Quote Originally Posted by Iyrnwaen View Post
Yes, you can definitely choose to play the job wrong and deal substantially less damage for no reason.
DRG has no CC and no ability to chase. If you're not maximizing your burst, you're a minor annoyance without your team doing the heavy lifting.
DRG is inferior to NIN and RDM even when it's played correctly, but by all means, make it worse.
I agree with you. IMO Dragoon is overestimated, likely because people see the raw damage numbers at the end and believe it wrecked the enemy team.

There are two issues here. The first one is that Dragoons don't do anything besides damage. They have no utility and - very importantly - not a single form of crowd control, which is an incredibly powerful tool for helping you and your team close kills. In a game where every job can cast instant self-heals and use guard, cc is just formidable, and Dragoon has none. The second issue is that much of that damage is "wasted" damage. Dragoon has a decent burst if you use the jump-back ranged attack correctly, but unlike every other melee DPS it sucks at chasing due to having only a single gap closer and having no stuns or speed% buffs. You can very easily heal through the burst and then there is absolutely nothing the Dragoon can do against you. On top of that, a decent portion of the Dragoon's damage comes from AOE, which is just inferior to single-target burst damage because it is less likely to result in enemies getting killed. 140k damage distributed between three enemies such that one takes 70k and the other two 35k each is worse than 140k damage where one took 100k and the others 20k each. The higher the portion of your damage that is dealt as a single-target burst, the more useful it is for you and your team because it is more likely to lead to kills. For these reasons, 1m damage dealt by a dragoon is inferior to 1m damage dealt by a ninja, samurai, reaper, monk, or RDM. Dragoon's damage is just less likely to lead to a kill and more likely to be healed off.

The numbers at the end don't tell you how much of the damage is single target vs AOE or how much utility or crowd control the player brought to the team (except heals). So Dragoon looks on paper quite a bit better than the actual value of its contribution to the team.