Let's talk about the upcoming DRG rework...

[Ramiee]

The changes don't seem stellar, but I think most people who do play the job feel like we dodged a bullet (only to see it hit BLM instead, against all the goddamn odds).

We got monk'd.

[Tamaerl]

I'm rather glad we didn't get a full DRG rework, because I rather like the way DRG plays. I'll definitely miss spineshatter dive and dragon sight, but there's quite a few additions I do like. I like that we can enter life of the dragon right off the bat now, rather than having to build up to it, because we can now properly benefit from the 2 min window raid buffs. I also like the new iteration of nastrond with a greatly reduced cooldown to allow us to get in bigger bursts, and that the addition of the new drakesbane skill which makes us slightly less dependent on positionals.

[Matheus]

(part1)I've been a DRG main since ARR.

Couple of things I liked, and one big thing I dislike.

I actually like the damageless gap closer. Shame that it replaced Spineshatter because it means my feet will remain on the ground longer and thats not as fun. However I am a big fan of no damage gap closers, I don't know about you guys but I have never actually used Spineshatter as a gap closer in any place where damage matters, I always just save it for buff windows, so it almost never felt like a gap closer to me, just another oGCD and while I like them, I had a problem with spineshatter dive in particular because it didn't participate in any other part of the job (remember this part, I'll complain about it later).

Dragonfire Dive and Stardiver follow-ups are good, it mitigates the problem I had with Dragonfire Dive, which is the same problem I had with Spineshatter.

I have mostly positive feelings about Dragonsight being gone. On one hand the skill always felt clunky to use well, drg has too many oGCDs for me to be able to click the right target and apply it, and macros failed too often for me to actually like using the skill. On the other hand, I think there was a EXTREMELY easy fix for it, just have a action to mark someone as a eyes partner, if they're in range they get the tether, if not then you just apply it on yourself. I don't know why they haven't tried fixing the skill, it was a unique part of DRG and it could've been used with other parts of the kit to make it more unique. Now it is gone and I can only be happy that I won't be frustrated over seeing my icon still lit after I pressed it 4 times and wonder what could have been.

The skill upgrades are whatever for me, I like cool animations but I don't like that we have less positionals. True north exists, there is no reason for any job to have less positionals with true north in the game! That is why you added it in the first place, why remove positionals now?

Gierskogul and the new Life cycle are my big problem with the changes. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the idea of entering life during the opener. Getting everything I have in my buff windows feels great, the one thing I liked about phase breaks or dungeons is that sometimes they allow me to do a re-opener with Life and it just feels really good to get all of that out. I also like that Nastrond has a shorter cooldown now, I didn't particularly mind the 10 second cooldown 90% of the time, but the 10% where a boss got invulnerable and I still had 2 loads to blow were very, very sad.

My first problem with Gierskogul and Life is that I really liked casting Gierskogul, and I really liked that it lined up with High Jump, it just felt good to have that pairing up all the time. Now Gier has a 1min cooldown and High Jump is alone.

[Matheus]

(part2) The real problem, which has happened to other jobs in the past and has been creeping up on DRG for a while now is that DRG kit doesn't work with itself anymore. At some points in the job history more than others, DRG had a few moving parts that worked together for something bigger, optimizing those parts was very fun and even when I messed them up, I would have something to watch out for in the next attempt. Lets just look at the different implementations of the job over time and how those bits that worked together used to be:

-In Heavensward, the 4th hit of our combos were implemented, they were also random (which was painful for people with high ping like me), if you hit those you extended your Blood the Dragon timer, and gierskogul was a spender, which shaved 10 seconds of that timer to cast. You would stay on your toes throughout most of the fight for your positionals and try really hard to fit in as many Gierskogul casts as you could, using Blood of the Dragon to reset the gauge and help you with that.

