What happened to Dragoon? A rant/essay

[YuukiMizrahi]

For starters, I've been playing since around winter of 2014. The job I mained from 2.0 until now and played through every single expansions story, was the Drg. Even during the abysmal time before their magic defense buff.
I loved it.

Now though, I cant stand playing it in anything other than PvP. At least THERE it still feels like a functioning class.
Now, I'm referring to the casual PvE feel of the class.
For starters, lets look at the best Drg has ever been in; Shb & EW

In both expansions, Drg felt RIGHT. It was fun, engaging, and had an awesome state of flow that just kept you engaged. Sure, after a while it got repetitive but overall, it flowed easily.

EW added to Drg in the best way possible, Wyrmwind Thrust. It didn't stack the end of the class with finisher-after-finisher like some classes. (looking at you Rdm).

Then Dawntrail...

Look, I understand it needed some kind of overhaul so more could be added to it in later expansions. But not this.

Starcross
Winged Glide (i hate this skill so much)
Spineshatter Dive

Starcross has the dumbest restriction in the entire kit... 3 yalms... The skill cant be executed unless the goon is inside the boss when the rest of the kit has 15 to 20 yalms of range to play with. Why? This makes 0 sense. Its THE class that hops, jumps and flips around the arena. Its got the most range of all the melee for a REASON. Yet this capstone can only be used at 3? Please for the love the Deus Ex Machina in the sky, FIX THIS!

Winged Glide
... I don't have words to express how much I despise this skill. It is so out of place on the Drg and feels awful to push, I'd rather eat my desk...
Why on Elpis was this skill green lighted? I understand trimming the busyness of the job with removing Dragon Sight for more damage buttons, I get it, but WHY A SLIDE??? On the class that can literally fling itself 100s if not 1000s of feet INTO THE AIR, would they just slide forward? Removing the damage from Spineshatter and making it executable on any target would fix this egregious issue. You're not doing damage so leaping to a target makes sense!

Spineshatter Dive
I think I can speak for almost all Drg mains when I say, GIVE IT BACK. Unlike Kaiten being used solely for stupidly high damage, Spineshatter gave an RP feel to Drg. Not only was it the SECOND jump after, well, Jump, to get in ARR, I am not counting Elusive, it also was the first movement added to the kit! I cant count how many times a well timed Leap saved me from a stupid mistake. Take that Cha-Cha slide ability back (burn it with Dragonfire) and give us back our Leap.

There are 14/21 jobs in the game with a slide-like gap closer ability... 2/3! With Nin and Rpr having teleport gap closers... Drg would be the ONLY CLASS to have a jumping gap closer that's not using the back-flip in the same way. Please Yoshi-P... please fix this.

Edit: So Ive calmed down a bit, but I still hate [B]Winged Glide[B]. After giving it some more thought, it comes down to this.
The addition of the dash button was meaningless. Movement was built into the kit already with all of the jumps. You had 5 jumps that moved you in EW. FIVE. Even if "OpToMiZiNg" your opener, at least one Spineshatter is always off CD to move in with. And in regards to the Arcadian HW Division, with the forced ranged portions you would of had an immediate return in with SSD as at least one was always off cooldown.
Now, we have the worst movement in the game on a 60 second cooldown BECAUSE WE CAN JUMP AND MOVE ABOUT ANYWAY!!!!

I have beef with other class designs as well but thats for a video or some such.

[Aco505]

The changes to DRG in Dawntrail have been a head scratcher both thematically and mechanically. These issues have been discussed before in other threads (e. g. here, here, here, or the last quarter of this one).

On the one hand, Life of the Dragon has been streamlined for the more casual players.

On the other hand, the job has become a WAR clone mechanically but worse because there's not much gauge to manage. Common issues on this front are:

- Most actions just deal damage directly with no build up: only GSK, WWT and Life Surge affect other actions. HJ and MD lost their key role and got nothing special back besides the possibility of doing double Mirage Dive in buffs.

- Mirage Dive's duration is too low. 15s makes it too tight during bursts if playing optimally with a normal rotation, firing it with around 1 second left of its timer.

- No real gauge until level 90. Scales were not expanded upon in any shape or form after the loss of eyes.

- Starcross' short range and Winged Glide's long cooldown for a dash ability with no damage.

- Hollow filler phase with only one thing to take into consideration besides rolling the GCD, keeping High Jump on cooldown, and even then it's not much of a problem due to some flexibility in burst (which is a positive nuance).

- Lowering of positionals that further hurts the filler phase. Additionally, fitting True North in 120s bursts is still complicated.

- Lance Charge and Geirskogul both increasing damage done with the same cooldown, thus questioning the relevance of the former.

- Piercing Talon still being awful with no potency upgrades for many years now and no tool to keep uptime when disconnecting besides Winged Glide and Elusive Jump.

- Stardiver dealing less damage than Starcross despite the former being a forced single weave.

