How difficult are Dragoon and Samurai?

[Renryuu]

Hiya, so I've been mostly maining Dancer and have been loving it, but I've noticed a high demand for melee on my server so I've been considering giving melee a try and have been debating on doing either Dragoon or Samurai. Looking at guides on the Balance discord, they make the two jobs seem extremely complex so I thought it best to ask the people that actually play the jobs on how hard they are in comparison to say physical ranged and caster dps jobs.

[armandojc3]

Melee dps will always have a higher difficulty during boss like encounters due to positioning. Not that much really anyway, just gotta get used to losing a bit of movement freedom.

Speaking for the jobs themselves, both DRG and SAM are somewhat easy to use with DRG being harder. Both are in a great place this expansion.

[Remus]

They are both easy. I would put Dragoon as harder than Samurai but only by a very small amount. Once, you get the opener down everything basically lines up and just becomes muscle memory. Could say that for pretty much most of the classes to be honest.

Pick a class you think might enjoy and go from there (don't be daunted by the openers and such). Try learn the opener and run some dungeons/trials/raids and see what you think of it.

[Duskane]

they are both pretty simple class
but Dragoon is pretty much autopilot so probably better to go with Drg if you wanted something easier

[Renryuu]

Well ideally I would prefer to play dragoon alongside my dancer since dragons are my number one favorite thing above everything and while I do oh so love swords as a weapon, dragoon is more aesthetically pleasing to me than Samurai.

[Ardox]

DRG is fun and simple enough, but I might not be impartial

[ChaoticCrimson]

I'm leveling DRG now myself, and so far it seems relatively straightforward, especially compared to SMN which I've mained for a while now. It is a bit different getting used to a melee perspective as opposed to the ranged caster's, but overall DRG seems to have a nice flow to it. I haven't played enough of SAM to know much, but based on what others have said it seems to be even easier to pick up the basics. DRG has a bit more raid utility, but if you're looking to do raw damage and little else then SAM is probably for you.

[Arkenne]

Coming from a NIN perspective I've been playing SAM this past week.
The cheer freedom you get from it is quite amazing.
From the very first input you already know what you want and how to get it, and there are so little things to keep track of, so its rather hard to tunnel vision with it.
I have yet to play DRG more seriously but I feel like it has a few more things to keep track of so it could tunnel vision you with a bit more ease.

Both are fun to play tho.

[Kaiten_kenbu]

DRG probably has the most dry and straightforward rotation, much like a BLM, with a slight emphasis on positionals.

Then there's the weaving in of Jumps between GCDs.

SAM is just about building Sen and maintaining buffs and let off your most powerful attacks, weaving kenki skills between combos.

Overall, DRG doesn't have as much burst potential as SAM, but once you get the DRG rotation down, you can get pretty consistent DPS.

Then again, DRG also have more 'ranged' skills than SAM and 3 gap closers...

And the final plus point to DRG would be their bad-ass skill animations imo.