Media Tour MCH issues: MCH is now 4 times more punishing

[ProfessorCoffee]

Never played Machinist, and never theory crafted anything, but I still want to try and give an idea. Everyone says that MCH has gone through so much change that it's practically a new job, so perhaps theory crafting should handle it like its a brand new job that nobody played before? Or theory craft a rotation that is completely different than a SB or HW MCH rotation?

Truth is, it's really not that different. It's still more or less entirely revolving around Wildfire, but now we've got a few more flashy GCD's, and a 1-button Rapid Fire GCD rotation instead of 3-buttons.

[Kitfox]

snip

Let me elaborate on the suggested changes.

The animation canceling issue is a major issue because it makes you totally lose the gcd. Making Heat Blast available outside of Hypercharge would make it so that it wouldn't cancel the attack, just make it weaker. A weaker attack is better than no attack at all should you fail to land it in time.

The current Wildfire+Hypercharge window consists of 6 Heat Blasts. Hypercharge is 8 seconds long, so you can fit Heat Blasts within the effect at: 0s - 1.5s - 3.0s - 4.5s - 6s - 7.5s. This leaves you with 0.5s window for error. This is a common value used for buff windows in the past for other classes as well as the current Stormblood MCH, so logic and history would state that 6 Heat Blasts is the intended usage. Increasing the timer to 9 seconds would give you a window of 1.5s, but still wouldn't allow for 7 hits because of animation locks and the 1.5s gcd speed can't be improved upon with skill speed. This would make the window much more lenient to weave in.

Heat Blast has the additional effect of reducing the recast timer of Gauss Round and Ricochet by 15 seconds. This means that a full Hypercharge window with 6 Heat Blasts reduces the recast time by a total of 90 seconds. 90 seconds is 3 full charges of Gauss Round and Ricochet so even if you use all your charges before entering Hypercharge, you will still cap them out by the end of the window and lose an effective 8s of the recast timer + whatever amount it had left before the window. This causes loss of usages if none of the charges are used within the Hypercharge window.

Using charges within the window is difficult because Heat Blast only a 1.5s gcd. With an average animation lock time of 0.75s. That leaves zero room for error or latency based delays because you spend the first half of the gcd locked into the Heat Blast animation and the other half doing whatever ogcd weave you choose, then have to immediately start another gcd. For comparisons sake, double weaving at 2.50 gcd leaves you a window of 2.50s - 3 x 0.75s = 0.25s for latency based clipping. So if double weaving is difficult for you, Heat Blast weaving is much more so.

So the next set of suggestion aim to deal with the overcapping of charges and promote not weaving anything during Hypercharge. To make it possible to avoid any weaves, it must be possible to store more recast timer than the total of 90 second the full window restores, if you want to keep your cooldown rolling and not lose out on any gains. It can be thought of the same way as a resource you don't want to cap on, eg. like DRKs want to use their MP before it hits maximum value.

Changing the cooldown reduction to 10s would mean that a full window of Hypercharge will restore only 60s of the full 90s you can store, so you're still left with a 30s window where the cooldown timer can free tick and not stop because of overcapping. No usages lost as long as you enter with zero charges left.

Increasing charges to 4 maximum would not make the job 20% busier or increase the amount of actions performed over the rotation in any way, but it would allow you to store 120s worth of timer. Even if the full window restores 90s of it, there would be again a portion of 30s left for the cooldown timer to keep ticking in.

Increasing the recast timer of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 40s would have the same effect as increasing the charge count to 4. It would allow storing a total of 120s of the timer so the Hypercharge window will not cap you as long as you enter with zero charges saved.

Double Hypercharge windows would be extremely bad in this context because you would be forced weave between most of the Heat Blasts. Another reason why it's not recommended to double up the duration is that you have to fit Hypercharges between two Drill usages, which is only a window of 17.5s at most and only 15s if you have to weave Air Anchor in the same window. It's better to use Hypercharge in single segments each within its own window between Drills.

[Arkenne]

Forward and back and then

So, in other words, we both say the same but consider 1 main difference:


8s Over Heat Window can only have 5 Heat Blasts. VS 8s Over Heat Window is meant to have 6 Heat Blasts.


Sorry again if it sounds rude, I swear is not my intention >_>;;


Thing is that, as shown in the Mr. Happy video shared a couple posts ago, it seems like you can't input more than 5... like Fell Cleaves in an Inner Release phase for a WAR, or Holy Spirits in a Requiscat for a PLD.
To my opinion, it may seem like a 6th can be pushed in, but its actually only 5, and it has the 1.5s lenience for the weaving of the oGCDs and the goal of restoring 75s worth of their charges. Not 90s.
Sadly, in order to test this out we need actual hands on the job... and all this discussion is meant for pre-launch... geez, contradictions :/

You already mentioned that animations have a lock, so the timer of the first Heat Blast is not actually 0, but 0.75, so in a perfect world, they should be something like 0.75 -> 2.25 -> 3.75 -> 5.25 -> 6.75 -> 8.25


I did read the elaboration of your suggestions and I do not disagree with them altogether, really. I even like most of them and believe all they need is a potency modification to compensate the difference in timings.

