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

[Rxvenluvsducks]

DRG players when square removes a really dated jump animation that is supposed to be our mobility ability and had no interaction with any other ability: NOO DRAGOON IS ABOUT JUMPING WHY REMOVE A JUMP?????

DRG players when devs remove a clunky interaction between cooldowns that caused an annoying drift unless played in a really annoying contrived way: might as well remove high jump if they're going to make a damage ability only used for damage on a dps spec.

Hard to take these forums seriously. Bunch of oldheads.

What's funny now too is, dragoon is harder now than it was before. Just harder in the ways it should be, and has all clunk removed.

Also the complaints about our new mobility spell are so weird. We do a backflip to disengage, and then loop back in with a dragonlike swoop. If you pair the two abilities together it looks like a dragon doing a loop dive. Maybe you are just bad at fantasy? On top of it having less action delay than spineshatter dive, both thematically and for gameplay smoothness it is an upgrade.

Just a reminder that stardiver is a jump that's pretty long on animation lock. Removing a shorter jump aka spineshatter dive which got 2 stacks by the way later on to "implement a new movement that simplifies the job" doesn't make sense tbh. Dragoon is harder to play as a dragoon because it feels more of a ripoff Wannabe Estinien who was inspired by his deeds. It feels even more clunkier than the instance in Shadowbringers (or perhaps endwalker, whose memory i absolutely lack lmao) where we play as him. If the game had to remove certain abilities from a job because of people complaining about it being too hard pre-dawntrail, perhaps you just need to get better.

[Aco505]

Stardiver's animation lock is 1.5 seconds and I personally like that it's our "heavy" jump. It should get a boost of potency to 700 or 800 to compensate for it being a single weave though.

[Selvokaz]

so no gcd jump?

[Reldhir]

I always liked the idea of jump being a slow and considered heavy attack. DRG from other ff games have always embodied this idea and im sure the devs had this concept in mind when they made the first iterations of DRG in ff14 with the long animation lock jump. But then titan arrived and suddenly people were getting wrecked and probably when the loldrg moniker stuck. So they made it faster, but still people were getting caught out. It was probably at this point the collective concisousness of the player base started catching on to double weaving being the optimal way to play as well, so they demanded faster and faster jumps. Now we're the faceroll push every button everywhere all at once job of today, and thats cool. its fun, but wholy different to the concept of slow and heavy DRG from past games.

Stardiver feels like the last nod to that idea of jump being a heavy attack and not a peck like it feels today? Probably why there are mixed feelings on it regarding the lock out time. I do miss the slow heavy jump being a slow and considered powerful attack. But with where drg is today being the manic flurry of light/medium blows (even our potencies reflect this) I feel like its at complete odds todays drg to go back to slower jumps either by going thr way of stardiver with longer lockout or putting jumps on the gcd.

That being said, if they AHEM* did end up reworking the job, maybe then they could reconceptualize the current DRG and maybe reintrouduce a slower more considered playstyle xD

Not advocating for either! Just saying I wouldnt want a situation where it was half in each and neither at the same time. Adding a gcd jump to the current feel of drg would *probably* make it feel weird.

In my opinion anyway :P

[HikariKurosawa]

Replace easy with just about everything youve ever posted in this thread.

Its a open forum buddy. People have to put up with you too.

The difference is I am saying relevant things and that guy was just explaining how he personally found new dragoon to be easy. Objectively speaking, new dragoon is much more demanding than endwalker dragoon even at level 92. Even at level 90.

People don't have to "put up" with me, and my post was not about having to "put up" with that other guy. I was making a statement on how they posted irrelevant conjecture.

If the game had to remove certain abilities from a job because of people complaining about it being too hard pre-dawntrail, perhaps you just need to get better.

They removed spineshatter because the animation was godawful and it was supposed to be our mobility utility yet was always used as part of our burst window. On top of it having more animation lock than the new mobility ability we got in dawntrail. On top of this, removing spineshatter and replacing it with a true mobility skill has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity or simplicity of the job. It's just utility that we were supposed to have access to this entire time.

