Dragoon Opener and Rotation

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.

Standard Opener

We use our raidbuff Battle Litany after applying our DoT for party alignment, the rest of our buffs surround it with Geirskogul being used last to ensure its own potency is buffed by all our personal buffs and potential raidbuffs.

Using our buffs before or after Chaotic Spring makes little difference, favoring being used after due to the Wyrmwind Thrust at the end.

The timing of your buffs, High Jump & Dragonfire Dive will determine the position in which you will weave them for the rest of the fight, our other weaves will be used as filler when possible keeping mind of Life Surge and Wyrmwind Thrust.

Alternative Openers

4th GCD Geirskogul

This opener delays our oGCD usages in benefit of party alignment, ensuring our Geirskogul is under full party buffs.

2nd GCD Battle Litany

This opener has considerably better alignment for ourselves at the cost of having worse party alignment on our raid buff.

Whether this opener is a better general option for us or not is yet to be determined and will likely depend on which jobs are in your party due to exact burst timings.

2nd GCD Geirskogul

Similar to moving forward Battle Litany, we can also choose to use sooner and keep our standard raidbuff alignment. This will still offer an incredibly small gain in personal dps (pretty much equal to standard) but keeps the advantage of being able to use Life Surge without overcap.

Recommended if you have no raidbuffs since the Geirskogul timing will make this opener worse as soon as it starts to miss raidbuffs it usually wouldn’t.

Rotation

Dragoon’s Dawntrail rotation consists of a 10 GCD combo loop with alternating Chaotic Spring & Heavens’ Thrust finishers, as well as using our 30s interval oGCDs on cooldown.

The GCD and oGCD parts of our kit work independently of each other, your GCD loop takes 25s while our oGCDs work on intervals of 30s meaning that the GCDs which line up with your burst are not consistent. Due to this you will have to plan your burst windows around Life Surge which is optimally used on your highest potency GCDs Heavens’ Thrust & Drakesbane. And also plan around Wyrmwind Thrust which must be used before overcapping on your next Raiden Thrust.

Our 60s and 120s burst windows follow the logic of using oGCDs with a hard cooldown precisely when they come up, then filling the required slots with Life Surge & Wyrmwind Thrust, finding a single weave for your Stardiver, and filling the leftover space with filler oGCDs.

Hard cooldowns: Lance Charge, Battle Litany, Geirskogul, High Jump, Drangonfire Dive
Non-flexible oGCDs: Life Surge, Wyrmwind Thrust
Flexible oGCDs: Nastrond, Rise of the Dragon, Starcross, Mirage Dive, Stardiver