Quote Originally Posted by Archwizard View Post
Well, Dragoon has only one secondary resource to worry about, the Dragon Gauge. It doesn't use MP or Ninki, Kenki, Mana, or any other type of %-based Gauge to allow for a more gradual increase. If it affected the Dragon Gauge directly in a reliable way, it would quickly become part of the main combo, which would affect the balance of the entire job.

So your options to make it more engaging while still being a secondary skill purely for distance are all going to either affect timers -- Blood/Life of the Dragon, Chaos Thrust, cooldowns -- or require a complete rework of the job. Considering Blood of the Dragon lasts for as long as its cooldown now, affecting that timer further would be largely redundant. Affecting any timer that would require you to be in melee to receive mileage would, I feel, also defeat the purpose of attaching it to a ranged skill.

Now, while I could think of ways to add on to the job in future expansions, that would still leave Piercing Talon in the same position until then.
My point was merely that you don't have to do something so integral with distant systems like Jump to make it engaging, let alone functional. It just has to have a greater range of GCDs across DRG's 10-step rotation under which it using it comes out ahead of not using it. You take the potency lost from restarting the combo (and from delayed or clipped CT ticks in the adjusted rotation) and try to give that 2-4 extra GCDs per 10 in which that cost is minimal (in the range of SAM's 20 to 65ish, assuming an unlucky lost CT tick).

Give Piercing Talon (1) a higher base damage, have it (2) upgrade to a skill which takes advantage of, and/or gives back some amount of, Combo progress, and (3) add it to the list of skills buffed by Lance Mastery II, and voila, it no longer forces itself into obsolescence.