DRG Thread

[SargeTheSeagull]

I think overall it’s good but I agree, it needs work. First, it has too many buttons. Life surge and dragon fire dive feel like button bloat to me. Removing animation lock from all jumps/dives and letting me weave during them would be a good start. “But it adds skill bc you have to plan when you jump!” Yeah, except in fights where that happens all the time and you end up just drifting your jumps outside of buff windows which feels terrible. Also, wyrmwind thrust feels so… out of place? It feels like the just threw ideas at the wall to see what stuck.

[Scuoll]

I think overall it’s good but I agree, it needs work. First, it has too many buttons. Life surge and dragon fire dive feel like button bloat to me. Removing animation lock from all jumps/dives and letting me weave during them would be a good start. “But it adds skill bc you have to plan when you jump!” Yeah, except in fights where that happens all the time and you end up just drifting your jumps outside of buff windows which feels terrible. Also, wyrmwind thrust feels so… out of place? It feels like the just threw ideas at the wall to see what stuck.

Playstyle wise i think its pretty good, but i also think its just a little busy during burst windows, having so many ogcds and being unable to double weave them without low ping is kinda painful, just getting rid of 1 or 2 should help a lot, and i think there are clearly ogcds that are less fun to press than others, namely life surge and spineshatter dive. I get what you mean and dragonfire dive doesnt really interact with the rest of the kit and its kinda just there, but at least the fire explosion animation feels good.
Having spineshatter dive deal damage also kinda defeats the purpose of giving it charges, since it means the optimal play is mostly holding them for buff windows, and its such a wimpy button press, the animation is slow, it only feels good when you use it to actually gap close, id like it better if it dealt no damage and it was just used to gap close, and then it could have no charges and perhaps a lower cooldown, and maybe give the 2 charges to dragonfire dive, which is a way more satisfying button press.

[SargeTheSeagull]

Honestly the main thing they need to do is change the level at which you get skills. Syncing down on dragoon is agonizing

[KhalRedd]

I'm a little bit of a dinosaur, I tend to think that the design of Heavensward was the best iteration of Dragoon.
But I've adapted to the changes of Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

Endwalker is the first time I've ever felt like they really did Dragoon a disservice, one that I felt strongly enough about to make a forum account.

Dragoon just doesn't feel good right now. I'll try to avoid any statistical comparisons and just focus on the feelings I have while playing. Numbers are an easy tweak, but I feel like this iteration of Dragoon needs to be slated for a revamp.

Level synced Dragoon kinda sucks. Sub 50 is sub 50. I won't hold that against Dragoon, sub 50 has almost always sucked. But 60 and lower is feeling really sparse right now. Turning BotD into a trait makes the class feel really passive. You don't upkeep BotD, its just a potency increase for Jump & Spineshatter between 50 and 60. You gain access to Wheeling and Fang & Claw, but with BotD being passive its just an extension to the combo now instead of a feature of this new stance you got at 54.

At 90, the class feels too busy, and commensurately unrewarding. I can't fit all of my oGCDs into my 2 minute burst window without double weaving jumps and delaying my GCD, it doesn't feel good.
The 2 minute burst window has: Geirskogul, 2xNastrond, Stardiver, High Jump, Mirage Dive, 2xLife Surge, 2xSpineshatter, Dragonfire Dive, and Wyrmwind Thrust. And you're trying to fit all of that in under Litany, B4B, and Eye. All while also moving to accomodate positionals. TO BE CLEAR. I don't want to get rid of positionals. I like positionals. They help the class feel interesting, even when level synced. But I have 5 jumps to weave into that burst window. 4 of the 5 jumps are going to pull me into minimum melee range (which isn't always safe) and sometimes the mechanics just flat out prevent you from using jumps (Zodiark) during your burst window.

Jumps are unique, interesting, and fun. But there are too many in this burst window.
Dragonfire Dive is a 300 potency AoE on a 120s cooldown. Why do we still have this? Stardiver is 500 potency on a primary target, and 350 potency (30% reduced) on all remaining targets. It has a functional cooldown of a minute. Why hasn't Dragonfire Dive upgraded to be Stardiver? (admittedly, the animation for Dragonfire is better in my humble opinion. I'd prefer them to upgrade from Stardiver to DFD)

Why do we even have a timer on Life of the Dragon? You are automatically set to 30 seconds of LotD, thats 3 casts of Nastrond. Full Stop. Why not just give us stacks instead?
Wyrmwind doesn't feel good to use. There are two reasons I feel this way. Wyrmwind is an escalation of Geirskogul and Nastrond. But its not an upgrade, and it doesn't interact with GSK or Nastrond. Its a higher potency non-upgrade which does the same thing. Why not make it interact with GSK and NSTD instead? Why must this be its own separate tacked on thing?
And lastly: Why does Wyrmwind thrust have a cost of 2, and we can only accumulate 2 maximum scales? We can't delay this to sync with burst windows, and we can't use it in our opener. Why not give it a max scale count of 3, with a cost of 2 instead?

