EW 6.08 Dragoon: Improvements to functionality and accessibility

[Eorzean_username]

Context

I personally think that Dragoon is one of the Endwalker Jobs that is in a strong and comfortable place in terms of its overall, and core, design structure.

I think that Dragoon's overall system, GCD flow, animations, aesthetics, etc, are all appealing and intuitive, and that the fundamental gameplay system is satisfying to execute.

However, I also think that Dragoon is currently suffering from several logistical issues that make it unnecessarily hostile to player accessibility and comfort when attempting to use the Job at a high level of play.

These suggestions are based around a goal of simply trying to clean up and refine the rough edges that I think that Dragoon currently has, rather than attempting to drastically change the overall design or flow of the job, because I think that drastic, overhaul-type changes to Dragoon's job design are not necessary.

000 — Table of contents (for Ctrl+F jumping)

• 000 — Table of contents
• 111 — Dragon Sight functionality
  • 111a — Discussion of issue
  • 111b — Suggested improvements
• 222 — Elusive Jump functionality
  • 222a — Discussion of issue
  • 222b — Suggested improvements
• 333 — Reducing OGCD over-burdening
  • 333a — Discussion of issue
  • 333b — Suggested improvements

111 — Dragon Sight

111a — Fundamental issues
(skip this if you don't care about reviewing the logistical problems with Dragon Sight usage)

I personally think that "Dragon Sight" is one of the single most execrable actions in the entire game, and that its design demonstrates a fundamental lack of sensitivity to the needs of players' actual moment-to-moment gameplay.

To understand my hostility toward "Dragon Sight", please accept some basic premises about FFXIV gameplay:

• Performing well in FFXIV combat is fundamentally based on never allowing the GCD clock to stop spinning, if at all possible.
• For Dragoon, the GCD clock cannot keep spinning if the player currently has no enemy target selected to activate actions on.
• Auto-Attacks represent a significant portion of total combat damage for most Weapon-based Jobs.
• For weapon-based Jobs, not having an enemy target — for any period of time —increases the chance of losing Auto-Attacks during combat.
• Re-targeting a lost enemy target in FFXIV is often awkard, slow, and/or difficult, especially in crowded situations, due to FFXIV suffering from characteristic MMO issues with both click-targeting and tab-targeting.
• Therefore, for several reasons, it is undesirable for a Melee DPS player in FFXIV to willingly de-target the current enemy and switch to a friendly target during combat.

• The GCD clock also stops spinning if a player attempts to activate too many OGCD ("Ability") actions inside one GCD spin, or activates the OGCD keypresses too slowly.
• Dragoon has an immense number of OGCD actions that need to be activated in a precise and consistent manner, and near-mandatorily double-weaved, from start to finish of an encounter, in order to perform at full potential.
• Macros in FFXIV are implemented in a manner that borders on maliciousness, due to a misguided attempt at balancing. This means that Macros do not utilize the action queue, and thus Macros are clunky, awkward, and have a high chance of failing to activate when needed, unless aggressively spammed.
• This means that Macro'd actions have a higher chance of delaying the GCD spin or otherwise interfering with action-weaving, and this delay will occur during burst windows when Dragoon has no margin for allowing any delays in its OGCD sequence.
• Therefore, it is undesirable and detrimental to use Macros for OGCD actions.

With those premises about FFXIV gameplay established, hopefully (??? please...) it is clear why it is undesirable to give a Weapon-based Melee DPS Job a tool that requires de-targeting the enemy and targeting an ally during the most intense portion of said Job's burst cycle.

It seems to me like this should have been intuitive to the Job Design Team from the beginning, but somehow, it has apparently escaped their understanding for approximately 5 years.

That's okay — we don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents, right? So I would appreciate it if the Job Design Team would just finally get around to cleaning up the happy little accident that is called, "Dragon Sight".

Especially because, essentially, Dragon Sight was dragged out into the snows behind Ishgard in Patch 6.08, and had half of its limbs blown off with a sawed-off shotgun.

To recap the 6.08 Patch Notes about "Dragon Sight":

• Range has been extended from 12y to 30y.
• Target party member is no longer required to remain within 12y in order to receive the effects of Left Eye.
• The channeling animation between the dragoon and their target has been removed.

...so, look, uhm. Dragon Sight is pretty much dead. It's bleeding out. It doesn't even have an animation any more. The entire concept is pretty much KO'd at this point.

