How to Dragoon per Second: A DPS Paradigm

[SunnyHirose]

Fair enough, but I'm less worried about SS being too low (although I do like HT and Ph clipping) and more worried about SS being too high. If you have a GCD of 2.38s or shorter, then, assuming 100% uptime, then you're going to end up with an outright DPS loss because of sub-optimal Geirskogul use.

I must have missed that discussion. But what I will say is that I raid A4S with a 2.38s GCD and any Geirskogul timing tricks one might wish to employ in A4S will probably backfire. I'd argue it's more important to be paranoid about keeping Blood of the Dragon through phase shifts and Quarantines.

[Thendiel]

I must have missed that discussion. But what I will say is that I raid A4S with a 2.38s GCD and any Geirskogul timing tricks one might wish to employ in A4S will probably backfire. I'd argue it's more important to be paranoid about keeping Blood of the Dragon through phase shifts and Quarantines.

Sorry--it's not a point that I've raised before. What I've found (assuming 100% uptime) is that when you reach a GCD of 2.31 to 2.38, your BotD will come off cooldown just after you land a Full Thrust or Chaos Thrust. In short, you'll end up with a situation like 4th-(GK)-Ph-TT-VT-FT-(BotD comes off cooldown)-no 4th. This means that you'll either have to delay your last Geirskogul by a full combo, or delay your GCD slightly in order to get the usual VT-(BotD)-FT transition. Either choice would represent a substantial DPS loss.

I guess, though, that if we're using the ideal opener, your first BotD comes a GCD earlier, which means that your first transition will be fine. However, your second transition, at about the two-minute mark, will suffer from the issue I've described.

That said, this is all ideal Striking Dummy navel-gazing on my part, since I've yet to set foot in A4S. If there's inevitable DRG downtime built into the fight because of mechanics, then this won't be a problem at all.