Do dragoons have a bad rap?

[Lium]

I’ve been leveling a DRG and I’ve been noticing that out of all the jobs I’ve leveled or am leveling,DRG seems to get the least love from people in groups. But I personally am having a blast playing it, which I know is all that matters.

There have been two occasions, however, where after the dungeon, someone would give me a backhanded compliment. Like, “Thanks for not dying” or something like that. I also notice I rarely get any comms on my DRG. As opposed to the other DPS jobs where I always seem to get at least one.

For example (and this is completely non-scientific) I started a monk roughly three months after my DRG, and he’s a bit over 10 levels below the DRG, but has nearly double the comms.

I know they don’t really mean anything but that, coupled with some of the comments I’ve seen, made me wonder if DRGs have a bad rap or something.

[Xatsh]

it is a meme.

Dragoons back flipping off arenas, standing in aoes to get a positional, and generally being clueless.

Devs made some 8bit videos of drgs dying to stupid stuff during the ARR days with titan, then getting up at the end of titan and getting the loot and leaving.

As for coms, generally tanks get the most, healers get the leftovers, and dps get the coms when the healers/tanks que in pairs.

[RyuDragnier]

As Xatsh said, most DRGs end up dying to silly things, and it has been a meme since FFXI. Though I'm going to quote a post made by a Reddit user named Bunlapin, from his response to a thread 3-4 years ago on Reddit.

DRG is an amazing job and wanted in raids. But the average player tends to be bad, and then there are some that are especially bad. The job itself, while not as bad as before, can lock you in animations (jumps specifically) and executing those at a bad time means death. A misuse or mispress of Elusive Jump can also lead the DRG to jump off the map all by themselves on those maps that have it such as Titan. When you combine bad player with risky job, a meme is reborn (as noted, loldrg comes from FFXI times).

[Floortank]

DRGs are well loved, perhaps the most popular DPS in this game.

People give DRG shit because it's a meme. Most people having a go at you probably don't have any actual negative feelings toward the job.

[Ultimatecalibur]

During ARR, dragoons has a very long animation lock on their jump abilities, an inability to move while jumping and the worst m.def by a wide margin. This was especially noticeable in EX Trials and the Bahamut Raids which had several instant kill AoEs and Raid wide magic damage attacks. It was common for a badly timed jump to kill a dragoon dodging every other AoE marker just because the marker that killed them spawned during a Jump animation. Late into ARR, the gap between Dragoon M.Def and everyonelse's M.Def was so great that a magic attack that would deal 50% max hp in damage to a Monk or Bard (who were tied for 2nd worst M.Def) would deal 90%+ max hp to a Dragoon.

Dragoons dying regularly was a bit of a meme that hasn't really disappeared.

[Esmoire]

Every MMO tends to have like... the idiot class, like Night Elf Hunters in early WoW, or Assassins in early Ragnarok Online. I'd imagine that DRGs, as the coolest-looking DPS job in ARR and HW, probably drew in the lowest common denominator. I am new to this rodeo, but I am pretty sure the jump animation lock was reduced in Shadowbringers, right? It's a nightmare to imagine the worst of the worst players getting drawn to a job where a key component of the job kind of requires encounter knowledge or just general sense of combat flow. Easy to imagine people jumping into their death or backflipping off of cliffs, and a lot of these same players would be failing encounter mechanics in general which would just exacerbate their poor image.

Though I think, like others, that reputation exceeds itself. I don't see anything about DRGs to say they are worse off than others; maybe it's because it is such a slow-paced and simple melee, but they tend to handle themselves well. If I had to say which job I expect the least out of right now, it is probably dancer players. Something is going on here where just a lot of.... really dumb people are kind of just off in space and doing stuff like standing way too close to the tank for their AOE and dying. Especially if they are viera.

[Enkidoh]

Unfortunately it was because early in ARR their abilities were rather imbalanced which left them somewhat unable to deal with large amounts of damage for melee fighters, leaving them somewhat as paper tigers (hence the 'tank the floor'/'raise please' memes). And as mentioned they had also had a bad reputation in FFXI as well for similar reasons (although there the cause was different, in FFXI DRG's strength came mostly from it's wyvern pet, so if the player had set their subjob incorrectly that hamstrung the wyvern's AI, or if the wyvern died and they were not able to resummon it (due to the ability to do so originally only being able to be used once every two hours), they were fubared).

The same was here in FFXIV. Lack of sufficent defense coupled with immense damage but massive enmity resulted in many a dead DRG in trials and boss fights, leading to the obvious association with 'tanking the floor', made worse by unskilled players choosing it for the 'cool' factor and not knowing how to properly play it.

Which is unfair, as rebalances to the Job mean it's not relevant anymore, but like all memes, it still lingers.

[Enla]

Yeah, like others have said the meme is 100% due to past iterations of the job. Which was incredibly punishing with it's invulnerability windows and animation locks. You really had to know fights fairly well in early ARR in order to pull DRG off, because one wrong jump and suddenly you'd be dead before you even came back down to earth. Things have mostly been resolved since then - they extended the invuln windows, upped their defense to an acceptable level, and made the job tremendously more newbie friendly and yet due to experiences in FFXI and FFXIV the meme lives on. You'll find that once a perception is made of any given thing - be it a job, an ability, or even a server - it tends to stick well past the point it has any relevancy anymore.

[monk-dps]

You mean monks?

[Jennah]

"Yo, my name's Estinien and I'm here to say
I like killing dragons in a major way"

... like that?