Sigurd's Descendants: The Art Of Dragon Slaying.

Ahhhh, even hints of validation feel pretty good.

This accurately sums up my Dynamis experience with Ryu R15.


I made myself sad

TLDR: It's not bad, it's not exceptional, it's on a pretty even playing field with Trishula which just confirms Austar's original sims to be accurate in terms of % different between weapons. To raise my total DPS, I'll need to swap back and forth for different bosses/mobs.

I hyped myself to the moon that this would allow me to finally get my WS average up overall and let me widen that gap to flex on these kids... That uhh... That didn't happen. It went down. I actually struggled this round to stay relevant, but it was by no means a wash. Ryu has a few things going for it, most of which I explained previously. Now, let's talk numbers.

On the Wave 2 boss, my WS average was abysmal. An astounding 12.5k for Drakesbane. Oooooouch. It may be higher in Windurst vs the Yagudo, but jesus in Bastok it was bad.

On Wave 3 in general, Drakes suffers tremendously. I was surprised to see anything over 20k, but you are doing A LOT of them so it evens out.

On the Wave 3 boss, I was fairly impressed with the weapon. I made up a 1.3 million damage gap to overtake the top spot, my DPS ranged heavily, it mainly sat in the range of 5.5k~6.7k with a WS average around 24k. Slightly higher than Trishula, but not the 30k+ that i hoped.

Final stats for the whole run were:
Rank: #1
Total Damage: 9.7 mil
Average DPS: 3,135
Drakesbane Weaponskill Avg: 16,542

I could chalk up my early-run performance to a bad day, some lag, or a missing buff/debuff here or there, that's feasible, but I'd rather just take this as canonical and work to improve these numbers in future runs.

Crit def bonus likely flubbing your ws numbers a bit, plus drakes had some atk penalty to it didnt it?

Drakes is terrible in Dynamis due to the attack penalty, same issue Resolution has. Geomancy debuffs have a 75% reduction on "NM's" (Champion mobs and Wave bosses) so there is no easy magic Idris-Frailty capping attack. Instead we need to pay attention to attack buffs's while stacking defense down buffs on those boss mobs. A WS with a heavy attack penalty on a job that doesn't have naturally high attack is really gonna hurt inside there. Neither Trish Stardiver or Shining One Impulse suffer from that attack issue so those would likely do better inside Dynamis.


Also you don't need to "cancel" anything, this isn't an action RPG where your attack round waits for the animation to finish. Every WS has a 2s pause in your attack round, after that 2s (server side) is finished you will automatically start attacking again even if the client is still in the middle of an animation. Counters and Retaliations can both proc during animations. The only thing JA0 is letting you do is input another command without waiting for the animation to clear first. I've done WS's and had watched my TP go from ~300 to over 1K in the middle of the animation before.

You're not wrong. I'm fully aware of the attack penalty and geomancy effect reductions. (My LS is BiS and clearing Dyna for almost a year now too brotha.) The only debuff we ever go without is dancer steps.

The idea is that you're far and away over attack cap on Wave 1 and 2. This is very common for us because we SV 5-song with 4 attack songs at the start... So even with the penalty, I would have been close to cap.


Because of how Jumps work, you can jump before you can auto attack after an action. Because of how fast you get 1k TP with mythic aftermath, the time you spend overflowing drastically affects your total weaponskill count, which is the bread and butter of dragoon. If you don't have 3~4x the WS of every other job in there, you lose. I was equate my DRG play very closely with an action RPG. Every decision does matter, Jump is significant damage with Ryu, so you need to be using on CD and not overflowing.

So in a way, it is an action RPG. The action is - don't waste jump CDs and don't waste TP. 3k TP does nothing for Drakesbane except more crit, which is a DPS loss in the long run.


At the end of the day, all I proved was that even spamming Drakesbane, Ryu and Trishula are about the same @ R15, within 5% of each other.

Just thought I would bump this. Nothing more.

After using Ryunohige at R15 for a while now, I strongly prefer it. I like spamming Drakesbane and Dps is always within +/- 3% of Trishula. Just thought I’d give my extended usage thoughts. I don’t use Trishula for anything except Zerde multi step now.

All JA's, reguardless of animation length, are instant use and have a 2s pause in your attack round. FFXI is not an action MMO, it's made after the original Everquest style.

What your likely confusing is thinking that WS animation and JA animation have some sort of bearing on your attack speed, they don't. We can edit the .dats and set the animation for a WS or JA to exactly 1 frame and it will still have the same 2s delay to attack round. There is no such thing as "animation cancel" in FFXI.

How is this for a DRG hybrid set:

ItemSet 368495

Could switch ammo back to Ginsen and be 1 PDT from cap but the status resist seems valuable since dragoon kinda has a hole in terms of serious meva gear?

That's not really a hybrid build, that is a full DT build, but hey.... DRG can do that.

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Here_Be_DRGs#DT_Ideas_and_Misc

Yeah, that seems like a reasonable take to me. The Odin pieces have blurred the line between hybrid DD and DT sets, especially for dragoon where you don't always need as much gear haste. They have a nice spread of stats to where you aren't giving up a ton of dps for them.

There are only two types of DT sets you you need dragoon in any end-game scenario.

1. Full DT (Much like the set you have)

Full DT is for when you have a tank death and all the other real DDs die. There's no other way you should have hate on anything.

The set I use is very similar to yours.

2. Wyvern DT / Survivability

This is for AoE spammy bosses which last longer than you have available Stoneskin recasts / spirit link CDs.