My penultimate request: please do something different with Spineshatter Dive. Its a legacy move, it doesn't really have a place in level 90 anymore. We don't use it for gap closing, its just a single target 250 potency attack which doesn't stun enemies anymore. How about upgrading Spineshatter to Dragonfire Dive?

And my ultimate request: please get rid of Eye. Dragon Sight sucks to use. Just roll the damage increase into Lance Charge. Make Lance Charge like 15% or something, add a little potency to one attack, and get rid of this skill. We don't need it. It doesn't serve a purpose.


Hoping you guys can take a look at EW Dragoon and give us a little more love.
-Thanks

[Kahnom]

ShB DRG was the best, it was fun to play even I’m no main DRG.
Everything clicks together and line up beautifully, It was arguably that the job has “evolved”.
But DRG feel weird to play in END, that’s for sure.
The job encouraged double weave more than before but I can live with that. The main problem is the 2nd charge spineshatter dive.

My ping is high and I can’t double weave the animation lock ogcd such as Star diver and Dragon fire jump but I can make it work in ShB but now with 2 charges of SSD, it got a lot worse.
I’ve got tons of gcd clipping to the point that when I have to apply Chaotic spring, the buff always run out when I was doing Disembowel, sometimes even prior to that.
This problem will be gone if they just remove dmg from SSD. Make it like MNK’s thunderclap.

DRG was in the full—bloom state in ShB but I can’t see the clear direction they want to take DRG in END tbh.

[Noraiga]

I like the busyness of DRG EW, but yes there is too much "Spineshatter dive", "Mirage Dive" <= near to become useless, "Dragon Sight" <= is a huge pain to use on a partner, double "Lance Charge" <= is a pain and useless.
Beside that DRG is fine (for me).

[Shurrikhan]

1. Allow for Wheeling Thrust and Fang & Claw to be performed in either order, offering some of the positional adaptiveness available to all Melee but Monk (since the removal of Touch/Fracture or GCD speed manipulation a la old Tornado Kick).
2. Have Life Surge's CD scale with GCD speed.
3. Consolidate Mirage Dive to the same button as (High) Jump, but do not allow it to be queued until the prior's animation has resolved. (This would still allow you to spam it through but wouldn't cause clipping for high packet-loss players who need to spam their keys and would therefore accidentally queue Mirage Dive atop Jump.)
4. Make Dragon Sight a bit more interesting, such as via increased Crit damage/healing bonus, and have Dragon Sight's secondary (ally-targetable) buff should simply remain on the DRG itself if no other allied target is selected. Additionally, put it back at a 90s cooldown so it doesn't just feel like a bloated addition to Battle Litany. Or just get rid of Dragon Sight.

More on the pipedream end of things... Stardiver aside, our jumps and dives just haven't increased enough in their 'cool factor' between 50 and 90.

[minooo93]

I really like the current Dragoon gameplay and hope they dont change it much, would like to see a dmg buff for us due to "busy" and "most positionals" Reaper and Monk are crazy with close to same buff value .

What we really need is a defensive cooldown jumps are fine and the animation lock doesnt bother me really much if planned well even during busy 2m buff window during savage prog
I agree that Dragon Sight is not playable without mouse over macro, i need to keep my partner on focus target for easy use wich kinda sucks

[Kolsykol]

Imo I hate when people complain constantly about positionals, DRG is an exception I can see tho because of how many animation locks there are.
Positionals and animation locks don't go well together.

I also think that Dragon Sight should go to the closest DPS automatically if you have no target.

[Tobalito]

Imo I hate when people complain constantly about positionals, DRG is an exception I can see tho because of how many animation locks there are.
Positionals and animation locks don't go well together.

I also think that Dragon Sight should go to the closest DPS automatically if you have no target.

Agreed. I'm not against positional but with 5 animation locks in each burst window. No... just no.... that's not good gameplay, just bad design.

I would disagree with your Dragon Sight change only because there would be no way to really optimize that. I would just prefer they get rid of it. The skill has never felt good.

Lance Charge used to be a 25% damage buff then they nerfed it just to give us Dragon Sight and basically make it annoying and called it a new ability.

Its just clunky and doesn't work well with Dragoon