[Kitfox]

You already mentioned that animations have a lock, so the timer of the first Heat Blast is not actually 0, but 0.75, so in a perfect world, they should be something like 0.75 -> 2.25 -> 3.75 -> 5.25 -> 6.75 -> 8.25

Buffs snapshot at the start of the animation, so as long as the server catches the attack confirmation in time, the tail end of the animation doesn't matter. It does matter for starting another action though, because of the animation lock.

None of the footage we've seen from the media tour includes an honest attempt to even get 6 Heat Blasts into the Hypercharge. We had no MCH experts there and nobody probably even though about it, so many of them simply used random weaponskills and bad timing resulting in unable to do it. You absolutely do have the time to pull it off like Fell Cleaves and Holy Spirits. The windows have the same error margin so 6 Heat Blasts should still be possible.

[Kabooa]

Would it be better if Hypercharge just gave you 5 charges that you use on Heated Blast or Auto Crossbow?

[Darkpaw]

Kit in your opinion is it possible to get it sorted out before 5.0, or is this something we are going to have to hope comes out in the patch savage releases or the patch right after.

[Kitfox]

Kit in your opinion is it possible to get it sorted out before 5.0, or is this something we are going to have to hope comes out in the patch savage releases or the patch right after.

The changes I compiled are mostly simple number changes so I don't think it would be too difficult to implement them before release. Heat Blast being available outside Hypercharge is a slightly bigger one, but we have precedent for it in the form of the current Cooldown, so it should be easy as well. Other than that I don't think the job needs any significant mechanical changes. It actually looks like a very interesting job with all the added flexibility, so I hope they make it a bit more ping friendly.

It really depends what kind of vision they have for the job but I think the small number adjustments I've suggested would retain the current image they're trying to portray.

[Darkpaw]

The changes I compiled are mostly simple number changes so I don't think it would be too difficult to implement them before release. Heat Blast being available outside Hypercharge is a slightly bigger one, but we have precedent for it in the form of the current Cooldown, so it should be easy as well. Other than that I don't think the job needs any significant mechanical changes. It actually looks like a very interesting job with all the added flexibility, so I hope they make it a bit more ping friendly.

It really depends what kind of vision they have for the job but I think the small number adjustments I've suggested would retain the current image they're trying to portray.

agreed nothing seems drastic so now i suppose it's wait and see what happens at the patch note release on the 27th.

[LeoLupinos]

Hello,

[...]new Hypercharge burst window containing 6 gcd and happening twice each minute[...]

Hypercharge only lasts for 8 seconds, and has a animation too. It's impossible to fit 6 Heat blast inside it. With 5 Heats blast it's already 7.5 seconds, how it's possible to fit another one if 0.5 is barely the animation lock of hypercharge? Even less possible since when the buff that enables heatblast is gonne the animation is canceled too. It's pretty clear to me that the rotation is based on 5 uses. The old one was 5 too.

[Kitfox]

Hypercharge only lasts for 8 seconds, and has a animation too. It's impossible to fit 6 Heat blast inside it. With 5 Heats blast it's already 7.5 seconds, how it's possible to fit another one if 0.5 is barely the animation lock of hypercharge? Even less possible since when the buff that enables heatblast is gonne the animation is canceled too. It's pretty clear to me that the rotation is based on 5 uses. The old one was 5 too.

The old one is NOT 5. The current Overheat rotation uses 6 GCDs and can be seen in MCH gameplay all over the place. Example here: https://youtu.be/iR8RPWpBeG4
The margin of error is the same 0.5s: 3 x 1.5s + 2 x 2.5 + 1 = 9.5s and the OH duration is 10s. This means the GCDs normally come out come out at 0s - 2.5s - 5.0s - 6.5s - 8.0s - 9.5s. This has been the golden standard through the whole expansion. The only reason you would use a 5 GCD OH rotation is if your ping is literally too bad to use 6 GCDs, which is exactly the issue we're trying to fix here.

The reason we don't have to worry about the animation lock of Hypercharge too much is that, as with most buffs, the actual buff effect usually applies at the very end of the animation giving you the full window of the benefit. The current Hot Shot for example doesn't apply its effect until a full second after, slowly enough that if you were to weave Gauss Round immediately afterwards, it wouldn't catch the benefit.