What happened to Dragoon? A rant/essay

[ThorinG]

To make mirage dive meaningful again i would let the Wyrmwind thrust stacks be granted from mirage dive instead of the phys combo, and make Jump/high jump on 20 sec cd to increase overall usability.

Also yeah, remove winged glide and return spineshatter dive with no -or minimal- damage

[YuukiMizrahi]

But then DT came around and that actually ruined my enjoyment of the job to a point that I'm considering abandoning it as my melee main. The complete removal of the eyes mechanic with no new job mechanic to replace it makes the job completely hollow, completely removing the feeling that you're building up to your burst during filler phase. Delaying life is not even a possibility anymore and High Jump and Mirage Dive are now completely empty damage button with zero tie to your job mechanic. Their stated reasoning for this change was to allow DRG to Life in it's opener, but that could have been fixed without outright removing eyes as a mechanic by just letting DRG start fights with 2 eyes. Making Life last 20s and changing Nastrond to a 2s CD was also a loss in my opinion. The old 30s life with 10s Nastrond meant that you had to be precise with your nastrond usage to ensure you used all 3 before it finished. And then they also replace your 5th hit combo with a boring no positional GCD. One of the thing I loved the most about DRG was how well Fang & Claw flowed into Wheeling Thrust and vice-versa on top of enjoying the small positional dance that on the 4th and 5th hits of your combos. Now that's gone.

Those change felt like they removed failure states from the job which IMO is a BAD thing. Failure states are what make mastering a job meaningful and interesting. Trying to remove them from the game is IMO one of the biggest issue with the current job design philosophy, alongside the 2min burst meta.

For other issues, as others mentioned, Winged Glide is really underwhelming animation wise and Starcross has unnecessary short range, making it awkward to use.

All in all, I feel the job is a hollow facsimile of it's old self. It's a job with zero resource building to give you that feeling for building up to your burst. It's a purely CD focused job with nothing interesting happening between it's crazy burst windows beyond High Jump/Mirage Dive, which as I pointed out earlier don't interact with the job in any interesting way beyond being damage buttons to press every 30s. I really hope they look into DRG in the future and give it back some interesting mechanics to build up for burst, because for now, I've lost all interest I ever held in the job, gameplay wise.

This. Youve stated exactly why i now despise the class ive played and mained since 2.0. Theres no sense of control, expression, thematics, or fun anymore. Im probably gonna put ff on the back burner for a while since i dont really find a lot of the other classes to fill that gap for me anymore. its depressing how awful and hollow this class feels. it seems like the dev team just ripped the Dragoon idea out and left it with "just hit buttons"

[DeltaCyan]

I would've preferred they make spineshatter dive a ground targeted gap closer like nin's instead of the slide. I feel like that fits the jumping job way more and is an excuse for it to not do damage at the same time.

[Aaramis]

Agreed 100% with the initial complaints. In addition, I truly wish we had more to do in our off-burst moments, and that our burst moments weren't a full on game of whack-a-mole with GCD - OGCD - GCD - OGCD etc. etc. I'd rather have a less button presses, if possible, thanks.
And lastly, Starcross, given it's 2min recast, should be much higher potency. I'd like Stardiver to be as well. The sounds effects or flashy effects on those skills do not match the damage numbers at all. You pull off that combo, and then watch as the Reaper, Monk, Ninja, and Samurai all do way more damage with their 1000+ potency attacks. It's sad. Dragoon is literally the only melee without a 1k potency attack, yet have a 7 foot lance and channel the power of dragons.
*facepalm*

[Aco505]

And lastly, Starcross, given it's 2min recast, should be much higher potency. I'd like Stardiver to be as well. The sounds effects or flashy effects on those skills do not match the damage numbers at all. You pull off that combo, and then watch as the Reaper, Monk, Ninja, and Samurai all do way more damage with their 1000+ potency attacks. It's sad. Dragoon is literally the only melee without a 1k potency attack, yet have a 7 foot lance and channel the power of dragons.
*facepalm*

Stardiver and Starcross are on a 1-minute cooldown. In total they deal 1440 and 1800 potency over 2-minutes. We also have ~40% more damage done (specifically 39,15%) for 20s every minute without taking others' buffs into account, so the actual potency of a single STD is 1001,88 and STC's is 1252,35.

oGCDs simply have naturally lower potency because you are already weaving them with a GCD. A combination of Chaotic Spring, Starcross and Rise of the Dragon yields 2150 potency without buffs or 2991,725 with the aforementioned ~40%, a much higher number than something like a Hyosho would achieve.

DRG's damage is simply spread over more actions in comparison to other melee jobs like RPR (e. g. three Nastronds amount to 1080 unbuffed potency). The high extra burst damage of 39,15% is perhaps one of the factors that makes it appear like the baseline numbers are low.

[Alice9]

Just giving my two-cents and saying I agree with not liking this new direction dragoon has gone. I enjoy the large number of button presses and weaving (but it does admittedly, feel rough on the player in this state of constant DDoS'ing and overall poor server performance...), but the removal of failure states as mentioned before just makes the job way too straight-forward. I enjoyed Endwalker dragoon, it did feel like it was in a good spot in my opinion- things felt meaningful. Now, the changes just seem like random darts thrown at a board, there is hardly any cohesion let alone identity.