Why in the world did they change Jump > Mirage Dive?

[Aco505]

You speak like slotting it in the same window as jump was some amazing trick. It was not, it's basically arbitrary how soon you use it as long as it is in a buff window. Any real flexibility comes precisely from being able to hold it for so long.

No, the flexibility comes from the ability to double weave HJ + MD when you need to do a double life or when you start an encounter/new phase with 1 eye. The case of DSR is a bit different, it's done so that you can get a 2nd eye by the end of a phase that lasts around 32 seconds. With the 1s recast, this was extremely tight to get if your ping wasn't low.

In this case you often lose the GSK, but that loss is manageable vs losing an eye, and thus having to reopen the next phase with 1 eye, which is going force a HJ + MD double weave regardless, and will delay the burst, thus not allowing you to get yet another 2nd HJ before the boss leaves if that phase's duration is also around 30+ seconds.

This creates a chain reaction in which you will always be delayed or drifted and it may or may not be fixed by downtime (since your CDs are still ticking).

How many eyes you accumulate? What do you mean? There's no drift with mirage dive, it's a proc. And what are these situations exactly, where it isn't simply a skill issue?

Sometimes 1s is enough to lose a use of HJ and thus an eye.

Another example can be found in the newest extreme trial. You must use HJ at least 1 GCD earlier than normal and not drift it by more than 1s or you'll end up drifting it for around 12s or more due to boss phasing, thus making the next parts annoying to deal with since you can get HJ back when you have to move away, or simply 'cuz having such a big difference between HJ and GSK can be problematic in order to keep life aligned with buffs. Again, a chain reaction that can't be fixed in this case because there's no more downtime and that can easily drift oGCDs out of buffs and/or make you lose a whole life window in the fight, which is catastrophic: 1700 oGCD potency not counting buffs.

Please, do point me where in the statistics there's half a blip in DRG viability when they patched in the mirage delay.

I can return you the question. When have I said anything about the job's viability? People have not started playing DRG en masse just because it got HJ + MD merged. Let's be clear, it's one of the jobs with the lowest amount of actions having to be bound in the hotbar, and HJ and MD have been separated for all of their history except for 3 months.

And no, being able to freestyle weaves without loss clearly does lower the ceiling. There's nothing to learn there. Taking a tiny loss because you slightly clip GCDs does not raise the floor though - that level of optimization has no impact at all to clearing normal content. It's not the biggest deal in the kit either way, but let's not pretend making oGCD slotting completely arbitrary isn't a form of dumbing down in the scheme of things. I just hope they don't now axe something more important for sake of button bloat, because apparently swapping around a couple weaves different from how they were used to was too hard for people.

Missing a potential eye that you could get due to clipping is not tiny loss, it's huge. Clipping in general can lead to huge losses, and it shouldn't exist on a job that has had its oGCDs' animation lock reduced precisely so that they can be double weaved.

Who said that you need to optimize to clear normal content? You can clear normal content with HJ + MD merged or not. That's beside the point.

Saying that having the ability to double weave most of our kit is dumbing it down makes no sense to me. We're a job that has a 2-min burst which requires us to do something like 8 GCDs with double weaves in every single one of them except Stardiver. The difficulty resides precisely in achieving this to perfection and putting all of those oGCDs within the 15s that Battle Litany lasts, making sure that we also get two NAS under it.

And in any case, removing the ability to double weave HJ + MD from most players unless your ping is low is, again, less flexibility. You shouldn't need to have low ping when you got to do this specific weave.

TL; DR. The HJ + MD brings flexibility and doesn't hurt anyone. The job has worked like that for all of its life except for 3 months. Button bloat concerns cannot be called in here when DRG has the least amount of actions requiring to be bound in the hotbars.