Soloing as Dragoon Part 1: Understanding Healing Breath

Prior to the updates for Dragoon mentioned in my last post, the best thing a Dragoon could do was be one efficient healing machine. Nothing really changed on that front except that we can generally kill stuff a lot faster now thanks to the two-handed update and the wyvern's ability to "level up" as long as you stay in the zone.

There are 3 different "classes" of wyvern. They are Offensive, Balanced, and Support and the class is determined by your subjob.

Offensive Wyvern

Uses elemental breaths based on the elemental weakness of your opponent. Not the most accurate critter in the world, but it gets the job done and often times will provide a clue about which type of magic is most effective against whatever it is you're fighting.

Offensive Wyvern types are available by subbing THF, SAM, RNG, WAR, MNK, BST, COR, PUP and DNC.

This type of wyvern will not use Healing Breath or use any form of status removal.

Balanced Wyvern

Available through using PLD, DRK, NIN or BRD as a subjob.

This wyvern will use healing breath and will use elemental breaths. It will not remove statuses and it will not heal other party members. In addition, you cannot activate healing breath until you're at 33% HP or below (with AF1 hat).

Support Wyvern

Available through using WHM, RDM, BLM, SMN, BLU or SCH as a subjob. This wyvern is your key to soloing. Pick your subjob based on what it is you're going to be fighting. I tend to look at using WHM if I'm going to be fighting stuff that likes to inflict a bunch of status effects. I'll sub RDM if I'm interested in being defense-oriented. I'll sub BLM if I'm just being completely lazy and want a warp home from farming things that have no chance of killing me.

With this wyvern, you have the ability to trigger healing breath at 50% health (with AF1 hat) for anyone in your party. You also have the ability to trigger status removal by using a weapon skill for anyone in the party as well. The status breath will remove Paralyze (level 40), Poison (level 1) or Blind (level 20) only.

There are three things that people generally fail to notice when using this wyvern.

1. YOU always have the wyvern's priority for any breath used. Your HP dropping below 50% or becoming inflicted with one of the 3 statuses listed above can cause some of the most well intentioned plans to fall flat on their face.

2. The person with the lowest HP PERCENTAGE has priority if you are not the priority.

3. Lastly is the range. Most people (especially mages...) don't understand that, in combination with the first two items listed here, that healing breath has a range limited to 13'. A wyvern will not move to the next healing target just because someone who meets the above criteria is out of range. You will essentially be cockblocked from healing anyone else in your party until you get said person in range.


Healing Breath

There are several factors that go into determining how this calculates it's end result. They are:

1. Drachen Armet/+1
2. Wyrm Armet/+1
3. Saurian Helm
4. Wyvern's Level
5. Wyvern HP+ Gear
6. Wyvern's Current TP (20% increments)
7. Deep Breathing

(I also suspect Lightsday and Darksday effect it, I just haven't gone out to test it myself.)

Without getting into the complex formula involved in calculating all of that, here are the basics you'll need to know:

• Drachen Armet/+1 will trigger healing breath at 50% HP and gives the effect of Cure III.
• Wyrm Armet/+1 will trigger healing breath at 33% HP and gives the effect of Cure IV.
• Saurian Helm will trigger healing breath at 33% HP (not 100% certain on this, please correct me if I'm wrong as I have never used this hat before) and gives the effect of Cure III.5.
• Every 200XP you gain increases your wyvern's level and grants a 6% bonus to healing breath up to 30% (5 levels for you non-math people out there).

If you're a formula nut, here goes...

Wiki has the current working formula to be as follows:

FLOOR(0.1757*(Drachen Brais Bonus + Wyvern XP Bonus + 1)*(Helm Bonus + Wyvern TP Bonus + Deep Breathing Bonus + 1)*(Wyv. HP + Wyv +HP gear)+42)

I personally don't think it's that complex. This formula might be 100% accurate, but if you're like me, I'm not going to spend time poring over every ten-thousandth of a percentage to figure out what the end result ends up being. There is a floor for healing breath w/o using any of the things that affect it and each hat grants a different level of healing breath. I believe SE has it broken down to something like this:

Healing Breath (Z) = (Wyvern's Max HP * Hat/No Hat modifier = W) + (Wyvern TP Bonus) + (W*Wyvern XP Bonus = Y) + (Deep Breathing bonus if used W * 60%).

Here's why I think it's this simple.

The gear that I use for soloing allows me to do a minimum healing breath of 409HP. This is with no XP or TP bonus. Using this as a basis, let's look at what pieces of gear I'm actually using that modifies my wyvern's HP and HB potency.

Wyrm Armet
Drachen Brais +1 (Wyvern HP+15%)
Homam Gambieras (Wyvern HP+50)
Chanoix's Gorget (Wyvern HP+50).

This means I need to determine two things.

What is the hat bonus for each of the respective hats that modify healing breath?
What is my wyvern's base max HP?

I'm theorizing the hat % works like this:

No hat = 16% of Wyvern's max HP.
AF1 hat = 26% of Wyvern's max HP.
AF2 hat = 36% of Wyvern's max HP.
Saurian helm = Unsure, but I would speculate it's approx 31%.

In determining what my wyvern's base max HP is, I've eyeballed damage (I don't use third party tools) my wyvern has taken and approximated that it's base max HP is 900. With my 3 pieces of gear, it's max HP becomes 1135. With no TP or no XP bonuses, our formula looks like this now (rounded up or down):

409 = (1135 * AF2 hat% of 36%) + (0) + (0).

Using AF1 hat, it looks like this:

295 = (1135 * AF1 hat% of 26%) + (0) + (0)

No hat at all looks like:

182 = (1135 * No hat % of 16%) + (0) + (0)

With full wyvern XP bonus, no TP , the use of Deep Breathing and the standard gear listed here, we see the following:

776 = (1135 * 36%) + (0) + (409*30%) + (409*60%)

And so on...

I know I'm not 100% accurate with this idea, but this is a much more general idea to go with in calculating how much healing breath will do. This theory also suggests that, using the wyrm armet, for every 50 HP you add to the wyvern, you're adding 18HP to your healing breath.

Tomorrow, I'll go over soloing gear sets in detail.