Dragoon = Monkgoon

[Syzygian]

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. =/