On the topic of DRG being busy and button bloat.

[LauraAdalena]

I’m not quoting all of it because I either agree or just see it as an “we can have a difference of opinion on that and that’s fine.”

Dragonfire Dive is not an AoE version of Spineshatter Dive.

It’s a jump that’s added in ARR, moves the character to the position of the edge of an enemy’s hit box, and does slightly less than jump and a lot less than High Jump. The only difference between the two is that DFD hits in an AOE, has a longer cs, and does 50 more potency (and now SSD has 2 stacks) but at least at one point SSD proced Mirage Dive. Now it is mechanically the same. Explain to me in detail how they are not mechanically.

[QUOTE=Aco505;5888839]We can't really compare DFD with Stardiver, when the latter is the capstone that Life grants us. [QUOTE]

We absolutely can from a damage, animation lock, and etc standpoint. I am not comparing them mechanically when I do because obviously mechanically they are different.

[QUOTE=Aco505;5888839] Since you've been using RPR as a reference, Stardiver would be like Communio and DFD like Plentiful Harvest.[QUOTE]

Given what you say later, that’s kinda weird you’d do that. But I’ll tackle that later. Also to save room, I don’t get your added damage bit, and the whole tangent on “well Geiskogul is redundant” when you blatantly ignore my point that it should swap to that when Life is charged meaning it kind of is depending on the situation. Having to hit it to start life is redundant when they could just give Nastrond extra damage and reduce the number of buttons pressed during bursts.





Therefore, giving DFD a role that is not simply the "AoE jump" would round out the DRG's kit quite well.

We have to be careful when we compare jobs: RPR is a GCD-focused job like MNK, whereas DRG is the only oGCD-focused melee. Removing oGCDs from DRG without a general kit overhaul would strip the job of its unique aspects. Do we want all jobs to look the same in the end? I understand that it can be different to get used to DRG, but this happens with every job and it is precisely these differences that make them good. Otherwise we'd be playing the same thing with just graphic changes.

I’ve been playing DRG since ARR with a break in HW, because I didn’t like it in HW, but I thought a lot of jobs then were bloated and/or unwieldy. I will not disagree on you Saying that it’s OGCD focused but I will say that it does seem weird that for an OGCD focused job that you don’t have enough time between weaves to actually target a partner for your eye. You have tons of locks making certain windows impossible to use multiples of them? I also will still stress how you struggle to fit Feint into that rotation during certain windows making your job harder since that’s required as a melee.

RPR is more focused in personal damage, but it's not dealing "far more damage with less effort" at all. If anything, RPR should be doing a bit more.

Numbers considering, this is incorrect. Right now I place the same place as Reaper as I did on a clear for Dragoon amongst players in terms of percent of damage and was doing significantly more and only had to learn the double Communio burst which is very easy. The positionals are not set meaning True North management is near 0. And the only thing you really need to focus on is making sure you keep Gluttony on CD. And that’s the hardest thing. Well and figuring out how to recover out of a death but yeah. Dragoon you need to plan a very stiff and set in stone rotation with no wiggle room for holding things unless it will result in better damage later, which might I remind you I was a SMN player at one point and liked that but thought it could improve. And yet I did much better on RPR in terms of personal damage and damage accounted for in terms of buffs provided to the group. I put in far more effort constantly pressing buttons and managing to make sure I got two LOTD in burst phases and making sure the CD drift for my bursts was extremely minimal and making sure my eye macro went off correctly.

In short, for the amount of effort put in RPR does more damage even including the non-personal damage. Unless you can explain otherwise I fail to believe a job that easy putting out that much damage compared to a job far more full would not attract more and dissuade engrossed DRG players to play RPR.

The duration of Chaotic Spring is a conscious choice because it lasts 24s and our rotation takes 25s or a bit less with SkS. For it not to drop, we'd need it to last 27s or change the GCD string and DoT so that it takes 30s to perform, or in other words, multiples of 2.5. I wouldn't really change that considering the things you can do sometimes, such as ending a phase or fight with a double Heavens' Thrust combo…

And we wouldn’t be able to without it…? Also CS applies at the end of the GCD, and it’s more like 4-5 seconds before it’s time to reapply at a low SKS like we are supposed to have.

You say we can’t compare RPR to DRG when all I was comparing was effort to damage ratio and how they both fill the same role, that being the maiming melee. So by that same measure that people were wrong to say SMN wasn’t as good as RDM despite RDM and SMN being in the same place as DRG and RPR?

