5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

Yeh you've brought up a lot of good points. Ping is always going to be the main enemy in ffxiv (and all MMOs for that matter haha) and I wouldn't want it to become a homogenised mess

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Originally Posted by Mistyregions

Ok thank you! So opening with wild fire is technically the way to go and usuing hyper charge and cooldown and spam it. I'm disappointed that it does such negligible damage.

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Tbh the strongest opener I’ve found so far is.

To go into air anchor —> double weave 2x gauss rounds —> reassemblance —> Drill —> use ur last gauss round and 1 ricochet double weave —> stabilise barrel —> hyper charge —> wildfire —> into the heated shot + 1 weave it doesn’t matter which u do as it’s counts abilities not damage now. Just whichever’s accessible. —> into standard rotation.

Hold Drill for reassemblance use anchor on CD always use hyper charge on available. And use golem at 100 and instantly blow it up for maximum potency

Always line up hypercharge up with wildfire each time.

And it’s just going into standard rotation into hypercharge spam into hypercharge+wildfire spam,

It’s quite easy to play it’s just keeping everything aligned and playing it at the pace desired.

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Originally Posted by memepapa

Yeh you've brought up a lot of good points. Ping is always going to be the main enemy in ffxiv (and all MMOs for that matter haha) and I wouldn't want it to become a homogenised mess

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Yeah it’s sad but true.

Slowing down every job is fine, til you see it will exclude a lot of players. We have to remember compared to most MMORPGs FFXIV combat is slow for most jobs compared.

And while i suspect a lot won’t play the job. But a lot also will and bard is a really good alternative for those who don’t desire taking up such a speedy level of gameplay

I think this was genuinely SEs intention. And tbh I think adjusting bard to match the machinist on a more stabilised gameplay option was prolly the best way they could counteract the problems that would be assiosated

While ideas are always good, I don’t think there’s any avoiding it, to create a fast paced combat class in FFXIV requires a lot of things which don’t bold well with high ping.

My $0.02 on the new MCH:

I’m really enjoying it, honestly. I’ve long wanted this to be a main job of mine, but could never jive with the punishingly restrictive feeling of SB MCH. The sheer number of plates one needed to keep spinning was daunting, especially since it felt like a small error could get your whole alignment out of whack in major ways.

ShB’s MCH gives me the feeling of revving up a big steampunk motorcycle at the start of the fight, making minor adjustments as I cruise — fiddling with dials, opening up the engine, whacking something with a well-timed wrench — and occasionally flooring the gas pedal. You can definitely get a touch out of alignment if you’re not on top of your major cooldowns (Drill and Hot Shot/Air Anchor), but I never feel the sense of rapidly cascading failure that I used to in
SB.

That said, I agree with the fact that some changes could definitely be useful in making the job feel more engaging, particularly by adding some secondary resource spenders to avoid overcapping on Battery/Heat.

Other than that, here are the things I’d like to see:

1. Some sort of change to Flamethrower. A potency increase, and maybe an enemy debuff? Applying a Slow effect could give it great use during big pulls. It’s just so underwhelming as is. A really middling potency increase over Spread Shot with the opportunity cost of building less heat. This ability looks so freaking rad, and which it felt as powerful to use as it seems like it ought to.

2. Honestly, bring back some more utility. If they want to keep DNC the star here, which I understand, maybe we could instead be the debuffer — give us Dismantle and Rend Mind! The animations are still there! I don’t want to be purely selfish. -__-

3. Wildfire needs... something. While I’m honestly happy it’s no longer the job’s defining ability, it feels so oddly unimpactful with its current potency and CD, especially since the process of using it is almost exactly the same as the regular Hypercharge windows. Here’s my buck wild idea for how to organically boost Wildfire’s damage... and have it feel very distinct from Hypercharging:

(The rest is basically theorycraft fan fiction. I know it’ll never happen, but it’s fun to think about.)

So, we all know that Hypercharge is about kicking things into Sonic mode, jamming your foot in the gas and zooming through your Heat Blasts and GR/R weaves. What if Wildfire... was the exact opposite? What if it were the equivalent of jamming on the e-brake and executing a perfect, graceful drift in the eye of a storm?