Thematically, Dragon Sight was removed instead of becoming an upgrade to Lance Charge at least visually or repurposed as some kind of gauge cooldown, Spineshatter Dive was transformed into a dash, and we have lost the eye gauge, which is not only relevant mechanically but also the whole lore reason DRGs exist in the first place. The blue Blood of the Dragon aura has returned from levels 60 to 69 only and our actions are only inspired by Nidhogg lately instead of including more of the other great dragons we've encountered such as Hraesvelgr. We also have less jumps than before, although we could consider Starcross to be one animation-wise even if it doesn't have higher animation lock. The "low impact" sfx or vfx (for some players) of Starcross, Rise of the Dragon or Drakesbane compared to the actions introduced in other expansions, and so on.

Let's hope they take our feedback into account. I guess that the reason why the job feels weird is due to them cancelling the rework at the last minute and trying to hastily fix it.

[YuukiMizrahi]

I think my biggest complaint has to do with Spineshatter and Winged Glide, thematically speaking.

Im not exaggerating when i say i refuse to even put Winged Glide on my hotbar.. id rather backflip then use that. The loss of spineshatter as an ability as a whole feels like such a silly decision. If its a tech issue, make it mimic Nins teleport only jump instead of poof.

Mechanically, we might as well not even have a guage since it's just a timer now and Starcross just feels awful being the only melee jump in it's whole kit. I'm not sure why they decided to get cold feet on the rework. I'm not sure what was planned but as of now, this class that once felt really fun to play is just... awful.

[Ramiee]

Starcross range is very weird, I get that its meant to be a followup to Stardiver but the animation lock doesn't make it work like that. Spineshatter dive for sure should of just lost its damage instead of giving us winged glide, Bards repelling shot still shoots an arrow but does no damage they can keep the same animation, same with plunge.

[Carighan]

They just had to remove the damage of Spineshatter Dive, or - always my favorite solution to this - make it cause a GCD, hence with its lower potency than other attacks you would only use it if you are at range.

Then if needed - and I think it is but I know how much many Dragoon plays hate the jumps so eh - add way more jumping onto way more skills. That being said , I also feel Winged Glide is also pretty damn awesome, just not the animation.

Make it:

* GCD
* Medium damage (so still only used as a gapcloser).
* Fairly slow animation, you jump up into the air, fly once side-to-side, then crash back down into the enemy. This super-fancy actual winged glide!
* To then not make it factually unusable, make you actually invulnerable while in the air, PvP style.

[Sarantserel]

I only started in ShB, so I don't have much insight for it played before that, but for my part, I LOVED ShB DRG. It was my main job throughout the MSQ and as I first tried out extreme and savage raiding. And for my money, that was the best the job was and it's only become worse and worse since then. While I enjoyed the skills DRG gained during EW, the changes to buff timers from 90s/120s/180s to flats 60s/120s removed a lot of the fun from the job for me. Something I really liked about ShB DRG was that you had to delay or rush your life throughout your rotation because you wanted to align it with your buffs. It'd lead to back to back life windows at times and just gave the job more dynamism. With the EW change, now you just delayed the first one and that was it. While it diminished my enjoyment of the job and made me move to RDM as my main, I still liked the core of it and the EW additions enough to consider it my main Melee job.

But then DT came around and that actually ruined my enjoyment of the job to a point that I'm considering abandoning it as my melee main. The complete removal of the eyes mechanic with no new job mechanic to replace it makes the job completely hollow, completely removing the feeling that you're building up to your burst during filler phase. Delaying life is not even a possibility anymore and High Jump and Mirage Dive are now completely empty damage button with zero tie to your job mechanic. Their stated reasoning for this change was to allow DRG to Life in it's opener, but that could have been fixed without outright removing eyes as a mechanic by just letting DRG start fights with 2 eyes. Making Life last 20s and changing Nastrond to a 2s CD was also a loss in my opinion. The old 30s life with 10s Nastrond meant that you had to be precise with your nastrond usage to ensure you used all 3 before it finished. And then they also replace your 5th hit combo with a boring no positional GCD. One of the thing I loved the most about DRG was how well Fang & Claw flowed into Wheeling Thrust and vice-versa on top of enjoying the small positional dance that on the 4th and 5th hits of your combos. Now that's gone.

Those change felt like they removed failure states from the job which IMO is a BAD thing. Failure states are what make mastering a job meaningful and interesting. Trying to remove them from the game is IMO one of the biggest issue with the current job design philosophy, alongside the 2min burst meta.

And to expand on High Jump/Mirage Dive's empty feeling, I want to compare them to Fleche and Contre-Sixte on RDM. While those 2 oGCDs seem to be empty damage buttons with no interesting interactions with RDM's core mechanic, their 25s and 35s CD combined with RDM's 6 GCD burst means there's an element of optimization to properly use those 2 oGCDs on CD. To me, that gives those oGCDs an interesting element of play even if they don't interact directly with RDM's mechanic. High Jump and Mirage Dive on the other hand, are just 30s weaves with little optimization room atm.

