Dawntrail Dragoon Feedback

[CidHeiral]

Normally I would post in an existing thread but this is going to be incredibly long. I'm going to try to format my feedback in an easy to digest manner so apologies if this ends up reading like a book report.


THE PROBLEM(S) WITH 7.0 DRAGOON


I. Background

I think it might be appropriate to give a little background on myself in relation to the job. Lord knows there are many DRG players better than I, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who loves the job more than I do. Not only is DRG my favorite job in FFXIV but it's also my favorite job in the entire series. Kain, Freya, Aranea, Fang, and my namesake Cid from FFVII are my favorite characters from their respective entries. I mained DRG in FFXI and I always had a Lancer in my party in Final Fantasy Tactics. Heck, I even started playing the Insect Glaive in Monster Hunter after they added the DRG lance.

I say all this to illustrate that I am not some doom and gloom person who cries "my job is ruined/dead" any time there's a change I don't like and hops from job to job. I'm about as ride or die as it gets with DRG and until Dawntrail I've rolled with whatever changes came down the line whether I agreed with them or not.

Like a lot of DRG mains I was dreading the rework because I viewed Endwalker DRG as pretty much perfect and extremely fun. When the Dawntrail changes were shown I actually breathed a sigh of relief and thought we dodged a bullet. However, at this point I've played through the MSQ and a decent chunk of current endgame content as DRG and for the first time ever I'm just not finding the job fun at all.

Below I'm going to break down most of the issues I have with the job in its current form. It's going to be in two main sections, Gameplay and Animations, because in my view both are contributing factors to why the job feels so rough to play in Dawntrail.

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II. Gameplay Issues

• Burst Phase & Removing Dragon Eyes

I think this is the main culprit behind how unsatisfying the job is now. I understand that delaying your Life window to line up with party buffs wasn't exactly intuitive to a new player but removing the system entirely seems very heavy handed. Even putting aside the fun optimization gameplay around when to delay your life window and when not to, building up a resource to unlock your burst phase was very satisfying. It felt like you earned the ability to unleash hell on the enemy. When you finally unlocked that burst phase, executing your abilities in the fairly strict order they required felt rewarding especially while navigating tricky mechanics.

In 7.0 all of this has gone away. The periods between Life windows are dull, your burst window feels like you're just throwing random nonsense at the boss, and activating your burst has all the excitement of turning on a faucet since you do nothing to build up to it. You just wait around until the burst button is off cooldown, press it, then roll your face on your keyboard.

Why did this have to change when so many DRG mains loved it the way it was? During the job action live letter the DRG slide said the following:

"To reduce the number of inputs during burst damage phases, certain actions will be removed or adjusted."

Why is it a bad thing if the job has a lot of inputs during its burst phase? There are 20+ jobs in the game now. If someone doesn't like busy jobs they have a multitude of other options to choose from. Furthermore, they didn't even accomplish that goal because it's just as busy as it's always been if not more so, except all the parts of the job that formerly worked together are all disconnected now so it feels horrible to play. If 6.X DRG was a concert pianist, 7.0 DRG is a toddler banging on a piano.

I also find it pretty nonsensical that it's apparently asking too much for people to manage Dragon Eyes but this is totally fine:



7.1 UPDATE: Not only was none of this addressed but the burst phase is now even worse due to the removal of two Nastrond charges. Nice!

Proposed Change: In the short term, revert the Dragon Eyes system to 6.X including its cooldowns and give full resources at the start of an instance like PLD. On a longer timeline, probably 8.0, address the burst phase to return to the flow it previously had in some form rather than the freestyle oGCD vomit that it is now.

• Mirage Dive/High Jump

With the Dragon Eye mechanic gone these two abilities feel pretty awful to use. There's really nothing exciting about Mirage Dive on its own, it was satisfying to use because each time you pressed it you were building your resource. Without that it just feels like you're belching a blue mist at the enemy every so often for no reason, and by association this makes High Jump feel pretty pointless as well. When you've reached the point where a jump on Dragoon feels bad, something is very wrong.

Proposed Change: In relation to the Dragon Eye change above, return Mirage Dive to building Dragon Eyes.