That’s right. What if Wildfire was used in tandem with Flamethrower?

Stay with me. For every tick of Flamethrower, Wildfire’s potency increases — and let’s have it work on an exponential scale, too: your first tick is worth 160 pot, second is 170, etc., working up to a final tick worth 250. This gives a total Wildfire potency of 2050 that’s weighted toward the back-end of the combo’s execution. (Plus, of course, Flamethrower’s base potency of 1000 over the 10 seconds.) [Basically, this would mean that every two minutes we’d have the potential for the equivalent of dealing a bit more than 4 Drills in a row. In other words, pretty awesome but probably not gamebreaking.]

Wildfire would become about playing a tactical game of chicken: how long do I dare to ramp up my damage while the battle and its mechanics are raging all around me? Are there times when it’s smarter to go for just six or seven Flamethrower ticks during a hectic phase, or do I delay WF slightly until I’ve got more freedom? Is there a perfect little spot I can find at juuust the right angle from the boss in order to stand my ground throughout several mechanics? It’s the perfect feel for a job boasting a move called Tactician.

Plus, can you imagine the warm, fuzzy feeling of seeing the numbers pop up for a 2050 potency move? I dunno. It seems like it could be fun, to me. ^__^

Why are people saying use torrent when ever? Using at 50 gives you more pile drivers/overdrives. Which is more dps since the durations increase. At the same rate as battery gained. Am I missing something?

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Originally Posted by Genbe197

Why are people saying use torrent when ever? Using at 50 gives you more pile drivers/overdrives. Which is more dps since the durations increase. At the same rate as battery gained. Am I missing something?

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The potency of pile drive increases if ur battery level is higher when he explodes.

Not a day goes by that I don't see someone ask about how much ping you need to play this job and not a day goes by that someone isn't disappointed when I'm forced to say that this class is still ping gated and unplayable for them after 2 years. Putting all other annoyances aside, I just can't understand how SE could've ignored the number one complaint through the whole of Stormblood and doubled down on the things that caused problems. Rapid Fire weaving was a problem with just 3 gcds and a couple of weaves. What do they do? Now you have 4 times more Rapid Fire in the form of Heat Blast and the same amount of ogcd weaves but why on earth would it be a problem!? What, the buff window is slightly more lenient? The core problem is still exactly the same and just as bad for higher ping players! Extremely frustrating that feedback is straight up ignored. They could've fixed this job in so many ways, even kept up the exciting speed aspect in many ways, but they decide to do it in the worst way possible, in way that was already given negative feedback about. But hey, at least everybody so busy pressing a million buttons and roleplaying with their cool robot that they won't have time to notice the problems.

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Originally Posted by Drayos

The potency of pile drive increases if ur battery level is higher when he explodes.

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Originally Posted by Drayos

And use golem at 100 and instantly blow it up for maximum potency

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That's not how it works. The duration of Automaton Queen and the potency of the skills she uses are linearly increased the more battery level you have. Exploding it early doesn't increase the damage. You can test this easily.
Even the tooltip of Pile Bunker specifies: 'Potency increases as Battery Gauge exceeds required cost at time of deployment". It has nothing to do with how much duration or whatever is left.

I played stormblood as a high ping mch the entire expansion and could still optimize and parse well.

Shadowbringers is FAR more punishing to high ping players than Stormblood ever was.

1.5s recast times have been a complaint about machinist for as long as they have been a thing and a pretty universal ones at that, they really have to go if they dont want to force people off the job.

To any low ping players saying that they would leave the job if they slowed it down: Id rather you had a CHOICE to leave the job due to not liking it than others being FORCED off the job due to their latency. Its not fair to people who live on the other side of america to design a job like this in a game with instances which are so inconsistent. Not to mention they put their servers on the very west edge of america which just destroys anyone on east coast.

Very unfun to just be told "its our class now go find something else to play" after 4 years.

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Originally Posted by Ayanumi

I played stormblood as a high ping mch the entire expansion and could still optimize and parse well.

Shadowbringers is FAR more punishing to high ping players than Stormblood ever was.

1.5s recast times have been a complaint about machinist for as long as they have been a thing and a pretty universal ones at that, they really have to go if they dont want to force people off the job.