But the Job Design Team has insisted on still forcing Dragoon to de-target the enemy and target an ally in order to activate "Dragon Sight", and therefore failed to address the most core and fundamental problem with this action, even while decapitating "Dragon Sight" conceptually in nearly ever other way.

111b — Suggestions for resolving the remaining issues with Dragon Sight:

Proposal 1:

Give Dragoon a "Dragon Partner" action similar to Dancer's "Closed Position".

Then, similar to "Devilment", "Dragon Sight" always activates on the current "Dragon Partner".

Now, Dragoon does not need to manually target allies during the heat of combat in order to make "Dragon Sight" work.

Proposal 2:

Convert "Dragon Sight" into a party-wide effect like "Battle Litany", that does not require a specific target.

Maybe make a giant Nidhogg eyeball pop into existence above the battlefield and radiate out Dragon... energy fumes, or whatever.

Maybe change the effect to a party-wide damage buff, in order to copy Reaper's homework. (Although I have absolutely no idea how that would be balanced without nerfing other areas of Dragoon damage, given its already-solid numbers right now)

Proposal 3:

Merge "Dragon Sight" into "Battle Litany".

They're both 2-minute CDs. They're both party buffs. Maybe just allow "Dragon Sight" and "Battle Litany" to perform a Fusion Attack and become, uh... "Dragon Litany". Or "Battle Sight".

You know, something like... "Increases own damage by 10%, and the critical hit rate of self and nearby party members by 10%".

Maybe throw in a 1% damage increase for the party or something, just to memorialize the loss of the 5% targeted ally damage boost. Everyone loves seeing a 1% increase to something, right?

222 — Elusive Jump

222a — Summary of issues:

I suspect that "Elusive Jump" is one of those problematic types of actions that makes well-practiced veteran players that know how to exploit it feel terribly clever, while being largely under-utilized chaff for the majority of the player base.

To clarify:

The "intended", and seemingly-obvious, way to use Elusive Jump is to activate the action in order to dramatically leap backwards and escape danger.

The "actually-useful" way to use Elusive Jump is often to instead perform some ridiculous contortions and convolutions with the FFXIV camera, mouse/control-stick, and character-facing, in order to force Elusive Jump to launch the player toward their intended target, rather than away from it.

Why I think this functionality is problematic:

It's simply unintuitive and awkward, first of all.

It's also user-unfriendly, because performing this trick wrong results in launching off in an unexpected or unintended direction, which has a high chance of being directly into horrible fire, or off the edge of a platform, or both.

The bizarre design is made even more obvious by how much more intuitive it is to use Reaper's movement tools, in which you just press "Hell's Ingress" and go directly to wherever you want to go.

This also lacks parity with all other Jobs' much more intuitively-usable movement tools, placing unusually more burden on the Dragoon to effect the same type of mobility.

Even just conceptually, I'm not really sure what, in the overall FF franchise, suggests that Dragoon should be characterized by spinning around and jumping backwards in order to travel... in general, FF franchise Dragoons tend to be aggressive and straight-forward individuals that jump directly toward their targets.

"But Spineshatter Dive!"

I don't see "Spineshatter Dive" as being in the same action category, for several reasons:

• Spineshatter Dive's prolonged cooldown.
• Spineshatter Dive's enemy target requirement.
• Spineshatter Dive's attached Damage potency, that is more desirable to reserve for damage-buff windows if at all possible.

These factors make "Spineshatter Dive" essentially a part of the DPS rotation, and constrained in several ways in how it can be used for simple, free movement.

Therefore, the awkward and counter-intuitive "Elusive Jump" becomes Dragoon's first-line movement solution, simply because it has a short CD, no target requirement, and no cost in DPS output to hold it indefinitely, and activate it whenever needed.

And so, Dragoon spends encounters comically launching itself backwards across the battlefield. Or dying trying. Or embarrassingly ending up at 45 degree angle from the intended destination.

222b — Suggestions for making Elusive Jump more intuitive for players:

Honestly, I don't think that this requires a high-concept solution. Just copy Reaper's homework.

Give Dragoon a new movement tool. Call it, ugh, I don't know... "Confrontational Pounce", I guess.

Confrontational Pounce:

• No target requirement.
• Launches the Dragoon forward 15 yalms.
• 30s CD.
• Shares a cooldown with "Elusive Jump", which is not removed. Let me repeat that: Elusive Jump remains in the game.

