Thread: EW 6.08 Dragoon: Improvements to functionality and accessibility

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.