Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

[SunnyHirose]

Thank you. I am trying to figure out what gear and melds (if crafted) I should be aiming for. Seems like, in general terms, I should go for the BIS Augmented Ironworks gear first and use crafted gear in the other slots until I get Dreadwyrm pieces.

My personal philosophy on BiS has always been to ignore BiS and shun crafted gear (I'm poor). I always try to purchase the tomestone gear that'll give me the most DPS per tome, using whatever other gear I have. This isn't the best way to go at all (especially when 2.4 dropped, because High Allagan and Astrum stuff had way too much skill speed), but at least it's gil-friendly.

I read a lot of builds with the crafted boots over the augmented ironworks ones. I am wondering why as those boots have such good stats.

Accuracy requirements is why we don't just pick the gear piece that does the most damage for the slot and call it a day; puzzling conclusions can be achieved! That said, I wouldn't trust those at the moment. The playerbase has been working off faulty stat weights for many moons now; what I just told you is experimentation I just did. So, nobody's had a chance to test/refute it nor revise what BiS would look like with crafted gear. Maybe it kicks pentamelds down a notch. Maybe up.

Do you guys do anything in particular to keep DPS high in the second half of the rotation? I find that in the first 20-odd seconds I parse well over 700 on dummies, and then it slowly falls to about 540 over the next 30 seconds until I can pop a buffed Full Thrust again when the rotation restarts.

This is the famed DRG burst. We never catch up to it again. Other jobs have burst like this too, but not quite this far above the norm for 20 seconds.

And DRG cooldowns used to not be aligned so well. They changed it because our DPS was too low. Now everything is really aligned, but it is a little more boring too.