There. Now Dragoon players have a normalized, balanced, equitable way of launching forward that is intuitive and not reliant on weird camera tricks and "backwards aiming".

And Dragoons can still backflip instead, if they want to.

333 — OGCD bloat reduction

333a —Fundamental problem
(skip this section if you don't need, want, and/or care about an explanation about how Dragoon is currently overflowing with OGCDs, and why thats becoming an issue)

SE, developers, Job Team, Community Managers, Mr. Yoshida's secretary, whoever is possibly actually listening, PLEASE listen to this: FFXIV's OGCD bloat is completely out of control, and Endwalker Dragoon is currently one of the worst offenders.

The situation is so severe for Dragoon that the Job often almost-literally cannot fit all of its OGCD actions into its major buff windows, even while double-weaving inside every single GCD where it's possible without clipping.

Therefore, even a single delay, or having a bit too much latency, can result in consistently pushing large chunks of damage outside of Dragoon's buff windows — which is quite bad for any Job, but especially for Dragoon, which is fundamentally designed around pushing its damage into 60s spikes during its self-buff windows, that are coordinated with wider party buffs.

This problem has reached the point that players are now commonly and openly recommending utilizing 3rd-party latency- and animation-lock modifying tools as a first-line solution to playing Dragoon, simply because the job's OGCD burden is so over-loaded that it feels close to impossible to play the job to its full potential unless a player can reliably double-weave Jumps, or even just brazenly triple-weave OGCDs in general.

And this is only considering rotational damage OGCDs — this isn't even allowing for the possibility of needing to insert support actions like "True North", "Feint", "Second Wind", and so on, which makes the situation feel even more difficult.

All of this is not just ridiculous from a design and accessibility perspective for a game that was originally presented as a fairly mellow-paced, slow-GCD-based, console-friendly MMO, but it's also creating a problematic divide between PC players that can utilize these tools, and console players that, for the most part, cannot.

These sorts of factors are especially ironic because players that still attempt to follow the developers' rules, and only use FFXIV's internal tools, are still being punished with draconian measures like Macros not being allowed to queue, ostensibly in order to enforce parity between players.

In my opinion, something needs to be done to scale back the OGCD overload that Dragoon is currently burdened with, such that the Job can reasonably be played to its full potential without requiring ideal latency combined with 3rd-party tools to enable cramming a maximum number of OGCDs into buff windows.

Additionally, even setting such meta-level concerns aside, I think that Dragoon is becoming an exhausting chore to try to execute consistently during situations where too many OGCD actions are all becoming available in rapid succession.

I know that this is a tightrope walk — I think that it's not fun to have too few OGCD actions to press, since it can make rotations feel slow and "empty".

So what I'm hoping for is that Dragoon is scaled down enough to feel more comfortable to use again, while still keeping a reasonably-brisk pace to its buff windows... I think that's fun. But I also think that Dragoon needs to peel back its number of OGCDs, for example, to a place where Jumps can be comfortably single-woven again without displacing large chunks of damage from buff windows.

"Okay, we'll reduce the animation lock of Jumps further!"

NO.

I mean, okay, fine, I guess... that's still a gain, so I'll take it, but... you're also missing the point.

As a primary concern, I don't think that FFXIV or Dragoon needs "faster OGCD locks". That's treating a symptom, rather than the core problem.

The problem is that shortening animation locks still doesn't change the ridiculous OGCD vomit that's afflicting Job design right now — it just makes it somewhat-less-pernicious to deal with.

And it will still leave players that have less-than-ideal latency or connections feeling like they cannot participate competitively, if they still can't manage to fit at least 2 OGCDs inside their GCD spins.

In my opinion, FFXIV just needs to take a deep breath, and start culling the amount of OGCDs that the Job Design Team is expecting players to use.

FFXIV is played in a design in which players mostly fill time in between narrow 15-20s personal or party buff windows, during which players attempt to unload as much of their damaging actions as possible.

The Job Design Team needs to come to terms with the fact that any OGCD actions that are given to players, will always be attempted to be crammed inside these narrow party buff windows.

Therefore, there's a tolerable upper limit on how many damaging OGCDs can be crammed inside any given Job's toolset before it begins to overflow — in terms of physical logistics, in terms of player comfort, in terms of accessibility... etc.

333b — Ideas for how Dragoon could have its OGCD burden scaled back

...Honestly, I'm just listing every random example that pops into my head right now, in order to make a point. There's probably many other good — or much better — ideas.

