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 | Twitch

Xiu Ye (Midgardsormr) – the most active Mentor on The Balance Dragoon Discord

Provides the video content that will be sprinkled throughout!

Contact: Xiu Ye#0560 on Discord | Youtube | Twitch

Resources

Gear Comparison tool (More accurate, but slower version)
Allows you to fill in your current [Level 80] gear and melds and figure out roughly which set will perform better.
Rotation Builder tool
Allows you to input stats (either your character’s stats or ones made with the above Gear tool) and then build a rotation with them to get a more accurate readout of your DPS. You can use this tool to compare multiple rotations with the same gear to see which one outputs more. This tool causes some substantial load, so be cautious when using.
Controller Guide
A simple guide to setting up your controller to play this Job. Old setups are listed within, but I’ll be working soon to get updated ones in there!
Tethercalc by Platinum Xephera on Ultros
An incredibly useful tool that you can use to see which member of your party is the proper tether target. You just inject your fflogs link to the fight in question and it’ll tell you who you tethered and show you who was the best target. Before you ask any questions about how it calculates the damage in the 20s window: anything you think it might have issue with has already been properly solved. It may not be updated for 5.0 yet, but I’m sure it will be before Savage.

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

Currently not used. You are safe to unmap it from your bar. With us having two 5-hit combo chains and this button breaking either combo at any stage and the longer runoff for combo maintenance, there is almost no way that this skill will ever find use. If it does, this section will add those niche cases.

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 90^o 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.

Positional Parity

The DPS disparity between landing every single positional and missing every single positional is approximately 4%. Meaning, if you would do 10,000 dps while hitting every positional, then you would only deal 9,600 if you missed every single one.

In other words: You should always strive to land every positional in any situation where it is easy to do so, however, there is a priority system to what you should be focused on while learning to optimize a fight.

Handle Mechanics
If you fail a mechanic, you lose the fight, so it doesn’t matter how much DPS you gain if it causes you to miss a mechanic.
Stay Alive
Dodge death puddles, avoid standing in boss cleaves, etc. Don’t die for DPS, because a death has a negative impact you won’t overcome by keeping uptime up until you died.
Maintain Uptime
ABC – Always Be Casting. If your GCD stops spinning, you messed up. Assuming you are handling 1 and 2 properly, focus on keeping your rotation flowing and your GCD staying in constant motion.
Land Positionals
Never let your GCD stop spinning in order to make it to a position for your flank or rear positionals – this helps no one and costs you DPS. Focus on landing positionals only after you have mastered the first three steps. Some fights and some strategies will require you to eschew positionals to handle mechanics, stay alive, or maintain uptime. This is okay.
It is not the end of the world if your group stacks on the face of the boss.
The DPS loss is not worth causing wipes over.

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. Stardiver in particular has a significant animation lock. When using it, be sure to press it as soon as possible after your GCD. Even with good ping and early pressing, you might encounter clipping if your GCD is anywhere below 2.35. Please hear our prayers, Yoshi-P.
	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. This skill requires a target in order for its full effect to activate. In a later section, we have included some helpful tips for using this. You can activate the skill without a target, but you lose the second effect entirely.
	Battle Litany is pretty much just used when it’s ready. There are times where holding it becomes beneficial.
	Life Surge doesn’t affect 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.

The two rows beneath the GCDs show the total potency gain for using Lance Charge after the above GCD and catching the amount of GCDs listed in the left column. Color coded to show the trends. These values shift if you’re using Life Surge on your Full Thrust. The numbers beneath it would shift in favor of covering that Full Thrust quite significantly.

GCD
9 GCDs	636.90	638.55	577.50	631.95	615.45	636.9	633.6	603.90	631.95	615.45
8 GCDs	561.00	584.10	524.70	518.10	556.05	561.00	579.15	546.15	544.50	556.05

Using any buffs after the red spaces will cause you to suffer substantial losses.

The yellow spaces are reasonably good enough in comparison to red.

The green spaces guarantee maximum output of your buffs.

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. We’re the only melee that doesn’t get that benefit, so it’s likely a mistake. Someday, based Yoshida will notice us and fix it. Maybe.

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 answer to this question is kinda complicated. When you decide to use Disembowel during trash pulls, you sacrifice the potency of the above combo for two GCDs to apply a 10% damage buff to the subsequent four combos. The question of whether or not this is a gain is a very valid one.

The short answer is yes, you should be using Disembowel during trash.

