Contents
Overview
Dragoon is a very static melee dps Job. You have strict, long combos to execute and timers within those combos that need to be maintained. Unlike other Jobs – especially other melee – which rely upon a priority system for their basic GCD rotation, Dragoon instead has static buttons to press in a specific order with very little variance. Shadowbringers brings with it a new reliance on hitting proper positionals to trigger new skills.
The Brains Behind the Operation
Eve Malqir (Ultros) – the primary writer of this guide; always open to answering questions!
Contact: Evie#1153 on Discord
Xiu Ye (Nidhogg) – the most active Mentor on The Balance Discord
Provides the video content that will be sprinkled throughout!
Contact: Xiu Ye#0560 on Discord | Youtube | Twitch
Resources
Created and compiled by myself. As of latest update, contains:
- 5.0 Dragoon Rotation Calculator
Global Cooldown (GCD) Actions
The bread-and-butter of your rotation, so to speak, these are the buttons you press most frequently. They’re broken down into several combo chains with various effects and uses.
The Chaos Thrust Combo
This combo has our basic damage buff in Disembowel alongside our damage-over-time skill, Chaos Thrust. These two effects are essential to dishing out proper amounts of damage.
The Full Thrust Combo
This combo uses our strongest weaponskill, Full Thrust, and that’s about it. It’s essentially just a filler combo whenever the aforementioned effects are active.
Raiden Thrust
This action functions as a direct upgrade to True Thrust after you’ve successfully completed one of the above combos. If you land your proper positional on the final/fifth hit, True Thrust upgrades to Raiden Thrust!
The Coerthan Torment Combo
Our new and freshly upgraded area-of-effect combo now packs Coerthan Torment as a third hit finisher! This is primarily used when dealing with a group of enemies numbering 3 or more.
Basic Rotation
Putting all of this together with the timers, we come out with one single string of actions. In general, under normal circumstances, we want to maintain this sequence of GCDs for as long as we are capable!
The Other Guy
Don’t use this one. Seriously. No one has any idea why it still exists. It is completely worthless and utterly unremarkable in every conceivable way. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Positionals
Several actions in the kit deal more damage from the Side of a boss, and several deal more from the Rear. You want to be sure to set up to hit these for extra damage whenever possible.
How do I know if I’m at the Side or Rear of a target?
| The arrow at the top is the Front of the target. You get no special bonuses by attacking here, other than lots of bonus deaths for standing in tank busters and cleaves.On the left and right, you will find the Sides of the target. They account for 90o of the target on either side, but you will generally want to stand near the base of the visible line.At the bottom of the image, there’s a gap between the two Sides of the target. This empty space is the Rear. When standing at the base of one Side, it becomes easy to decipher between the two positions – you either attack the empty space, or the line.Some enemies will have the Side mark wrapping their entire hitbox, with no arrow to indicate a Front. These target rings are special, in that you will get positional bonuses from every action without needing to worry about where you attack from. All the enemies in the Palace of the Dead, for example, have this special targeting ring. |
Side Positionals
| Fang and Claw deals 40 more potency from the Side. |
Rear Positionals
| Chaos Thrust and Wheeling Thrust deal 40 more potency from the Rear. |
Off-GCD Actions
These actions have individual recast timers, allowing you to so-called “weave” them in-between your GCDs.
