How to Dragoon Per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[Dervy]

The Rotation

How does Blood of the Dragon Work?

Blood of the Dragon is a new mechanic for the Dragoon. The ability has a 15 second duration, which grants you the ability to use three new skills: Wheeling Thrust, Fang & Claw, and Geirskogul. Blood of the Dragon also increases the Potency of Jump and Spineshatter Dive by 30%.

Wheeling Thrust and Fang & Claw are two new 4th tier combo GCD skills, which extend the duration of Blood of the Dragon by 15s, to a maximum of 30seconds. Each skill also has their own positional to deal maximum damage.

When you use Full Thrust or Chaos Thrust whilst having Blood of the Dragon active, you have a 50/50 chance of proccing either a Wheeling Thrust or a Fang & Claw at random. You must pay attention to which skill is being procced whilst playing the Dragoon and remember what positional each skill has.

Geirskogul is an off-cooldown ability which can be weaved in between your GCDs, but reduces the timer of Blood of the Dragon by 10s.

Essentially, you're juggling your two main combos, Full Thrust and Chaos Thrust, to proc either a Wheeling Thrust or Fang & Claw, to ensure maximum up time on Blood of the Dragon, then using a Geirskogul for additional damage.

The trick is to use Blood of the Dragon before either your Full Thrust or Chaos Thrust so you always have the highest timer available to make sure you do not fall off on Mechanics.

Thrusting the Rotation

The Dragoons "Rotation" is a hybrid Priority system, where certain skills have a priority over others. Essentially, If A is down, use A, If it's not, then use B. If B is is down, use B, if not, use C. Therefore, skill A has highest priority, followed by B, C, D, E etc. Having said this, the Dragoons skill usage can be written down in a very specific order to follow which will always loop. This is why the Dragoon is a Hybrid between a Rotation and a Priority System. If you wanted a pure priority system, you'd want something like a Summoner.

The Rotation for the Dragoon consists of 3 core components:

• Juggling skills, maintaining Blood of the Dragon to enable 4th tier combos for maximum damage
• Managing Heavy Thrust, Chaos Thrust and Phlebotomize up-time
• Using our Full Thrust combo as a filler in between our skill timers

Before we start getting into managing your off-cooldowns, we'll first learn the Global Cooldown Rotation with Blood of the Dragon.

There's one important rule that you must follow. The Dragoons new rotation only works with a Global Cooldown of 2.4s and below to play efficiently. This means, you need to have approximately 590 Skillspeed to make this rotation work.

Heavy Thrust has highest Priority, followed by Chaos Thrust, then Phlebotomize, then using Full Thrust as a filler, we get a rotation like this:

Heavy Thrust -> Impulse Drive -> Disembowel -> [Blood of the Dragon] -> Chaos Thrust -> 4th Tier Combo -> Phlebotomize -> True Thrust -> Vorpal Thrust -> Full Thrust -> 4th Tier Combo -> Repeat

Abbreviated as:

H -> IDC4 -> P -> TTT4 -> Repeat

Let's break this down. Both Heavy Thrust and Phlebotomize has a duration of 24 seconds. With a Global Cooldown of 2.4s, 24/2.4 = 10. So this means you can fit 10 GCDs in between each of your Phlebotomzie and Heavy Thrusts.

IDC4 = 4 GCDs
TTT4 = 4 GCDs
P = 1 GCD
That's 1 GCD left over, which can be used to keep a fully buffed Heavy Thrust up. This also means you have no downtime on Heavy Thrust, giving you a full 15% damage boost to your DPS.

The same applies to Phlebotomize:
IDC4 = 4 GCDs
TTT4 = 4 GCDs
H = 1 GCD
This means you will never lose HT, nor clip a Phlebotomize tick at 2.4 GCD.

H-P-IDC4 vs. H-IDC4-P

However, you might now ask yourselves, why don't I go for HP - IDC4 over H - IDC4 - P? This is a very good and valid question. Before with our 2.0 Rotation, using HP-IDC was equivalent to trading 1 tick of Phlebotomize for 1 tick of Chaos Thrust + 1 GCD 10% buffed via Disembowel.

This time, as we have an additional skill we need to put in between Chaos Thrust and Phlebotomize when we go H-IDC4-P, we're only trading 1 Tick of Phlebotomize for one GCD 10% buffed by Disembowel. If we do the math:

30/24 = 1.25 PPS.
(170*0.1) = 17/24 = 0.7083 PPS

So if HP-IDC4 is 0.5417 PPS more, why do we use it? The reason are the Off-Cooldown abilities. But as we're only discussing the GCDs in this post, we'll leave it till later. For now, you need to understand that H-IDC4-P-TTT4 is superior to H-P-IDC4-TTT4.