To any low ping players saying that they would leave the job if they slowed it down: Id rather you had a CHOICE to leave the job due to not liking it than others being FORCED off the job due to their latency. Its not fair to people who live on the other side of america to design a job like this in a game with instances which are so inconsistent. Not to mention they put their servers on the very west edge of america which just destroys anyone on east coast.

Very unfun to just be told "its our class now go find something else to play" after 4 years.

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With this view, should we not just eliminate MCH? Give bard the visual ability to equip a gun. Because they will be exactly the same if you remove APM. I guess with the removal of that is just glamour since they will play exactly the same. That's boring.

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Originally Posted by Mistyregions

With this view, should we not just eliminate MCH? Give bard the visual ability to equip a gun. Because they will be exactly the same if you remove APM. I guess with the removal of that is just glamour since they will play exactly the same. That's boring.

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In no way would the removal of 1.5s recast times make MCH the same as BRD, we dont have any procs in our rotation anymore and we also dont have any DoT abilities, were you even thinking before you said this?
In your mind what are the difference that make MCH and BRD different? If the answer is only 1.5s recast times then you have a very surface layer view of the class in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Drayos

It would not fix. Reguardless to how they set out heated shot or hypercharge. You can’t weave beneath the 1.25 GCD you can’t actively double weave either.

Your dps wouldn’t be any higher realistically. Because if ur pings at a level u cant physically weave, ur missing DPS Throughout its entire gameplay

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It’s not about fixing it, it’s about minimising the issues it causes. Of course a low ping player is going to have a better experience, but it will very much increase the damage of a high ping player.

Look at it this way. As a high ping player, you press heat blast, it activates the GCD because it registered you as having pressed the button. Hypercharge then wears off, suddenly the server changes its mind and says you didn’t press heat blast in time, cancelling the action. You’ve just lost that entire GCD because you can’t make up the time lost to the action cancelling, you’ve lost 15 seconds off both ricochet and gauss round AND you’ve lost 200 potency off wildfire, all because 1 action didn’t go off in the .5 seconds you had to use it.

If heat blast was charged based, even if you are a little slower, you will always get that 5th heat blast, it will never start casting and then cancel on you. At worst you’ll miss a GCD during wildfire (not lose a GCD entirely, just miss getting it into the wildfire window) losing you 200 potency, that’s a significant step up for high ping players while changing nothing about the job for low ping players.

As for your previous post about charges causing MCH to need pre-loading. This is no more an issue than current hypercharge, because you can’t build heat outside of combat and if there’s trash packs beforehand, current MCH and pretty much any job already has that issue because they’ll all want pre-filled job gauges.

Now that I'm finally 80, it's time for me to give my 2 cents on machinist.

The good:
From a marketing standpoint I think I like the revamp. The new 700p gcds are fun to use, and the job is visually more appealing than it was in HW and SB.
Would be nice to have the option to continue using the rook autoturret at 80 though, or perhaps a glamour system similar to the one summoners have. Some people have said the robot looks out of place in the game's aesthetic and I kinda agree. I'd rather have a faust from the alexander raids.

The heat and battery gauges being usable at 50 but capping at 100 is nice from a gameplay standpoint. Gives some flexibility as to when you want to overheat/summon automaton. It's very valuable for quality of life when in places like dungeons or fights with random combat timings. I'm enjoying this way more than the super scripted stormblood rotation where you had to time your heat to reach 100 at the same time wildfire came off cooldown, 50 gauge is much easier to plan around.

Improvements:
Wildfire feels like it doesn't do enough damage for a 2 minute cooldown? It's strange that it can no longer crit or direct hit too. The reason old wildfire couldn't do so was because it scaled directly from damage you did; so if it took in a crit, and the final number could crit as well, it would have basically double crit which mean it could double dip from crit/dh. The current version that just deals flat potency increments doesn't have this issue, there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to crit or direct hit.

Air anchor and drill are integral to keep on cooldown in the current rotation, and as others have said the cooldown isn't easy to track from the small icon. I think giving both 2 charges would be an easy fix. It would make the job slightly easier to play yes, but I don't think anyone will argue mch isn't one of the hardest jobs to play optimally right now - definitely way more so than bard and dancer.