• Positionals

This is another bit of optimization that was taken away. It was fun to "solve" how you're going to hit all your positionals for a given fight or when to burn True North charges. It made your filler between burst phases more engaging as well which is now incredibly boring in 7.0 with the lack of a second positional and a Mirage Dive that doesn't do anything. Was it really that big of a deal for players to move the one millimeter it takes to go from the target's rear to its flank and vice versa? And why is this apparently not a problem on other jobs like Reaper?

Proposed Change: Revert to the previous design. If this isn't possible, Drakesbane needs major work which I address in the animation section.

• Winged Glide

This is one of the more baffling DRG changes to come with Dawntrail. Why would you take a jump away from the jumping job, whose main thing for its entire existence in every FF game has been jumping, and replace it with a dash? This is like taking a melee attack away from Monk and replacing it with a squirt gun. Leaping back into battle with Spineshatter Dive always felt so cool and thematic to the job and now we just do a goofy little slide.

Proposed Change: Remove Winged Glide. Return Spineshatter Dive and remove the damage. If SSD looking like an attack is a problem, create a new gap closer animation that is a jump and not a dash.

• Starcross/Rise of the Dragon

New abilities should add to the job in fun and interesting ways. Wyrmwind Thrust and the Dragon Scale meter is a great example of this. I understand it was done as a reaction to people complaining about button bloat but there is not much fun and interesting about "press stardiver/dragonfire dive... again!" especially when their follow up animations leave a lot to be desired as outlined below. The 3 yalm range on Starcross also makes it awkward to use in some situations.

Proposed Change: In the short term, Starcross' range should be increased. In the long term both Starcross and Rise of the Dragon should be removed in my opinion. I expand on this more in the animation section.


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III. Animation Issues

I have this in its own section because I know not everyone cares about animations and this may seem nitpicky, but as a very visual person the animations have a strong impact on how I perceive a class. I've leveled entire jobs just because I thought a certain ability looked cool.

The average FFXIV lance is visually a heavy and cumbersome weapon and for much of the game's history the DRG animations conveyed this very effectively. Even when your character was doing a flashy attack you could always feel the weight behind those attacks and how much strength your character is putting into them, it made them feel powerful. Endwalker replaced Chaos Thrust with the very floaty and weightless Chaotic Spring and Dawntrail has not only doubled down on this trend but made some very bizarre animation decisions. I hate to disparage the artists that I'm sure worked hard and did their best on these new animations but many of them quite frankly look amatuer.

During the job action live letter, while commenting on the new DRG animations, Yoship said "you want to have cool looking actions." Below are a few examples which I would argue do not look cool, and definitely much less cool than many of the animations that preceded them. The particle effects are hidden in most of these examples because outside a couple exceptions I generally have no issue with the particle effects. I don't normally play with effects off.

1. Lance Barrage






Issues:
- The character is so extremely low to the ground they're practically sitting down.
- This posture makes it unbelievable that they could then push off for a thrust forward.
- Because there is no power to the character's stance and movement, it looks like she's just holding onto the lance while some invisible force yanks it back and forth.
- The forward thrust is an equally absurd contortion of anatomy. Some exaggeration is fine and can really sell an attack, but the races in this game are more or less just humans and we all know how a human body moves. Contorting them into extremely unnatural poses not only looks ridiculous but robs the hit of visual impact.

Compare it to a similar animation, Fang and Claw.



Fang and Claw looks like what Lance Barrage is trying to be.

- There's a windup before the first upward strike, then she takes a big step back to build momentum for the thrust forward.
- The pose during the thrust is totally believable, looks cool, and it's held for a second to really sell the hit.

Proposed Change: Have the character stand up more and adjust the animation so the character is shifting their weight appropriately to thrust the lance forward. The character should look like the driving force behind the attack and right now it looks like they're just along for the ride. Adjust the ending pose of the thrust so it looks like a pose an actual human being might perform.


2. Drakesbane



This one is rough.

