[Suggestion] Quality of life changes for Dragoon (Shadowbringers)

[Reldhir]

I have been playing the Dragoon few months now after being away for 2 years. I have cleared the most recent savage raid tier as well as leveled most of the DoW and DoM jobs to 80. So I feel like I have a reasonable grasp of the job and how it stacks up to other jobs in general as well as those within its particular role.

For the most part, I am enjoying Dragoon. It's fun, it's unique enough that it stands apart from its melee DPS brethren while still generally being able to be switched in an out of any given party's Melee DPS slot.

However, despite the rework to the Dragoon in 4.0 the job still feels slightly dated in its design, there are a few areas where I feel like the Dragoon is tripping over itself and I don't mean Jump's animation lock. So here are my thoughts on some possible changes to make the job feel slightly less floor prone.

Mitigation: Give us some form of mitigation! Nearly every other job has one. Every other melee DPS has some form of it. Monk: Fist of Earth; Ninja: Shade Shift; Samurai: Third Eye. Feels terrible when you're in a raid environment and your healers mistime their shields but everyone is able to save themselves with mitigation but you can't and die #loldrg

Reintroduce Keen Flurry as a one off parry skill or dig one out from 1.0 and give us Dread Spike where we mitigate damage and gain HP (although maybe only 10%)

Clipping Issues with Life of the Dragon and Latency: I would suggest changing Life of the Dragon so that it gives 3 stacks of Nastrond"(3)" to freely use within the 30 second time limit of Life of the Dragon rather than having a 10 second cool down on Nastrond.

This would help with more efficient use of damage buff windows but more importantly make it more forgiving to those of us having to deal with high latency. We are often unable to trigger Nastrond on cool down until after it has fully lit up which means delaying it for one GCD skill which shortens each subsequent Nastrond window by 2.5 seconds, leaving 5 or less seconds left to trigger the final Nastrond.

With fight mechanics and other skills needing to be used during this time, Life of the Dragon occasionally drops off before the final Nastrond can be used but more so, it falls out of many buff window timings due to the delay. This is only further exacerbated when stacking Life of the Dragon phases back to back. Nastrond is still on it's 10 second cool down from the previous 30 second window which delays the first use of the new Life of the Dragon window. Having 3 stacks of Nastrond that can be used quickly in succession would make this phase a lot smoother without altering overall DPS significantly.

Dragon Sight cast range:(I was reminded of this in a comment below) A good QoL change to this skill would be to up the cast range to 20 or 30 BUT still maintain the 12 yalm requirement for the secondary effect to activate. Similarly to how the tethered eye breaks when the target moves out of range but reattaches when within the 12 yalm range.

This would make those super frustrating false starts a thing of the past and put the burden of moving within range on the person you cast the buff on. It is really frustrating when trying to fill an already weave heavy opener with the burden of having to hunt the party list for appropriate targets that are also within range.

Nice to have but not a big deal/wishful thinking:
Rather than having True Thrust > Raiden Thrust for a 40 potency bonus. Maybe shift it to Full Thrust > Raiden Thrust for a 80 potency bonus as this would just make more sense given the Dragoon's buff windows leaning toward Full thrust and away from True thrust

Also as a possible future trait maybe giving us a Life Surge(2) stack would be nice?

[Seraphor]

On Mitigation, this is balanced against DRGs additional HP recovery.
Drawing on the whole 'lancet' thing from past iterations.

That said, I do think something should be done, and if it's at all possible, I would like it if Jumps had an innate defence boost when in use.
Classically Jump takes you out of harms way for a turn to deal damage on the next turn. Instead, FFXIVs Jump is a hindrance to survival.
But given that they've shortened the Jump animations this would probably be too tricky to implement now.

[Eliadil]

Well technically the bonus damage resistance you get from armor is the bonus mitigation you have. And I don't really think Dragoons needs some tbh. They already removed the vuln up from Blood for Blood, giving peoples a defensive cooldown would just make peoples pay less attention when they jump into an aoe.

[SpeckledBurd]

The changes you're asking for Nastrond, Raiden Thrust, and Life Surge are all straight up buffs that would give Dragoon more potency within it's Lance Charge/Battle Litany windows instead of quality of life changes.

I don't think we really need to buff what's already one of the strongest DPS jobs in the game.

[Reldhir]

On Mitigation, this is balanced against DRGs additional HP recovery.
Drawing on the whole 'lancet' thing from past iterations.

Well technically the bonus damage resistance you get from armor is the bonus mitigation you have. And I don't really think Dragoons needs some tbh. They already removed the vuln up from Blood for Blood, giving peoples a defensive cooldown would just make peoples pay less attention when they jump into an aoe.

I get that, but the fact of the matter is it doesn't work. The tiny physical boost you gain over the other melee jobs is not enough to change the amount of hits you can suffer over the other classes. If you have 1000 HP and an attack deals 900 to a monk and 880 to a dragoon, both are gonna die on the second hit by a mile. No scenario changes that because the margins of damage are too large vs the margin of def. Removing vuln down on Lance charge simply made using the skill non suicidal. I'm talking about bringing the dragoon in line with the other melee jobs who have a clear and distinct mitigation skill.

We can compare individual skills between jobs all we like, but what really matters is how it truly performs in practice and in practice the DRG falls short when it comes to mitigation vs any of the other jobs that DRG shares its ROLE with.

You simply need to think of it as: In any role specific scenario, does the this job have an answer for the given scenario? and in the case of mitigation for incoming raid wides that may kill you, every other job in the melee dps ROLE has an answer to that except DRG.

