Dragoon = Monkgoon

Ever since LV 60 and getting geirskogul, I've seen dragoons are like monks were in 2.0, except worse. In order to do max DPS you're only allowed a second of leeway in any fight, which just isn't feasible. At least GL had a 12s duration which can be reused before the timer runs out. Monks are limited by the duration of GL. Dragoons are limited by ways to sacrifice the buff to do more damage. In essence, to make you more likely to lose it. For monks, if GL falls off you can just restart the combo. For dragoons, you're forced to wait 60 seconds. Without a target, there is nothing to maintain your buff on. I'm ILV 180 and have been trying out some end game, and am sorely disappointed. I used to rank high in DPS, now I'm rarely top DPS. And NOT ONLY THAT, but all these new bosses are already suited for casters. Look at Ravana; long burn phases, reflection that only bothers melee, etc. Bismarck isn't much better. Just try it at 60 and see. I know some of this is just getting used to it, and my DPS on a single target if I don't mess up IS quite insane, but the whole mechanic just seems pretty poor. I'm not complaining about damage potential, rather, the method to get it.

I would wait until Alexander before saying Dragoons mechanics isn't good in the current Heavensward content. I know doing Ravana EX as a DRG feels extremely awkward especially when avoiding mistakes, but it is manageable. Ever since I got to lvl 60 DRG it became a much more stressful class, but at the same time, the feeling you get when you know that you pulled off all you moves, oGCDs, and rotation perfectly for the entire duration of a boss fight is extremely satisfying

Maybe you're not supposed to be able to keep perfect rotations going all the time.

Note that even with the 10 sec take off you should still have more than enough time to get it back on. By the time you would need to recast Blood of the Dragon because it fell off for any number of reasons, it should already be back up because it isn't really that hard to keep on.

I've done Ravana and Bismarck Ex, and they're not really that bad. Sure, it sucks losing positionals due to shield and BoTD due to downtime, but it's all manageable. Just the satisfaction in using a Geiskrksidhdul is good enough for me!

Black Mages = Black Monks, except we have two Greased timers to watch out for.

Gotta agree with Whymes here. It´s really frustrating when you lose the buff due to factors you can´t help.

You lose a buff because you don't pre-plan your Geirskogul usage. You don't need to pop it all the time. You can hold it. As long as you're getting in your 3 Gks a minute, it's more than good enough.

Even in Ravana EX, any time I've lost my BotD is because of a mistake on my behalf, not the bosses. It's hard, I know, but it's doable. Very doable. It just requires a lot of thought process.

Eh.. Well I'm kind of glad dragoon got harder because honestly the old rotation gets pretty boring after a while. And yeah, other classes got some pretty hard rotations in the expansions now too. I can just say this though, that anyone who invites a dragoon into a fight who doesn't know it very well, is probably better off adding a monk or ninja because a dragoon's damage on a fight they don't know well is probably going to be pretty bad until they learn when to use the skills. True for all classes but even worse for dragoon.

It's not just using geirskogul though. Sometimes I lose it even without, and to make matters worse as you all know, it randomly chooses a finisher as well as having insane positional requirements. All these things just make it really hard to do max DPS. The funniest thing that tops it all off is that all the new bosses have just the mechanics to make this difficult. What a coincidence.

I really like the changes on Dragoon. It's much more challenging now but it's very rewarding if played well.

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Originally Posted by Drakolos

I really like the changes on Dragoon. It's much more challenging now but it's very rewarding if played well.

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Sir, the forums are for people that don't like their class changes. Please delete or add complaints.

I have to say that the new rotation is extremely fun and satisfying... on a dummy. But Heavensward has introduced a lot of new content that is extremely mechanic heavy to the point of just feeling like noise. 99% of bosses in even just piddly old dungeons have one or many of knockbacks, stuns, binds, becoming untargetable for long periods, dashing away from you, etc. or even just a ludicrous number of AoEs and lets not forget the hilarious pick-up-put-down at the second boss of Neverreap... I've taken to missing positionals, saving Geirskoguls, or even skipping a Phlebotomize to keep BoTD up and that's assuming I can even do those things without taking a ridiculous amount of damage.

