After trying out dragoon on extreme contents and with personal past experience with other melee DPS and tanks. It feels like dragoon has been left behind and not following the other melee progressive expansion changes. Personally even though i love pressing a lot of its ogcds while juggling with its gcds, i think it is under-rewarding for such a play style.
For example, ninja has removed its dots and huton buff to focus more on mudra and its ogcds, Samurai has nerfed hakagure and remove kaiten to focus more on ogcds, dark knight has removed darkside and compensated with more ogcds. But current dragoon has 15 OGCDS to spam in double weave including buffs. And even with maintaining all its buff like lance charge, life surge, power surge and battle litany while pushing the rotation properly. it's dps still falls short compared to reaper whom also has only 1 party buff, no attack buffs to maintain or activate, only 1 debuff to look out for, only 4 ogcd hotkeys including party buff(where dragoon has 8 ogcd hotkey including buffs and not including same hotkey combo swaps like geirskolgul), have the basic 1-2-3 combo gcds which are not hard to miss (compared to dragoons infinite gcd rotation chain that you cant break) and still the dps is not rewarding and higher compare to reaper.
These are my suggestions without compromising the current core gameplay of dragoon.
- Like removing life surge and its effect (guarantee critical damage and absorbs HP) should just be included in drakesbane (since theres 2 charge and it is always used either on heaven's trust, drakesbane or coerthan torment if during AOE usage) and coerthean torment. There are times where since we have to dodge mechanics, carefully not screw up the gcds while double weave alot gcds that life surge is accidentally turned on at the wrong time to be used on the wrong next gcd. Its my personal skill issue but i would believe there are other dragoons out there which has this problem once in a while.
- removing lance charge and just reduce Geirskogul cooldown so there will be dps increase while not compromising the "button spamming" gameplay of dragoon.
- I personally think dragoon is much more challenging to play than reaper, i would suggest dragoon's dps should be higher than reaper IF and only IF played and maintained rotation properly/consistently. Hence, even if the above two points included and the dps is only barely the same as reaper, a buff for ALL dragoon skills potency is required. To reward dragoon for maintaining the infinite gcd rotations, double weaving all its ogcds and everything else in order to have good dps. This will be better than simplifying and changing the already clustered dragoon playstyle which some people like (or what is currently intended).
With the current playstyle of dragoon, the dps should feel rewarding and higher for playing it right. Unless SE wants to change dragoon's gameplay again.