Just replying to thread to help add my voice in hopes Yoshi-P and the development team will hear our plea's a little better.
Please learn how to play the machinist job and demonstrate competent meaningful changes to the job. It seems the community of players and the developers do not view the job in the same way and do not assess the job's capabilities the same way. I wish you would provide more information as to the reasoning for the developers' decision making when making changes to the Machinist job, so we can understand why you have chosen to make it such a poor performer.
Currently, Machinist and other physical ranged jobs have retained lower DPS overall in favor of party buff contributions as well as, in compensation for the increased movement flexibility during combat. However, with your development combat team failing to create engaging and complicated movement in combat -specifically adding complication to melee roles-, this mindset is now incorrect. The developer mindset must change and make combat significantly more challenging for Melee DPS so fewer of them are capable of maintaining their significantly higher DPS over physical ranged dps.
If you will not do this to melee DPS, then please consider giving machinist a party buff once more. You removed this hypercharge ability in the past but you did not buff machinist damage to compensate. Please add healthy challenge and party buff to the role so we can be seen as a more competent job at the highest levels of player skill in challenging content. Please consider some way to reduce punishment upon death due to our gauge build up being lost on death and this is a significant portion of our DPS compared to other jobs in the physical ranged role when they die.
Please make flamethrower and the queen robot more engaging to use. There should be a single target and a multi-target option for the queen robot or perhaps a damage synergy between the queen robot and some of our other moves so we have more DPS while the queen is out.
I may not be very smart with more complex and nuanced suggestions, but it is clear that the development team did not put forth a comprehensive, proper effort to assess the machinist job's current state of play. Or, the team did, but then the developer viewpoint is vastly different of the job than the player base and rectification of this issue needs to take place. Please do not make us wait 2 years. Please.
Thank you for taking time to read my additional comment to this.