Issues:
- You can't tell from the gif but the entire attack sounds like you're whacking the target with celery. The sound also seems to not line up correctly with the actual animation and it sounds like more attacks are happening than there actually are visually (sounds like five but looks like three or four).
- The animation feels unfocused, like it's trying to do too many things and your character is just flailing around. This is accentuated by the fact that it always follows Wheeling Thrust or Fang and Claw, both of which are very quick (and very cool looking) attacks. What was formerly a very flashy two hit combo now looks like one cool attack followed by your character frantically swinging around.
- After the second lance twirl the character does a thrust forward that, similar to Lance Barrage, looks like some invisible force is yanking the lance from them. They actually look like they almost fall over trying to hold onto it.
- Despite thrusting a lance forward they somehow do not move at all from their original position. Their legs just slide into opposite position and back again. It looks like they're being suspended from an invisible wire harness.
- The final upward attack looks even more weak due to holding the lance very far to the front. Her body shows zero recoil or any sign that she just hit something.
- Much like Lance Barrage, during the penultimate hit the character is contorted into a very absurd pose, where among other nonsense her entire weight is balanced on one leg far to the front and bent at a 90 degree angle. Below I have placed it next to the similar end pose of Fang and Claw. Which one looks "cool" to you?






Let's compare it to a similar animation, Chaos Thrust.



This animation does everything right that Drakesbane does wrong.

- Her front foot and lower body move back in preparation for the next attack, then she takes a big step forward to perform a powerful forward thrust. At all times the position of her lower body is believable with how she's moving, as opposed to the goofy shuffling in place of Drakesbane.
- You can see her entire body recoil slightly from the force of the blow.

Even with no target, one of these animations clearly looks like she's hitting something solid with a powerful weapon and one looks like she's struggling to attack the air.

Proposed Change: - If simply reverting to how the combo previously worked isn't an option, perhaps Wheeling Thrust and Fang&Claw could change to a flashier version without the positional instead of both being replaced entirely by Drakesbane, similar to how Draconian Fury is basically just Super Doom Spike.
- If you have to keep Drakesbane, it could potentially work if you adjust the sound to sound like lance hits and not a pool noodle, and make the sounds line up properly with the tempo and number of strikes.
- It may also work if you end the animation after the first two hits and remove the silly looking shuffle thrust bit entirely.


3. Rise of the Dragon

Issues:
- To me the fantasy of DRG is jumping and attacking with your lance. It's one thing for dragon heads to accentuate what we're doing with our lance and another to just stand there and summon a giant head. It doesn't fit the fantasy of the job or the visual flow of abilities in my opinion.
- Wasn't Nidhogg my mortal enemy? Estinien is using his power but I'm not. Stardiver can be written off as a flashy jump but for RotD I'm literally summoning Nidhogg.
- Why does the attack that looks like Stardiver come after Dragonfire Dive and not Stardiver?

Proposed Change: This does not fit DRG at all in my opinion. Remove in 8.0.


4. Starcross



Issues:
- What is even going on during this attack? We jump up, there's a particle effect, and we land and do a little spin. We didn't throw our lance because we're not picking it up after the fact. The little spin isn't the attack either because it happens after the particle effect. Is this just an act of god happening and we're getting out of the way?
- The particle effect is a big flash of nothing with a gold color scheme that strongly clashes with the long established red/blue scheme we've had up to this point.
- The sound is either nonexistent or turned down so low it may as well not be there.
- The lack of any animation lock makes the ability feel even more weak.

Proposed Change: At the very least some sort of high impact sound should accompany the ability. In the bigger picture though I don't think there's any way to truly salvage this ability. Remove in 8.0.


5. Spiral Blow




Spiral Blow is easily the best looking of the new animations. The lance spin is neat and it has a fun sound effect. It could still use a tweak however.

Issues:
- The only real issue with this animation is that right at the start you wave your lance to the right for no apparent reason before swinging back to the left to begin the attack. This makes the attack feel like it has a weird delay.

A comparison isn't really necessary this time but I still want to show off Disembowel because it's one of the best examples of that "weighty" feeling I've been referring to.



- As with the previous examples, you can see her shifting her weight around to move the lance, there's a slight pause before the last strike, and after that last hit you can see her massively recoil from the force of the strike. Even with no target this looks powerful. At all times her stance makes physical sense with what she's doing, such as when she braces her legs to help get that backward reach on the last strike and keep her balance.

Proposed Change: Remove that initial swing to the right and begin the animation at the windup for that first upward thrust.


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IV. Community Sentiment

Here I would like to highlight a sample of posts I've seen elsewhere with similar sentiment about the rework since they're presumably not on this forum to add their voices. The names have been crossed out because as far as I'm aware naming people specifically is against the forum's ToS.