Merge Dragon Sight and Battle Litany into one action.

This would free up another weave space during burst windows.

Convert "Mirage Dive" into a Trait, which makes the "Mirage Dive" effect automatically activate whenever "High Jump" is activated.

This would compress away yet another separate action that needs to be crammed into burst windows.

Remove "Dragonfire Dive" from the single-target rotation.

One possibility is to merge "Spineshatter Dive" and "Dragonfire Dive" into one action.

• 400 potency to target, 150 potency to all nearby targets, 2 charges, 60s CD.
• Or, 800 potency to target, 300 potency to all nearby targets, 1 charge, 120s CD.
• Reasoning: two uses of SSD @ 250 potency = 500 potency per 2 minutes + one use of DFD @ 300 potency per 2 minutes = 800 potency per two minutes, single target.

Alternatively, "Spineshatter Dive" and "Dragonfire Dive" could share a cooldown:

• Spineshatter Dive: 400 potency to one target, 2 charges, 60s CD
• Dragonfire Dive: 150 potency to target and all nearby targets, 2 charges, 60s CD
• Reasoning: One DFD per 2 minutes is 300 potency, so one DFD per 60s becomes 150 potency. Add +150 potency to SSD per minute to compensate for losing 300 potency per 2 minutes from removing DFD from ST rotation.

Automatically shoot the first "Nastrond" when entering "Life of the Dragon".

Currently, Dragoon must double-tap "Geirskogul" when entering "Life of the Dragon": the first keypress activates "Geirskogul" and begins "Life of the Dragon", but "Geirskogul" then immediately becomes Nastrond, which then needs to be pressed again in order to actually begin using Nastronds.

This results in a peculiar, stuttering "double press" of "Geirskogul" when first entering "Life of the Dragon", and thus adds yet another OGCD burden to the rotation during burst windows.

If the "Geirskogul" that activates "Life of the Dragon" also automatically activated the first "Nastrond", then Dragoon would have one less OGCD activation to fit into burst windows.

In this design, the rhythm when entering "Life of the Dragon" would become:

1. reach 2 Dragon Eyes
2. activate Geirskogul
3. Life of the Dragon activates automatically (from activating Geirskogul)
4. Nastrond activates automatically (from activating Geirskogul)
5. The Dragoon is now in Life of the Dragon status, with 30s remaining, and Nastrond's CD ticking down from 10s.

"Life Surge" only affects "Heavens' Thrust".

Currently, Dragoon has an awkward situation where it has so much OGCD overload that it can be difficult to sneak "Life Surge" activations in during buff windows.

Missing a split-second of opportunity to fit "Life Surge" in at the correct time is especially-problematic, because in addition to drifting the action, "Life Surge" also loses significant value if it is not activated before the precisely-correct GCD action, which thus even further narrows the windows in which "Life Surge" can be productively squeezed in.

If "Life Surge" was changed to only be consumed by "Heavens' Thrust", then Dragoon could safely activate "Life Surge" in a much broader window of opportunity (whenever there is a comfortable free weave space), and then continue with the GCD rotation and allow "Life Surge" to be consumed by the next naturally-occurring "Heavens' Thrust".

Alternatively: "Life Surge" enables the next "Heavens' Thrust" to be used at full potency regardless of current combo step, and without interrupting the current combo process.

This change to "Life Surge" would allow "Heavens' Thrust" to be freely-inserted at any point in the Dragoon rotation after activating "Life Surge".

This would help Dragoon to productively consume both charges of "Life Surge" in openers and reopeners, without having to resort to counterintuitive behaviors, such as deliberately using "Life Surge" on "Fang and Claw" or "Wheeling Thrust", just to try to prevent "Life Surge" charges from overflowing.

[Aco505]

Dragon Sight (DS) as an ability would be "fine" if it had all of its clunkiness fixed: not losing the buff if the partner dies, letting it affect pets, removing the need of a macro, etc. As I explain in my DRG feedback thread (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-for-Endwalker), giving DS the DNC partner treatment is fine, but only as long as they make it free and easy to switch around without incurring any cooldown, otherwise what happens if your partner dies right before it's coming but switching requires 30s? The fix cannot cover all the possibilities, but it should try to be as flexible as possible.

While it is true that removing DS or merging it with another ability would ease 2-min burst windows a bit by providing 1 oGCD slot, the issue that DRG has is that Battle Litany (BL) was changed to 15s, meaning that the window in which to fit all your oGCDs except the 3rd Nastrond (NAS) became quite tight. The first NAS needs to be out on the GCD right after BL was used or you won't be able to get the 2nd inside of it, and any mistakes will push more oGCDs out of BL and potentialy LC and DS as well.