Dragon Spaghetti
| Blood of the Dragon is our primary mechanic.Under normal circumstances, it should never fall off. | |
| Mirage Dive helps us gain Dragon Eyes to build toward Life of the Dragon.Eyes only open when Blood of the Dragon or Life of the Dragon is active. | |
| Geirskogul can only be used under Blood of the Dragon, and when you press it with 2 Dragon Eyes open, we enter Life of the Dragon. |
| Under Life of the Dragon, Geirskogul becomes Nastrond.Ideally, you want to press 3 Nastrond before your Life timer runs out.When the Life timer hits 0, you return to Blood with 30 seconds remaining. | |
| Additionally, we can utilize Stardiver while under the effects of Life of the Dragon. We will always use exactly 1 Stardiver in each sequence. |
One Giant Leap for Dragoon Kind
| Jump and its big brother High Jump are our most important actions. Using it gives us the Dive Ready buff, which grants access to Mirage Dive. Without these friends, Life would be a distant dream. | ||
| Spineshatter Dive crosses gaps and saves lives. Don’t hold it for doing those things, though, because it does do a decent chunk of damage on its own! | ||
| Dragonfire Dive also closes gaps and explodes damage on everybody.It should be used whenever available, except in the rare case where you will want to hit multiple targets before it’s back again. | ||
| The new kid on the block, Stardiver (STD for short) has a 30 second window in which to use it, each time it’s available. Your job is to decide when in that time is the best time to orbital strike some coward(s). | ||
| Note that High Jump, Spineshatter Dive, Dragonfire Dive, and Stardiver all have long animation lock, meaning you should never pair them with any other actions in one spin of the GCD. | ||
| Elusive Jump does no damage, so it has just one purpose: traveling long distances quickly, either to escape or to get back to the boss. |
Do-More-Damage Buttons
| Lance Charge is the strongest buff in your arsenal.You should always press this button as soon as it’s available. | |
| Dragon Sight should always buff High Jump, Spineshatter Dive, Dragonfire Dive, and the associated Mirage Dive. | |
| Battle Litany is pretty much just used when it’s ready. There are times where holding it becomes beneficial. | |
| Life Surge doesn’t buff the damage-over-time effect of our strongest Weaponskill, Chaos Thrust, so it should always be paired with Full Thrust, where it does affect the whole damage amount. |
Basic Buff Rotation
Our buffs fall on timers that function pretty well together in the duration of an encounter. Generally speaking, every six minutes our three buffs should automatically re-align. Talking in seconds, our buffs should align like so:
| Time | |||
| 0s | |||
| 90s | |||
| 120s | |||
| 180s | |||
| 240s | |||
| 270s | |||
| 360s |
Buff Duration and Optimal Placement
If you have decent practice properly delaying your buffs within the gcd, you should, ideally, be able to get 9 gcd actions under each cast of Lance Charge, Dragon Sight, and Battle Litany, assuming your gcd is in our ideal Skill Speed window. Otherwise, you will get 8.
As our rotation is now 10 GCDs and our buffs last 9, we want to ideally miss only the weakest actions in our rotation with them – Disembowel or Raiden Thrust – while making sure first that we catch both finishers – Chaos Thrust and Full Thrust – and then that we catch both 4th and 5th hits – Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw. That said, below is a graph:
Using any buffs after the red gcds will cause you to miss a combo finisher.
The yellow spaces will guarantee hitting your combo finishers – Chaos Thrust and Full Thrust.
The green spaces guarantee hitting both casts of Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw.
Multiple Target Situations
We will be operating under the assumption that the fact that our multi-target combo does not extend Disembowel buff is an oversight for these calculations. We’re the only melee that doesn’t get that benefit, so it’s likely a mistake.
Two Targets
When up against two targets, you’ll get more gains out of simply spreading your Chaos Thrust damage over time effect to both targets and keeping them both active. This is done by a simple modification to our basic rotation:
| Target 1 | Target 2 |
Three or More Targets
When dealing with any more than two targets, we want to roll into our Coerthan Torment Combo. You want to keep pressing High Jump, Mirage Dive, and all of the other buttons, especially Dragonfire Dive and Geirskogul, as they also hit multiple targets. Once you get your 2 Dragon Eyes, you can roll into Life and drop Nastrond and Stardiver to unleash destruction on a level where only Black Mage can compete.
Should I use Disembowel?
The short answer is no, it isn’t worth getting it active before rolling into your combo if it isn’t already up. There is a longer answer, though.
If you’re in a dungeon scenario and the tank is still in the process of pulling monsters, you should focus on chasing and getting off at least a True Thrust > Disembowel combo. If the enemies are already settled and you don’t have the buff, you’re losing damage by applying it at this point, because your net PPGCD – that is, potency-per-gcd – of applying the buff is only 305, compared to even just Doom Spike landing for 510 on three targets.
