Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

[Kaiten_Ex]

This is super amazing btw. Thanks for so much for explaining the rotation (and why Lancer/Archer is not a useful combo)!

Gosh DRG is a much harder job than I thought. Is there an easier button mashing job? hehe

[Alexander_Dragonfang]

Is there an easier button mashing job? hehe

Bard is far easier.
And Monk has easier rotations but has a harder positioning. While having good positioning skills...
BLM?

[Ayvar]

I feel like a lot of the basic theorycrafting questions about Dragoon damage have been (for the most part) answered, so now I've been turning to some more complicated questions that I (and hopefully other people) would like to try to answer. In no particular order, here are some issues I would like to tackle next:


1) What is the best time to use your damage buffs?

This one is probably the most complicated one to answer because there are a lot of possibilities. The issue arises with the added benefit the Disembowel debuff gives to damage buff increases. As I mention in the section on DoTs, if you have a 10% damage buff (so 110% damage) the Disembowel debuff will turn this into a 121% damage increase since it is buffing the damage taken and not the damage done (if it buffed the damage done it would just add an additional 10%, so 120% and not 121%), but this will only apply to piercing attacks. If you buff your damage by 30%, as with BFB, all of your piercing attacks will now follow this calculation: 100% (your damage) + 10% (HT buff) + 30% (BFB buff) = 140% + (0.1*140) = 154%. So DoT damage would receive +150% and piercing attacks would receive +154%. This many seem like a small difference, but that is what we are all about here. Therefore, if BFB disproportionately benefits piercing attacks, when is the best time to use it in your rotation? or does it even matter? If you use it prior to applying your DoTs, are you wasting some of the potential damage you could've gotten by waiting, or is it better to use on DoTs because they are some of your highest potency attacks?


2) Is there a preferable ability to use Jump attacks directly after?

This one is partially anecdotal, which we obviously don't like and is why I'd like to do a little more testing on it. I've found certain abilities, such as Disembowel and Chaos Thrust, to be potentially more friendly to quick animation interruptions for casting off-GCD abilities. For example, I've noticed I will have a harder time getting off-GCD abilities to activate on True Thrust or Vorpal Thrust, while Disembowel and Chaos Thrust seem to interrupt their animations quite easily. If this is the case (which I am not saying it is), would it be better to use the Jumps, which have longer animation durations, with these abilities since they interrupt more quickly and so would give you a longer window to get the animation over with?


3) Related to #1, is it better to use BFB and IR at the same time, or use them at different times?

The answer to this one, I'm almost positive, is to use them at the same time since a +30% damage crit is very likely more beneficial than without. The argument for using IR without BFB could be for bursting down adds, or if you don't want to use BFB since you're at a point in the fight where the longer duration of BFB may be interrupted by boss/player movement but you want to get IR on cooldown.


4) What the hell is the accuracy cap for a Hard Mode/Coil boss?

This one is pretty self-explanatory.


5) How do Dragoons compare in potency per second to the other dps classes?

A lot of the "lol best dps" threads are full of anecdotal examples or incorrect parsing. The easiest way (for now) to deal with a class comparison would be to take agreed upon rotations for each class, the approximate GCD that they operate with (for example Dragoons are generally around 2.35-2.4), and calculate the potency per second each class should theoretically produce by the conclusion of their rotation, or the closest they get to one. This may not give us the answer everyone wants about which class is the best dps (information which is only really valuable to people who play the game to see themselves at the top of some unimportant list), but it will show how well the various rotations for each class stack up against each other. This would also involve factoring in the damage buffs that would theoretically be used by the conclusion of each rotation. This one I might tackle myself, though I'd have to dive into the respective threads on each job.


If anyone else has anything they've been wondering about (that hasn't already been answered) then let us know and we'll see what we can come up with.