How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[Sentinillia]

I have tried and tried and tried some more, and I have never been able to skip lapis. Closest I've been is 62%. For the drg player, do you basically use your standard opener and then save ogcds at optical sights to have another opener ready after limit cut? Or do you just need to go ham the whole time?

It's very much a team effort.

What you have to realize as well is that timings and RNG plays a big part in it. To increase your success chances you want to have the boss as much below 70% after the first phase as possible. To achieve this the boss has to be pushed below 72% while he's busy doing an ability, in this case Optical Sight. This is the RNG part as getting the Shiva pattern is a lot better for your DPS than the other pattern.
After Limit Cut you have to push the boss to as close to 60% as possible before he takes off. The options here are to either:

A) Have high enough DPS to push it straight off the bat
B) Have low enogh DPS to not skip the Left/Right Sword to get a few more precious GCDs

After CC lands everyone still has a chance to hit 1 GCD + 1 OGCd before the boss becomes invulnerable. Limit Break 1 can and should be used here if you wouldn't skip otherwise, don't worry about the LB hitting invulnerability as it will go through as long as you start the cast immediately after the boss becomes targetable. If you manage to push the boss to 60.9% he'll become vulnerable again right after he finishes casting Limit Cut and commence Eternal Darkness.

For the dragoon this doesn't change much other than the fact that you really want to have BotD up as soon as the pre-airship phase starts, as well as having it up again right after you land. You also might want to hold your OGCDs during the pre-ship phase.
You can get in two Leg Sweeps, one Jump, two Geirskoguls, and a Spineshatter and DFD depending on your DPS on the first phase. It is optimal to land as many of these as possible inside Trick Attack/Hypercharge. What I've done to solve the BotD conundrum is doing the 4 GK/70s rotation for the first phase, delaying the last GK until the boss starts casting Limit Cut and blowing my BotD there (althought you might be able to get more GKs in if your DPS is significantly lower).
During the numbered Limit Cut I do HT -> ID -> Botd -> Dis -> CT -> (boss becomes vulnerable here) B4b -> 4th -> Phleb.
This BotD timing allows full GK usage in the first phase, gets you into the pre-ship phase with BotD, Disembowel and CT already applied which allows you to spam TTT combo and weave OGCDs for the whole phase AND have BotD up again before Eternal Darkness.

[Aquaslash]

1. Drac and SSD are "Draconian Potion of Strength" and "Spineshatter Dive"

2. "Opener" typically refers the start of the fight, where you have all your cooldowns available. Generally after your second 4th tier move, all of your global cooldown attacks can be repeated, starting from heavy thrust. You can generally use your off cooldowns as soon as they're available again, which some adjustments as the situation may call for.

3. It's random. One of them will randomly be available after each Chaos Thrust or Full Thrust. You'll need to pay attention to which one procs so that you can get the proper positional

[SirMen]

ty for the explainations!
so after the opener i do the cycle and everytime the CD are off ich squeeze them in when necessary?

[Aquaslash]

Word going around the block is that the Proto Ultima ring might be a new BiS, overwriting the shire one. Can we get some mathematicians on the scene?

[dark494]

Edit: Go with this http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z38R. Swap out for proto ultima ring and necklace, switch to alex feet, and restat relic some more.

Old stuff below:

I'll take a stab at it. tl;dr, I believe the proto ultima ring is ever so slightly better than the shire ring, if I'm going off the relic BiS set (http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z4GK) (http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/YT92) Also ariyala isn't updated yet.

Shire Ring: 22.419

Ultima Ring: 23.931

2 things I want to point out:

• I'm using a weight 0.290 for Crit, according to Dervy's estimate on its new weight due to the higher average crit baseline with the relic set (which isn't reflected on the front page of this thread).
• Changing to the ultima ring in place of the shire ring is an increase of 17 ss. So there are a few adjustments that went into calculating the weight of the ultima ring: Removing the extra 3 ss from the relic and putting it back into det (crit ends up maxed at 275 with just acc restats), and subtracting the extra 14 ss from the weight that is wasted since it's over the 625 ss tier.

So the ultima ring looks like this:

59 ss - 10.03
54 crit - 15.66
=25.69
-2.38 (extra 14 ss)
+.621 (restat 3 ss to 3 det in the relic)
=23.931

So yeah, slightly better. I believe. http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z4GP

What I don't know is if the rest of the ultima accessories open up other avenues of gear sets, or if there's a way to bring that SS back down. I'm too tired to look more into that right now.

[Umbrax]

Go with this http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z38R

Ariyala relic stat allocation is odd atm, as it usually is, so if you want 3 different stats on it, the maximum infused stats is 283/285

The set you linked, if I'm not wrong would be as follows: http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z4UI = 3471.686

As we can only get 1 jewel per week, I'm using this so far: http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z4TR = 3471.781

As you can see, the set I'm using is wasting way too much skill speed and I'm still in the 2.39 tier

So even tho the set you linked with the corrected relic stats is lower in ariyala (super tight difference), it's actually higher because you are gaining 21 determination (4,347) vs 8 crit (2,232)

I'm looking forward to go for it next week if we don't discover something better, GJ!

[dark494]

Yeah, 283/284 stats is what you can achieve. This is the lazy set I'm currently using so I'm not burning food for everything that requires 699 acc, like all the bird farming I'm still doing. http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/Z59D

[MarinDoDouce]

Hello,

My dragoon is my only job, and I try to have the best stuff, as everyone. But I don't know how to choose between different gears. For example for feet, I have :
+ Prototype Alexandrian Sollerets : IL 250 / STR 89 / ACCU 72 / VIT 98 / CRIT 51
+ Shire Pathfinder Sollerets : IL 260 / STR 96 / CRIT 76 / VIT 107 / SS 53
+ Diabolic Sabaton of Maiming : IL 260 / STR 96 / ACCU 76 / VIT 107 / DET 51

I know that STR is very important, as CRIT and DET. So how can I make a choice ?
Thanks for advices

[aleph_null]

Hello,

My dragoon is my only job, and I try to have the best stuff, as everyone. But I don't know how to choose between different gears. For example for feet, I have :
+ Prototype Alexandrian Sollerets : IL 250 / STR 89 / ACCU 72 / VIT 98 / CRIT 51
+ Shire Pathfinder Sollerets : IL 260 / STR 96 / CRIT 76 / VIT 107 / SS 53
+ Diabolic Sabaton of Maiming : IL 260 / STR 96 / ACCU 76 / VIT 107 / DET 51

I know that STR is very important, as CRIT and DET. So how can I make a choice ?
Thanks for advices

There's this thing called "stat weight" which pretty much gives a value for crit/det/sks in terms of str. Check Dervy's site for details: https://dervyxiv.wordpress.com/stat-weights/

Then you can use Ariyala's website (http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/DRG) and click on the BiS solver to show stat weights for every piece.

[Sentinillia]

snip

It's 99% of the time the best to go with the piece with the highest STR value. There are some cases where a piece of gear will be loaded with enough bad stats for a lower ilevel item to be better but this is rare.
If you don't feel like consulting a website whenever you're choosing a piece of gear (which you should, mind you, if you want the most out of your resources) there's a simplified priority list of stats:

ACC(up to 699)>STR>CRIT>DET>SKSP

Looking at stat-weight alone for a single piece of gear can be deceiving as it doesn't account for accuracy and massive spikes/drops in skill speed which can make it worse that it looks on paper. Not having enough accuracy makes all your other stats worth less since you aren't actually hitting your target and having too much or too little of skill speed can mess up your rotation big time. Linking your full gear set would be helpful when looking for gear-related advice.