Dragoon is next

[butchersblock]

There ARE some things that they can to do clean up the job that won't change things too much. I _doubt_ that will be it. Every time Work 2 Game mentions the possibility of Dragoon having a Dragon pet like in FFXI I shudder and disappointingly come to terms that it's going to be something like that, or worse... Here's some predictions if it's not changing much (unlikely):

1. Remove Wheeling Thrust/Fang and Claw from hotbars and have it replace True Thrust like Raiden Thrust does. So instead of the Heavens' Thrust combo being 1-2-3-4-5-1 it would essentially be 1-2-3-1-1-1. Yes, it simplifies, yes, it's kinda shitty, but really if they're looking to make room, this is a nice easy way of doing it.

2. Reduce the number of distinct jumps - Make them all do AE damage, Keep Spineshatter, give it 4 charges (Remove Dragonfire, High Jump, and Star Diver). When you use it you get a 5 sec buff to use Mirage Dive if it's up, if you enter Life of the Dragon then Stardiver replaces Spineshatter until you use it.

3. Make Wyrmwind Thrust Replace Raiden Thrust during that cycle and add the potencies together

4. Clean up AE stuff for everyone and just make all abilities do AE damage

5. Drop Life Surge (basically is a shitty Kaiten)



That drops off 7 abilities if you don't do anything with AEs. I'd say that's plenty of room to grow the job with no significant changes. But, I think that SE should seriously consider my #4, at least for non-healer jobs. AE kits in most (all) jobs are anemic, boring, and taking up almost a third of the real estate on hot bars.

If they changed it so that all abilities are either full AE or are single target with fall off damage (e.g. Wyrmwind Thrust) and get rid of AE specific abilities I feel like that would clean up quite a few jobs. There would be exceptions, I don't think that you could fully do it with SAM, specifically Tenka Goken (Though, I can certainly think of a few things to do with that, e.g. a debuff like Death's Design). But, SAM has a shit ton of abilities that should be merged anyway (e.g. Shoha/Shoha II, Shinten/Kyuten, Guren/Senei, Iaijutsu/Tsubame-gaeshi, etc, etc, etc)



I just hope that we can come together and call out that bullshit if it happens. Kaiten's removal reason has been questioned as a misunderstanding/mistranslation but whatever they meant, this was a shitty way of handling it. Some people say that it was "Button bloat" i.e. hotbar space (Which, I could EASILY, remove 5-6 buttons from SAM's hotbars without changing the job AT ALL, so that's bull) and other people say it's "Action bloat" i.e. number of buttons you have to press for a perfect rotation (Which, again is bull OR the first of a set of changes, because now instead of casting 5 Kaitens, you're casting 4 Shintens, that's not really reducing anything UNLESS the plan is to also reduce Kenki generation)

Man those changes would suck. How about we just not remove anything in the middle of an expansion