Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

[Ayvar]

So I'm all for min/max'n my character in whatever mmo I'm playing. I just got Dragoon unlocked yesterday, and I greatly appreciate this write up. I have to admit that the amount of button bloat is intimidating lol. I noticed someone else on page 2 listed some macros to help, can macros be used to alleviate the amount of abilities we have to keep up with reliably? I haven't looked into ARR's macro system so I don't know much about it.

Sadly if you want to be amazing you cannot retreat to macros to help you out. There are several reasons for this. Someone posted some potential macros earlier in the thread, which is a fine way to go if you want, however it limits you to only using the off-GCD abilities whenever you use specific attacks. For example, if you macro'd Jump along with Disembowel, you would attempt to cast it every time you use Disembowel, but what if the cooldown comes off before it is time to use Disembowel? It could be 20s before you use it again and you'd be wasting Jump uptime. In addition, what if you happened to use Disembowel as AE was about to drop at your feet, if you Jumped right then you'd die.


You cannot macro your combos the same way Pugilists can because even if you are on Vorpal Thrust in your rotation, the ability to use True Thrust isn't blocked and so if your macro was something like:

/ac True Thrust
/ac Vorpal Thrust
/ac Full Thrust

you'd just cast True Thrust over and over, this works differently for classes like Pugilists whose abilities switch off during their combos because they require a specific stance. In addition, you cannot macro multiple off-GCD abilities to the same key (e.g. Power Surge and Jump) because you cant cast more than one off-GCD ability per interval without sacrificing dps. Dragoon abilities are way too situation dependent to macro. Sometimes you want to use IR over BFB because some AE is about to hit, sometimes you want to save Leg Sweep to stun or avoid stun resists, etc etc. I'll edit this in a few (after Garuda) with a picture of my hotbars and how I have my keyboard setup to monitor my abilities if this helps people out.

EDIT: Here are my hotbars, M means mouse key, so in my case M3 is the middle mouse button.

http://imgur.com/iSywWZ5

This keeps your main combos (TT-VT-FT and ID-Dis-CT) near your WASD movement keys, your emergency moves (stuns, avoidance) on your mouse buttons for quick clicking, groups your cooldowns together so at a glance you can see what is coming up, your medium-use abilities on the easier to press Shift+ keys, and the less used abilities on the harder to press Ctrl+ keys. I also find it helps to keep abilities related to each other close together so your fingers don't have to do much thinking. All your AE is on 5 and Shift+5, PS+Jump are right beside each other so you can see if PS is coming up soon so you dont use your Jump, and BFB and IR are beside each other so you can easily see which ones you've used.