Dragoon 6.2 Civil discussion thread

[Shurrikhan]

What is wrong with DRG keeping its unique combo string as long as it was made more interesting?

This is a good question. However, the longer a combo string, the fewer opportunities the kit has by which to add options within and around rotational play.


That's especially if we continue with the XIV take on combos (single actions across multiple buttons that merely punish fat-fingering rather than offering any choice between combo fork and finisher).

Ideally, imo, we'd have XIV reimagine what a combo ought to be --such that they can actually be combinations of real skills rather than just a skill each across n GCDs-- and have DRG have longer, though still modular, commitments across those more organic combos.

LotD's rigidity stems from the fact that we must use everything on exact cooldown to avoid drifting. I find this a good thing because it's one of the core aspects of the jobs that needs to be mastered: learning to plan or know when you can or cannot use your abilities, especially jumps, so that you never have to delay them.

That also is what arguably keeps DRG relatively brainless, though. Since everything can and should be used immediately now (apart from SSD effectively being a hit-twice 2-minute CD), in the same order each cycle, there's no value to be had from the bankability DRG houses (via things like Mirage Dive or Wyrmwind Thrust).

Wyrmind Thrust
A great addition to our arsenal due to providing a new interaction between GCDs and oGCDs that is often overshadowed by the fact that we cannot store it for long. It's meant to be a flexible action, but it becomes a bit rigid when there's only a window of 5 GCDs to use it.

Note also, though, that 5 GCDs is already 12.5 seconds pre-Haste (or, 11.9 after animation lock). Doubling that by adding an extra scale before cap would push that to ~24 seconds pre-Haste would deny Wyrmwind any urgency.

Make True Thrust and Doom Spike permanently upgrade to RT and DF when the appropriate trait is learned and just have Draconian Fire give us a scale when these weaponskills are used.

This would push our first Wyrmwind up by 3 to 5 GCDs (in AoE and ST, respectively), but I'd rather have each feel more an earned reward than merely replace the baseline.

Technically, you could also have only every other Doom Spike / True Thrust turn into Draconian Fury / Raiden Thrust and remove the scales (with every DF proc permitting Wyrmwind) and you'd:

1. Have DF/RT feel (faintly) more like a reward,
2. Have your first Wyrmwind become available 4 GCDs earlier, and
3. Give Wyrmwind 10 GCDs of banking, up from its current 5.

Allowing BL to last 20s for the DRG would help alleviate this problem. However, another perhaps-not-so-known problem is that the GSK action can't be queued when exiting LotD.

Given LotD's current behavior, I don't think we'd lose anything to have the a proccing Geirskogul itself turn into a Nostrand (complete with 10s CD), the first of which would trigger LotD (offering 2 more uses within the next 30 seconds), and increasing Nostrands' potency by a third of a Geirskogul per hit to make up for the skipped cast.

Mirage Dive can never be removed because taking it away and making HJ give the eye directly would remove all flexibility in regards to choosing when to enter a LotD window.

This doesn't quite make sense, though, seeing as we neither need nor want to make use of such flexibility. GSK should always be used before J/HJ anyways, and we want Jump's damage itself to fall under raid buffs, so there's actually no value in keeping those two effects separate.

That's not to say that we should consolidate them, ofc. Rather, we should be adding more damage windows such that DRG again has some actual use for its banking.

[Aco505]

That also is what arguably keeps DRG relatively brainless, though. Since everything can and should be used immediately now (apart from SSD effectively being a hit-twice 2-minute CD), in the same order each cycle, there's no value to be had from the bankability DRG houses (via things like Mirage Dive or Wyrmwind Thrust).

You can have specific parts of the kit to be rigid and other parts of the kit to be more flexible. One doesn't take out the other. DRG is not the only job that needs to use specific attacks on hard CD so calling it brainless simply because there's a number of actions (perhaps there should be less) that are used on CD is misunderstanding the job imho. NIN is very similar to DRG in this sense, yet it's not considered brainless despite the fact that it has low positional thought, for instance.