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V. Closing Thoughts


I keep wondering, who was this rework even for? The job was changed enough to ruin the previous design for people who liked it, but not changed enough to appease people who wanted it reduced to atoms and reworked entirely. Who is this supposed to have made happy? I'm really at a loss trying to understand how the same team that designed such a near perfect job with pre-7.0 DRG could then turn around and make it into such a miserable experience. It seems to just be yet another casualty in this misguided mission to make every job appeal to the people who hate it even if you have to ruin it for the people that like it now.

I can put up with almost anything I don't agree with in an MMO as long as my class is still fun to play, but now I'm in a position where that is no longer the case. I've tried to switch my main to something else but no other job scratches the same itch that DRG used to. This has a cascading effect into the rest of the game, such as not being able to enjoy the new raid tier despite it being objectively pretty fun. I expect the same to be the case in the new exploratory zone and FFXI raids I've been looking forward to, which really sucks. If I didn't care so much about my Free Company I would probably just quit the game at this point. Instead I've chosen to leave my feedback and hope for the best. While my hopes aren't high I have to hold out at least a little hope that this makes it to the dev team and something comes of it.

I've always been a DRG main and I always will be, I just want being one to be fun again.



Thank you for reading, and if you've agreed with any of these points I encourage you to leave your feedback as well.

[Aco505]

Burst Phase & Removing Dragon Eyes

I think this is the main culprit behind how unsatisfying the job is now.

Definitely. The loss of eyes without any further fix has meant several things: lacking filler, no burst buildup, an illogical change due to both lore and game play reasons, and removal of control over resources and LotD (double, early or delayed Life windows).

Everything is automatic. The filler is comprised of 40/80 seconds of just pressing the GCD combo string and avoiding overcapping scales. Even drifting HJ is largely irrelevant due to the flexibility of burst; a positive outcome but not redeeming in the current context. Life Surge is also kept for bursts, which worsens the filler compared to before although it does have some positive implications as one of the last bastions of optimization left.

If they wanted to remove eyes, they should've expanded the scales (even though doing so means the job only starts to actually be playable at 90) by allowing us to get more through, for instance, Mirage Dive. Making WWT into more of a machine gun action would've at least made it better.

That, or having kept Geirskogul's CD at 30s and allowing us to be in LotD often for a flatter damage profile, an oGCD BLM or even MNK, so to speak. Perhaps not too complex but still busy. Removing Dragon Sight instead of turning into some kind of gauge or free LotD generator for overall more LotD over time was a loss opportunity, as well, or even as an upgrade to LC while keeping the same properties just for flavor. Instead, we got a watered version of EW with none of the nuance.

Mirage Dive could've also followed on the mechanics that existed in PvP before the changes in 6.x, in which one could store up to two charges of it after using HJ and then use them at any time as long as they didn't overcap. A system of this kind would've been fitting to fix MD's role.

Despite it all, it was a positive move to lean into a 1-minute burst profile (although it was mostly that already anyway) rather than a 2-minute one. Starcross being a 120s cooldown activated after using BL would've been terrible.

"To reduce the number of inputs during burst damage phases, certain actions will be removed or adjusted."

Why is it a bad thing if the job has a lot of inputs during its burst phase? There are 20+ job in the game now. If someone doesn't like busy jobs they have a multitude of other options to choose from. Furthermore, they didn't even accomplish that goal because it's just as busy as it's always been if not more so, except all the parts of the job that formerly worked together are all disconnected now so it feels horrible to play.

We cannot understand their logic unless they decide to elaborate on it. The JP have certainly been wondering about this change of focus from the devs because the explanation they gave was a bit lacking and contradictory. My guess is that they were going to go further with the changes but decided to just hastily "fix" what they had and leave it for 8.0, which would explain some of the QoL problems like SC's range.

The number of buttons remained the same or even higher and fitting True North in 120s bursts is still complicated. But I agree: the job should be allowed to keep its hectic machine gun burst. If VPR can have a fast burst of clicking the same buttons over and over, why can't we have one with different presses? Streamlining specific aspects of a job is fine as long as the core is kept.

