How to Dragoon Per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[SunnyHirose]

Just occurred to me that Life Surge is back to being awkward. Not that we weren't going to have to rethink it, but if you have appreciable skill speed (and I suspect we'll probably want that now, so HT isn't always falling off momentarily), you will run into trouble trying to use it every other Full Thrust.

[RachaelMarie22]

I'm just hoping AST's Time Dilation works for blood for blood...but I guess if it was for other classes' buffs that would be too OP..

[Thendiel]

30% increase to Jump would be a 260 potency attack, no? Still would be weaker than Full Thrust. I never used it on Jump unless a target is at like 1-2% and I just finished a combo, and Power Surge and Life Surge are both up, i'll stack them both on jump just to get a big hit. Or while doing atma books, I would just one shot mobs with PS+LS Jump then run to the next spawn(in the case of spawns that were spread out far).

I very rarely used Life Surge with Jump, either. But if Jump is buffed multiplicatively by both Power Surge and Blood of the Dragon, it will come to 200 x 1.50 x 1.30 = 390 base potency, which should outperform Full Thrust slightly. I still think that LS+FT would have been ideal to avoid cutting into the GCD timer, personally, but some were suggesting that PS+LS+J was going to be the optimum approach in 3.0. This change to Life Surge settles the issue, and means that we don't have to bother crunching numbers to weigh the two possibilities against each other.

Just occurred to me that Life Surge is back to being awkward. Not that we weren't going to have to rethink it, but if you have appreciable skill speed (and I suspect we'll probably want that now, so HT isn't always falling off momentarily), you will run into trouble trying to use it every other Full Thrust.

That might be true, but it's also worth mentioning that LS+Wheeling Thrust and LS+Fang and Claw might be viable substitutes for LS+Full Thrust, depending on how the timing works out. At 290 potency, they're substantially more comparable to Full Thrust than Chaos Thrust was. I could easily see, e.g., Life Surge becoming available immediately after a Full Thrust but before a Wheeling Thrust, in which case I'd presumably pop it for Wheeling.

[Hyrist]

My real concern is the timing balancing between ------gul usage and Blood of the Dragon maintenance. There's bound to be a mathmatic setup that dictates exactly how many of these things we can use and still keep gul up long enough to re-apply, if I'm reading these skills correctly.

[Jonnycbad]

I wonder if SE just makes abilities willy nilly or if they have a rough idea of how rotations should be. Seemed like the current drg rotation is very tight and relatively easy to use, given practice. But now with the new abilities, and probable clipping/LS awkwardness, things seem out of wack, timing wise. I wonder how well thought out durations were and if they may be adjusted when the dust settles in 3.x or something. Here's hoping that similar to the changes we got in 2.x, we should see some adjustments based on feedback moving forward. I guess now that Holy and Flare have been nerfed, our AoE damage is better by comparison I suppose. Also odd that they said "Geirskogul will be quite strong" and called the ability which would deplete BotD would be "a big hit" but its just 200 potency, compared to MNK's 330, or WAR's 500 or whatever n

[Hyrist]

-snip-

It looks like its strength lies within the frequent availability of its use, depending on its circumstance. So long as you have 10-11 spare seconds on the timer left after usage... you might get 2-3 of them in during your typical Blood of the Dragon rotation.

Start before Chaos Thrust, Geirskogul after 4th tier, do next rotation, refresh/clip HT/Phleb, next rotation, Geirskogul again - or some such. I'm not matching the timers mathematically right now. But you should be able to do it either every first and third or first and fourth rotation, and then you get one to push right before the cooldown is up again.

No doubt though, it will be messy. Use of Geirskogul will be far more context based than just a flat cooldown rotation.

Still, over the same amount of time, comparing cooldowns with Warrior, we're likely to output the same potency or more.

[Avalios]

Also odd that they said "Geirskogul will be quite strong" and called the ability which would deplete BotD would be "a big hit" but its just 200 potency, compared to MNK's 330, or WAR's 500 or whatever n

Let's say in practice on average you roughly use geirskogul twice a minute during your normal rotation. An extra 400 potency every minute between globals is HUGE when it's just simply getting added to what we already have. Add in the additional damage from our 4th combo strings and DRGs are getting the largest increase in DPS by far.
Would you prefer a 450 potency hit you can only use every 120 seconds?