-In Stormblood, eyes were added and in their first implementation you had to gather 3 eyes (from High Jump, same as always) to enter Life of the Dragon, and you could cast Nastrond in it. 5th hit were implemented and RNG was gone from them, which was good. I believe the timer was still there and the 4th and 5th hit increased it and Gierskogul would put you on Life, and Life would make the timer go down iirc. Your goal was to gather eyes and then enter the Life window with 21+ seconds on it to cast 3 nastronds (you could do 4 if you had really good ping iirc). The management there was a lot easier, but in some fights you cared about when your life cycle would begin, so every now and then you would purposefully delay the cycle or even not gather a eye so things would line up better. At some point in Stormblood they changed it to 2 eyes, which made management a lot simpler, but also a lot more comfortable.

- In Shadowbringers nothing changed other than the adition of Stardiver if I remember it right.You still used 2 eyes to build up to your Life window, the timer for Blood still existed and 4th and 5th hits still increased it, gierskogul entered Life and it started ticking down. No problem there other than you might've wanted a couple of extra seconds so you could stardiver.

[Matheus]

(part 3) Currently Blood isn't real, only its gauge. There is no timer attached to it so our combo hits don't chime into multiple parts of the job like they used to. We still build up eyes to enter Life for our coolest skills, but there is absolutely nothing to manage. In Dawntrail there will be no build up, just a cooldown related to a stance.

There will be no moving parts to manage because the job will be made of a bunch of gears spinning on their own as opposed to smaller parts of something cooler which takes a lot of the fun I had in the job away.

I'm sure DRG will play fine, we still have a ton of oGCDs which is why I play DRG over other melee classes but its just makes me sad that they decided to slowly strip away the job cohesion until there is nothing left. Happened to BRD when their DoTs stopped interacting with the rest of their kit, happened with MCH when Gauss Barrel stopped being a part of the job and ammo was removed, happened to DRK when management stopped being a part of the job overall and there are probably other examples out there.

I wish DRG is looked at later on and then reworked to be a more like MNK is looking to be in the sense that their kit has built-in interactions. I can only hope and until then, for the first time since ARR I'll main something else. Probably PCT or MNK.

I apologize for the long post and any grammar mistakes, this wasn't written in a single sitting, english is not my first language and I'm honestly too lazy to look it over to see if I still make sense, I just wanted to get that out of my chest.

[Kabooa]

I don't know who is disappointed by a lack of rework, except for the people who didn't play DRG and just bought it when SE said it needed one. The changes don't seem stellar, but I think most people who do play the job feel like we dodged a bullet (only to see it hit BLM instead, against all the goddamn odds).

Anyone who scrutinized the Endwalker changes should have been rightly concerned for "The after".

And now "The after" is here.

[Ayalu]

The lack of interlocking parts was what made the endwalker and now dawntrail Dragoon so boring to play.
Keeping up such a buff via combos is fun.

[Aco505]

(part2) The real problem, which has happened to other jobs in the past and has been creeping up on DRG for a while now is that DRG kit doesn't work with itself anymore.

I agree with several of the points you make, and especially this one. I have written my feedback about it before in this post, should you wish to check it.

The job's kit feels more disconnected now that High Jump and Mirage Dive have no interaction with the gauge. The "oGCD combos" that we get are good and thematic for the job but most of the DRG's actions simply deal damage with no build up or consequence with the exception of Geirskogul, Life Surge and Wyrmwind Thrust, as these are the only actions that interact with others in some way.

DRG isn't going to be changed much in DT, which I'm very happy about since I have loved the hectic weaving nature of the job during bursts and the positional awareness in EW. It's in the most fun state it's ever been.

However, the filler period in DT will be quite boring due to the loss of GSK every 30s, as you say. It's just pressing HJ on CD and doing the normal GCD loop, and unlike the other melee jobs, there's no different GCD paths to think about or much gauge building/spending to be done between burst windows.

In order to make the filler period a bit more interesting, I propose two short-term solutions:

1 - Make Mirage Dive give one scale when used. As a consequence, increase the maximum amount of scales we can store from 2 to 3 and reduce WWT's CD to 3-5s. Additionally, WWT's damage could scale depending on the number of scales when used (normal with 2, more with 3).