Flamethrower is still a very underwhelming level 70 skill. While it's true that at 250p per gcd for 4 gcds it's our strongest aoe after bioblaster, losing autoattacks and heat from other skills cut into those gains slightly. It feels like it needs to do something else to distinguish itself. In the first place it's kind of weird that a move called flamethrower doesn't interact with your heat gauge at all too.

Would it hurt to have autocrossbow reset the cooldown on gauss round/ricochet as well? MCH's niche is more burst aoe compared to bard that excels at sustained multidotting, they should at least excel at that. Even though autocrossbow is a dps increase over spread shot and heat blast in aoe situations, knowing you're losing the cd resets on those ogcds feels bad.

They could stand to do a bit more dps in general too. As the numbers look currently, it looks like they are behind monk and dragoon in certain fights right now. As the 3rd 'selfish' dps, they should be at the very least the 3rd highest dps only behind blm and sam. And before you tell me about 'ranged tax', this is from real fights already; monk and dragoon are losing uptime to mechanics and still doing more damage than mch.

Random:
I think barrel stablizer could be more interesting too. It's very useful to ensure you can wildfire quickly at the start of a fight of course, but I feel it could do a bit more.
What if worked in two ways: if below 50 heat, it works as normal and gives you another 50 heat, but if you were at 50 or more heat, it drains 50 heat and gives you 50 battery instead? It's a stablizer after all, it's more thematic if it works in both ways.

Currently there seems to be an issue where you actually generate more heat than you need from weaponskills, and when the time comes to wildfire you need to use barrel stablizer afterwards instead of before it, which is kind of weird and out of sync. It might alleviate that issue somewhat and give it more flexibility.
For people complaining about hypercharge ping dependency, if it was a dps gain to trade 1 hypercharge window for 1 extra automaton summon, it would at least reduce the incidence of hypercharge in the rotation a little when used like that.

I actually got carpal tunnel from MCH after a long binge in game haha. A change I'd like is possibly making Hyper charge make all of your weaponskills 2 sec GCD , Heat blast on a 4 second recast but reduces the CD on rico/gauss by 30 seconds and overheat last for 10 seconds to be slightly forgiving on heat blast.

I feel it would be much more fluid with the class as a whole that way and a bit more lax on peoples ping. Makes it a bit more forgiving too in case drill comes off CD and you need to go into hyper charge. I also sorta like it because I get an immediate feedback from heatblast to auto give 1 charge of gauss/rico instead of every 2 attacks. flows a bit better.

I've been playing FFXIV since the Beta (although just for a while) and then returned after Heavensward was announced. What got me so much into the game until now was the Machinist job. Being able to play the job one of my favourite characters from Final Fantasy Tactics (Mustadio).

After being a MCH main for a good while, over the course of the last 2 expansions (HW and StB) and experiencing the joy of raiding with it despite its shortcomings, I can't help but come to these forums and type down my frustration with the job right now...
For starters I'm Mexican and as such, having slightly high ping has been an issue while playing the game since forever, its a factor when deciding what jobs to play when bringing them to raids (like Ninja, for example). While I could feel the great disadvantages of playing MCH back in Heavensward and Stormblood, it has never felt as punishing as it does right now.

To elaborate on my experience so far: The extremely fast pace of the job doesn't take into account people who suffer from moderate to high pings, thus making the loss of resources the most evident culprit when calculating difference in potential DPS and the cause of much distress for players, I would imagine. For example having to sit on 3 charges of Ricochet and Gauss Round, because sometimes that is the only way you can get a proper 5x 1.5gcd "Rapid Fires" + 1x Regular GCD Wildfire (You would only be using Heat Blast in this scenario, without weaving at all between GCDs). Even after switching ISPs to improve my experience, it still remains the issue that sometimes I won't be able to play the job as its intended.

After experimenting for a while I noticed that Ricochet animation lock is the longest out of our predilect ogcd's and, in my case at least, the main reason I'm super scared to weave during Hypercharge + Wildfire windows. During such windows I've begun to only weave 1-2 Ricochets only as a means to bypass this issue. I'd imagine shortening the animation lock for this ability would solve most of my issues. I don't think I have the ammount of insight right now to propose any other kind of improvements, either that or slightly reworking the way Hypercharge works to make it better.

