same problem with latency as me, think we can either use this rotation and make our dps suffer more, of we get a temporary rotation cause in october latency shouldn't be a problem anymore. (eu datacentres)

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Originally Posted by ColdestHeaven

Pushing buttons too fast is risky because of how latency acts - there may be times where the animation lock activates but the skill is canceled halfway, clipping your GCD and resetting the UI indicator of combos as well. Sadly, there's hardly a solution for that except for praying you got the right timing or you didn't get shafted too much for waiting.

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That's what I was afraid of, it's a battle against near imperceptible latency. I haven't recorded it yet but I did make some new crossbars with the double weaves closer together (in the same expanded cross) so I could hit both before the GCD. While it kind of worked and I can keep the clock rolling, 3/5 Blood for Blood didn't pop when it was supposed to, or even more annoying, BotD did not pop like it was supposed to.

It's all a bit annoying to practice while Battle Litany is on a 3 minute cooldown lmao.

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Originally Posted by Ninjah2r

And for the brevvs having the same problem with latency as me, think we can either use this rotation and make our dps suffer more, of we get a temporary rotation cause in october latency shouldn't be a problem anymore. (eu datacentres)

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For an alternative, one thought that comes to mind is precasting BL. It won't affect as many skills but allows us to still probably allows us to hit all needed GCDs.

Also, would the eu datacenter help out American servers with latency as well?

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Originally Posted by Dualgunner

For an alternative, one thought that comes to mind is precasting BL. It won't affect as many skills but allows us to still probably allows us to hit all needed GCDs.

Also, would the eu datacenter help out American servers with latency as well?

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I truly dont know might be but who knows o.o And about precasting BL, what do you exactly mean I dont quite understand :c

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Originally Posted by Ninjah2r

I truly dont know might be but who knows o.o And about precasting BL, what do you exactly mean I dont quite understand :c

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One of the biggest issues I have is HT->BL+BfB->ID, because BfB is a diva and sometimes likes to not go off, and if I give it the time to go off, ID is already cooled off. So I was thinking of casting BL before HT, that way BfB is its own thing and I can continue on my merry rotation without that much of an issue.

Hopefully the eu datacenters work. I'm also still going to keep practicing the rotation until I have it more to muscle memory like Jack said. It certainly can't hurt, and if it does help me I'll be happy.

I did notice though the second time BoTD is up you used it before vorpal thrust instead of full thrust? I tested it and it does come up by then but I delayed it before full thrust

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Originally Posted by LiquidSwordz

I did notice though the second time BoTD is up you used it before vorpal thrust instead of full thrust? I tested it and it does come up by then but I delayed it before full thrust

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That was a mistake on my part. What I should have been doing is TT->GK->VP->BotD+IR->FT->Lifesurge->4th.

EDIT: My current skillspeed puts my GCD at 2.39 actually. Should I look into dropping my skillspeed a bit?

Skill speed actually affects all of your animation speeds. Jumps act faster as do the animations for all of your ogcd and gcd skills. More skill speed beyond 2.4 gcd doesn't exactly hurt, it's just not ideal since Crit and Det are both weighted higher beyond that point. You don't need to look into losing some, just be aware you want AROUND that much; you don't want your gcd longer than 2.4 or shorter than like 2.38; that might get a bit excessive. But in the ballpark is fine.

Oh I didn't know the Skillspeed also sped up the animation. That's awesome!

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Originally Posted by JackFross

Skill speed actually affects all of your animation speeds. Jumps act faster as do the animations for all of your ogcd and gcd skills. More skill speed beyond 2.4 gcd doesn't exactly hurt, it's just not ideal since Crit and Det are both weighted higher beyond that point. You don't need to look into losing some, just be aware you want AROUND that much; you don't want your gcd longer than 2.4 or shorter than like 2.38; that might get a bit excessive. But in the ballpark is fine.

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I don't think it does that. The jumps feel faster because they sped them up yet again in the expansion. I did not notice any change at all from zero skill speed to sonic skill speed.

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Originally Posted by ColdestHeaven

I don't think it does that. The jumps feel faster because they sped them up yet again in the expansion. I did not notice any change at all from zero skill speed to sonic skill speed.

