Dragoons: A Rotation Reborn

[Ratm3000]

snip

Can you please post a screenshot of your hotbar.
Thank you

[Ayvar]

Can you please post a screenshot of your hotbar.
Thank you

It's actually on page 3 of the thread, I've added a quick note about that to the guide. Here it is again for those who missed it:

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.

[Brynmor]

Man, this could manage to be more complicated than my enhancement shaman. That was priority-based at the time I left WoW.

I mained Enhancement for several years and while Dragoon is best approached with a priority system as well (as most well designed DPS classes are) it is quite a different playstyle. Enhancement used many abilities with (for the most part) varying CDs that would often come off of CD at the same time resulting in having to make a correct spilt decision with high priority procs thrown into the mix to muddy things up even more.

Noticeably, Dragoon has no procs and, ironically when compared to how you'd expect a Lancer or Dragoon to play based on leveling, is a lot of maintaining buffs, debuffs and DoTs. Ayvar's OP is a good example of how your abilities fit together and what should be prioritized but the long list of abilities stringed together is more intimidating on paper than in practice.

[Brynmor]

That said, if you're still early into Lancer/Dragoon and you were expecting something like a Tera-style Berserker melee heavy-hitter you may want to reconsider the class you're playing.

(boo 1,000 character limit)

[Ihm]

I feel like cranking out some DPS calculator spreadsheets for this stuff, may have to look at it later.

How do DoTs apply? Is it the potency every second? So 10 seconds of 20 potency is 200 damage (Ignoring mods etc)?

Also, has anyone tested if Disembowel is actually doing anything? I haven't personally tested it, but my thought was if a mob has 0 resistance to Piercing can it actually go lower, will you actually be receiving a boost from it in that case?

It's something to test I guess later.

[xyaie]

dots tick every 3 seconds for the listed potency. so 20 potency 12 seconds ticks 4 times for 20, so 80 total.

disembowel seems to always be a "enemy takes 10% more damage". not positive that does not change for certain mobs.

[Kieda1080]

Does anyone think its worth upgrading to the Darkflight gear prior to AF2 or just stick it out with AF gear till then?

[Ihm]

dots tick every 3 seconds for the listed potency. so 20 potency 12 seconds ticks 4 times for 20, so 80 total.

disembowel seems to always be a "enemy takes 10% more damage". not positive that does not change for certain mobs.

Ahh, so dots tick the same as they did on FFXI. It's due to how XI worked that I questioned disembowel as Tomahawk on XI reduced resistance by some value I can't remember, but on creatures that had no resistance then it did nothing.

I guess until we know the stats of every mob its safe to say its 10% more damage.

[Ayvar]

I feel like cranking out some DPS calculator spreadsheets for this stuff, may have to look at it later.

How do DoTs apply? Is it the potency every second? So 10 seconds of 20 potency is 200 damage (Ignoring mods etc)?

Also, has anyone tested if Disembowel is actually doing anything? I haven't personally tested it, but my thought was if a mob has 0 resistance to Piercing can it actually go lower, will you actually be receiving a boost from it in that case?

It's something to test I guess later.

I added a bunch of information on DoTs and Disembowel yesterday. It's in the post directly after the rotation guide.

[EasymodeX]

Phlebotomize has a piercing-adjusted total potency of 307 (170*1.1+20*18/3). This results in a DPS (assuming 2.5s GCDs) of 123 and damage per TP of 3.4.

The Thrust combo has an adjusted total potency of 715 (650*1.1). This is a DPS of 95 over the full combo, and DPT of 3.8.

Oh, Phleb is less TP-efficient than I thought it would be, but that's a lot more DPS. So in any TP-constrained situation you'd want to drop it for Thrust combos.

Fracture has a pierce-adjusted DPS of 92 and DPT of 2.9 ... so don't use it at all assuming you're finishing every Thrust combo and not dropping the third strike due to buff/debuff constraints. In other words, Fracture is a better "loose" GCD to spend than Thrust x2, or Thrust x1. However, if your choice is a full Thrust x3 versus injecting a Fracture, then Thrust x3 is better.

This is probably only relevant when TP management is not an issue, e.g. shorter fights. In addition, Fracture is probably effective to stack for cooldown bursting (since it does the "snapshot" DOT as described previously).

However, either way dropping Fracture probably won't result in much of a DPS loss overall, and may increase DPS due to its poor DPT.

Note: the DPS and DPT of a loose Impulse Drive + Disembowel (e.g. no Chaos Thrust) is 88 and 3.4, so it's not that bad to use as a filler if you can't get the full Thrust combo off. Fracture seems to be Not Worth It.


To recap the above numbers (DPS, DPT):

Phleb: 123, 3.4
Thrustx3: 95, 3.8
Frac: 92, 2.9
IM-DI: 88, 3.4

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

IMO they really need to change this. There's zero added gameplay value for allowing the player to use vorpal if true fails or isn't used. It's simply obnoxious.

lol, i was nowhere near the master. I'm just not afraid of numbers and decent with excel. but yeah, on that game i was seyon on the forums and xyaie in game, now im xyaie on the forums and seyon in game :P

I remember you ...