Every single encounter so far in the game has been a fragmented minefield of mechanics. And I get what those mechanics are, but they are hostile in the extreme to the way DRG now plays. I cleared t13 and t6 savage on drg in 2.0, I'm not a TOTAL scrub, and even in those fights i'm confident keeping these buffs up would not have been too hard save for a few bits that are easily planned for. I guess some people are okay with not being able to keep BoTD up 100% but I'm not, I want 100% uptime and it makes me wanna flip my ps4 when I can't.

People are saying that its "really not hard" and its not. Its not *hard* in any true sense of the word, its extremely unforgiving. If you're doing the rotation properly as I understand it, after the first Geirskogul your rotation is refreshing BoTD 1-2 seconds or less before it will fall off and if anything interrupts you leading up to that, its gone. Hell in Fractal Continuum there was a BRD who wasn't paying attention to his aggro and ripped a mob that the tank wasn't focusing on, that I had tab-targeted to in order to hit the F&C positional (I tab between targets during single target DPS quite a bit to avoid ripping aggro). It took off after the BRD before the animation went off, and by the time I got to it, BoTD was gone. Ridiculous, silly shit like that. MNK at least has several seconds to remedy such an occurrence. And before anyone says anything I DID play DRG before the 2.4 buffs, this is worse IMHO. Hell even regular mobs like the tall gangly ones before the second boss in the Vault will just spin around randomly and target random people. I've given up on the positionals, I head vaguely to the flank or rear and if I hit it I hit it, especially with these tons of tiny mobs with miniscule hitboxes. Due to accuracy issues while gearing up, I've even found myself missing quite a bit at some points, which obviously COMPLETELY screws everything sideways. If I raid with DRG in Alex I'm gettin' that frontal acc cap, that's for sure.

And I am having difficulty understanding how one "saves Geirskoguls" as long as you get "3 per minute" You can't save them. Its not a spammable move. You can chain two towards the end of BoTD's cooldown if you plan it out like that, if that's what people are talking about, but you can only get 1 per 4th tier, 2 if you don't mind it dropping BoTD (as is the case when its about to come off CD). But that's just the problem, these encounters are so stuffed with mechanics/interruptions/AoEs that its difficult to have a plan for, because so much can go wrong and sometimes it only takes ONE SECOND for it to be screwed. Every fight feels like a piece of china that's been nudged a bit on the shelf and is just wobbling, waiting to fall and fly to pieces. Maybe I'm overreacting to BoTD falling off, but when it does in the middle of the fight, it feels like I fucked up, even if it couldn't be helped, and that feeling is demoralizing and makes me wanna shut off the game. I could get to a point pretty quickly in 2.0 where I could do fights *perfectly* and if for any reason I didn't, I knew exactly why. But I could play the job well, and had the potential to do it perfectly, given the chance. This just feels hopeless. I don't mind interruptions but they are so frequent that I can't even get 1 single satisfying circuit of the rotation off. The game literally has not given me the chance to see how my job could play optimally in an encounter, other than on a dummy.

Now what I'm really frustrated with if its not apparent is not the job. As I said, this rotation is EXTREMELY satisfying when you can actually do it correctly, but the conditions under which you can do so are nonexistent in new content. And this is just regular old dungeon bosses I'm talking about. If its like this in dungeons I can only imagine the hell that Alexander will be. And frankly DRGs already have a poor reputation as is and are the first target of abuse when they fuck up, (which every job does from time to time) and now we have the "BUT MAH STACKS" problem that MNKs had. What's more is that the mechanics in the encounters that interrupt this new rotation repeat VERY regularly and frequently throughout said encounters. (Take the cyclops boss in the Library. It's 360 knockback and random dashing around are used frequently enough that you can barely get two Geirskoguls inbetween and that's IF BoTD wasn't falling off previously).