New abilities should add to the job in fun and interesting ways. Wyrmwind Thrust and the Dragon Scale meter is a great example of this. I understand it was done as a reaction to people complaining about button bloat but there is not much fun and interesting about "press stardiver/dragonfire dive... again!" especially when their follow up animations leave a lot to be desired as outlined below.

It was a good idea to implement the action follow up system, because it gives you more room to expand jobs without bloating the hotbars. The first issue though is that DRG didn't suffer from button bloat because we didn't have any AoE duplicates unlike other jobs like RPR or VPR. The second is that using the system just to include another random big hit with no build up or interaction is underwhelming.

I do believe that DRG having oGCD combos fits the job well and wish they had expanded on that better.

Another thing they should do to make hotbars easier to manage for keyboard users is to implement something similar to what controller players have by allowing us to swap one group of hotbars into another, so that we could dedicate one for single target and the other one for AoE. While this is already possible by using macros, the system is too finicky and they should simply streamline it instead of relying on weird UI stuff like using the hotbars of basic classes.

III. Animation Issues

I personally like Spiral Blow a lot and Lance Barrage is fine. Vorpal is quite mid so I'll take any improvement.

I agree that Rise of the Dragon shouldn't just be summoning a random dragon head and, if anything, it should've been a Hraesvelgr themed ability.

Starcross is meant to be a second Stardiver and we're supposed to create that beam of light by diving at high speeds on the target.

The issue is that the vfx and sfx are not striking enough to make RotD and SC feel powerful. And it's not even limited to DRG, as several new actions across jobs in DT are as underwhelming, too.


On the subject of Drakesbane and positionals, it is curious how your GIF shows DB to be a three-hit attack but when adding the vfx and sfx it looks and sounds like a five-hit attack. Imho, DB was a missed opportunity to include an upgrade to FnC and WT, but only on the 5th position, as well as the ability to use them in any order after CS and HT to either give more freedom to positionals or manage some kind of gauge.

Life Surge could also be turned into a GCD with like 20s charges that would help delay positionals when needed (or make BL give TN effect, as simple as that is), which would also open up the possibility of timing such GCD for bursts and to have even more oGCDs available for us due to LS freeing the slots.

However, the need to fit everything into 20s buffs is something they really have to look into. I'd be happier being able to machine gun oGCDs in a more consistent basis than just in burst, even though I'd still prefer to keep some semblance of hectic burst anyway.


To conclude, I think this is a great post and agree with most of it. The changes to DRG in DT have felt half-hearted with no intention of improving the job much. The range of SC, the cooldown and animation of Winged Glide, the disconnection within the kit, Stardiver's potency being lower than SC despite being a single weave, Piercing Talon being unchanged and as terrible as always, going from managing resources to nothing...

I hope we get some fixes in 7.x and actual improvements on 8.x, as they keep promising, but I won't give them the benefit of the doubt until I see it.

[Balmung_Griffin]

Problem with jobs is that most of them have a point where we as players find it "Perfect" and then a new expansion comes out and they have the impossible task of improve perfection.

If they just upgrade animations, we would have people saying they feel left out, or blatantly calling devs lazy.

With that out of the way, I mostly agree, it's high time our abilities to reference Hraelsvegr or Midgardsormr.

However, I just find curious that you take issue with Rise of the Dragon?
I mean, 90% of Freya's Dragon abilities are summoning:

https://youtu.be/id_lRF-asgk?si=ZgGmgbT4eLncp9Se

Even Cid Highwid has a limit break that he *shockingly* summons a Dragon:

https://youtu.be/ZUBCdWZsd_A?si=aImOZafhW09MkOw6

Nitpick aside, great thread!

[Reldhir]

I mained DRG in FFXI and I always had a Lancer in my party in Final Fantasy Tactics. Heck, I even started playing the Insect Glaive in Monster Hunter after they added the DRG lance.

Ayyyy samesiesss! I'd go a step further and say I typically only play games if they have a cool spear user and where possible I always try to build them into a dragoon with some aerial element to their gameplay, even if its severely suboptimal xD

On topic though, I agree with a lot of your commentary on the changes to dragoon from prior iterations~ I would however be open to new ideas and spicing things up, as opposed to reverting a lot of the changes as you suggested! Whatever method I just hope they fix the souless state we're in atm

The animation stuff though! Ooo boy... you mention weightlessness to some of the attacks, id go so far as to say most of them have felt this way since 2.0. I'm am a huge advocate for the animation and motion of our characters models portraying power over flashy flash light shows to imitate it.