As to whether or not you should continue or break your Chaos Thrust combo at this point, it depends how many enemies your Doom Spike would hit. You need to be certain that Doom Spike will connect with at least 4 targets – 680 potency, compared to Chaos Thrust getting 690 with positional, 660 without. If you can’t guarantee that, apply Chaos Thrust.
The Opener
This is completely tentative and kinda unlikely to actually be THE THING. I’m mostly keeping this here to have all the actions pasted so I can adjust as needed after launch.
One is the Loneliest Number
This is our bread-and-butter. Our Blood-and-Life, if you will. Barring any of the below-listed conditions, this is what you can and should be using. If you’re too poor for Potions, simply… don’t use them. The Opener will remain the same, otherwise.
Ninjas Hate This One Simple Trick
Because Ninjas are the worst and they hate us for some reason, we need to severely adjust all of our damage and back-load it to get any sort of benefit out of their selfish asses. As seen below, we inject 2 empty GCDs to account for how slow Ninjas are at doing any damage when the fight starts. They’re an embarrassment to the role. We know. The Geirskogul gets delayed in the GCD spin here since Trick Attack lands after Fang and Claw but before Raiden Thrust, and there should be (don’t quote me on this) enough time to squeeze our spaghetti in there.
| delay |
Optimization Station
This section requires playtesting. I’ll have headings filled out and maybe some blurbs? But the majority of it will need to be filled out once we actually have the game in our hands and final potencies. I can’t very well make a “best way to end a phase wrt gcds” without knowing final potencies, for example.
GCD Rotation
Action Specifics
Geirskogul and Nastrond
The general cycle for Life of the Dragon is very straightforward:
| >30s> | >10s> | >10s> | repeat | ||||||||||
| 1 | 2 | Life |
Not so obviously, following this rotation is not always optimal. If you do follow this throughout the encounter, your output will, in general, be just fine. It’s just that there are some cases where you will want to delay your Life cycle by a single Geirskogul cast.
The basic idea is to choose between pressing Mirage Dive before or after Geirskogul when the Mirage Dive would fill your second Dragon Eye. The decision forces you to ask the simple question: “Will my Nastrond and Stardiver fall under more buffs (Lance Charge and Dragon Sight, primarily) by entering Life now, or if I enter in 30 more seconds, instead?” You should be considering the remaining time on the recast timers for your buff actions when making this decision. The following chart should help to make it more clear.
| Assuming you already have 1 Eye and High Jump is coming up soon: | |
| If at least one buff has less than 30s remaining | |
| If all buffs have more than 30s remaining, but at least one has less than 60s | |
| If all buffs have more than 60s remaining |
Nastrond and Buffs
Because our buff actions fall into a rather static rotation (as seen above), we can extrapolate these concepts over the course of six minutes and get a general “Life of the Dragon Rotation” so to speak, which shows us when we hold it and when we don’t. This will only hold true if we have six minutes of continuous uptime – that is, we can land every one of the High Jump, Geirskogul, Mirage Dive, Nastrond, and Stardiver hits listed in this visual representation, while ideally dropping zero gcds in that same window. As such, it is very rarely ever going to be the optimal approach, and the above chart will serve you better in most situations.
| Act | 0 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 1m | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 2m | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 3m | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 4m | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 5m | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 6m |
| HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | HJ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | MD | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| G | G | G | G | G | G | G | G | G | G | G | G | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | N | |||||||||||||||||||
| S | S | S | S | S | S | S |
As you can see, the only place we currently even employ this strategy is for our very first Life entry. After that, we just let the skills fall where they may and they naturally align neatly with buff windows. Keep in mind that this could change if a boss jumps out of the arena at an odd time, so you should still learn the general idea behind the priority system!
How Fast Can We Go?
Our sweet spot for GCD appears to be somewhere between 2.25 and 2.4.
Life Surge’s 45s cooldown means that once we go faster than 2.25, we’ll start to severely delay it if we want to keep it on Full Thrust.
Disembowel and Chaos Thrust having a 24s duration means that if we go slower than 2.4, we will see noticeable buff dropping, between recasts.