To Clip or Not to Clip? That is the question

If you've been playing around the Rotation I've suggested, you might of realised by now that you're clipping Chaos thrust 1.9ticks earlier than usual. But Dervy, isn't this also a PPS loss? Why don't we go back to our old roation of IDC x2 TTT? Well, who else better to explain it than the fabulous Thendiel Swansong, who's done an in depth analysis for us already:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post3057963

In this post, I want to compare a rotation that involves Disembowel and CT clipping:

HT - ID-Dis-CT-4 -Phleb - TT-VT-FT-4 - (repeat)

...to a rotation that does not involve Disembowel and CT clipping:

HT - ID-Dis-CT-4 -Phleb - TT-VT-FT-4 - HT -TT-VT-FT-4 - Phleb - ID-Dis-CT-4 - HT - TT-VT-FT-4 - Phleb - TT-VT-FT-4 - (repeat)

Basically, I was wondering if and when it would be useful to clip Dis and CT vs. letting them fall off for a few seconds.

On the one hand, if we clip, we maximize our ticks of CT, which weigh in at 35 x 1.15 raw potency per tick, plus extra damage from getting the Disembowel buff on Disembowel and/or Impulse Drive, which comes to 220 x 1.15 x 0.10 (possibly + 180 x 1.15 x 1.10) = 25.3 potency to 46 potency.

On the other hand, if we don’t clip, there is a loss of CT ticks, but with the advantage of favoring our TT-VT-FT-4 combo--which has higher initial potency values--over our ID-Dis-CT-4 combo.

The initial hit damage of our clipping approach is, (170 + 180 + 220 + 250 + 290 + 170 + 150 + 200 + 360 + 290) x 1.15 x 1.10 = 2884.2 potency across 10 GCDs.

The initial hit damage of our non-clipping approach is ((170 x 6) + ((180 + 220 + 250 + 290) x 2) + ((150 + 200 + 360 + 290) x 4)) x 1.15 x 1.10, or (1020 + 1880 + 4000) x 1.15 x 1.10 = 8728.5 potency across 30 GCDs, minus the loss of Disembowel’s bonus on Dis and/or ID’s hits. I’m guessing that, for typical levels of Heavensward Skill Speed, ID gets the Disembowel bonus but Dis itself does not. As we saw, that’s a loss of 25.3 potency per Disembowel, of which there are two. So, 8728.5 - (25.3 x 2) = 8677.9 potency across 30 GCDs.

SO. We should be able to construct an equation that tells us when clipping is or is not worth our time, based on Skill Speed:

((2884.2 potency / 10 GCDs) x (1 GCD / X seconds)) = [(8677.9 potency - ((40.25 potency / 3 seconds from an HT-buffed CT) x ((15 GCDs between CTs x (X seconds / 1 GCD)) - 30 seconds of uptime))) / 30 GCDs] x (1 GCD / X seconds)

In other words, we want to take the potency per second of the initial hits for clipping, then compare it to the potency per second of the initial hits for non-clipping minus the penalty we get for missed ticks of Chaos Thrust. Let’s solve the equation for X, which should tell us the threshold of GCD length underneath which NOT clipping Chaos Thrust (rotation #2 above) will be a benefit.

When I solve for the equation, I end up with an X-value of 2.1257 seconds. In other words, holy poop, we are never going to have enough Skill Speed for a non-clipping approach to be worth it. (A rudimentary check of the numbers does suggest that ID’s initial potency receives a Disembowel bonus at this GCD length, whereas Disembowel itself does not, which is consistent with my mathematical assumptions.)

Now, to beat a dead horse even further: keep in mind that Disembowel buffs our auto-attacks, in addition to the damage of any bard(s) or machinist(s) in our group. This means that those tiny pockets of downtime, even the ~1 second or so that we would have at a 2.13 second GCD, would cost even more than this equation suggests.

Conclusion: HT - ID-Dis-CT-4 - Phleb - TT-VT-FT-4 - (repeat) is officially our new GCD rotation.

The 2.4 GCD conundrum

Every 24s you're doing a Heavy Thrust/Phlebotomzie. 24/2.4 = 10, so that's 10 GCDs Heavy Thrust will buff. It just so happens that the 10th GCD is Heavy Thrust.

It makes it so Heavy Thrust will never drop off, so you're not continuously losing 170*0.15 = 25.5/24 = 1.0625 Potency Per Second.

The biggest question is though, is us sacrificing other secondary stats, such as Determination and Critical Hit Rating, worth this investment?

Now, these are rough approximations, as Determination is linear, where as Skillspeed and Critical Hit Rating are exponential, but roughly:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

So 2.39GCD is our Skillspeed cap, a number which we will not want to go over.


Rotation Of Shame

Of course, no matter how ever hard we try, at some point, we will eventually let BOTD drop. What now? Should we revert back to our old 2.X rotation, or is there something new we can do?

H - IDC - P - TTT - TTT -> Repeat is the best rotation we can do when BOTD has dropped.

Math will be provided soon.

Spinning the AoEs

Under Construction