Dragoon Fall Damage

[Amarande]

I've always felt that they should be invincible when jumping because they aren't on the ground when an aoe hits.

Sadly, you are on the ground. You have T8 terrain exploits to blame for that (between T5 and T8 terrain exploits are pretty much the main reason why boss battles in this game now tend to almost universally be on samey Fighting Game style arenas).

Since then, no ostensible "teleport" or "jump" or other insta-movement class ability has been allowed to operate in the intuitively expected way: All such abilities now actually rapid-move you along the ground for the movement vector, so you only visually jump or warp, but if there's something in between (like a cliff - see level 73 dungeon or a few boss arenas that have a "hole in the middle" setup - or a persistent ground AoE), you will still be treated as having tried to run through it.

Wait, Dragoons used to have self-damage when they use their jump skills in HW? That has to be the stupidest thing Ive ever heard about this game.

Nah, the memes were just contemporaneous and for other reasons (DRG armor used to have low MDef in a game where most major AoEs tend to be magic, jumps caused animation locks which made DRG have more trouble than most to dodge said AoEs, and they used to have a DPS buff that caused you to take more damage as well).

I like it when you have shields up that protects against damage. But they don't stop anything of the fall damage. Another you're in a mount that hovers off the ground, but you can still take fall damage in none flying zones.

Yeah, these seem to both be across-the-board norms in MMOs too.

WoW has exactly the same kinda behavior, where shields (unless it's a total invulnerability - and now that I think of it I'm not sure if Hallowed Ground prevents
fall damage or not, LOL) don't do anything against things like fall damage.

And yup, also the same thing with mounts (complete with it being your mount grunts or makes crashy sounds but it's you who take the damage ... then again, what major MMO games actually even have mount HP systems anyway besides LOTRO - where you actually don't take fall damage anyway unless it is fatal, otherwise you get an injury debuff but no HP loss - and Black Desert?)