Can someone help me understand the heat gauge?

So just picked up MCH and this heat gauge is a weird mechanic to me.

First off the description. It says when overheated it increases damage by 10%. Is this 10% on top of the 5% from gauss barrel? Or does it replace the 5% from gauss barrel, in other words, is overheated, in total, a 15% damage increase or a 10% damage increase?

Next, do I want to overheat it? Overheat seems to be a bonus and, at least right now at 60, there seem to be no advantages to not overheating it. Yet all my skills want to stop me overheating it. Ammo stops the heat increase, quick reload reduces the heat and I just got cooldown which greatly reduces the heat for an attack that's weaker than clean shot.

Looking over the skills I think the idea is to overheat during wildfire and get as many host potency attacks in while you can then stay between 50 abs 95 while you wait for your next wildfire rotation. As for the percent buff I'm not sure. Still leveling my mch.

That was my first thought, but then ammo stopping and reducing the heat gauge seems really counter intuitive. Do I just not use ammo until I'm overheated? Do I just spam hot shot for the extra 5 heat gauge per GCD to get there faster? That's what I'm finding weird about it, it seems like we want to overheat but everything wants to stop that happening.

I'm on my phone so excuse typos!
The heat gauge is something that at 60-63 you want to try and align with overheating your wildfires. Your 62 skill Cooldown will help this by reducing heat by 25. The magic occurs at 64 with a new trait that turns your 1-2-3 into heated shots that are MUCH more powerful than before! But these only occur over 50 heat and the 10 seconds of over heating. That is why you have so much heat reduction, to keep you between 50-95 heat. You are consistently strongest at this point.

As for asking if you should spam hot shot to get heat- no. It's a potency loss to hit hot shot that many times instead of just 1-2-3 your way back up if Barrel Stablizer and Flamethrower aren't available. Also avoid Quick Reload til 60 heat in this situation.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

That was my first thought, but then ammo stopping and reducing the heat gauge seems really counter intuitive. Do I just not use ammo until I'm overheated? Do I just spam hot shot for the extra 5 heat gauge per GCD to get there faster? That's what I'm finding weird about it, it seems like we want to overheat but everything wants to stop that happening.

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Take this with a grain of salt since I'm still leveling mine. My wildfire rotation will be something like this at 70 (tweaks to be had I'm sure)

http://ffxivrotations.com/s7v

The idea is to get close to overheat > setup ammo and buffs > let flamethrower take me into overheat > wildfire > use as many ogcd and GCD as I can fit in 10s

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Originally Posted by Muziko

Take this with a grain of salt since I'm still leveling mine. My wildfire rotation will be something like this at 70 (tweaks to be had I'm sure)

http://ffxivrotations.com/s7v

The idea is to get close to overheat > setup ammo and buffs > let flamethrower take me into overheat > wildfire > use as many ogcd and GCD as I can fit in 10s

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Your Wildfire will be big but your overall damage will go through the floor because after wildfire pops you had already used both of your best means of getting heat back to 50 after the 10 second delay on your Gauss Barrel.

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Originally Posted by Greedalox

Your Wildfire will be big but your overall damage will go through the floor because after wildfire pops you had already used both of your best means of getting heat back to 50 after the 10 second delay on your Gauss Barrel.

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That's a great point. I'll look into a better way to optimize it. Thanks =3
-keyo

The TL;DR of it is, don't overheat unless you have barrel stabilizer to put you back into the heated shots because its a huge dps loss otherwise. You lose an incredible amount of DPS using flame thrower to go from 0 heat to 50 heat, and You can't use ammo while manually building heat back up with the 1-2-3 combo so you are even more at the mercy of random procs to help sustain your dps. As a community of MCH we are hoping flamethrower gets adjusted somehow to not be a total waste as an alternate to barrel stabilizer, or that overheat will be boosted in damage to counteract the long period of lost damage afterwards, or something. Right now it just doesn't quite make sense to discourage/punish overheating so harshly, but then make it give you a damage boost. It's a trap, basically. You think you want to overheat, but everything is so punishing if you do. I'm not sure if another job can lose so much DPS from a single incorrect GCD press and we're already lowest.

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Originally Posted by Id_Slayer

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Flamethrower has 4 primary uses IMO. One is in a group setting opener that delays your WF a bit to get group buffs- so it is used to go to 90 heat from 50 in that case.

The second is that in dungeon settings overheating isn't a bad thing on trash packs, so you Spread Shot until overheating, continue spread shotting til 1 second left on Overheat and then Snapshot the damage bonus on Flamethrower for the full 10 seconds. It's very strong AOE in that sense.

The third option is when you don't have issues with overheating anymore and can use it as a 1 tick of damage OGCD.

And lastly as a booboo fixer if you're not very good at heat management yet.

I just don't even bother with overheating. The amount of work needed to do the mechanic "properly" isn't worth the small dps increase. We're still at the bottom of the charts with or without an "optimal" rotation so why even care?

Just wait until they buff the damage wildfire and overheating do and reduce the time it takes to recover.

It has been a very long time since I did anytime with my MCH. And decided that I don't care if it is at the bottom, that is what I want to play. With that can someone show me a non- 70 rotation.

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Originally Posted by HolyNirvana666

We're still at the bottom of the charts with or without an "optimal" rotation so why even care?