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Have an AST throw an Enhanced Arrow at you and tell me it didn't speed up. You're looking at a GCD difference of 0.1s and using a skill that takes about 1.7s to fully perform, animation-wise. At 2.4 that's maybe down to 1.65 or so. At the 2.1 you can get to, it cuts down to around 1.4 and the difference becomes readily apparent. (I assume; these numbers are all made up on the spot.) At that said lower SS value, I was still able to do my full opener without any GCD delay at a breakneck pace, so either the animations for every skill are shortened in accordance with SS or the animations are already short enough that they'll fit neatly in a 2.1s gcd, which seems unlikely due to how many people seem to struggle to fit them in 2.4s currently, due to slight latency.

I could be wrong, but that's my experience of it.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

Have an AST throw an Enhanced Arrow at you and tell me it didn't speed up. You're looking at a GCD difference of 0.1s and using a skill that takes about 1.7s to fully perform, animation-wise. At 2.4 that's maybe down to 1.65 or so. At the 2.1 you can get to, it cuts down to around 1.4 and the difference becomes readily apparent. (I assume; these numbers are all made up on the spot.) At that said lower SS value, I was still able to do my full opener without any GCD delay at a breakneck pace, so either the animations for every skill are shortened in accordance with SS or the animations are already short enough that they'll fit neatly in a 2.1s gcd, which seems unlikely due to how many people seem to struggle to fit them in 2.4s currently, due to slight latency.

I could be wrong, but that's my experience of it.

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First: that's a haste effect, which is different from a Sks increase.

Second: many people (such as me) struggle to fit two off-GCD in a row or a single off-GCD in a specific moment, rather than the entire window between two GCD, because there's a delay in when you press the button and the moment when you execute the skill - and if you queue the second oGCD and shortly after use the next GCD the game decides that one of them may be canceled because it's still calculating the first oGCD or whatever. An arrow or more skillspeed won't change that.

I will test this tomorrow, it's late right now, but I'm still sorta skeptical.

Truuuue. I forgot it's an Attack Speed buff. That said, I don't know whether or not Skill/Spell Speed boost your Attack Speed like Greased Lightning/Huton/Arrow/Fey Wind/PoM do. So I could be wrong on that, for sure. I'll have to give it a closer look, too, now.

Ran tests.
Normal/Extended Arrow: 2.16 GCD - assuming 0 latency and no slowdown on GCD, if you do the extended rotation, your ID is buffed by Disembowel. \o/
Enhanced Arrow: 2.04 GCD - just give up everything is too fast and you cry a little bit how fast it is.

Under both of these: 4 GSK per minute is possible. You'll actually get in a FULL extra combo before re-upping BotD compared to 2.4s gcd with the Extended one (I tested with an 85s Extended Arrow)

Expanded is only 2.28. You should still use the normal rotation with that. A quick look at the party list should tell you.

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Originally Posted by Dualgunner

Trying to push BfB and Battle Litany between the first two feels the slowest and sometimes BfB won't go off even though I hit it. I don't feel any real latency but I always seem to either be too slow for the clock or abilities refuse to go off D:

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Ichi's 30 Seconds into Adv. Dragoon Opener.

Lol, that was what happened to me, fairly often that I need to change my rotation slightly so I get an increase instead of reduction.

I haven't watched your vid so :c

EDIT: Rotation for the High-Latency Players

I'm not sure if this works with you guys, but my ping is so high, that casting BL+BFB in between > Heavy Thrust > Impulse Drive makes me loses the BFB buff BEFORE the 2nd 4th after Full Thrust.

The solution @JackFross mentioned when I was rant--asking was swapping the IR and BFB placement.

So we go Heavy Thrust > BL + IR >Impulse Drive > BFB + BotD > and the usual

As for my case, it was 180+30% VS. 290+30%, it's a no-brainer.

I'm not sure about you guys' case, but figure I might just throw this out.

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Originally Posted by Greyfrost

I'm not sure if this works with you guys, but my ping is so high, that casting BL+BFB in between > Heavy Thrust > Impulse Drive makes me loses the BFB buff BEFORE the 2nd 4th after Full Thrust.
So we go Heavy Thrust > BL + IR >Impulse Drive > BFB + BotD > and the usual

As for my case, it was 180+30% VS. 290+30%, it's a no-brainer.

I'm not sure about you guys' case, but figure I might just throw this out.

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Blood for Blood with BotD placement, X-Potion of Strength used
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen.../sora_dps5.jpg

Blood for Blood with Battle Litany placement
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen.../sora_dps6.jpg

Admittedly my friend parsed for an extra 6 seconds in BfB+BL, so there is some room for error there, but aside from the potion going awol on me in my first attempt (didn't pop when I used it) this went a bit smoother than usual imo.