The other issue, and the main one, is the animation lock of jumps. DRG is an oGCD-heavy job that has roughly half of its oGCDs unable to be double-weaved. This does not happen to any other oGCD-focused job, so changing the animation lock of jumps is indeed a very needed fix for it. The graphics of the animations cannot be used as justification when so many jobs (think of GNB or RPR) never let them finish at all under normal circumstances.

LC would be the more obvious ability to merge DS into. Just remove LC and make DS give 15-20% damage with a 60s cooldown while combining their animations if wanted. However, and as stated in my feedback post, this would make it a bit simple and boring. Merging DS with BL would make the buff too strong, and therefore would probably remain at 15s, which is detrimental to us due to the aforementioned reasons. In addition, it would push DRG more towards the "support melee" role similar to NIN, and I'm not sure if that's a good idea due to the differences between the two jobs: NIN has stronger 2-min burst, but is tame between them, whereas DRG is more constant. It would make more sense for DRG's role to be more personal, closer to RPR's, than supportive.

DS needs to do something besides buffing someone every 2 minutes for it to be interesting, something similar to the way Brotherhood or Arcane Circle work could be interesting.

Elusive Jump (EJ) is not the best "gapclose" there is, but it can be more flexible than others because it requires no target, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it. The problem with EJ is that its cooldown is a bit too long for what it does, shortening it to 20-25s might help. If your character didn't take so long to turn, EJ would be quite better.

However, if the devs want DRG to have more gapclosing options, what could be done is to just give us a normal gapcloser similar to Corps-a-corps but without damage, while still keeping EJ to use when needed. I'm suggesting a normal gapcloser and not a forward EJ precisely to avoid the job looking too similar to RPR. Homogenization is fine to an extent, but we have to be careful because otherwise all jobs will look the exact same, with only flavor changes.

It is obvious at this point that jumps are not gapclosers, they are damage oGCDs that happen to have the ability to gapclose and they are only used as such in very niche situations such as E12S-2 when the cooldown of Spineshatter Dive (SPD) coincided perfectly with the knockback from Darkest Dance.

This ironically makes DRG less mobile than the other melees, especially if we consider the fact that we are also the most positional-demanding job and so have to care for them more. This is not a bad thing, as it adds complexity to the job (though this could be argued), but then we need tools to manage it so that players can be rewarded for doing so. Removing positionals would not make the job better.

An interesting solution they could think about is making DRG attacks have 2-3 more yalms of range. Since lances are long weapons, why not have DRG have a minimum range of 5 or 6? Maybe this is an awful idea since jumps move you to the enemy's hitbox, but it would certainly be different.

As for the state of the number of oGCDs that DRG has, I think that DRG is not a job that is button bloated. Only three of your buttons are used exclusively in AoE, our AoE weaponskill combo, with the rest being oGCDs that we use in all situations. I think this makes DRG unique and making SPD and Dragonfire Dive (DFD) share a cooldown would just make it boring. You'd only use DFD in dungeons and you wouldn't really be fixing the problem with DRG's oGCDs, which as stated above are the animation locks and how tight they can be to fit in 15s buffs (BL in particular). Additionally, you'd lose one jump in the iconic feel of DRG jumping several times in a row, breaking the job fantasy.

What DFD needs to have is a role, because right now it's just a fire-and-forget medium-damaging attack that you use every 120s. It should either hit harder or keep the damage but give us something else such as a scale or eye, as I propose in my feedback post. I'm sure there are more interesting ideas for it though.

Sometimes people ask for Mirage Dive (MD) to be removed. If it is an issue, why not merge the button with High Jump (HJ) and perhaps bring the window in which you can use it to 20s for more flexibility? I am against removing it or merging it and would rather see it converted into a charge-like system like in PvP so that DRG can start the fight with a Life of the Dragon window, even though this has to be looked at carefully to make sure it doesn't disrupt buff windows and eye generation. Taking it away though would simplify a job that doesn't need that and we'd also lose a nice animation when it can at least be merged into another button if button bloat is a concern.

