Dragoons Thread

[Lollie]

Pre nerf Penta-Thrust though

Indeed agreed

[Khel]

So what do you guys think for the combat changes? Less buttons would be nice although it will change our rotation and the timing.

Just some ideas....
1. Remove heavy thrust, add the effect to impulse drive.
2. Remove phleb, add the effect to true trust.
3. Remove feint, add effect to vorpal thrust.
4. Remove power surge, buff jump to compensate.
5. Do ???? With fang & claw and wheeling thrust. I don't mind the mechanic but it seems silly to have pretty much the same skill twice. Maybe add small effects to them that won't hurt balance.

For 1 to 3 you could just use the skills I suggested be removed as the part of the chain and remove the damage only skill. Can add traits that add the effects for low level balancing.

[Sentinillia]

I practically just dinged 60 and have been looking to share my feelings about the class.

Dragoon has a surprising amount of depth. The fact that Thendiel's old Dragoon guide was 64 pages long proves that.

It also seems to be misunderstood. From what I've seen, Dragoon was an easy class to play pre-HW. Some people still seem to think it's only about using Jumps between GCDs.

But the timing of Blood of the Dragoon is so tight that it can be really hard to maximize our potential.

When you haven't memorized an encounter, it can be difficult to know when to delay your cooldowns. One wrong decision can harshly punish an inexperienced player.

Our rotation changes as oGCDs come off cooldown, and the ability bloat can make for some awkward finger gymnastics.

It's a class that's easy to pick up, but hard to master.

While managing BotD isn't very hard after you get used to how the job plays I can't emphasize enough how important it is to learn the relationship between BotD and Geirskogul. Nearly every time a dragoon asks why their DPS isn't up to par the cause is low Geirskogul usage. If you're a budding dragoon please don't underestimate the power of over 600 free potency per minute. It's not an incredibly deep or difficult mechanic but a lot of people seem to be afraid to drop their BotD so much that they forget to utilize it properly. Don't be afraid to ask your fellow floortanks for fight specific advice, it could save you a few gray hairs in the long run if you're just learning.

[Xenos88]

I love my dragoon class and have been using it since 2.0. I remember the animation locks that got me killed numerous of times and glad that it has been fixed. I'm looking forward to the new skills to come from the stormblood expansion.

[Shurrikhan]

So what do you guys think for the combat changes? Less buttons would be nice although it will change our rotation and the timing.

Just some ideas....
1. Remove heavy thrust, add the effect to impulse drive.
2. Remove phleb, add the effect to true trust.
3. Remove feint, add effect to vorpal thrust.
4. Remove power surge, buff jump to compensate.
5. Do ???? With fang & claw and wheeling thrust. I don't mind the mechanic but it seems silly to have pretty much the same skill twice. Maybe add small effects to them that won't hurt balance.

For 1 to 3 you could just use the skills I suggested be removed as the part of the chain and remove the damage only skill. Can add traits that add the effects for low level balancing.

No to all but 5, maybe 4. EVERY class has a roughly 150/200/finisher sequence for its main attack combo. Adding a massive DoT to your most basic attack, no matter how late-acquired a trait, is a far cry from balance, let alone enjoyable play.

You don't need to remove skills to severely reduce button count. All you need is a UI function commonly seen in other MMOs - stacked slots.

[Khel]

No to all but 5, maybe 4. EVERY class has a roughly 150/200/finisher sequence for its main attack combo. Adding a massive DoT to your most basic attack, no matter how late-acquired a trait, is a far cry from balance, let alone enjoyable play.

You don't need to remove skills to severely reduce button count. All you need is a UI function commonly seen in other MMOs - stacked slots.

That's a possibility too but we also will be getting 4 to 5 new abilities in the expansion to manage. Collapsing our combos will save us 4 to 6 slots depending on how they handle the 4th combo. Also what they do with cross class abilities will factor into this too.

[Shurrikhan]

That's a possibility too but we also will be getting 4 to 5 new abilities in the expansion to manage. Collapsing our combos will save us 4 to 6 slots depending on how they handle the 4th combo. Also what they do with cross class abilities will factor into this too.

True; while it's possible that we will be receiving some traits this time in place of just abilities, due to their finally being concerned with button-bloat, it's still just fact that traits don't really... sell... as well as a shiny new ability, even if the ability may actually reduce the enjoyment of the class's gameplay. So yeah, probably some 3 to 5 more buttons... That said, Dragoon at least would be right on target, due to that collapse. It's the others, like Monk (due to Perfect Balance), that I really worry about.

To be clear though, stacked slots aren't only usable for combos. You could stack a Power Surge and Jump, for instance. The skill would look like an even-split of two readied abilities until the first (i.e. top or top-left) is used, at which point it would show the second with an outer radial that does not grey out the skill or any other sort of graphical progression to show its cooling progress. So you hit your Ctrl-1 to Powersurge, Shift-4 to Leg Sweep, and on the next GCD gap you hit Ctrl-1 again to Jump.

I would argue though that any situation in which stacked slot oGCDs would provide just as optimal control as separate slots, one of those oGCDs doesn't need to exist. It's a non-decision. It's waste. (Hence my agreement with Power Surge being rolled into Jump, unless Power Surge would ever purposely be blown on anything but Jump, such as if you wanted a longer stun on SSD instead.)

[Staar]

Would like the animation lock of jump to be the same as spineshatter and dragonfire. I know they shortened back when but its still long compared to other 2 jumps. I guess its intentional for skill of timing, it rarely an issue for me, just like the mobility of the other 2 jumps.

[Khel]

Mr Happy just uploaded a video talking about the combat changes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFVZcqMiO48

He said at the Euro fan fest they were specifically asked about the changes and they said they would be removing un-used skills by combining their effects into others. Feint was mentioned specifically. Their goal is for you to have the same amount of skills at 70 as you do now at 60. They talked about class specific UIs as well for buff tracking. No discussion on cross class abilities.

[Valenth]

snip

Hehe, yeah, they talked about that on the Tokyo and Las Vegas FanFests too. They really didn't provide new info there, just reiterated it for those too lazy to google it, just like they always do for half the questions in their Q&A sessions on those fanfests/LIVE letters. It can actually be quite infuriating sometimes when they answer the same question AGAIN while we want new info. Dammit, go google things first before asking that question! xD

Anyway, to stay on topic, they could indeed easily reduce button bloat if they made combos activate with the same button. On DRG specifically this would reduce the number of buttons by 5 already from the top of my head. To illustrate - have the Full Thrust (3 into 1), Chaos Thrust (3 into 1) and 4th tier (2 into 1) combos under their respective button, it prunes having their icons seperate on your bar. Aion had this system already 7 years ago and it worked really well. You just press the same button for the next step in your combo. You could even select which combo would trigger this way in the ability window and have the other possible combo finisher on a seperate button in case of branching combos. This sadly doesn't work well to reduce bloat on say a BLM though, as they don't really have combos.