[Aco505]

It’s a jump that’s added in ARR, moves the character to the position of the edge of an enemy’s hit box, and does slightly less than jump and a lot less than High Jump. The only difference between the two is that DFD hits in an AOE, has a longer cs, and does 50 more potency (and now SSD has 2 stacks) but at least at one point SSD proced Mirage Dive. Now it is mechanically the same. Explain to me in detail how they are not mechanically.

All jumps are the same mechanically by the definition you propose, but they serve different purposes. The issue with DFD is that it's weak in its purpose, which is to be a 120s cooldown that adds strength to 2-min windows. Spineshatter Dive is like DRK's Shadowbringer: an oGCD with charges that you try to fit within as many buffs as possible, but without overcapping.

We absolutely can from a damage, animation lock, and etc standpoint. I am not comparing them mechanically when I do because obviously mechanically they are different.

STD is tied to our gauge, happens once every minute, and is meant to be our hardest-hitting oGCD. DFD is a 120s cooldown meant to strengthen our 2-min windows. They are not the same even if they both do cleave damage, which is mostly relevant in dungeons.

DFD is not tied to any of our gauges, partly because it cannot be due to how they work. This is why I advocate for an improvement of the ability, so that it feels like a true 120s cooldown, of which we don't have many besides our buffs.

Given what you say later, that’s kinda weird you’d do that. But I’ll tackle that later. Also to save room, I don’t get your added damage bit, and the whole tangent on “well Geiskogul is redundant” when you blatantly ignore my point that it should swap to that when Life is charged meaning it kind of is depending on the situation. Having to hit it to start life is redundant when they could just give Nastrond extra damage and reduce the number of buttons pressed during bursts.

How is it a tangent? GSK and NAS are both line attacks and your argument was pointing to the direction that SPD and DFD are the same, which they are not, so this is why I provided the GSK/NAS example. They are not meant to have the same role. You cannot unlink GSK from starting Life right now because it'd become a dead ability if so and because you'd lose casts of it if Life started directly after achieving two eyes, unless you made NAS have its own button or we had a button that allows us to start Life, but then... we run into button bloat issues.

Additionally, if we did have a way of starting Life without using GSK, Life would look too similar to Enshroud, and homogenization like that would be very bad for the game. The flexibility would be welcome, but only if properly implemented, and still it would look too similar.

it does seem weird that for an OGCD focused job that you don’t have enough time between weaves to actually target a partner for your eye. You have tons of locks making certain windows impossible to use multiples of them? I also will still stress how you struggle to fit Feint into that rotation during certain windows making your job harder since that’s required as a melee.

Having to target someone to use Dragon Sight is a clear design flaw. No other DPS in the game needs to target someone else to do their job, and literally every single DRG has to use a macro to circumvent this issue, besides the fact that DS is always weaved with another oGCD buff (mostly Lance Charge) so that they overlap as much of their duration as possible, as that's how buffs work most effectively in this game. How will reducing oGCDs resolve this problem with DS? What DS needs is quality of life changes, as mentioned several times already in this thread.

In regards to role actions, they can still be weaved with jumps right now only by those with low ping, and by hopefully most people in two days, so this won't be an issue anymore.

Numbers considering, this is incorrect. Right now I place the same place as Reaper as I did on a clear for Dragoon amongst players in terms of percent of damage and was doing significantly more and only had to learn the double Communio burst which is very easy. The positionals are not set meaning True North management is near 0. And the only thing you really need to focus on is making sure you keep Gluttony on CD. And that’s the hardest thing. Well and figuring out how to recover out of a death but yeah. Dragoon you need to plan a very stiff and set in stone rotation with no wiggle room for holding things unless it will result in better damage later, which might I remind you I was a SMN player at one point and liked that but thought it could improve. And yet I did much better on RPR in terms of personal damage and damage accounted for in terms of buffs provided to the group. I put in far more effort constantly pressing buttons and managing to make sure I got two LOTD in burst phases and making sure the CD drift for my bursts was extremely minimal and making sure my eye macro went off correctly.

In short, for the amount of effort put in RPR does more damage even including the non-personal damage. Unless you can explain otherwise I fail to believe a job that easy putting out that much damage compared to a job far more full would not attract more and dissuade engrossed DRG players to play RPR.

A job's complexity should not be the sole metric used to compare it with another one that is more complex. RPR is flexible and DRG is strict, and one is neither better nor harder than the other, just different. Difficulty is subjective. The fact that RPR has an easier time with positionals, for example, is intentional design.

Still, if we go with the argument that a job being more complex should output more damage with more effort, where's the problem? It may be easier for RPR to deal damage compared to DRG, but at optimal or higher levels of play, DRG deals more damage in general. I personally don't think a job being "easy" or "hard" should automatically guarantee higher or lower DPS, but from a design standpoint, it makes sense.

