Dragoon eye stacks & Dragon Sight

[WolfgangM]

So as it stands Drg wind-up time is rather slow taking a atleast more than a minute to get to your Nastrond window so maybe to make it better we could be given an eye stack for finishing our 5th combo hit which would increase the time drastically and you would be constantly working towards the stacks, also dragon sight really needs some sort of fix, maybe a 12 yalm placeable aoe and all who are in it gain a % damage buff i want to know what everyone else who plays dragoons thinks of it and what could be altered

[emrys_h]

Giving an eye just for finishing a combo makes it a bit too easy to enter LotD if I'm being honest. If that were the case you could just pop Jump and Spineshatter Dive, do a couple combos and boom! The timer on Botd is very generous, so it doesn't make sense for you to barely spend any time in it. A much easier solution is just make Dragonfire Dive trigger Dive Ready, which would cut the time required to enter LotD down to 30 seconds. Honestly, I'm not even sure DRG needs THAT buff, since it is one of the most forgiving mDPS in terms of potency (the job only has 3 positionals).

As for your proposal for Dragon Sight, I wholly disagree. If it were to be made into an AoE, the damage buff to those affected to would have to be lowered to uselessness or changed entirely. As it is, that 5% damage boost alongside Battle Litany can be used strategically to help the party's SAM or MNK do silly amounts of damage during their openers and burst windows.

[Ogulbuk]

Sadly, I think DRG optimal DPS is already very good, problem is getting to that optimal is extremely hard and easy to [bleep]-up.

A change to the job, IMO, should not boost damage, and this would do just that by having DRG reach Life more often. I don't like how Life of the Dragon feels, but that's a separate topic that may require redesigning the whole concept, I doubt that will happen.

Things I would like to see to improve the playability of the job right now:

Increase maximum Life of the Dragon timer to 90 seconds, making it harder for it to drop in between spawns and mechanics (you still have to fill in that bar yourself.) This wont boost damage, just make it less likely for it to drop. Life of the dragon would still be capped at 30s.

Blood of the Dragon, the cooldown click, should be disabled while you are in Life of the Dragon. It should be impossible for you to accidentally get yourself out of the stance.

Blood of the Dragon, the cooldown click, should add time to your Blood of the Dragon bar. Have to double check but from my last memory (got sick of playing the DRG as it stands so have not touched it in a few weeks) Life of the dragon will just set your bar to 10s if its less than 10s, else do nothing.

These 3 changes would make the job much more playable. Death would still be terrible for a DRG.

One last thing: Dragon Sight buff should be stronger on the other player. It's current uptime is of 16.7% max, at 5% str that seems very weak. In average you are buffing one party member by 0.83% damage.... that's very weak even if used optimally. Should be 10% for both, the player and the target. Making the cooldown or duration a bit longer may not be too bad, given how small the buff is to only 2 people (you and your ally.)

[Eyvhokan]

In an expansion where the philosophy/aim was to reduce button bloat, pulling damage out of an ability to put into a new ability with a separate button (and more annoying cast requirement) basically does the opposite.

They should roll back Dragon Sight buffs back into B4B and throw Dragon Sight off the side of a bridge or something.

[Balmung_Griffin]

Snip

I agree with you. And yes, you should never be able to turn off LotD, absolutely no use for that.

Oh, and clicking BotD gives 20s now, if you have more than 20s it's just wasted.

[Carstien]

Misinformation

I think you'll find that DRG has 4 positionals, not 3. If you want to go deeper, a DRG rotation has 11 gcd's before repeating, 6 of which are positionals, which is over half. Each positional will cost you 40 potency, so if you were to miss them all you would lose 240 potency in a 25 second period, making DRG the most punishing job in the game positionally, even above MNK, unless you count people that miss trick attack, which should never ever happen, if it does stop playing NIN. If you want to comment on a job, learn the job please.

[Carstien]

Things

You make good points, DRG is in a good place damage wise right now, but the suggestions you make would remove any sort of personal responsibility for the job which isn't the way to go. Never pressing the botd button during lotd is common sense and doing it SHOULD be punished by losing your lotd, 90 second botd is way, way too long and would make it impossible to drop, which in turn would make the skilled timing of certain skills to keep it up redundant. Dragon sight could be stronger, I agree there. Botd does add time to your botd timer, it resets it to 20 seconds, which is very useful in maintaining your buffs on tougher fights.

[Lastelli]

These 3 changes would make the job much more playable.

Dropping botd is almost impossible already. botd cd resets your botd gauge to 20 seconds if it's lower than that and we usually go from 20 to 30 botd duration during a normal rotation, which means we have a 40 to 50 seconds window to keep botd during mechanics by refreshing it. So these changes are unnecessary and would make botd management totally braindead. It's easy already, let us not ask for a huton copy, 'mkay?