Perhaps you need to use more rational thought processes instead of jumping at the opportunity to remark on someone else's skill level like a dog.

[Magikazam]

Perhaps you need to use more rational thought processes instead of jumping at the opportunity to remark on someone else's skill level like a dog.

Maybe you are just bad at fantasy?

Sometimes, joke write themselves

[HikariKurosawa]

Sometimes, joke write themselves

Maybe if you're bad at fantasy

[Shurrikhan]

Maybe if you're bad at fantasy

Reality seems sufficient for the conclusion above.

[Aco505]

I always liked the idea of jump being a slow and considered heavy attack. [...]

That being said, if they AHEM* did end up reworking the job, maybe then they could reconceptualize the current DRG and maybe reintrouduce a slower more considered playstyle xD

Not advocating for either! Just saying I wouldnt want a situation where it was half in each and neither at the same time. Adding a gcd jump to the current feel of drg would *probably* make it feel weird.

In my opinion anyway :P

The problem is that you have to choose. What do you want, "heavier" jumps, to maintain the machine-gun play style, or to preserve core unique aspects of the job? Jumps could become GCDs to hit for +1200 potency or they could remain oGCDs but then you'd have to have lower potencies on GCDs and have a lower amount of oGCDs to press if you wanted their potency to stay at +1200.

DRG is already a slow job that doesn't look like it due to the oGCDs. Removing some of them would quickly expose this.

DRG is one of the few jobs whose main focus is dealing damage through oGCDs. This unique feature -alongside having to build up for burst in or being able to store a lot of gauge in 6.x, its power in 2-target spread cleave with line attacks, the long GCD combo string, etc.- is one of the things that makes the job so good. Making jumps feel stronger is just a feel. We already have most jobs with +1000 potency attacks and the last thing the game needs right now is to also keep homogenizing the damage profiles. DRG has always been a job with "low" potencies that don't "feel" powerful.

Yet I'd also like to remind of the fact that we deal almost 40% more damage for 20s every minute and that double weaving two strong oGCDs after a GCD can amount to higher potency than a NIN's Hyosho with the Kassatsu buff accounted for, and this is without taking into account the DRG's damage buffs. The damage is simply spread out among more actions.

In my opinion, we just need the kit to be more cohesive. Actions must interact more between themselves without it being overwhelming.

But no matter what, DRG faces design walls when thinking of how to rework it while keeping its identity intact. How do you add GCDs when the timers of the CS DoT and Power Surge are set by the strict combo loop? Can new GCDs increase the duration of an active DoT? Is this even possible for SE to code? And what about making SkS desirable for DRG by turning oGCDs (for instance, the jumps) into "oGCD weaponskills" that benefit from the stat yet can still be weaved (e. g. Lost Slash)? And so on...

I think it would have been interesting for the developers to give current GSK a 30s CD for us to be able to have a more involved filler. I'd rather DRG became consistent with its damage profile with some higher peaks but still high valleys compared to the profile of so many other jobs that go full ham in 1 or 2-min burst and do absolutely nothing for 40 or 80 seconds in between. The latter point is where we are at: we just press one HJ and any WWT that cannot be kept for buffs while also having less positionals to think about.

[Icycrits]

Just came here to say that as someone who has been maining this job since HW at a mid-to-highend level, this "rework" has genuinely killed my love for this job. There is little to no synergy, cohesion or thought put into anything. It has been homogenized into another 1-minute job with a lot of "busy-ness" with none of the nuance. While I will admit these changes fix some of the problems that DRG had in EW, I would consider that iteration of the job superior overall. It is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I wrote some suggestions on a reddit post after it was driving me crazy that no DRGs seemed to be complaining about the rework in-game, so I googled it only to find a massive thread full of DRGs completely unhappy with the state of 7.0 DRG. I doubt it SE will ever read this, but I think it might open an avenue for discussing constructive criticism and ideas on how to address the job's old painpoints without destroying the idenity of the job: both gameplay and fantasy-wise.

