Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
And generating an extra Eye in those situations can do as much harm as good, as now your LotD would be desynced from Lance Charge (which you'd not have popped with that "pull almost dead").
You can, most of the time, adjust to have at least one NAS and the STD under buffs and any kind of downtime should fix this anyway (for example between packs in a dungeon or after a boss is killed, since the cooldowns keep rolling). This kind of flexibility is only allowed by having MD, as otherwise it'd result in lost eyes.

And in any case, in this game what matters the most is getting more uses out of attacks (except in Save the Queen areas with stacked damage increasing actions and Eureka with stuff like Double Edge), so getting additional LotD windows will almost always be better than putting it under buffs.

A LotD under LC gives 134 extra potency from the two NAS and the STD (not counting Power Surge here, which would give an extra 1% due to multiplicative buff stuff). An extra LotD in an encounter is 1700 potency.

Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
What part of "there is no reason to hit MD before [entering an already-prepared] LotD" suggested otherwise? That was my point; HJ's timing vs. Geirskogul is inconsequential outside of the rarest of rare situations because you have 15s in which to dump HJpart2 (MD). MD therefore ends up just making the job that much easier, rather than actually giving any further opportunities for skill expression. It's a jiob built to hit things on CD, with core components now functioning only to make things easier to hit on CD.
I think we're talking about different things here. I am not talking about pooling MD into buffs, holding it for long (side note, MD could last 20s for the rare occasions you might wanna do this) or something of the sort. I am talking about the fact that doing HJ > GSK can, in many cases, be the absolute difference between getting an extra eye and LotD window or not. It can be as small as 2 seconds of difference. In P3S, you have a tight window to execute this double life, or you lose the 2nd STD on the boss.

Therefore, if they change HJ to make it give the eye directly (my initial worry), then they'd remove the flexibility that MD gives (so lower ceiling for nothing): it allows us to use HJ before GSK with two eyes already stored, which can easily result in more eyes throughout an encounter and thus more LotD.

A poignant example is DSR, which I've mentioned already: due to the HJ and MD merge, we literally have to use HJ as our first action (before any GCD!), for example at the beginning of phase 2 with Thordan, to make sure we get two eyes before he goes away. Same thing happens if we reach such a phase with two eyes: we still want to use HJ first, but if HJ gave the eye, we'd overcap and wouldn't be able to get a 2nd eye at the end of this phase.

Getting extra eyes by playing around encounter timings and downtime is one of the things that can increase DRG's damage by quite a lot. The job benefits greatly from this kind of optimization in a very similar way to NIN (mudras keep rolling while nothing's happening), because we can get extra eyes that will then fall under more buffs.

Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Sorry, got confused by the "just have Draconian Fire give us a scale when these weaponskills [antecedent: RT/DF] are used," followed by "it's probably better for scales to be granted by RT/DF." Describing what you intended as the "Leaden Fist treatment" was kind of confusing in that Leaden Fist is a simply "+100 potency on next <Weaponskill A>" procced by a separate weaponskill used at the same point in combo as the benefiting weaponskill, which is more like TT/RT, rather than WT>RT or FnC>RT.
The "followed by" was a different suggestion of me pondering, in a different post as a response to what you said to my initial one, a different situation in which the scales were directly granted by the 5th positional GCD if we had a maximum of three.

In my initial message, I think it's clear that what I mean is for the weaponskills to be direct upgrades. The 2nd part of what I said that you quoted now ("followed by") happened after you had already misunderstood what I initially said in the first post.

However, I did get mixed up with Leaden's Fist's effect: in my head it was what grants Bootshine the autocrit, but this doesn't really change the point. Leaden Fist's effect is only consumed by Bootshine, thus Draconian Fire should give an effect to be consumed only by RT/DF and in this way we can get rid of TT and DoS when their upgrades are learned, since they're barely used afterwards.