How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[SunnyHirose]

Which is why I am asking here. I challenged him to point out exactly who is doing what wrong, and he fell back on "well maybe everyone should review their job rotation to make sure they're doing it right."

Just because he was bluffing doesn't make what he said wrong. Usually when someone says "rotation issues" and can't elaborate, they've just seen what other groups can do with worse gear, but they don't know the actual source of low DPS. What I'm saying, having at least a passing familiarity with all the jobs, is that everyone in your party, 8/8, has some "push all the buttons and stick to the boss" issues. That's beyond just rotation problems; a competent rotation that isn't optimal isn't going to be more than a couple percent worse than optimal.

But you guys are letting your some buffs and debuffs fall off that should be very high uptime, not using certain cooldowns anywhere near on cooldown, and spend a remarkable amount of time just plain not hitting the boss. All of you, to some extent. There's not much I could or should say in terms of openers, rotations, and situational tricks as we usually talk about in this thread when the real problem is bare minimum basics that have less to do with rotation than they do with just plain using skills as much as possible. Remember, uptime is the best buff. If you aren't hitting, you're not doing damage.

Some people are holding on to oGCD buffs, sometimes for longer than their cooldowns, which is inexcusable. That's disgraceful, like straight up not attacking. I hope you can understand why I don't want to talk about that.

Some people aren't using GCDs as often as they could. Improving on this is not easy to explain, but it is the bulk of all damage whether you use the right or wrong skill; just aim to get it right >99% of the time so you can shrug off the mistakes. This is why people say "always be casting" (it's a reference to a movie scene where Alec Baldwin aggressively explains to a bunch of salesmen how they are very bad at their jobs because they're hardly even trying). All raiders need to know when and how to do this effectively. This is why we talk about gap-closers in the dragoon thread. This is why BLMs talk about what openers they can get away with in the BLM thread. Tanks and healers are not exceptions, either; some very good healers have talked about how GCDs are the real resource limitation on them, not MP. Particularly because of bird mode, there's no real reason both healers can't be dishing out serious DPS.

For a look at oGCDs and DoT uptimes, consult the buffs and debuffs tabs on FFLogs. You can isolate it to each player's contribution. If you do not know how a buff is used, compare it to how a good player performs in another browser window.

For GCD uptimes, you can check the casts tab and check whose casts aren't happening when other players' are, but it's only easy to diagnose that there's a problem that way, not how to fix it.

[whythehate]

Curious on what my dps should be like on dummy as i220, currently using full crafted gear seph ex weapon and midas nm pants.

Str: 1145 crit: 1001 det: 552 ss: 662
I average 1650 dps no food, pot, party buff.

Using drg as my alt job for all content outside of savage

[MiniTyra]

That's ever so slightly just below target. That could be attributed to damage/crit rng. For your stats, no buffs, 1671.7 is your target.

[Rayn]

In regards to materia melds is 9 skill speed better than 6 determination taking into account I am already sitting at 666 skill speed. If I were to pull out those det IV's for sks IV's I would have another 63 sks to contend with.

[whythehate]

That's ever so slightly just below target. That could be attributed to damage/crit rng. For your stats, no buffs, 1671.7 is your target.

Thanks I'll keep working at it a vast improvement from when I first started this job last month, it's a real shame I can't get any lore pieces for drg

[RachaelMarie22]

Had time to look through videos, so here's one pull (that obviously went very poorly - MT said he'd pull boss to A, but didn't). Just to help us see how we can skip that prey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8xXWPGiFgI and parse from it http://www.fflogs.com/reports/wT1mMQ...pe=damage-done

Are you finding lock-on on controller difficult? If it's a button press issue I recommend switching the postion from its default l3 to r3, then you can click it on and off much easier while playing

[JackFross]

Had time to look through videos, so here's one pull (that obviously went very poorly - MT said he'd pull boss to A, but didn't). Just to help us see how we can skip that prey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8xXWPGiFgI and parse from it http://www.fflogs.com/reports/wT1mMQ...pe=damage-done

Are you finding lock-on on controller difficult? If it's a button press issue I recommend switching the postion from its default l3 to r3, then you can click it on and off much easier while playing

I have my lock-on on R3 and I swear by it. I actually recorded my 1416 A5S from Thursday. You can see my handling of lock-on in this fight in particular. Where I have it on, where I have it off. I can explain every point where I toggle it, if needed.

[raela]

So it's a lot of on and off, huh..

Well, I did give lock on a try, but it went terribly awfully stupidly bad, to the point of wanting to go die in a corner from shame. Just having the change of view caused me to add large pauses inbetween GCDs, and I couldn't get a feel of movement, so I was messing up positionals. Of course making mistakes just bothered me more, so yeah, gave up maybe too quickly. Didn't help that I screwed up some boss mechanics and had some IRL stress, so I was feeling pretty down about my performance.

I do already have R3 set to target target's target since my main has been SCH since the start, other than picking up DRG for raiding only a few months back. Maybe putting lock on to R3 would help, but I still run healer in dungeons. I'm sure the answer here is to practice on a dummy to get the feel of it.. but I'm having IRL wrist issues that playing DRG makes worse, so while I don't want to give up playing altogether, I'm trying to minimize the stress from DRG (casters are easier since I'm not constantly pressing/holding buttons).

I am really grateful for all of the advice, and I passed it along (and am trying to improve myself as well), but we still need to work on mechanics. Got further last week, but still haven't seen pigs. Maybe we'll clear this week..

[Raveaj87]

umm not sure how this works but i m a ilvl225 drg i m always looking to improve i feel like i have a intermediate understanding of the class what would be the ideal dps of a drg of that ilvl i parsed a couple times all within the mid 1700s my highest was 1770 after the 3mins is that ideal or should it be more my stats of the top of my head 691 acc 941 crit 555 det 625 ss i haven been luck with a5s drops in weeks and i feel i could be doing bttr in a5s aswell

i should add that was with food and pots

[MiniTyra]

Weapon? STR? Food/pots/buffs in that parse?