Dragoon's Piercing Talon: Remove or Rework

[Shurrikhan]

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.

I don't know if that's really a matter of "coherent" so much as "inflexible". A single separable DRG action (in terms of decisions and what could without loss be macro'ed if not for the game preventing macros from queuing), in 95% of single-target situations, lasts 10 GCDs, and has zero reason for variance to anything else. The remainder of actions are just traps that will, generally, only ever hurt those with physical disabilities.

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.

Same. Completely. I'd have liked for Dragoon's HW mechanic to have more control and not be locked in so late nor so punishing to drop, but damn it felt simple-yet-lowkey-genius. Same with late-SB TK Monk, even as bad as it made the high-SkS builds I love.

My first thought was giving Piercing Talon -that- back. Non-combo breaking GCD that drains BOTD on use but has a suitably strong GCD.

Enticing, though I'm not sure how interesting that would necessarily be. If the cost wasn't outright negligible, for instance, that would equally describe Reprise, which the community has mostly reacted to with various shades of "...okay?", "meh", and "ick" even after all its buffs.

Backflip (Get out), Charged Piercing Talon (No combo break, higher potency, resets and boosts Spine Shatter), Spineshatter back in.

This is the suggestion I've seen most -- an enhanced Enhanced Enpi if you will. My two issues with it are that unlike Yaten, (1) Elusive has a decently long cooldown and (2) seems slower to actually move your hitbox out of danger, seeming instead to absorb every AoE between its origin and destination. I'm not sure I want to entrust my downtime tool entirely to a 30s CD.

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.

Given how little enmity or damage it deals anyways, I'm not sure it's providing much of a kiting tool as is. Though... and uhh huge spitball warning here... thinking about the combination of the two is pretty interesting. For instance, what if we... turned it into a draconic Harpoon. You could, in the course of one dynamic button, create a gap-closer, a pull-in, a pull-with, and a taunt. Impale an enemy from up close a la 1.x Full Thrust ("Sparta-dive") animation, then dash off, pulling the enemy with you if they can be moved or leave a trail of draconic essence that you can use to then rush to the target for damage based on time spent charging (literally just downtime, but with a neat VFX aura and slight idle animation adjustments to make it look real deliberate).

That said, I could as easily imagine Doom Thrust being given a charge-up function to enhance its range and use it as a enemy-crosser (closing the gap and then getting up to the far edge of its hitbox with remaining range, with its pathing blocked by any AoE zones, hidden or not, persistent or not)...