This is my set. It's never failed me and I never lose a wyvern unless I died due to some subsequent chain of events that sucks.
ItemSet 363759

The bg wiki page is a source of great information, but it borders on being too much information for the standard person to look at and know what's needed. All the niche sets you can pass on because you'll never use them and it's a giant waste of inventory space.

that's a difficult take to have
the guide has "too much information" because the layperson will go into AH or look at a gearswap with the best gear and say "okay, but what do i get before then??", so it serves to bridge the gap and try to cover every level of necessity/progression

niche sets are niche for a reason, and the only time you're getting them is if you're fulfilling those niches
naturally, if you aren't, you won't be going out of your way to obtain them

any further suggestions can be discussed in the talk page, or feel free to establish and fill out the Community DRG guide.

I wasn't making a suggestion to edit the guide, just giving my opinion on approaching its content and saying what information is important or not. It's not my place to say what content the guide should have because I didn't write it and have no interest in providing information in that capacity.

maybe we're on different pages here, but
dismissing the guide's information as "too much" or the niche sets being passable because it's a "giant waste of inventory space" does seem like you're trying to express what content should be on there. in a game basically revolving around the concept of min-maxing, niche sets do have a purpose, indifferent to how tiny the gains may be.

regardless of the matter, it's comprehensive to the point anyone should be able to understand and the staff is available to help should anyone ask.

at most it just seems you couldn't be bothered disseminating any relevant information and gave a passive-aggressive statement on the guide.

in any case, sirris' question has been answered, so that's the end of my participation on the matter

Thanks for answering my question. I'm kinda coming back to dragoon so I was thinking about hybrid in the way that a warrior or samurai would, where you pull hate and need to survive getting your face beat in, but you still want to do damage and kill the thing. For DRG it's more like, eh, that's his problem now.

For what it's worth I think Spicy's guide is great but I don't know if I'd ever have the inventory space to build all of those sets, unless they give us another wardrobe or two, lol. It's useful to have the information out there in any case for the community anyway.

You're projecting that point of view onto my statement. I don't make passive aggressive statements man. I deal in absolutes. If you really want to dissect the comment here it is:

"The bg wiki page is a source of great information, but it borders on being too much information for the standard person to look at and know what's needed."
Great source of information - that's a compliment to how the guide is put together and how much it covers.

but it borders on being too much information - This refers to the number of sets that the guide accommodates vs what sets you actually need or should be striving to obtain. It's common for a guide to do "New Player", "Mid Tier", "Top Tier" but the guide goes beyond that by providing sets for all possible weapons you could be using and scenarios that don't exist for dragoon.

for the standard person to look at and know what's needed. - This means when a new person starts gearing up Dragoon for the first time, all they see is an overflow of information about all the REMAs and non-remas. My opinion (because that's the important part of all this. This is my opinion, not some backwards insult to you or someone who worked on that guide) is that when someone is approaching a job for the first time and looking for advice, they should know what the end goal is for the best possible gear choices for the job. The guide's not segmented in a way that is conducive to handling that.

Let me state this is 100% clarity since you seem to be confused on my stance.

1. The guide is good and covers every set you could possibly image
2. Not all sets are necessary
3. When advice is asked, it should be given directly and relevantly, not just linked to a resource they almost certainly saw and still had confusion.

Please stop putting words and inflections on my statements, I assure you that I'm not disrespecting you or your informational database. It would be much more to the point if I were.



Good thinking. You're on the right track, but you don't need too much defensive gear. Just the aforementioned DT and Wyvern / Survivability sets. The full DT set doesn't even hurt Dragoon's DPS that much if we're really comparing pennies to pennies. The advent of 4x jumps fixes a lot of TP / Melee Haste problems with the full DT sets if you for some reason need to sit in one.

I see what you’re trying to say. It can be somewhat overwhelming when you’re looking at a new job for the first time and see a ton of sets, not sure which are most relevant and which aren’t.

It still comes across as kind of a petty backhanded compliment though. It’s definitely not the guide’s fault for being thorough and having sets for every niche situation. If someone is confused by it, they should learn more about the job first in the intro sections before looking at the job gearsets. The guide shouldn’t have to include a note with every set mentioning whether the set is very niche and low yield to obtain, that’s for the player to decide.

I’ve been playing since the beginning and I share that dude’s view.

The guide is so dense I get information overload quite often when I go there. And I generally have all the sets in it.

Genuinely, how does that even happen. I mean like, you copy paste the set. and that's it. What information is there really to get overloaded on, especially on a job like drg where it's literally 2-3 sets, with absolutely zero conditional changes.

Can hit it - can't hit it - immatryreallyhardnottodie

If you look at that guide and your mind melts, then jesus christ- what happens to you when you look at almost any other job's guide.

The pup and BST guides come to mind. If you're confused by a few DD sets, a million variables for pet configurations, use etc. is gonna brain you.

Man, everyone here must thrive on hyperbole. I didn't say I was confused, I said that the way that the drg guide presents the information is overwhelming, even for veterans.

At any point in time there can be up to 12 sets on the page, with very little text. I understand the sets, but the format of the DRG guide specifically (and pup for that matter) makes my eyes bleed.

2nd job adjustment for DRG this year. I can see PLDs crying in the corner XD

I feel like anything we get from the October update is going to be just extra. Dragoon is already in a pretty good place. What I'd like to see:

1. Call Wyvern timer reduced to 5 minutes like Call Beast. Not a huge thing but a nice little quality-of-life boost.

2. Attack penalty removed from Drakesbane.

3. One additional level PDL trait.

I'd like another tier of Smite, personally.

Don’t forget us blu

No, but it'd make Ryu even stronger.