Granted that the more skill speed you have, the more forgiving it is, and it seems at least Squeenix is aware of this given the heavy leaning towards the stat in DRG itemization apparently. And again, I actually agree partially with what many people are saying about the job in a positive light. It is challenging and rewarding, and fun, and it does a metric-fuckton of damage. I love that, of course. But its more with how it plays (or doesn't play, doesn't play nice at all) with the encounter design themes that seem to be prevalent in 3.0. barrages of mechanics that, are not complex, difficult to understand or execute, or unintuitive, but just annoying, obnoxious, numerous, and PERSISTANT, giving you 30 seconds at MOST of breathing room to do any of your jobs own mechanics. I hope Alexander is more intelligently designed and gives you at least enough breathing room to have a chance to succeed. It only requires 1 minute to get off a satisfying bout of the rotation, and many extremely difficult encounters in the game up to this point have at least given that, and now that DRGs actually need it, its nowhere to be found. Half the time in some of these fights I'm thinking to myself "Wait a second, does the tank have aggro??? Yep... he does, this boss is just an asshole..." Even Nael and Bahamut had the decency to face the tank and stay put in one spot for 95% of the fight, even Titan Ex of all fights would not be hard to execute this new rotation in. Most of the dodging is a simple matter of strafing or rotating around the boss. Now imagine you were all spread out when Weights came out, as opposed to stacked on Titan's butt. And imagine Titan did Landslides at the same time as Weights. That's what the dodging in a lot of these new fights is like.

I guess my real complaint, in the TL;DR sense, is with the "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink"-lobbing of mechanics that are not by themselves difficult to understand or handle, but peppered in encounters thus far with such density that we're left dancing around them with our buffs falling off left-and-right. I'm literally spending 40-50% of these fights dodging and/or handling mechanics, and being disallowed DPS uptime on the boss. Even if there are people somehow not having as much trouble with this particular job because of this, objectively, i think anyone could agree that encounters are now extremely dense with high-quantity/low-quality mechanics of *constant* dodging and interruptions for no other reason other than "because fuck you", really. =/

BLM's new rotation says hi.

Strict timers all over the place. BUT even saying that I love it. Sure there are fights that make me want to stab puppies with how bad they are for BLM's but when you do get those 15-20 seconds to just nuke…oh man. Look out. So rewarding.

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Originally Posted by Syzygian

And I am having difficulty understanding how one "saves Geirskoguls" as long as you get "3 per minute" You can't save them. Its not a spammable move. You can chain two towards the end of BoTD's cooldown if you plan it out like that, if that's what people are talking about, but you can only get 1 per 4th tier, 2 if you don't mind it dropping BoTD (as is the case when its about to come off CD). But that's just the problem, these encounters are so stuffed with mechanics/interruptions/AoEs that its difficult to have a plan for, because so much can go wrong and sometimes it only takes ONE SECOND for it to be screwed. Every fight feels like a piece of china that's been nudged a bit on the shelf and is just wobbling, waiting to fall and fly to pieces. Maybe I'm overreacting to BoTD falling off, but when it does in the middle of the fight, it feels like I fucked up, even if it couldn't be helped, and that feeling is demoralizing and makes me wanna shut off the game.

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And I agree. The "3 Gk's per minute" is nothing more than something you should try to aim for. It's highly unrealistic to get 3 GKs per minute in Ravana Extreme Mode for example, but it's a a guideline of what is to be achieved during phases where you're standing still attacking a single target. Obviously, this "3 gk per minute" phrase doesn't apply when you're dealing with complex mechanics.

Always remember this. BOTD > GK. If it means you can only achieve 2 Gk's during that minute, it's better than letting BotD completely drop off. The only reason why BotD will ever fall off is because you blind-blew a GK without consideration before hand.

Having said that, there are also some phases in boss fights where it's even unwise to have BotD up or use its cooldown. Best example is Prelude to Liberation in Ravana EX. You'll have BotD available, but you shouldn't use it, as it's an 18s phase and now you'll be all in huffs and puffs because you don't have BotD up for Nagas. This is just one of the many unique examples I can think of, where it's better off holding BotD off all together, to keep it for another phase.