The long answer is that using it causes you to lose potency overall if you’re hitting 4 or more enemies with the above combo, but that potency is very easily made up by any of our various off-gcd area-of-effect actions – Geirskogul, Nastrond, Stardiver, and Dragonfire Dive.

Applying Disembowel is 290+320 = 610 potency

Coerthan Torment combo is 200 potency per gcd per mob – 400 over 2 gcds

Enemies	CoT ppgcd	Pot loss for applying DE	Pot gain from applied DE	Total loss from DE	Potency needed to break even	Potency needed per enemy	Stardiver pot per enemy
3	600	590	720	-130	-1300	-433.33	440.00
4	800	990	960	30	300	75.00	426.25
5	1000	1390	1200	190	1900	380.00	418.00
6	1200	1790	1440	350	3500	583.33	412.50
7	1400	2190	1680	510	5100	728.57	408.57
8	1600	2590	1920	670	6700	837.50	405.63
9	1800	2990	2160	830	8300	922.22	403.33
10	2000	3390	2400	990	9900	990.00	401.50
11	2200	3790	2640	1150	11500	1045.45	400.00
12	2400	4190	2880	1310	13100	1091.67	398.75
13	2600	4590	3120	1470	14700	1130.77	397.69
14	2800	4990	3360	1630	16300	1164.29	396.79
15	3000	5390	3600	1790	17900	1193.33	396.00

Essentially: if, sometime during the duration of Disembowel, you will press off-gcds that sum together to equal the potency needed to break even (AoE skills only need to hit the potency per enemy column) then you should apply it.

At 3, it is always a gain. At 4, you just need 75 potency! Geirskogul alone is 270. Of note is even at 15, you still need less than 1200 – the potency of 3 Nastronds.

This table also assumes that monsters will last the full (or most of the full) Disembowel duration.

The formula to directly generate the potency needed per enemy column, knowing the amount of enemies (n) is:

1600 – 6100/n

Because of the nature of this formula, it has an absolute maximum value of 1600 – meaning that, no matter how many enemies you are facing, if you have over 1600 in per-target area-of-effect off gcd actions available to use in those 30 seconds, Disembowel is always worth using.

The Opener

I know a lot of you have skipped ahead to this section, since you feel like you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals, and I think that’s great! The primary use of the Opener is to prepare your cooldown alignment for the rest of the encounter. With our new Job design, it’s possible that we’ll actually have fight-specific openers down the stretch, and they’ll all be added here!

These openers have not been too thoroughly tested as of yet, so please take them with a grain of salt, and if you discover anything that flies counter to what we have listed here, please don’t hesitate to ask!

Standard [2.36-2.5]

This buff order gives much cleaner alignment with better GCD hits down the road. It mucks with the second Dragon Sight timing a little, but overall it’s better! Recommended for when we’re going somewhat slower.

You can delay Spineshatter Dive until after Geirskogul and shift Dragonfire Dive after Life Surge, but should only do so if that change will result in future alignments with raid buffs. This opener causes High Jump and Geirskogul to be separated enough so they don’t accidentally collide too easily. Similar for Spineshatter Dive and Dragonfire Dive.

Gotta go fast [2.35 and below]

The delayed High Jump looks strange, but ends up lining up better down the stretch. Everything is placed so that this speed tier feels more comfy than it would with things in different places. It’s all designed with you in mind.

Optimization Station

This section requires playtesting. We are in the process of fleshing it out, now. Thank you for your patience!

GCD Rotation

Disengaging from the target can cause your rotation to get forcibly shifted around. When re-engaging (be it after forced disengages or because you felt like taking a lap around the arena), you always only have two options for what you will lead with. Nothing particularly changes, either way, since your ten-GCD sequence will never actually shift.

Disembowel has less than 10 seconds remaining:
Disembowel has more than 10 seconds remaining:

That’s, honestly, all there is to discuss, here. This is more of a judgment call, honestly – anything up to around 12 seconds remaining could be clipped, but 10 is the basic cutoff for getting all 5 hits of your Full Thrust Combo with Disembowel’s buff before it falls off. You would lose the buff on Raiden Thrust and Disembowel after the fact, but that can be overcome.

The only exception to this rule is if you are going to hit an off-GCD action in that period of time after Disembowel wears off. In that case, you absolutely will want the refresh beforehand.