This would push our first Wyrmwind up by 3 to 5 GCDs (in AoE and ST, respectively), but I'd rather have each feel more an earned reward than merely replace the baseline.

No, it wouldn't push anything. Draconian Fire is still granted by the 5th GCD positional, this is purely an aesthetic change because I hate the animations of True Thrust and Doom Spike and because they are used only once in a fight. They're "dying" actions after level 76 and 82 respectively and it makes no sense to keep them when you can just give them the Leaden Fist treatment. In the opener, for instance, you'd get your first scale after the FnC, and then the 2nd one after the following WT just like usual. In fact, with a 3rd scale you could make it so that the scale is given directly by the 5th instead of the RT/DF. While this'd put the WWT under buffs in the opener, it may reduce flexibility down the timeline to put them under buffs though so it's probably better for scales to be granted by RT/DF.

The only change is that you gain 50 potency for every True Thrust you'd have used, so basically once in the opener and then one per downtime longer than X seconds.

Technically, you could also have only every other Doom Spike / True Thrust turn into Draconian Fury / Raiden Thrust and remove the scales (with every DF proc permitting Wyrmwind) and you'd:

1. Have DF/RT feel (faintly) more like a reward,
2. Have your first Wyrmwind become available 4 GCDs earlier, and
3. Give Wyrmwind 10 GCDs of banking, up from its current 5.

You achieve the same thing by increasing the scale cap. If we want rewarding gameplay, then they should implement it in some way, but TT and DoS are old, outdated actions that should just be permanently replaced. We're already rewarded by our positionals due to how often they happen, but this doesn't mean other actions can't help with this. Being able to keep everything in strict CD is rewarding on its own as well.

Given LotD's current behavior, I don't think we'd lose anything to have the a proccing Geirskogul itself turn into a Nostrand (complete with 10s CD), the first of which would trigger LotD (offering 2 more uses within the next 30 seconds), and increasing Nostrands' potency by a third of a Geirskogul per hit to make up for the skipped cast.

This would save one oGCD, but other than that I don't see the benefit. My gripe with GSK is the fact that it can't be queued after Life, so LotD would have to either last 25s (but then it becomes more rigid to use your three NAS) or GSK to be a separate action, but then you wonder what's the point of it. I suppose that the best solution is to have GSK have no cooldown and an eye cost of two. However, MD must stay for increased flexibility or this change wouldn't really fix anything, but the opposite.

This doesn't quite make sense, though, seeing as we neither need nor want to make use of such flexibility. GSK should always be used before J/HJ anyways, and we want Jump's damage itself to fall under raid buffs, so there's actually no value in keeping those two effects separate.

That's not to say that we should consolidate them, ofc. Rather, we should be adding more damage windows such that DRG again has some actual use for its banking.

The fact that in full uptime scenarios you can just GSK > HJ and everything fits under buffs doesn't mean you always want to do it. There's plenty of encounters and situations in which you want to do HJ > GSK:

In P3S before adds, you do this to get an extra 1k potency on the boss with a double life before it leaves for the add phase.

In DSR, there's several phases in which you must do HJ asap or you'll lose an eye.

In P2S, you want to enter LotD before Kampeos and you switch the GSK/HJ order after the first arrows to make entering LotD more flexible for the rest of the fight due to the way buffs and HJ/GSK are unsynced from one another.

In dungeons, you want to do HJ > GSK so as to get as many eyes as possible and thus Life windows.

Even in full uptime scenarios, you may want to do HJ > GSK to get a double life at the end of the fight before the boss dies depending on the killtime.

Using HJ > GSK should never have any of them outside of buffs, it just means that one comes out before the other, and it's mostly done to get extra eyes and therefore LotD windows. Making it GSK > HJ by default will strip the job of a lot of flexibility, even if it wouldn't affect full uptime ST scenarios too much (but it still will).

[Shurrikhan]

This would save one oGCD, but other than that I don't see the benefit. My gripe with GSK is the fact that it can't be queued after Life.