This change would make each Mirage Dive interact with the gauge and become relevant again and it would make our gauge more interesting and flexible. Having WWT consume all scales can also alleviate issues during burst when they might arise and it'll make pooling for burst more engaging as well.

Finally, the duration of the buffs that allow the use of Mirage Dive, Rise of the Dragon and Starcross should be increased to 30s, since right now they have differing timers (15, 30 and 20 respectively). This increase would greatly benefit MD in particular.

2 - Have Drakesbane be a positional but make either LotD or Battle Litany provide True North status to either all weaponskills or Drakesbane only for the duration.

Making Drakesbane a positional will make the filler more involved (it should probably be a flank one) but it can bring back pressure during burst. To avoid this, it can gain omnidirectional status during burst or BL can make all positionals omnidirectional for its duration.

In any case, if this isn't changed, there will be issues to fit True North in 120s bursts in some cases even with the 5th GCD not being a positional, so something will likely be done in this regard.


There's obviously more problems to be addressed such as our gauge being diminished and mostly useless till level 90, which I hope they revert at some point: eyes should return in some shape or form. This removal also had the consequence of eliminating a lot of flexibility and optimization from the job.

Other gripes I have is how Piercing Talon is completely unchanged, making it the worst ranged option of all melee by far, or how they didn't integrate Dragon Sight's animation into Lance Charge considering the former is way more thematic and fitting for the job.

We'll see if they respond to feedback or what kind of changes they introduce in the so-called expansion of job identity from 7.2 onward.

By the way, you can include as much text as you want in one post. After writing something, simply click on the edit button and add all the remaining text. It'll allow you to include everything.

[HikariKurosawa]

You can play dragoon perfectly with correct SkS and it will still drift over time as is because of the nature of the cooldowns. The changes are good and the job needed fixing. They thought it needed a total overhaul, instead it just needed to be polished. These changes are going to be amazing and the burst windows will be more consistently satisfying on top of probably having more oGCDs to press. Just less annoying cooldown drift avoidance, more oGCD weaving.

We have 3 nastrond on 2 sec cooldowns every minute, dragonfire dive has falloff, but is increased to 500 potency first target and has a followup oGCD with 550 potency first target and the same falloff so that's just a massive increase to single target potency and also an increase to AoE potency. High jump and mirage dive can be enjoyed for what they are now instead of being tied to a mechanic that is largely annoying because of how misaligned it makes our burst window in dungeon content + how it destroys our opener in raid or trial content. Stardiver has a followup oGCD, and we are strongly encouraged to fit all of this within our 20 second LotD window because of the 15% damage increase(no more giving away 5% potency, we get it to ourselves and don't have to weave it in anymore so we can weave more damage oGCD instead). Don't have to worry about spineshatter dive and its weakness being weaved twice into burst windows, on top of getting a proper mobility tool in its place.

This is 11 oGCD damage abilities including life surge that we should be weaving into our burst windows. Every one aside from life surge is just pure damage and pure dragoon. Currently we weave 7 and one nastrond will not be under buffs. We still enter LotD every minute, we will just no longer experience drift under optimal play. This is good.

[Aco505]

You can play dragoon perfectly with correct SkS and it will still drift over time as is because of the nature of the cooldowns.

The only thing that will drift when playing properly is GSK because it cannot be queued when exiting LotD. Any other kind of drift is due to player error. DRG is one of the probably few jobs that barely drifts.

The GSK drift is also irrelevant when downtime is involved so it's mostly a minor nuisance in full uptime fights lasting 8+ minutes, which are not too common. It's basically nothing compared to the drift that can affect other jobs, and it would've been fixed with the upcoming new system that couples/decouples related abilities. Changing the CD of GSK so that it's different from the LotD duration was another possibility, and the one that we will ultimately get although I doubt it was due to this particular question.