Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

[Ayvar]

Heavy Thrust - Phlebotomize - Impulse Drive - Disembowel - Chaos Thrust
x2 [True Strike - Vorpal Thrust - Full Thrust]
Heavy Thrust - Phlebotomize
[True Strike - Vorpal Thrust - Full Thrust]

Repeat. You'll need to add jumps and buffs between the combos but that's pretty much the perfect rotation. It's not as complicated like you make it seem. I wouldn't suggest taking Fracture because it's not really that good. Much better to run around with Internal Release, Bloodbath, Second Wind, Featherfoot and Mercy Stroke.

Converting this to our usual notation comes out as:

H P IDC TTT TTT H P TTT

Looking at the pattern of the rotation you should already be able to see that your Heavy Thrust buff falls off by the second True Thrust, meaning Vorpal Thrust and Full Thrust don't get buffed, and you never want to cast an unbuffed Full Thrust considering the huge benefits it gets from combining both Heavy Thrust and Disembowel. Also, by the conclusion of the rotation, when you loop back to the start you overwrite the Heavy Thrust buff and Phlebotomize DoT from the end of the previous rotation before they had time to finish, and your Disembowel buff and Chaos Thrust DoT fall off 4 moves before their reapplication. Converting this to potency we get the following:

170-187/132-198-242-193/220-181-242-363-181-220-330-187-205/132-181-242-363

+187 for looping back around to the start since now the initial HT is buffed from the end of the previous rotation. In total potency this is 4356 over 17 moves (40.8s using a 2.4 GCD) producing 106.8 potency/s. Comparing this to the rotations used by myself or the one suggested by EasyModeX above you suffer a 3-6 potency per second drop, with no possibility of improvement with added spell speed, and less DoT damage when you're not beside the mob. The loss of 3-6p/s may not seem like a lot, but consider that is 900-1800 potency lost over a 5min fight with 100% uptime, and that gap gets worse when you have to move away due to AE or add spawns since there are less DoTs running. The 3p/s gap between EasyModeX's rotation and my own was more acceptable since this closes dramatically with more spell speed, and the added DoT damage helps in downtime, this is not the case with your moveset.

Assuming Dragoons are easy to play is something I see a lot, particularly when people are discussing Monks (note I am not commenting on which one is harder than the other because that is a pointless discussion). However, the assumption of simplicity arises from people's non-optimization of buff/debuff durations. Yes you can use a 15 or 10 or 5 ability rotation over a 24 or 27 length moveset, but to do this you sacrifice a large part of the dps Dragoons can produce.

A member of my FC was doing a little bit of number crunching and felt that the game generally rounds down. I think he was figuring out hit or crit %, but usually if a game's programmed to round down on one of those, it rounds down on all combat-related numbers. From what I've noticed, at least.

This is very useful to know, thank you for the info!