[Thendiel]

I hypothesize that a 2.3 second GCD (or less) will be necessary to optimize our new 3.0 rotation. One advantage to reaching this threshold is that it enables us to comfortably maintain 100% Heavy Thrust and Phlebotomize uptime under a rotation of HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -> (repeat). A second advantage is that, because we can reach a third Wheeling Thrust at the one-minute mark--right as a new BotD cooldown becomes available--we should be able to time things rather neatly, and obtain 3 Geirskoguls per minute.

Here is a model tracing BotD and Geirskogul use across approximately 2 minutes, with a GCD of exactly 2.3 seconds (and assuming that these abilities all work the way we think they will):

HT -> ID-Dis-[activate BotD]-CT-F&C-[Geirskogul] -> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[18.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[22.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[15.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[19.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-[BotD wears off]-[ONE MINUTE: BotD is off cooldown again]-[activate new BotD]-WhT -[Geirskogul]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[23.5 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[17 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[20.5 seconds of BotD remaining]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[24 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[17.5 seconds of BotD remaining]-[TWO MINUTES: BotD is off cooldown again]-> Phleb -> TT-[Geirskogul]-[BotD wears off]-VT-[activate new BotD]-FT-WhT -[Geirskogul]-> (cycle essentially repeats with swapped combos)

General observations:
-The timing is very precise at the one minute mark, with BotD falling off exactly as it needs to be reactivated. It may be that this approach does not work at all, or perhaps only works if one is a bit lucky. On the other hand, it's possible that popping a new BotD while the old one is active simply forces the BotD timer to 15 seconds, which would eliminate the diceyness of the timing. Alternatively, one could perhaps manually click off BotD after landing FT?
-The general rule of thumb for aggressive Geirskogul use seems to be: pop Geirskogul immediately after a 4th-hit combo finisher, if you have about (5 GCDs + 10 seconds) or more remaining. In this example, that places the threshold at ((5 GCDs x 2.3 seconds) + 10 seconds) = 21.5 seconds. This value may have to be adjusted higher or lower, however, depending on how the animations for BotD, F&C, and WhT work. Also, knowing when to violate this rule, like I have in the above model just before the one-minute mark, will be crucial.
-Of course, it’s worth noting that this is an ideal, Striking Dummy-conditions model for cooldown optimization. There are, and I assume there will continue to be, many fights in the game that have periods of combat downtime. As Hyrist suggested, BotD and Geirskogul are likely to be very context-dependent in practice.

EDIT: With a little animation abuse at the one-minute mark of this model, it may be that the optimum 2.3-second-GCD approach is:

HT -> ID-Dis-[activate BotD]-CT-F&C-[Geirskogul] -> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[18.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[22.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[15.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[19.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-[ONE MINUTE: BotD is off cooldown again]-WhT -[Geirskogul]-[5 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-[BotD wears off]-[activate new BotD]-> (repeat exact pattern that began with original BotD activation)

Here, we reach Wheeling Thrust before BotD falls off, and thus end up with 4 Geirskoguls across 30 GCDs, or (4 Geir / 69 seconds) x (60 seconds / 1 minute) = 3.48 Geirskoguls per minute.

[SunnyHirose]

Here's hoping the 15s extensions are effectively more than 15s due to animations like they are with standard buffs, then ._.;;

[Thendiel]

Ah, great point. That should make the timing more comfortable and/or lower the Skill Speed threshold for achieving 3 Geirskoguls per minute.

EDIT: So I'm thinking (hoping) that we can likely abuse animations to reach that Wheeling Thrust right by the one-minute mark without BotD falling off. This would give us:

HT -> ID-Dis-[activate BotD]-CT-F&C-[Geirskogul] -> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[18.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[22.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-WhT -[15.9 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-CT-F&C -[19.4 seconds of BotD remaining]-[Geirskogul]-> Phleb -> TT-VT-FT-[ONE MINUTE: BotD is off cooldown again]-WhT -[Geirskogul]-[5 seconds of BotD remaining]-> HT -> ID-Dis-[BotD wears off]-[activate new BotD]-> (repeat exact pattern that began with original BotD activation)

This actually gives us 4 Geirskoguls every 30 GCDs, or (4 Geir / 69 seconds) x (60 seconds / 1 minute) = 3.48 Geirskoguls per minute. Almost three and a half. I'm thinking that's going to be our goal in Striking Dummy conditions.

Anyway... I'm gonna sleep now. Heavensward, ho!