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That is the most crybaby excuse I have ever read for not doing something. "We're the lowest DPS so why bother Q.Q"

One class will always (ALWAYS) be on the bottom, that's not an excuse to not try.

My 'point' is that the amount of effort required to to an optimal rotation is far, far too extensive for the negligible increase in DPS. Until our kit gets some bigger number tweaks, mainly to wildfire/overheated damage there's no point in attempting to overheat/wildfire. You're only doing like, 100 less DPS if you just keep yourself between 50 the whole time and never overheat.

lv66 (just)

havent tooled with barrel stabilizer in rotations yet. most tooling around has been on Shisui runs. (all rotations with gb, obviously)

on trash i drop bishop > hypercharge > spreadshot x4 > hs > reload > rf > wf > h split > ricochet > h slug > gr > h split > h clean > qr > h slug > reassemble > h clean

i use the same rote on bosses but use rook instead of bishop. rinse and repeat, pop cooldown when my heat hits 85, sometime i push to 95

not sure how much bstab will change my current style, but i dig the flash and blast. would like a little more pot on 1-2-3 and grenado shot back, but devs will adjust. hopefully.

cos ffviii gunblade

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Originally Posted by Greedalox

As for asking if you should spam hot shot to get heat- no. It's a potency loss to hit hot shot that many times instead of just 1-2-3 your way back up if Barrel Stablizer and Flamethrower aren't available. Also avoid Quick Reload til 60 heat in this situation.

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And that's the part where it feels like the ammo and heat mechanic are working against one another. Without ammo, you can't efficiently 1-2-3 because of the RNG limiting the way our 1-2-3 works. But if you do use ammo, you don't get any heat.

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Originally Posted by Georashi

And that's the part where it feels like the ammo and heat mechanic are working against one another. Without ammo, you can't efficiently 1-2-3 because of the RNG limiting the way our 1-2-3 works. But if you do use ammo, you don't get any heat.

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It stops working against you and works only for you once you get Barrel Stablizer/Flame Thrower and stop accidentally overheating a lot. Quick Reload is a god send for not having to use Cooldown a lot- it reduces your heat by 10 and makes the next shot not give heat so it's effective at not going overboard on heat.

Don't know if this helps I know nothing about machinist but my friends said the job doesn't get better till you get to the higher lv. Uhh you don't really want to overheat unless you need to bust and enemy down or at the end of a phase change. Uhh something about keeping heat at like 70 or something idk.... :D

Don't know if this helps I know nothing about machinist but my friends said the job doesn't get better till you get to the higher lv. Uhh you don't really want to overheat unless you need to bust and enemy down or at the end of a phase change. Uhh something about keeping heat at like 70 or something idk.... :D

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Originally Posted by Greedalox

It stops working against you and works only for you once you get Barrel Stablizer/Flame Thrower and stop accidentally overheating a lot. Quick Reload is a god send for not having to use Cooldown a lot- it reduces your heat by 10 and makes the next shot not give heat so it's effective at not going overboard on heat.

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Yet flamethrower means getting close and standing still, not something you want or can do at any time during an encounter. I recall many times of frustration withy the old gauss barrel. Machinist is not a class build to stand still! The other is on a two minute cooldown. There will be times in an encounter where you will need to rely on 1-2-3ing your way up to 50 again, but we can't really do that without a DPS decrease of some sort.

It just seems counter intuitive. I'd say it'd be a lot easier if the 50 heat requirement was removed and you just had to manage the heat gauge in its entirety. Double the heat without a non-working downtime would make it far more efficient to get the ammo rotations in without having it work against you for half the gauge which means it also removes the wind up time when going from overheat to cooldown and back to gauss barrel.

It's a complete mess at the moment and lots of changes need to come through. Personally, I'd suggest playing Brd if you want something that keeps lots of movement and benefits your team.

Been wanting to play my MCH as he was one of my mains in HW and I'd like a support dps to go with my full dps SAM, so I can fill in a couple different roles.

But it may just be easier to go back and level my BRD.

It's kind of ridiculous that they took 95% worth of damage increase off of mch, one of the lowest dps classes already, and gave it nothing in return. wildfire has gone from doing about 20k per rotation to about 6k and the recast was only shaved by 1/3. They shaved the class down but then didn't retool it to fix what they shaved so now the lowest dps has just gone even lower.

Don't avoid Overheating, but plan for it. MCH is a burst dps. Burst when the time is right, and don't hold back. Practice, experiment, work at it. Refusing to use the tools given to you - whether they need fixing or not - gimps you, your damage, and your understanding of the job significantly.

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Originally Posted by ValentineSnow

wildfire has gone from doing about 20k per rotation to about 6k

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Your wildfire rotation is very off if you're only in the 6k range. Your mild ones that aren't part of overheated 3rd 5th and 7th Overheated Wildfires should be hitting at least 10k.

I'm looking forward to unlocking MCH, and haven't played it yet, so i cant comment too much on it. However I played another MMO that utilized a "Keep in the middle of this gauge for extra sweet spot damage" mechanic. Rom my experience with that other game, it made the class a frustrating and draining experience and I ended up ignoring the gauge for the most part, even if it plummeted my dps. So when i saw a similar mechanic appear on MCH I simply groaned. Who knows? When i finally get to HW content it might not be all that bad. However some of these comments are making me think otherwise.