The changes you're asking for Nastrond, Raiden Thrust, and Life Surge are all straight up buffs that would give Dragoon more potency within it's Lance Charge/Battle Litany windows instead of quality of life changes.

I don't think we really need to buff what's already one of the strongest DPS jobs in the game.

Yes and no. The suggestions listed under "Nice to have"/wishful thinking are potentially buffs yes. BUT the Nastrond changes are not. The top tier Dragoons are already able to fit all these attack under their buff windows with the current implementation. But in order for them to do so they have very very tiny margins of error which means not only do you have to be flawless in your execution but you also need the very low latency as well as the hardware to mitigate potential issues with lag time between issuing commands. It seems unfair to have skills implemented in a way where executing it optimally requires high end equipment and a very good internet connection with proximity to the servers.

I live on the other side of the world and short of moving to America or Japan, I simply cannot reach the ping levels require to pull the fancy clipping stuff these dragoons are pulling off. The Nastrond changes are just an idea to even the playing field for those of us having to deal with latency. This is my main point, along side the need for mitigation to bring the Dragoon in line with other jobs in its role.

Also, Dragoon is not one of the "strongest DPS jobs in the game" not by any stretch of the imagination. Again, the Nastrond changes would have little to no impact on the current dragoons theoretical DPS. It would simply make attaining those numbers slightly more consistent for players dealing with latency.

Toss the "Nice to have"/wishful thinking suggestions if you like, those were an after thought and perhaps something the devs could look into in future when balancing jobs. Because lets face it, any changes they might make to any jobs will always be run against others and tested for balance. My assumption would be any potential changes would be ultimately balanced against where SE feels the job should be. These specific suggestions are just changes for what I feel might make the job FEEL more cohesive and not for the purposes of buffing the output.

[EONX_]

Yes and no. The suggestions listed under "Nice to have"/wishful thinking are potentially buffs yes. BUT the Nastrond changes are not. The top tier Dragoons are already able to fit all these attack under their buff windows with the current implementation

The Nastrond changes you're speaking of *are* a buff to the job. All Dragoons, regardless of ping, can fit only 2 Nastronds under a 20s duration buff. The system you're implying would allow DRGs to use all three of their Nastronds back to back to back, all in the same buff window. This *is* an indirect buff. Same thing for Life Surge.

Mitigation wise, I never really understood the point of melee dps personal mitigation anyways. DRG has slightly more health and defense then other melees by default, plus they have Life Surge with Full Thrust for a *decent* self heal (provided it's on a strict rotation but still) and if DRG is too low on HP, they have insane burst potential with LoTD and can enter that with Bloodbath and gain a bunch of health. MNK uses their Riddle of Earth more for guaranteed positionals rather than it's mitigation, SAM also uses Third Eye for extra damage (even though it's a slight gain), and NIN.. is the only one that has an actual defense utility that only exists for mitigation. Melee DPS don't *need* personal mitigation and I don't understand why some (NIN) have cooldowns specifically for mitigation. Self healing is different, it's nice that they have that. Unless they start giving us adds that need to be tanked by melee DPS, we won't and should never need personal mitigation.

The only ping related change I'd actually agree with is lessening the animation locks on both Stardiver and High Jump, since it's frankly absurd how long the lock is on those two. I regularly clip Stardiver even with decent ping and hitting it right after a GCD, and High Jump is actually more punishing to weave than the original Jump was (the movement lock on High Jump is shorter, but the animation lock is long... I have no idea why this is a thing). If you're playing on ping high enough that not hitting Nastrond is a problem, you need to compensate for your ping a little more. Not double weaving with this job during burst is rough and I know you'll probably clip doing that with high ping but like... there's nothing that can be done about it really?

DRG is still very strong right now alongside other melees (it may not seem like so because SAM is so incredibly strong right now and also with NIN dominating this tier because of downtime), and is, imo, in a very good spot compared to the other DPS right now. It doesn't need any more buffs.

[gumas]

i wish they put fang claw and wheeling thrust into 1 button, and they change depending on which combo you do. So if you end your combo with full thrust, the button change automatically to fang and claw (and automatically change to wheeling thrust after that obviously) and vise versa.

also dragon sight should automatically link to whoever closest to you if you dont pick anyone manually.

[Reldhir]

It doesn't need any more buffs.

Thank you highlighting this point and allowing me to clarify the misconception. My suggestion is not a suggestion to buff the job. You can very easily solve any boosts that may arise from these changes by simply dropping the potency a tad. I imagine the devs involved in balancing the overall output would have a better understanding of this. The changes I suggest are very much for how the dragoon itself plays and not having a core mechanic that makes playing it with latency a drag.

Again. If you're worried about DPS numbers, tweek the potency. I'm talking about the actual mechanic of the Dragoon rotation and how it is prone to tripping over itself in latency.

This applies to all my suggestions, the idea is the mechanic itself not the numbers, the numbers can be tweeked to the desired DPS output. That is another topic.

Also, regarding the point made with Life Surge. It will never ever be saved for healing. Given just how potent a damage up buff it is, the only time the heal effect is of any use is if you're trying to solo something and need the tiny bit of sustain it offers. Again, it's not like i'm asking for the Dragoon to be given special privileges, only the ability to potentially save itself just like the other relevant jobs in the same role as Dragoon.

also dragon sight should automatically link to whoever closest to you if you dont pick anyone manually.

Actually, you remind me of an idea I had about dragon sight! I feel like it should trigger regardless of distance but ONLY come into effect if the person you used it on moves within range. Nothing worse than opening only to find the person you reached for on the party list is too far away and you're awkwardly soft targeting them and not doing anything (I play on gamepad) GET CLOSER IF YOU WANT THE DAMAGE PEOPLE!