Not all jobs must be the same, and DRG's complexity is just explained by "pressing everything on CD", which is a simple statement that is not so simple in practice, I agree. Nonetheless, this is balanced by the fact that our GCD string is fixed and doesn't require a lot of thinking on our part.

However, you mention that you used two LotD in burst phases, which is unoptimal: you always have one Life per burst, be it odd or even, and you never double Life as in ShB unless the fight is about to end or there's boss phasing forcing you to in order to avoid overcapping eyes through HJ.

RPR being played a lot right now is due to many reasons such as the fact that it is the new shiny DPS job, but your wording implies that people may leave DRG in favor of RPR due to difficulty when in reality, plenty of people do the opposite because RPR is the last melee in overall raid damage.

And we wouldn’t be able to without it…? Also CS applies at the end of the GCD, and it’s more like 4-5 seconds before it’s time to reapply at a low SKS like we are supposed to have.

It'd be different, because we'd need two more GCDs for our DoT and GCD rotation to be the same number (30 in this case). You need a GCD speed of 2.4 for the DoT to be reapplied instantly right now after it expires, but such GCD speed is detrimental to us as it forces drifts, particularly of HJ and GSK. CS applies its initial damage in about 0.5s and the DoT after another 0.5s, so you will never be in a situation in which it has 4-5 seconds left, unless you are in Delubrum Reginae Savage with full haste gear.

You say we can’t compare RPR to DRG when all I was comparing was effort to damage ratio and how they both fill the same role, that being the maiming melee. So by that same measure that people were wrong to say SMN wasn’t as good as RDM despite RDM and SMN being in the same place as DRG and RPR?

When did I say that jobs cannot be compared? While I get the comparison to RPR due to both jobs having a slow GCD and other factors, melees should be compared as a whole because of the role they share (melee DPS), not the gear. All this, though, taking into account the fact that RPR is GCD-focused while DRG is the opposite.

[LauraAdalena]

My last one was kinda long, kinda drained me.

Edit: “I’ll keep it short” *goes longer*

All jumps are the same mechanically by the definition you propose, but they serve different purposes. The issue with DFD is that it's weak in its purpose, which is to be a 120s cooldown that adds strength to 2-min windows. Spineshatter Dive is like DRK's Shadowbringer: an oGCD with charges that you try to fit within as many buffs as possible, but without overcapping.

Then by that regard, why not just consolidate the two and give us room to slap a feint in? That way we get the charge of one and the strength, animation, and name, of another? It saves buttons (esp for controller players), and we already have a jump that does strengthen any time that Life is up. Also no, Jump doesn’t displace you and returns you to your original position and unlocks Mirage dive. It feels like you’re just being pedantic at this point because you just like the way the class plays. Which is fine, but you have to understand that just because something exists doesn’t mean it serves a purpose that actually adds to the job’s identity.



STD is tied to our gauge, happens once every minute, and is meant to be our hardest-hitting oGCD. DFD is a 120s cooldown meant to strengthen our 2-min windows. They are not the same even if they both do cleave damage, which is mostly relevant in dungeons.

How is it a tangent? GSK and NAS are both line attacks and your argument was pointing to the direction that SPD and DFD are the same, which they are not, so this is why I provided the GSK/NAS example. They are not meant to have the same role. You cannot unlink GSK from starting Life right now because it'd become a dead ability if so and because you'd lose casts of it if Life started directly after achieving two eyes, unless you made NAS have its own button or we had a button that allows us to start Life, but then... we run into button bloat issues.

It absolutely would not be a dead ability. There are a few situations where you need to his GSK to get a double LOTD phase for a burst which is why I don’t want the mirage dive change I see people tout. I just think having to hit one less button in the opener just hitting the same button twice during a weave could be fixed is all.

In regards to role actions, they can still be weaved with jumps right now only by those with low ping, and by hopefully most people in two days, so this won't be an issue anymore.

Until Tuesday we can’t say. As for the “low ping” I’ll just say that adds to my point of it being clunky and bad design.

Still, if we go with the argument that a job being more complex should output more damage with more effort, where's the problem? It may be easier for RPR to deal damage compared to DRG, but at optimal or higher levels of play, DRG deals more damage in general. I personally don't think a job being "easy" or "hard" should automatically guarantee higher or lower DPS, but from a design standpoint, it makes sense.

Not all jobs must be the same, and DRG's complexity is just explained by "pressing everything on CD", which is a simple statement that is not so simple in practice, I agree. Nonetheless, this is balanced by the fact that our GCD string is fixed and doesn't require a lot of thinking on our part.