Beyond that, when they first announced their intent to rework DRG, one of their stated goal was to address it's extremely busy burst windows. While they seemingly removed 3 oGCDs from the burst windows (2 spineshatter and Dragon Sight), they were immediately replaced with a 3rd Nastrond and pressing Stardiver and Dragonfire Dive a 2nd time each instead. So the job's burst is just as busy as ever, with the only benefit being that you have 2 less buttons to press.

For other issues, as others mentioned, Winged Glide is really underwhelming animation wise and Starcross has unnecessary short range, making it awkward to use.

All in all, I feel the job is a hollow facsimile of it's old self. It's a job with zero resource building to give you that feeling for building up to your burst. It's a purely CD focused job with nothing interesting happening between it's crazy burst windows beyond High Jump/Mirage Dive, which as I pointed out earlier don't interact with the job in any interesting way beyond being damage buttons to press every 30s. I really hope they look into DRG in the future and give it back some interesting mechanics to build up for burst, because for now, I've lost all interest I ever held in the job, gameplay wise.

[jonimated]

They just had to remove the damage of Spineshatter Dive, or - always my favorite solution to this - make it cause a GCD, hence with its lower potency than other attacks you would only use it if you are at range.

Then if needed - and I think it is but I know how much many Dragoon plays hate the jumps so eh - add way more jumping onto way more skills. That being said , I also feel Winged Glide is also pretty damn awesome, just not the animation.

Make it:

* GCD
* Medium damage (so still only used as a gapcloser).
* Fairly slow animation, you jump up into the air, fly once side-to-side, then crash back down into the enemy. This super-fancy actual winged glide!
* To then not make it factually unusable, make you actually invulnerable while in the air, PvP style.

There's a reason gap closers are oGCDs.

If you put Dragoon's gap closer on the GCD it would need to do more damage than your other options in order to be worth pressing. Any other GCD with range would also need to be unavailable or on cooldown. It would need to be balanced around making it worth using over just walking back to the target yourself and hitting it with another GCD. Essentially if you have 2.5 seconds to walk back to the target you would never use a GCD gap closer, unless it put out just unbelievable potency numbers.

The benefit of having gap closers as oGCDs is that it gets you back to the target and lets you hit a GCD immediately. You can use it between your ranged GCD and your melee GCD with minimal interruption. Being an oGCD also means you can use them almost instantly, meaning the exact moment it is safe to rush back in you can do it, instead of having to wait for the end of your last GCD.

Changing Spineshatter to Winged Glide feels bad, but putting gap closers on the GCD is the greater of two evils. It would feel way worse.

[Azurarok]

The Mirage dive/Geirskogul change bothers me so much. Not only have they removed the ability to adjust when to go into Life of the Dragon, having one less aoe skill to use as freely just makes it worse for dungeons and other non-raid content.

Like if I know there isn't going to be a whole minute left between the current trash pull and the next boss I have to either hold onto Geirskogul to keep it lined up for the boss, use it and delay the burst, or just have my rotation out of alignment.

Or like when running FATEs, if whatever I'm fighting's almost dead and I use Geirskogul to finish it off a little bit faster, I'd have wasted 3 Nastronds and Stardiver. (Spineshatter Dive was also useful in situations like this too, being a charge action that's not directly tied the burst).

I didn't have to worry about that nearly as much when Geirskogul was on 30s and could just delay Life by changing when to use Mirage Dive. It just doesn't feel nearly as good as it did in EW.

[Carighan]

If you put Dragoon's gap closer on the GCD it would need to do more damage than your other options in order to be worth pressing.

Yeah that's what I said. Make it more damage than not being in range and having to walk there. And GCD would be necessary as an elaborate and importantly lengthly animation that comes with being unhittable during it. Which would make far more sense for a job idealized as being airborne a lot:

* Less ability to be hit
* Less control.

[jonimated]

Yeah that's what I said. Make it more damage than not being in range and having to walk there. And GCD would be necessary as an elaborate and importantly lengthly animation that comes with being unhittable during it. Which would make far more sense for a job idealized as being airborne a lot:

* Less ability to be hit
* Less control.

Sure ok, you can make it stronger than your ranged option, but weaker than your weakest single target ability. That puts it somewhere between 160-220 potency. It's weird to structure an ability that way, but not impossible.

This doesn't cover the issue that it still wouldn't be worth using if it's going to take you less than 2.5 seconds to just walk to the boss. Doesn't seem like a lot but a single GCD is in fact a massive amount of time when it comes to movement. You can cover half a mid-size arena in that time. If you're father than that then I would question your positioning to begin with. There are very few instances when a boss moves so far away that you can't reach them within a single GCD.

Ranged attacks being GCD is fine. In most cases ranged abilities are used when you literally cannot reach the target, as in there is a mechanic preventing it. Once there is no obstacle you would either walk back in or use your oGCD gap closer between your ranged GCD and your next melee GCD. This wouldn't apply to a GCD gap closer.

The only reasons gap closers see any use at all right now is because they are oGCD. Putting gap closers on the GCD is taking an ability with already niche use and pushing it into near obsolescence.

As I said it's fine to not like Winged Glide as it is, I don't really like it, but putting it on the GCD is so much worse. It would be used as a way to identify when a player was playing sub-optimally.