Talking of Nagas, due to the amount of tab-targetting required to kill the Butterflies, you can lose around 1 second per add you cycle through to attack. This will eat into your BotD time, meaning you will have to forget about blowing a GK until it's more comfortable. During that entire phase, I only use GK twice at a maximum, and I don't reapply BotD again. I try to juggle my current BotD timer, so I have my my CD ready for the next phase. I can use Ravana EX examples all day, but seriously, it's the best fight currently to illustrate how much you need to plan ahead whilst playing the Dragoon if you want maximum DPS.

This is exactly what I meant a few days ago. You can't blindly throw BotD and GK just because you feel like it. The Dragoon requires extremely precise pre-planning and coordinated movements during raids for maximum uptime. It's easily the hardest Job in the game to play as it requires the most thought process and knowledge of mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Dervy

Having said that, there are also some phases in boss fights where it's even unwise to have BotD up or use its cooldown. Best example is Prelude to Liberation in Ravana EX.

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And I also don't use it there. Doesn't really change the fact that the skill is ass shit for learning anything, I would never want to invite another dragoon to a learning party that's for sure.

Dude... I couldn't agree with you more. Even in 2.0 where DRGs were not in the best of places, I could tell what SE wanted from me to perform well in content as DRG. So far with BoD, I dunno what SE wants us to do in terms of Damage. Sure it looks cool on a dummy but it never works that well if at all outside that. I did more damage on Ravana Ex without BoD up at all because I wasnt doing 100 potency every 4th attack... its really just stupid and does not flow well at all

Ok one thing, may be its just me but were we all ARR may be just to use to the mechanics of things. I mean we weren't told that even boss dungeon mechanics will change drastically. We got so use to the way things were, what I'm trying to say is this whole entire time in ARR we got use to hitting fast balls now with HW now its a curve ball, so I guess we just need to adapt and learn.

As someone who main MNK(might change to DRG now though), I don't really understand all the fuss about the changes to DRG...

Everyone keeps going on about how you can't do much damage in actual fights because of the randomness and only getting 100 potency if you miss the positional etc... Well, welcome to the world of MNK. There pretty much isn't a single primal fight that is good for MNK. DRG might be more in level with MNK now with that huge loss of damage if you make a mistake, but MNK have a positional for every attack pretty much, and in some annoying fights that can add up to a pretty high amount of lost DPS.

Also, losing GL is much worse than losing BoTD... You don't have to wait 60 seconds to reuse it if you screw up, because it lasts for at the very least 15 seconds, making it a 45 sec wait at most. You also should never lose it right away, since you add time to it right after.

Losing it isn't as big of a DPS loss as losing GL either.

Most important of all, remember what I just said, MNK has always been screwed in primal fights... Have that been the case for all Coil turns? no. If anything, they made Final Coil so that it would be a little more friendly for melee DPS, and I'm expecting them to use some of that mindset for Alexander too. In FCoB there wouldn't be a single turn where those random positional attacks would be a problem, so lets not assume the worst before we actually know how Alexander will be.

The changes to DRG, and the lack of real change to how MNK plays, is what might make me change to DRG now... looks more fun, and there is actually some nice challenge to it now.

Well considering that I switch from Dragoon to Ninja because of how dry the Dragoon combo was. This maybe a time for me to get back into it, only after I finish gearing up my Ninja first as it is priority number one. It will take me time to get back into Dragoon again but I am sure it will be fun again.

I wish that the fourth combo skills procced baseline and that BotD was used to buff jumps and you had to manage uptime to use Geirskogul.

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Originally Posted by mirellol

Not to mention the LIMIT BREAK responsibility is still expected to fall to us.

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Huh, all the NINs i am with gladly took the LB responsibilty on them. Sounds more like you were with some bad NINs. I guess it will take some time for everyone to get the message but LB is now NIN responsibility, especially with armor crush.