Action Specifics

Geirskogul and Nastrond

The general cycle for Life of the Dragon is very straightforward:

>30s>

>10s>

repeat

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

After the final buff window, the rotation repeats from the 30s column, quite obviously.

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!

Dragon Sight

You need to be close to the target of your affections to properly give them a buff. If the target moves away from you, however, you will retain your buff. So it’s really only their loss. You can usually just worry about activating the skill and then stop worrying about whether or not it stays on your target. As of this expansion, you can now activate the skill without a target, though this is NOT RECOMMENDED, because you will only receive the 10% damage buff, and the 5% buff will be lost for that use, completely. No one gets it.

This skill is notoriously hard to use, already. Optimal handling:

Mouseover (<mo>) macro if you play mouse and keyboard.

Soft targeting (up/down on d-pad) without a macro if you play with a controller.

Different options are listed below, with varying degrees of usefulness/ease of use.

Mouseover Macro	Mixed Macro	One Specific Ally
/merror off /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo>/micon “Dragon Sight”	/merror off/ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo> /ac “Dragon Sight” <mo>/ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2>/ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /micon “Dragon Sight”	/merror off/ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2> /ac “Dragon Sight” <2>/micon “Dragon Sight”
Will simply place the tether onto your mouseover target. Just hover your mouse over the proper player in the party list and press the button and you cast it on the proper player. Optimal macro to use with mouse and keyboard.	Mixes left with right to create a macro that would prioritize your mouseover target, but default to your preferred party list position/member. Useful if you don’t trust your ability to mouseover, but you should really just practice that and shift to the mouseover one instead, eventually.	Specifically targets whoever is at position 2. The number or party list can be altered as needed. Rather inflexible in use, but very consistent in execution. Can also replace the number with a specific character name, for static raiding.

For controller, I recommend learning to soft-target and dropping all reliance on macros.

For keyboard/mouse, I recommend 1-3 specific ally macros for reliable friends and a mouseover as a backup (or primary, your call).

Gearing Up

As things appear to be right now, our stat priority has not changed!
Critical Hit Rate > Direct Hit Rate > Determination > Skill Speed

I recommend you use the gear comparison tool in the resources section to actually get a better idea of how melds affect your DPS!

Just meld (with 6’s; 8’s have a 40% removal chance and you will want to save those for bis!) and wear highest item level gear, for now!

Best Sets Available

GCD	Food	Critical Hit	Determination	Direct Hit	Skill Speed
2.45	Popoto Salad	3667	1814	2472	814
2.38	Popoto Salad	3520	1635	2106	1526
2.49	Robe Lettuce Salad	3605	1970	2772	440

The 2.49 set provides you with a particularly slow GCD speed for people who prefer that for one reason or another. You are also incapable of getting 9 GCDs (still unable to get fewer than 8, as well, assuming you don’t delay any GCD) under your buff actions at that speed, so if you’re feeling lazy about trying to push as hard as you can, it’s a very good alternative.

2.45 is, in my opinion, the most comfortable of the sets. It’s slow enough for easy double weaves, but fast enough for 9 GCDs in buffs if you push for it. It will parse well (arguably the best among them under certain conditions), and just overall feels good.

2.38 is a bit faster than the above sets, but could theoretically also be the strongest among them. The faster speeds will make double weaving tougher with high ping, but also makes 9 GCD buffs much much easier than the 2.45 set. The rotation similarly feels nice and smooth and flows really well.

These three sets are interchangeable for your best in slot needs. The latter two (2.45 and 2.38) can actually both be built on one character and freely swapped between. The way I’ve organized the melds is very particular in that they meld the exact same materia into every piece they share, so you’ll just need to swap which pieces you have equipped to change between the sets! Cool, right? Yeah, it is.

DPS Comparison Between Sets

Below is a graph comparing the total DPS of each of the three above sets over time. I’ve clipped out the opener to avoid having a super zoomed out graph to show the peaks (which are around 23,000, in case you were curious). Please note that the Y-Axis only shows values from 14,250 to 15,750 which results in seeing huge gaps between the mins and maxes which make the variation appear to be much larger than it actually is.

I’ll be retooling rotations to get a graph that extends to 7 minutes to catch the 6:00 burst at a later time.

How Fast Can We Go?

Our sweet spot for GCD appears to be somewhere between 2.25 and 2.47.

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.

Chaos Thrust having a 24s duration means that if we go slower than 2.47, we will see noticeable dot dropping, between recasts. This, in general, will not be a significant issue, but it is worth noting.

Overview