Regarding other job issues I've encountered so far its the weird Reassemble and Drill timers, although not as bad as the apparent Wildfire potency losses.

Things I would like to see kept going forward, but improved:
Flamethrower should build heat, It should also allow movement, albeit slowed as well as be manually aimed. I don't see how shooting flames out of your gun wouldn't build heat, and standing still while you flail around just feels like an arbitrary restriction. I think flamethrower would have a particularly good spot as an AoE opener to quickly build heat to transition into crossbow, and also as a damage boost when used with overheat on. (make it blue high-pressure flames) - This could only be used after the initial pull as flamethrower would still be on cooldown obviously.
Autocrossbow spamming the button and the animation resetting so soon looks and feels rather jarring. I think it would be better if this was a long cast thing like flamethrower that just continually fires until overheat is over or you override it with another ability. See Monster Hunter Heavy Bowgun Wyvernheart ability for inspiration. I also feel it should also provide the cooldown reduction heat blast does, atleast for Ricochet.
Bioblaster should be available at the same time as Drill. AoE low level feels terrible as all you can do is spam Spread Shot and with how much power creep there is most content devolves into AoE slug fests.
Reassemble renamed Reload/Charge-Shot and the old reload animation used instead of current one. Maybe make it cost 50 battery instead of a cooldown.

MCH I think is going to be needing a DPS buff with all this talk of SMN/RDM buffs going around. If it doesn't then it will likely be pushed to the sidelines in end game for double caster meta. For MCH a couple of things should change.
1) Queen needs to work with Wildfire. Its attacks should be treated the same as your own to stack up wildfire, the fact that it doesn't just bewilders me.
2)Reassemble should have an instant animation. Many times do I find myself ending a hypercharge with a drill ready and reassemble but no matter how fast I hit my buttons there is always a delay on the drill. The problem is 100% reassemble because without it I can get off an Air Anchor or a Drill after a hypercharge fairly easy.
3) Guass/Ritchotet feel like they need the buff. I don't think Heatblast needs the potency but guass/ritchotet do. 150 potency doesn't feel impactful enough to make me want to use them outside of hyperdrive simply because you spam them in between heatblasts. They don't feel like an important core. I think changing them to 200 potency would be perfectly reasonable.
4) What is really the point of flamethrower? Sure its a DPS gain if you let it run on two targets for 3 ticks but I mean who really does that?

I've noticed that Drill also has a weird animation lock that sometimes clips the GCD, is there any way to fix this? Playing MCH right now is causing me severe depression, lol

On the way MCH plays:
I really struggle to comment on this. I honestly love the way it plays right now, but I understand the frustration about latency and MCH. My ping to the servers is 82, and yet I have to play through a VPN in a mode that emulates 0 ping in order to be able to squeeze all my oGCDs into heat blast and still get off a full wildfire. Even then, there are times when I can't do this and miss a GCD in wildfire. I can't begin to imagine what it's like for people with substantially higher ping.


On MCH's position relative to other jobs:
MCH needs a bit of a buff right now. It's supposed to be a "selfish" DPS, but it does much less damage than SAM and BLM (with SAM also being a bit underpowered compared to BLM), and also does less personal (not just raid) damage than DRG and MNK. This problem goes a bit deeper than this simple statement, so I'd like to include a bit more:

- What MCH has that SAM and BLM do not have is tactician, but SAM has feint and BLM has addle. Feint and addle may cover only physical and magical damage, respectively, but the impact is stronger and it has half the cooldown of tactician. There is no reason that MCH should be anything more than a small (1-1.5%) amount behind these two jobs. Mobility on MCH is a helpful advantage, but Savage optimization is such that SAM and BLM don't lose more than a very small handful (if any, in some fights) of GCDs to mechanics.

- All 3 aiming jobs are not in the greatest place right now. The 1% role buff is giving us a spot in preferred compositions, but it's dangerously close to not being worth bringing an aiming job. When I say MCH needs a buff, I really mean that all three aiming jobs do. This is a MCH thread, however, so I'm mainly focusing on MCH's plight.