This thread is funny as hell. The fact that people are handless is not a game's problem, it is yours. Dragoon is so fucking OP, and if u are bad it is normal that u complain about how difficult the class is and it is normal that u do shit parses. Ravanah exm is so good designed and it is a real fun for dragoons.
U are just complaining cuz u do not know how to deal with it xD

I feel bad for dragoons. They are used to easily reaching max dps due to the old proc-less rotation, now it does seem hard. Might be hard to swallow, but it seems like a batter GAME now that perfection will be rarity to strive and struggle for.

I don't feel like this is a fair comparison, especially as someone who was a MNK main for most of 2.X.

Yes, dropping BotD is punishing, but even in a worst case scenario all that really happens is you return to your 2.X rotation and life goes on. Yes, you lose some DPS, but it's a far cry from a MNK who just dropped GL3. It's not like DRG DPS suddenly plummets once we can't GSK or FnC/WT.

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Originally Posted by FreyrPrime

Yes, dropping BotD is punishing, but even in a worst case scenario all that really happens is you return to your 2.X rotation and life goes on. Yes, you lose some DPS, but it's a far cry from a MNK who just dropped GL3. It's not like DRG DPS suddenly plummets once we can't GSK or FnC/WT.

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I've got no complaints about DRG. I relished the challenge way before they made it less positional based, and still look forward to it now.

But that isn't the only effect of BOTD.

I really don't think this is a problem. With a stationary target on which I can pull off 3 Geirskoguls per minute without losing BotD, I level out at around 1000-1100 DPS sustained. Without BotD, that drops to a still very respectable 900 or so. This is more about knowing when stuff will happen in fights and preparing accordingly - if I know that in about five seconds I won't have anything to hit for a little while, I'll hold that last Geirskogul so that I'll have the 10s left I need to keep going once a target reappears.

I will agree that it's made me understand why MNKs have been going on about their stacks all this time though, and I now also suspect a conspiracy where tanks who do not immediately run to the next pull are deliberately ruining my DPS. ;)

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Originally Posted by seekified

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Pretty much this on all points. BotD is an important part of our DPS, as is Geirskogul, but it's not our everything. It just requires some planning and awareness.

@Seekified, as an ex-MNK I find myself falling into those old bad habits lol.. "I can totally eat this AoE so I don't drop BotD/GL3" or "Yeah.. That NIN's got those adds.." or my favorite.. "This Tank seems like he's paying attention.. I think I can land my Spineshatter right as he pulls so I won't lose BotD"

Several things of note here...
1. You state that you are i180. You cannot get i180 unless you are wearing 2 180 rings, which would mean you are only wearing one strength ring and something else.
2. Blood of the dragons recast starts when you use it, this means that 60 seconds after that you can use it, not 60 seconds after it falls off.
3. You are not supposed to just burn off all the time of blood of the dragon, you are supposed to maintain it.

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Originally Posted by Kasaiya

Several things of note here...
1. You state that you are i180. You cannot get i180 unless you are wearing 2 180 rings, which would mean you are only wearing one strength ring and something else.
2. Blood of the dragons recast starts when you use it, this means that 60 seconds after that you can use it, not 60 seconds after it falls off.
3. You are not supposed to just burn off all the time of blood of the dragon, you are supposed to maintain it.

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Pretty sure you can hit 180+ with the Ravana EX weapon since they're i190, but I could be wrong.. I'm still waiting for mine to drop.

Dragoons are fine. I prefer having Dragoon/Monks as a second dps in my party over any other DPS in game.
Being a BLM aint easy either. We hate moving during fights, and we hate even more to lose a timed buff because of this.
Every class has its weak points.
L2P issues is all im seeing here. Adjust, or reroll!

Positional requirements for drg's new finishers are bad, only because if you miss, they're sad 100 potency skills. All that work for an auto-attack's worth of damage...in fact it's a dps loss if you miss the positional. They should at least make them 150-180ish potency like True Thrust or Impulse Drive, and then the regular 290 for correct positional.