A Small Dragoon Fix

[LiliBoulanger]

Dragoon pre 50 is now painfully boring with the removal of Phlebotomize.

Phlebotomize used to be the only real thing to do outside of your main damage combo, over and over again. It gave you a jerryrigged option for AoE by just spreading DoTs around and it made low level dungeons a lot more fun. Disembowel spices things up a little, but not much. And frankly, Impulse Drive is useless until you get Disembowel. Why is it even in the game...? They should just remove this skill, buff True Thrust by 20 potency, and make True Thrust the first part of both combos, like how Paladin has 3 combos that all start with Fast Blade. But that's tangential.

I thought of an elegant solution. Why not put Phlebotomize back in, but also add a Trait that upgrades it to Chaos Thrust at 50? They both apply DoTs so conceptually it fits. I can accept that there is no longer any room in the Job's rotation for Phlebotomize later in the Job's development, but this would mean you can play pre level 50 Dragoon like we used to in 2.0-3.0 without upsetting the balance the class has now.

[LiliBoulanger]

Am I remembering something wrong or did Impulse Drive used to have a positional requirement in 2.x? Is that why it still exists?

[Daisy]

Impulse drive used to be a crossclass skill, and it still is the highest dps move until you have full thrust, I think. That only makes low level dragoon that much more boring though, keep heavy thrust up and spam impulse drive through the whole dungeon.

[LiliBoulanger]

I think Impulse Drive spam was superiour at some point but not any longer.

True Thrust + Vorpal Thrust would be a combined 390 potency (150+240)

Two Impulse Drives would be 380 combined potency (190 x 2). So ten less potency over the same length of 2 GCDs. I don't know the intricacies of damage calculation but that seems like it makes it superior, even if barely worth the extra effort. But it's a lose/lose situation. Either the strategy for the class is even more brain dead than initially thought since you can do something easier and get more performance, or it has a useless skill for 32 levels (Disembowel is at level 38).

You get Vorpal Thrust at level 4, and Impulse Drive at level 6. So there's never a point where you can use Impulse Drive but can't use Vorpal Thrust.

[Emstidor]

Like you said, Daisy was right previously but SE adjusted the potencies so that it is no longer the case.

[Bacent]

Go play Paladin early levels. All you do is Riot Blade + Flash for a long while

[LiliBoulanger]

I have Paladin at 70! And yeah I don't do anything below 60 anymore unless I have to

[Lastelli]

All jobs are boring at 50 since they basically lack half of their core toolkit. Just like all jobs were boring at level 30 in ARR. Totally normal and doesn't need fixing. I do think they should make the leveling process faster though. Like double exp from everything before level 60 at the very least. Unfortunately, they probably won't do this because that would reduce the sales of jump potions.

[Riardon]

They shouldn't remove Phlebotomize and Scourge from DRK ever. Those skills needed an adjustment but not completely removal. Now the jobs feels boring somehow. Sometimes those small details make a difference on game play style. They should reconsider and add them back like they did with Sustain for SCH. Perhaps with some adjustments. Some jobs are so boring at early lvls that you can hardly convince yourself to continue play with them. Also those skills added the necessary "spice" to gameplay at max lvls.
And I'm still salty Squadrons can still use Phlebotomize while I can't.