I’d argue that most of RPR’s strict too, but in a different way. In an uptime way. But that’s beside the point. When it comes to difficulty it’s almost unanimously agreed that RPR’s rotation being loose AND tied to the GCD AND only having a handful of GCD skills with CS’s/tied to the gauge is exactly why it’s not hard.

I will admit I got a few things wrong there. Typing at work during a break didn’t allow me to do research because I was unable to notice that the job I was claiming was the weaker one was stronger. I still think Reaper’s ease-of-use is exactly why it will get more attention but I hold it. I also realize that my lack of playing DRG in a hot second due to being enamored with SAM suddenly (wow that timing was bad) shot me in the foot. It must have changed since I last played it.

It'd be different, because we'd need two more GCDs for our DoT and GCD rotation to be the same number (30 in this case). You need a GCD speed of 2.4 for the DoT to be reapplied instantly right now after it expires, but such GCD speed is detrimental to us as it forces drifts, particularly of HJ and GSK. CS applies its initial damage in about 0.5s and the DoT after another 0.5s, so you will never be in a situation in which it has 4-5 seconds left, unless you are in Delubrum Reginae Savage with full haste gear.

You at least agree on the GCD but but… what do you mean you’d need 2 extra GCDs? I’m not saying to just add 2 seconds and not adjust potency I’m just saying extend the dot to make it easier to apply and feel more satisfying. I can’t be the only one who finds it unsatisfying to let something drop and apply it with a gap in-between.

When did I say that jobs cannot be compared? While I get the comparison to RPR due to both jobs having a slow GCD and other factors, melees should be compared as a whole because of the role they share (melee DPS), not the gear. All this, though, taking into account the fact that RPR is GCD-focused while DRG is the opposite.

You said something of the sort that made it sound like that from my interpretation. If that’s not how you meant it I am sorry. However, let’s address the elephant in this statement. The “slow GCD” comment. I just want to point out that except for Monk, SAM and Ninja don’t like SKS too much so they barely count as “fast” because technically they don’t want SKS (I speak more for SAM than NIN. Point is that I’d say they’re still slow GCD but NIN with an asterisk because of Mudras.) the reason they can be considered the same niche isn’t just armor like I keep saying. It’s a melee DPS that’s got unique movement animations with locks that are not dependent on cursor or enemy location. And while you may disagree, they both have a heavy emphasis on the GCD (RPR keeping it going to make sure you don’t lose an ounce of gauge, RPR because of the endless combo.) They both are slightly tankier than the other melees so don’t have damage reduction skills. And on top of all of that both have a party damage buff that’s often popped very early. (Both for different reasons). You have to keep in mind when I say their roles are the most similar I mostly mean because of armor and minor details because the melees are all extremely distinct and it is one of the best roles, IMO, because of that.

[Iustitia-sama]

My only question is why are you going into a double life phase, in EW dragoon no longer needs to do that, just delay every time.

[Aco505]

To me Dragoon's sat in a similar space as Black Mage where they hit their core flow in Heavensward/Stormblood and have gotten QoL and downtime fillers to make that flow easier or shore up weak points. Their remark on Black Mage was "Job's basically perfect, no changes," so why's Dragoon being looked at? I've never seen it as a contested job in the ways many others are and it was especially odd to hear it mentioned alongside AST which is maybe the most contested.

I don't think DRG requires any fundamental design changes and can stay its course of refining the current build it has, that it is and has been in a comfortable place for a long time and it's concerning that they think it requires a rework without notable feedback urging one.

Yes, DRG is a very smooth job that only requires quality of life improvements and some tuning. These huge changes for 6.2 are concerning because they can easily break the job's identity, and a rework should be more suited for 7.0 than in the middle of the expansion.

DRG is all about oGCDs mechanically and jumps and dragon abilities (GSK, NAS, MD, WWT...) thematically. Removing or "streamlining" what a well-rounded job such as this one has to offer will likely strip it of its uniqueness.

My only question is why are you going into a double life phase, in EW dragoon no longer needs to do that, just delay every time.

While double life phases are less common, they are a tool available in our kit that can be used in some scenarios. If the boss will die before the next burst comes or if it phases out but we are able to get an extra eye before this happens, then we need to do a double life.

This is also why Mirage Dive cannot be removed, as it provides us with the flexibility to delay or enter life at will, even if in full uptime dummy fights we always delay life, this won't be the case in plenty of other encounters or scenarios.

We can find an example in P2S, where it is customary to switch the order of HJ and GSK after the first arrows in order to enter life just before Kampeos and put the two NAS at the end of the life window under buffs, to then keep delaying life by using MD after GSK.

Or in dungeons, where it's preferrable to use HJ first and as soon as possible to get as many eyes (and MD out) as possible before a pack of mobs dies.