If you would like to read them, I will post them here as it's quite a bit of text:

Dragon Sight: For starters, people that are happy that we lost Dragon Sight outright because it felt clunky without a macro are insane. Yes, it was clunky, but why is the solution SE came up with to outright delete one of the most defining features of this RDPS melee dps job? It would be like removing dance partner from Dancer; yes, it feels that bad in my opinion. Why couldn't they have made it like Sage or Dancer where you give a partner the left eye before the engagement begins? That way, casual players wouldn't have to worry about making a macro or having to click your party list during one of the busiest re-openers in the game? Heck, I would've even gone as far as adding a new passive somewhere 91+ for your partner that also grants them true north to make it that much more lucrative. It would actually help ease the burden of VPR's positional requirements rather than just straight up removing them (but that's another topic entirely)

Life of the Dragon: I get what they were going for here by putting it on Geirskogul on a 1-minute cooldown, but it completely destroyed any sense of preplanning and complexity. They wanted to solve the problem of DRG's weak opener and a few awkward tight ultimate phases where your MD was too tight to consistently hit. Instead, I would've made MD usable without a target and usable without high jump as a prerequisite outside of combat granting a charge of gaze of the first brood and greying out the ability until activated once more with high jump during the opener. This would solve many issues. It would allow you to enter Life of the Dragon immediately, similar to how Pictomancer can instantly prep its Motifs outside of combat. It would line up your life of the dragon and mirage dives with the one minute more naturally. No more awkward having to hold MD until after your geirskogul, and potentially wasting a stack if you accidentally spam HJ too hard. This would also ease the burden of annoyances where the boss dies in a dungeon or goes away in an Ultimate before you can get your stack. You would still lose out on the 200 potency OGCD, but it wouldn't ruin your rotation for the rest of the fight which I think is a fair trade-off more comparable to missing a couple positionals.

Hell, you could even add more flavor to the job by doing something cool like making Mirage Dive's animation cast while untargeted a jump where you disappear into the air and reappear almost immediately in the iconic DRG pose similar to how SAM's meditate can be used during downtime to grant gauge. It wouldn't give you anything for holding the animation longer, but DRG has always been about the cool factor and that would certainly add to it (as well as allowing females to strike the famous pose while afk).

Spineshatter Dive & Winged Glide: This one is really simple, just put the old Spineshatter Dive animation on Winged Glide and get rid of the animation lock so that we can attack instantly to make up for the lack of potency on our iconic jump. I genuinely miss being able to jump on enemies in the overworld to tag them at a distance before they are melted in overpopulated Hunt Trains for example. Sure, Piercing Talon might serve the same purpose but the job fantasy is descending from the heavens and raining hell upon your silly grounded nemeses, not spear-chucking like some kind of caveman and it most certainly isn't about some kind of pathetic wimpy dash that feels more like a repurposed tank gap-closer than having any business on DRG's kit.

These are potential solutions to the "problems" DRG had in EW that I concocted in 30 minutes of sitting down and thinking about it without destroying the identity or nuance of the job. They might have glaring problems I didn't consider, but my main point is that fixing mild annoyances to a job many already considered the perfect iteration last expansion shouldn't be changed so drastically with nothing of similar engagement given in exchange!

All in all, a new expansion should make me excited to play my job and if most players already consider their job of choice perfect, why change it so drastically if it's just going to be homogenized slop that you promise to fix in 8.0? At least when SMN got its rework, while it may have missed the mark in terms of gameplay, the core identity of the job was strengthened dramatically. It makes no sense that us DRG mains have had our beloved job playstyle ripped away from us while also losing a lot of core identity. Players should not accept such reworks just because it makes some annoying things better. There is always a way to fix such pain points without destroying the job's core identity.