Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
While undoubtedly simpler that way, I guess I just prefer to avoid this because I feel like working around melee downtime should be part of every melee's kit and core gameplay. I'd therefore prefer to give DRG more control by which to adjust for and around melee downtime rather than simply remove all necessity for such.
Dragoon kind of suffers from "Extremely coherent design philosophy" syndrome that Paladins and Black Mages do. Piercing Talon just has no place currently, even as an uptime tool as the uptime counter-intuitively hurts your longterm uptime, and tooling a unique keypoint to it would probably require more indepth kit changes.

Like, I personally loved the Geirskogul / BotD resource dynamic in Heavensward. In the same way that Stormblood TK Monk had clear and crunchy feedback for progressively doing it better, maximizing Gierskogul was that.

My first thought was giving Piercing Talon -that- back. Non-combo breaking GCD that drains BOTD on use but has a suitably strong GCD. Not something you can use all the time but at the same time, BOTD maintenance is pretty...non-existent.

My second thought was also non-combo breaker, and have it be the middle action with a Charge action effect in a non-conventional combo. Backflip (Get out), Charged Piercing Talon (No combo break, higher potency, resets and boosts Spine Shatter), Spineshatter back in.

My third was make it emphasize Dragoon Mobility by making it a GCD gap closer, but someone already pointed out that having a kiting tool was useful.

Like, I dunno. I gotta play it more.