We're physical in your face melee fighters with a weapon to shank and bonk. Its so much more visually appealing to see powerful or graceful forms than getting flashbanged into blindness. I for one am not thinking yes, the less I can see the more powerful this skill is.

As a 1.0 fossil seeing the progression of the game from then till now, YoshiP vision definately leans toward the flashy flash over "physical" substance in order to protray power

[CidHeiral]

It was a good idea to implement the action follow up system, because it gives you more room to expand jobs without bloating the hotbars. The first issue though is that DRG didn't suffer from button bloat because we didn't have any AoE duplicates unlike other jobs like RPR or VPR. The second is that using the system just to include another random big hit with no build up or interaction is underwhelming.

Exactly. I don't think the follow up system is a bad idea at its core, but the way it was implemented here is completely uninspired. As you said, DRG doesn't have a button bloat problem to begin with (and I would argue no job does but that's a debate for another thread) and these added follow ups don't add anything interesting or meaningful to the kit.

I like busy jobs, usually the busier the better, but if I have a billion buttons and none of them are working together or doing anything interesting, that just feels hollow. What made DRG fun before was that it felt like everything fit together as part of a well oiled machine that you would work your way through one step at a time. Now it just feels like, as one of those post examples above put it, "random bullshit go."

Starcross is meant to be a second Stardiver and we're supposed to create that beam of light by diving at high speeds on the target.

If that's the case then we should land with our lance stuck in the ground, but as far as I can tell we land on our feet and do a little spin. It doesn't communicate that any kind of attack happened on our part. The lack of any audible feedback doesn't help either.

On the subject of Drakesbane and positionals, it is curious how your GIF shows DB to be a three-hit attack but when adding the vfx and sfx it looks and sounds like a five-hit attack. Imho, DB was a missed opportunity to include an upgrade to FnC and WT, but only on the 5th position, as well as the ability to use them in any order after CS and HT to either give more freedom to positionals or manage some kind of gauge.

Drakesbane has so many strange issues it honestly makes me wonder how that ability made it past QA. It really feels like whoever made these new animations used zero reference from prior DRG animations and just tried to emulate some lance wielding dude from an anime. That would certainly explain all the strange unnatural pose decisions and the lack of that "weighty" feeling they used to have. I have no explanation for why the audio is so jacked up though.

And I totally agree on the upgraded F&C and WT. If we have to lose our positional I think the better way to go about it would have definitely been to make that hit become "Awakened Wheeling Thrust/Fang and Claw" or whatever, with a similar animation but a little extra flair added to it.

To conclude, I think this is a great post and agree with most of it. The changes to DRG in DT have felt half-hearted with no intention of improving the job much. The range of SC, the cooldown and animation of Winged Glide, the disconnection within the kit, Stardiver's potency being lower than SC despite being a single weave, Piercing Talon being unchanged and as terrible as always, going from managing resources to nothing...

I hope we get some fixes in 7.x and actual improvements on 8.x, as they keep promising, but I won't give them the benefit of the doubt until I see it.

I hope so too, man. And thank you, I've really enjoyed your posts on the subject in other threads and it was a pleasure to read your insights here as well.

Problem with jobs is that most of them have a point where we as players find it "Perfect" and then a new expansion comes out and they have the impossible task of improve perfection.

If they just upgrade animations, we would have people saying they feel left out, or blatantly calling devs lazy.

That's a fair point, but surely there was a better alternative to just mutilating the job?

However, I just find curious that you take issue with Rise of the Dragon?
I mean, 90% of Freya's Dragon abilities are summoning:

Oh I'm aware, FFIX is one of my favorite entries in the series. When I wrote that bit I was referring more to the context of FFXIV specifically, but to be honest I'm not really a fan of the dragon head summoning in the previous games either. I don't think standing there watching a big dragon head do something is ever going to be as awesome as jumping around and doing a fancy lance attack yourself.

Nitpick aside, great thread!

Thank you.

Ayyyy samesiesss! I'd go a step further and say I typically only play games if they have a cool spear user and where possible I always try to build them into a dragoon with some aerial element to their gameplay, even if its severely suboptimal xD

I feel you, Dragoons are so cool!

