Thread: is BRD a better support choice than MCH in 4.0?

Unfortunately, over on a Discord, with the infos we have right now about the class(MCH), the disparity isnt as pronounced as you make it appear, in fact, the heat gauge is extremely problematic for the fact that the buff it provides to Machinis damage doesnt outweight the Loss from being at 0 heat, and god forbids if you ever end up with no FlameThrower or Barrel stabilizer available for any reason, you're stuck with 40s to rebuild 90 heat at a rate of 5/cgd up to 50 heat ...
Overall Bard have extremely more stable damage ( because boosted dots and their proc system ) and globally better group utility than Machinist.

For some reason Machinist Main mechanic, the heat system, seems to be a goddamn punishment for a Machinist more than anything else ( even knowing that it's a +20% for 10s when in overheat )
I hear alot of complains about WHM, but Machinist took a monstruous hit to the face with this ""update"" of the class too...

Originally Posted by CookieMog

Unfortunately, over on a Discord, with the infos we have right now about the class(MCH), the disparity isnt as pronounced as you make it appear, in fact, the heat gauge is extremely problematic for the fact that the buff it provides to Machinis damage doesnt outweight the Loss from being at 0 heat, and god forbids if you ever end up with no FlameThrower or Barrel stabilizer available for any reason, you're stuck with 40s to rebuild 90 heat at a rate of 5/cgd up to 50 heat ...
Overall Bard have extremely more stable damage ( because boosted dots and their proc system ) and globally better group utility than Machinist.

For some reason Machinist Main mechanic, the heat system, seems to be a goddamn punishment for a Machinist more than anything else ( even knowing that it's a +20% for 10s when in overheat )
I hear alot of complains about WHM, but Machinist took a monstruous hit to the face with this ""update"" of the class too...

It really didn't. I'm a MCH main, and even just looking at the mechanic, I can tell that it's very easily a massive damage boost. It won't be hard at all to maintain a 50-95 heat rating, then overheat when you go to preform your wildfire burst, followed by flamethrower or barrel stabilizer to get back to 50 heat. The only way you'll not have those up when you're at zero heat is if you're playing the class wrong, or accidentally cut off Flamethrower too early for whatever reason. Even then, MCH has recieved a damage boost in the form of all of our potencies being higher than what they were before, and them being practically massive when over 50 heat.....

To top that off, we'll be getting more wildfire bursts than before. And if you want to talk about taking a massive hit to your DPS because a mechanic messed up a skill, clearly you're not thinking about how easy it is to lose Wildfire to an invincibility phase, when currently that's a significant portion of MCH's damage. With the reduction to its timer and duration, we won't be losing any potency to it, (1/3 less cooldown, but 1/3 less duration will balance out), but we are gaining more usability from it due to the fact that it'll be a lot more likely to go off and we can use it more often. Furthermore, the increased potencies will only further increase the damage on it....

While it's true that there is the potential for less experienced players to mess up and end up with 0 heat and no skills to bump it back up quickly, that doesn't present a problem as often for the MCHs that play at endgame, as it'll be easy to maintain it. Even though things happen, and it will pop up from time to time, the increased damage as a whole will make up for any DPS loss from those mistakes.....

I think people are forgetting something major about bards when comparing damage. Bard's did actually gain a decent amount of indirect damage buffs. Such as longer dots as well as losing the cast time on iron jaws to refresh the dots. This means many more globals to cast straight shot leading to more refulgent arrows (huge damage). I'm still trying to figure out if refulgent arrow is off the GCD though, which would be amazing.

Originally Posted by Shunye

I'm still trying to figure out if refulgent arrow is off the GCD though, which would be amazing.

According to happys stream and all of the spreadsheets I'm 99.99% sure it is on the GCD. It is just a replacement for using straight shot during procs for a damage gain.