To the OP, they could let us enter lotd more often, sure, but they should nerf the potency of most skills if they want to do that. I honestly like DRG as it is, especially the fact that lotd needs some time to be activated. It's a strategic tool to use in the most appropriate time of a fight and can be very powerful if planned correctly. As for sight, I don't see the problem with it. It's a nice buff to give your ranged/melee pal. It's slitghly annoying during dungeons if you don't have another physical melee, but who cares about dungeons anyway, and you can always link to the tank. There's only one little thing that I don't really like about drg and that is heavy thrust positional, the reason being, it's not very elegant and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the rotation since you will go FT-F&C-WT-HT. This forces you to go flank-rear and then flank again, whereas during the CT combo you just go rear-flank and then stay on the flank in preparation for the following F&C.

I think you'll find that DRG has 4 positionals, not 3. If you want to go deeper, a DRG rotation has 11 gcd's before repeating, 6 of which are positionals, which is over half. Each positional will cost you 40 potency, so if you were to miss them all you would lose 240 potency in a 25 second period, making DRG the most punishing job in the game positionally, even above MNK, unless you count people that miss trick attack, which should never ever happen, if it does stop playing NIN. If you want to comment on a job, learn the job please.

Well, not really. But of course you should still hit you positionals. Actually, DRG and SAM dps loss for missing positionals is pretty similar.

[Ogulbuk]

You make good points, DRG is in a good place damage wise right now, but the suggestions you make would remove any sort of personal responsibility for the job which isn't the way to go.

I would say your previous post clearly points out that DRG has plenty of ways to mess up even with DRG proposals, and tons of cooldowns and buttons to click based on many conditions and procs. But:

Never pressing the botd button during lotd is common sense and doing it SHOULD be punished by losing your lotd

It's not even explained in the tooltips. People find out by accident, some think its a bug, come here, find out how it stands. The game simply should not give the player a tool that is really no good for anything but shooting yourself in the foot, and that is all BotD cooldown is while in LotD.

90 second botd is way, way too long and would make it impossible to drop, which in turn would make the skilled timing of certain skills to keep it up redundant.

It still starts at 20, you still would have to increase it to 90, IF. DRG is balanced in such a way they are pretty much expected never to drop BotD, yet the game throws tons of mechanics and space between spawns in dungeons that it will drop. a 90 second timer is still a timer, more than can be said about most other jobs. Where is the warrior personal responsibility with BG? They used to have to worry, no more. Dark Blood? Shield Oath? Samurai Kenki? None of that expires, and those jobs don't have to worry nearly as much about all the other things DRG needs to worry about. If it wasn't because it is a big UI redesign, I would say the BotD should not even be time based and instead be a trait, with the bar measuring how many eyes you have.

Botd does add time to your botd timer, it resets it to 20 seconds, which is very useful in maintaining your buffs on tougher fights.

That is not adding time. That is setting it to 20 if its less than 20. Else, its wasted.

Dropping botd is almost impossible already. botd cd resets your botd gauge to 20 seconds if it's lower than that and we usually go from 20 to 30 botd duration during a normal rotation, which means we have a 40 to 50 seconds window to keep botd during mechanics by refreshing it. So these changes are unnecessary and would make botd management totally braindead. It's easy already, let us not ask for a huton copy, 'mkay?

Not looking at mages, but all other DPS I looked at has no expiration on their gauges. If there is time in between spawns, or a long mechanic, or hell, an afk in the middle of a dungeon, things resume perfectly for almost everyone but DRG. A DRG cant fight again for 25 seconds and any progress on LotD will be gone. Why is it so important for DRG engagement that we never stop fighting to sustain optimal DPS?

[Lastelli]

Not looking at mages, but all other DPS I looked at has no expiration on their gauges. If there is time in between spawns, or a long mechanic, or hell, an afk in the middle of a dungeon, things resume perfectly for almost everyone but DRG. A DRG cant fight again for 25 seconds and any progress on LotD will be gone.

What do you mean a DRG can't fight again? Lotd gives us access to 5-6% of our total dps during a normal fight. Even assuming you reaaaally mess up and lose botd once when 4 eyes are open, you're just losing a fraction of that %. Most of drg dps doesn't come from nastrond.
But the main point is that you will NOT lose botd ever if things go smoothly because, as I already said, you have 40 to 50 seconds tolerance on it and that's more than enough to keep it 100% of the time even during dungeons. It is way less punishing than MNK's GL, for instance. It is way less annoying than having to refresh enochian by using transpose during pulls on BLM.

Why is it so important for DRG engagement that we never stop fighting to sustain optimal DPS?

This is true for any job though. You want to have as close to 100% uptime as possible to "sustain optimal DPS". So it really makes no difference at the end. And again, mnk had to deal with this sort of stuff since arr and greased lightning is much more punishing than botd, which is totally fair since mnk's rotation is so much easier than drg's.