On topic though, I agree with a lot of your commentary on the changes to dragoon from prior iterations~ I would however be open to new ideas and spicing things up, as opposed to reverting a lot of the changes as you suggested! Whatever method I just hope they fix the souless state we're in atm

This is a great point that I would like to clarify. While a lot of my solutions are indeed "just put it back the way it was," please keep in mind that my only frame of reference is how DRG is now and how it used to be. I am not a game designer and I haven't conceived of every way one could possibly design the job across the infinite multiverse. I just know it was fun before and it's not fun now.

If when 8.0 comes around they were to totally redesign the job into something I hadn't thought of and it ended up being more fun than ever, that would be totally fine. However, given SE's track record of removing large chunks of jobs and never giving anything back in return that scenario seems highly unlikely, so the best course of action seems to be to just go back to what worked before in large part.

[fulminating]

I think starcross is meant to be midgardsormr themed (o10 has a similar pattern in bit after the immortal dragon iirc (slightly missed opportunity for it to be added to keeper of the lake in the rework if that was the case though)). I strongly prefer f&c/wt to the new drakesbane animation in terms of weight, perhaps they could rejig it so db is lower potency and you get the ability to do both the good ones together later on? The use of nidhogg feels a bit off, but I suppose he did kind of say “yeah sure go for it” in the 50 drg quest and was brought up less antagonistically in the 80 one - still I’d have him in 4th place for most likely after midgardsormr, hraesvelgr and potentially either primal dragon.

I’m not really a fan of how disconnected the kit is now either. It feels less structured in a bad way. The lack of building towards anything almost undermines the impact of the “spectacle” abilities, just hitting gier to have access to stardiver instead of being locked behind 2 mirage dives etc. I’m also less than impressed by the reverse qol on drakesbane - in endwalker, if the tank helpfully repositioned the boss and wt didn’t connect, f&c would not be useable as a combo breaker, they are now pressable whenever allowing for a novel failure state. Only really had it happen in the spooky dungeon first boss, but it’s still weird.

[Carighan]

As for the Starcross animation, this makes more sense in the context of the other follow-up attacks and that it comes after an existing spell effect.

Both of our big jumps have an impact AoE, and then produce an explosion upwards as a result of that AoE impact. Yes, for mechanical reasons we can disconnect the follow-up from the initial hit, and with Starcross in particular since you'd never weave it right after Diver it's a bit silly, but if you see the entire animation as a sequence it does make sense. It's one animation hacked into two seperate pieces with up to 15s delay between them, and the entire hacked-apart part is based on mechanical needs of gameplay, but it works well in that regard. Jump up, crash down in a big hit, do a victory twirl as the impacted ground explodes from the impact.

That being said, in a hypthetical rework where Dragoon's "unique" thing becomes either extreme damage or lots of temporary invulnerability in return for very frequent and long animation locks, I would be completely in favor of removing the ability to disconnect these moves from the original move, but also forcing them to automatically happen in-sequence. As in, pressing Stardiver locks you in for something like 1 oGCD + 1 following GCD or so, dealing absolutely superior damage for the time taken but also preventing you from doing anything else in the entire time. It'd be a cool unique job identity to have superior damage for basically constantly standing in stuff or having to pre-plan for it. A lot.

[CidHeiral]

More community sentiment since the OP is at the image cap:











I tried to pull from other places like Twitter as well but the FFXIV posts there are 98% NSFW.

[velswen]

Very detailed writeup, I'll just add in my opinion that I agree that removing the Eyes mechanic sucks. Having more resources to manage, more things to think about, more decisions to make is FUN. Jobs shouldn't become simpler when going from level 80 or 90 to 100, but that's what has been happening.

[noumen0nn]

Really great writeup, thank you. I'm frustrated at how few people are talking about DRG's burst feeling random and unsatisfying.

Slightly off-topic, but I've noticed a BUNCH of jobs, specifically melees, having less-than-stellar animations on some of the new attacks (Tendo Setsugekka's laughable ragdoll-spin comes to mind.) It feels like they designed the particle effects first and then tried to fill in what the player is actually doing after the fact. Might be a fun topic to have another thread about.