What if every job was like how it started?

[Mikey_R]

You also had Maurader's Fracture as a cross class action, which could be a third DOT. Both it and Phlebotomize were 18 seconds. I was checking it out through waybackmachine.

It seems like the main difference in your rotation was that you'd use Heavy Thrust to buff your damage before applying DOTS as needed and then going into either your standard combo, or your Impulse Drive > Disembowel > Chaos Thrust combo, which would inflict a piercing resistance down debuff through Disembowel and Chaos Thrust's DOT for 30 seconds each. You also had more personal buffs to apply. Life Surge was there along Power Surge to enhance your Jump damage, Blood for Blood which increased both damage dealt and damage taken, and Inner Release as a cross class action from Pugilist which increased critical hit rate. There were also a bunch of defensive things as well, as it seemed like there was this idea that a Dragoon could semi-tank in some circumstances by being able to wear tank gear and have very limited defensives, but that was never done by players and never explored in any updates afterward.

To add to this, Heavy Thrust's damage up only applied if you hit the targets flank (hitting rear or front gave no damage up) and Impulse Drive only comboed into Disembowel if you hit it from the rear (which means no combo if you hit from the flank or front. Chaos Thrusts also didn't have its rear positional at the time either).

As for Fracture, with the Dragoon combo, there was no spot you could put it, as the debuffs fell off, you were reapplying them and Fracture would have just pushed everything back, not to mention it was weak and very TP hungry.

As for wearing tank gear, only from levelling, and that gear wasn't really tank gear as it wasn't as good defensively as proper tank gear, but still stronger than normal DPS gear. Of course, this is a non issue once you got to 50. Dragoon also had the privilege of higher physical defence, but lower magic defence, which caused issues in final coil as they couldn't survive hits, specifically raid wides, especially under Blood for Blood, which meant they had to either delay their burst or get extra shielding from the Scholar to survive.

[Tint]

To add to this, Heavy Thrust's damage up only applied if you hit the targets flank (hitting rear or front gave no damage up) and Impulse Drive only comboed into Disembowel if you hit it from the rear (which means no combo if you hit from the flank or front. Chaos Thrusts also didn't have its rear positional at the time either).

As for Fracture, with the Dragoon combo, there was no spot you could put it, as the debuffs fell off, you were reapplying them and Fracture would have just pushed everything back, not to mention it was weak and very TP hungry.

Yes and this means you had to basically start over your rotation when the boss turned around and did a mechanic.

DRG was the floor tank becase of the long animation locks of his jumps. Back then in basically every patch note you could read that the animation lock of jump was reduced.

Fracture was necessary because you could not overwrite your own DoT when it was buffed. You had to add Fracture into the rotation because it pushed everything back.

[ty_taurus]

To add to this, Heavy Thrust's damage up only applied if you hit the targets flank (hitting rear or front gave no damage up) and Impulse Drive only comboed into Disembowel if you hit it from the rear (which means no combo if you hit from the flank or front. Chaos Thrusts also didn't have its rear positional at the time either).

As for Fracture, with the Dragoon combo, there was no spot you could put it, as the debuffs fell off, you were reapplying them and Fracture would have just pushed everything back, not to mention it was weak and very TP hungry.

As for wearing tank gear, only from levelling, and that gear wasn't really tank gear as it wasn't as good defensively as proper tank gear, but still stronger than normal DPS gear. Of course, this is a non issue once you got to 50. Dragoon also had the privilege of higher physical defence, but lower magic defence, which caused issues in final coil as they couldn't survive hits, specifically raid wides, especially under Blood for Blood, which meant they had to either delay their burst or get extra shielding from the Scholar to survive.

Yeah, I did see that about the positionals. Positionals in general held a lot more weight back then because it really was feast or famine with them. With Dragoon, the combo starters had positionals while the follow ups didn't it seems, so you didn't need to maintain that position throughout the combo, but if you were in the wrong spot at the start of your combo, the entire thing would flub. I should've added that.

And yeah, with the tankiness stuff, I was just wondering if there was at some point this idea that maybe Dragoon could be a sub tank or something on the developer side, but they never committed to it. Or perhaps the idea was just that at lower levels, a Dragoon could be the tank for something like FATEs or whatever by having the pseudo tank gear on and using, what was it, Helm Splitter? As a cross class from Marauder to generate Enmity. Who knows.