That too would be fixed by the aforementioned suggestion. By having the lead LotD-entering Geirskogul convert to a LotD-entering Nostrand that, via LotD, allows up to 2 more uses of Nostrand in the next 30 seconds (10s ICD retained), you'd drop out of LotD upon using the second (previously third) Nostrand, rather than only after 30 seconds, which then again allows you to queue Geirskogul that 30s after entering LotD, since it wouldn't be locked behind an unusable Nostrand key.

And, as Nostrand would be increased by a third of Geirskogul's potency, the consolidation would cost no potency per minute.

The only actual change, QoL aside, would be that a clipped / mostly wasted LotD would be slightly more punishing, as you'd previously be able to Geir-Nos for 620 of 1340 from Geir-Nosx3 (46% of total), whereas now you'd get only 447 of that (33.3%). Of course, to even reach that level of waste, one would need to enter LotD right before 30 seconds of continuous downtime.

In dungeons, you want to do HJ > GSK so as to get as many eyes as possible and thus Life windows.

That has more to do with Sprints and gathers (having not enough mobs in range of GSK for it to be worthwhile) than LotD windows. The LotD windows are determined by Mirage Dive, not HJ itself, and shuffling either among HJ and GSK by 0.6 seconds isn't going to give you more 60-second windows.

There is, even there, no reason to hit a third Mirage Dive before entering LotD. GSK before MD remains the way. Bare GSK, Bare GSK, (LotD readied after 30s) GSK-LotD; repeat.

Jump and MD, meanwhile, contribute more than double GSK's ST potency, so if you're going to maintain an alignment at cost of a skill not falling under raid buffs that weren't pushed back raid-wide, it will generally be GSK. Buffer death aside, that shouldn't happen regardless, but the way the skills work incentivize the most straightforward, repetitive, unnuanced option possible in virtually every case.

We can argue whether that's better overall, for the purpose of smoothness over depth, but DRG is rather unvaried and uncompromising now compared to, say, Stormblood.

No, it wouldn't push anything.

Currently you get your first Wyrmwind after the 11th GCD, and then every 10 GCDs thereafter, overcapping per 5.

With the given suggestion, you'd get your first Wyrmwind after the 6th GCD, and then every 10 GCDs thereafter, overcapping only per 10 GCDs.

That would indeed push the first WWT up by 5 GCDs (or 3 in AoE). Given larger contexts, though, your solution would not be able to do the same.

Here's why we can't merely entirely replace True Thrust and Doom Spike with Raiden Thrust and Draconian Fury without removing Scale generation from either ability itself (which would then no longer push up the time it takes to generate your first WWT):

Raiden Thrust itself deals 490 ppgcd (+105 AoE ppgcd) due to Scale generation. If you do not lock that behind the combo's completion, you won't have a combo anymore. You'd instead just do a 440 ppgcd mini-combo of RT-DB-CT (-150 direct potency, recouped in just over 3 GCDs), or a 370-ppgcd combo of RT-DB, per 30 seconds (-240, recouped in 5 GCDs). The rest of the time, you'd just spam RT.

Draconian Fire likewise deals 235 ppgcd given Scale generation (plus a further 105 ppgcd to a primary target), up from the rotated combo's 168.3. Unless you remove Draconian Fire's key effect from Draconian Fire, you won't have an AoE combo anymore.

To have RT and DF replace TT and DS, you'd have to have them function as no more than either skill it replaces, which means Scale generation would have to be granted on the GCD following combo completion, via a separate effect (that is now less marked by UI and animation), in which case the opening GCD could not have scale generation anyways.

There are more clunky/roundabout solutions we could apply, such as nerfing the shit out of WWT directly or indirectly, but ultimately, WWT needs to be limited to production per 10 GCDs, which is exactly what the current RT/DF design provides while granting 40% overcharge.

We could potentially add yet another gauge (especially if LotD just gets shown as a buff), whereby every GCD grants 10 DRG-Ki and WWT spends 50, so that RT and DF truly function as no more than TT and DS, respectively, but... why?