Regarding Life Surge (LS), I don't think it should only affect Heavens' Thrust (HT) because then there'd be no thought behind it. What it could do is affect Chaotic Spring (CS) in some way, perhaps adding 50% of the DoT's damage to the initial hit (and allowing it to crit) so that we'd have to think whether to use it on HT or CS depending on the situation/buff window. Right now, the only other weaponskill in which we can use it is a 5th combo positional under both LC and DS for a measly 4 potency gain, which means that you can just use them all on buffed or unbuffed HTs and not think much about it.

However, this could change if they allowed automatic (direct) crit attacks to get extra damage under a (direct) crit chance buff, as it would make using LS for a 5th combo under BL more desirable. It's just quite odd that a job providing a crit buff has an automatic crit attack, just like DNC's Starfall Dance under Devilment. I talk about this in my feedback post, but it's also mentioned in this post about WAR (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...eds-addressing). This change is necessary to avoid all the jobs looking the same while avoiding these weird interactions that negatively affect specific jobs.

The suggestion about allowing LS to make the next HT usable regardless of combo could be interesting, though it'd have to be checked carefully to see how this would interact with CS's DoT duration and other factors such as scale generation. Our GCDs can no longer be weighed in a vacuum with the addition of Wyrmwind Thrust (WWT).

If the devs want to tweak DRG, the solution will never be to prune abilities from the job, but to make the existing ones more meaningful or interesting. The challenge for 7.0 will be to add something without taking something else away. If they want to change DRG, then they'd have to do it in such a way that the current kit becomes more interesting or different, and not just by way of pruning abilities on a job that doesn't have the button bloat issue that many others do.

[LauraAdalena]

So I like some of your ideas (like Dragonfire Dive sharing a CD with spineshatter) but a lot of them I feel are unnecessary or could be solved in different ways. Life Surge is also used on your first Wheeling Thrust and every 120 second buff burst, and personally that feels good to have more than just one thing to use it on IMO. But I do like the idea it’s a skill you can like pre-pull pop.

Also, your suggestion for an elusive jump that fires you forward is redundant because you can save a charge of spineshatter for that. What I’d do personally is make DFD and SSD the same skill and one upgrade into the other (DFD being the preferred end goal). This would, of course, have an increased potency to compensate. And your point of the jumps not being gapclosers is somewhat true except for the fact that they added charges to them the same they did for Cops-a-Corps for RDM. Holding a charge for damage buffs is optimal, but if it brings you closer to the boss faster it’s even better. Just because they do damage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold them for optimal times to get back in faster.

Your ideas to combine battle lit and Dragonsight I both like and dislike. I do believe DS needs reworked but removing it, in my opinion, removes some identity. Perhaps the idea to make them AOE. However I do think since they share a CD making it AOE OR reducing its cooldown to 60 and changing its damage buff both just raise the questions at that point “why have a separate button for Lit or Lance Charge. So I’m mixed on my feelings there. As for the “dragon partner” idea, I completely disagree. Because that’s no different than setting a macro for one, but not having a second one for if your partner is down/if they aren’t optimal. And as it stands optimal dancer doesn’t stick to one target the entire fight. They tend to bounce from whoever does the most during bursts to whoever does the most sustained damage outside of bursts. Which DRG isn’t too different from, as if my comp was BLM, BRD, RPR Id give to the BLM for the opener and the RPR for their bursts because they burst a lot harder than BLM after the opener if they’re using their two Communio burst as they should. Just an example. But if the RPR dies the BRD would be more optimal.


However I think the key ideas you said about mirage dive and Geiskogul could be said about WWT. Having WWT is nice and all but what if instead of it being gained from Raiden Thrust/the AOE version it just becomes WWT instead of Raiden? While yes it’s a gain to do it in buffed windows it’s also kind of a pain to weave it in bursts.

As for your geiskogul and nastrond and high jump and mirage dive, I’d like to expand on those a bit. Instead of just combining High Jump and Mirage Dive, High Jump also instantly charges for Life of the Dragon (and maybe take a hit to CD NA dincrease damage ETC). Make Geiskogul just get replaced with Nastrond when it’s fully charged for Life and increase its damage. No need to have extra animations delaying OGCDs. I’m mixed on whether I would keep Stardiver or not.

I’m honestly surprised you haven’t pointed out that without ridiculous SKS your Chaos Thrust will never last to the next one which feels clunky as hell. Just extend it to there come on.

And finally, to finally trim down on one less OGCD, I’d just trim Lance charge. Yeah I know that removes some of the distinction but I personally would make it combine with DS as I suggested earlier no matter the change to DS.