The Current State of Dragoon

[Sepher]

Dragoon has gone from the premiere Melee DPS of 3.0 to the bottom of the bucket. LOTD needs to be reworked and can be accomplished in many ways. Overall the current state of DRG is due to both it's utility being diminished and it's personal DPS being lowered. These changes can be viewed below:

What Dragoon Lost in 4.0:

Leg Sweep: A 130 Potency move every 20 seconds that stuns the target.

Power Surge: Next jump is 30% stronger every 60 seconds.

Phlebotomize: 170 potency attack that inflicts a 30 potency dot.

On top of these kit changes it also lost Internal Release and Mercy Stroke from the changes of the Cross Role system.

Utility:

Disembowel: 10% Piercing damage reduced to 5%.

Battle Littany: Crit Rate of the party up 15% for 20 seconds (Unchanged).

Dragon Sight: Increase DPS by 10% of the DRG and 5% of one selected party member within 6 yalms. Every 2 min.

Let's first look at its utility. Battle Littany is a very strong buff and has great synergy with any class in the game, but now SCH has a similar buff. Disembowel's nerf was partly needed because of the double physical range Meta was seen at the end of Heavensward, but not only did it lower the DRG utility it lowers the personal damage of DRG as a whole.

The newest move added to the DRG arsenal is Dragon Sight. It is a good move on paper, but in actual content seems more of an annoyance. Firstly you must target another player to use the move which is extremely tricky without forcing you to use a macro. The distance of the tether is far too short and needs to be extended or removed entirely. If no player is close enough to receive the buff or mechanics force you to separate you as the DRG have lost a 10% buff.

With Disembowel nerfed, Dragon sight has not made up the difference. This can be fixed and ultimately fix dragon sight to feel more like a buff.

Drgaon Sight FIX: Drgaon Sight raises the DRG DPS by 10% and raises all party members by 5% within a 15 yalm radius.

This fixes the issue of selecting teammates between GCD's and raises its overall utility to compensate for its lower DPS.


Life of the Dragon:

This new mechanic that is now the core of the DRG kit is very lackluster. Not only does it have one of the longest build up periods in the game, but the payoff of achieving it is not high enough. To activate LOTD you need to do 4 mirage dives that are only proced by using Jump and Spine Shatter Dive and they do not stack if you use the jumps back to back without using a mirage dive. The other issue is to enter LOTD you must Geirskogul, which is now on a 35 second timer. This move can be fixed multiple ways and will fix how DRG feels and raise its personal DPS.

The two Universal change throughout all of these methods is once the Dragon eye is awakened Geirskogul will automatically reset its timer so that you can enter LOTD ASAP. The other is that Dive ready can now stack multiple Mirage Dives.

These next suggestions should be one or the other NOT BOTH:

1) LOTD requires only 3 eyes. This will allow for you to enter LOTD very quickly at the start and much more often throughout the fight.

2) Dragonfire Dive will be acknowledged as a Jump and be influenced by BOTD and proc Dive ready for every add it hits. This will allow you to enter LOTD quickly in your opener. This will also allow for DRG to enter it quickly in big pulls in dungeons to use Nastrond's to AOE more. LOTD is not achieved realistically in dungeons because you are pulling big groups of enemies and using your aoe is a better choice than maintaining BOTD til you are ready for LOTD.

Overall I think these changes can make DRG feel like a fun class and be a worthwhile addition to any team. Please let me know what you think and what you would like to see changed.

[Sepher]

Reserved for Cool Suggestions.

[Sepher]

Reserved for cool suggestions.

[Sepher]

Reserved for cool suggestions.

[Sepher]

Reserved for cool suggestions.

[Shamox]

You can bypass the 1000 words limitation in a single post if you use the edit option afterward.

[Sepher]

You can bypass the 1000 words limitation in a single post if you use the edit option afterward.

They really should let you know this when you submit lol

[Vincent_Mateus]

I agree with most of these changes, though would also accept Blood of the Dragon generating an eye if the buff was already active. I'd also like the UI gauge to be split between Gaze of the First Brood, and Blood/Life of the dragon. This way, aside from death you aren't losing eyes for phase changes. Dragon sight buff would be nice, considering Red Mage gets embolden which is just an aoe damage buff. I personally dislike target buffs like this, or things like Goad in tab target MMO's. goad isnt nearly as bad though, because we rarely have to double weave it, unlike Sight

[Gravton]

Have mirage dive, jump, and spineshatter dive give eyes. That would allow for quick activation of Lotd and more frequent uses. Increasing the number of times it can be used (increasing overal dps) and the eye building speed would make fall off less punishing.

Your dragon sight fix is to OP, increasing damage and crit rate for the whole party's opener would make dragoon instant meta and people won't even consider mnks or nins.

As an aside I think mnk and one of the tanks should be dealing piercing damage. To reward different compositions such as mnk/drg/tank and nin/Sam/tank or rdm/blm/tank for magic comps. Instead of trying to make all of them "jack of all trades"

[MordynE]

Drgaon Sight FIX: Drgaon Sight raises the DRG DPS by 10% and raises all party members by 5% within a 15 yalm radius.

Haven't done much thinking on Dragon Sight as I've been more focused on LOTD and how it functions, but this would be a much welcomed change in my book. Maybe a bit too powerful though? Either way if it is it would be simple to balance, would just have to adjust the numbers a bit.

LOTD requires only 3 eyes. This will allow for you to enter LOTD very quickly at the start and much more often throughout the fight.

I think this is a good suggestion and would go a long ways into solving LOTD's problems, but I think they'll be disinclined to go with this approach unfortunately with the 4 eyes being symbolic of the whole 4 original dragons thingy with the lore.

Dragonfire Dive will be acknowledged as a Jump and be influenced by BOTD and proc Dive ready for every add it hits.

I originally thought this would be a bad solution due to how congested our opener would become with having to weave Mirage Dive's in and out after every jump. Would be difficult to fit in Life Surge -> Full Thrust for the initial part of our rotation . However, if we could stack Dive Ready's as you've suggested, this wouldn't be as much of an issue and we could simply hold the majority of the Mirage Dive's until after the first Life Surge -> Full Thrust. Good suggestion. Optimally I think this is probably the most realistic and beneficial change the team could make.

That being said, my suggestions are for if they decide for whatever reason they would not wish to have Dive Ready as a stackable buff:

1. The ability to stack up to 2 Eyes of the Brood if BotD is dropped.
The benefits of this are pretty obvious. It would simply make phase transitions a bit less punishing for us and dropping BotD wouldn't be such of a pain. Not a fan of this suggestion though. It wouldn't really solve the issue of LotD just simply feeling underwhelming and infrequent, and it would more than likely be a bit more of a pain to code into the game. There's some other pretty obvious drawbacks as well such as fights like A1s, A5s, and A9s that have mini bosses where you can stack eyes before the actual raid fight.

2. Lowering the CD of Spineshatter Dive to around 40-45 seconds or so.
I can see this being a change the team could make. It's a rather straight forward approach that wouldn't be difficult to add to the game, would allow us to enter LotD more often and would bring up our numbers a bit since we seem to be on the tail end of most jobs atm. Our opener wouldn't change much but CD alignment might be kinda iffy. That's one of the problems I see with this.

Overall, I'm a big fan of the stackable Dive Ready's and Dragonfire dive proc. So far that seems to be the best suggestion that I've seen.