Another thread about MCH or in other words "Yoshi Please!"

So I've been toying around with figuring out how to start a thread like this. There's really only one way I can think of that works first. These are my opinions laid in no uncertain terms about the problem with MCH as a whole. I states these knowing that people will disagree, and that's fine. For this I'll show what I felt from 3.0. How I feel about 4.0. And my overall difficulties and problems. In no order anyways. Note that this is not talking about it’s player strength and instead talking about the Feel of the Job.

I should state that this is going to be a bit wordy so I’m going to be making liberal use of the edit function to try and categorize this in bite sized ways. Those that want to cut to the chase should just skip to the end. Make special notice that I won’t talk about the dungeon experience because Yoshi stated in a live letter that lower level content is getting some sort of pass.

It's almost impossible to talk about this at all without talking about how wildly different MCH are now than they were in 3.0. Which goes far FAR beyond losing cast times which we never respected in the first place. So this brings us to our first topic.

1) Machinist how I understand it and why I think 4.X could use some work

How 3.x and 4.x MCH felt for me

Reload, Rapidfire, and Wildfire

We're going to talk about the proc based game plan and what this means to the Machinist gameplan as a whole.

3.0: In Heavensward a MCH had cast times that were managed by ammo. Ammo also helped deal with your otherwise unassured 1-2-3 combo. You used ammo for Wildfires(!!). Used procs for mildfires(...). The proc based gameplay was a deterring factor for some, but getting a proc gave a better reward. You got the ability to fire a shot without a cast time. This improved your wildfire by number of procs. You had ways to ensure better wildfires by using rapidfire to circumvent this. And your procs lined in with wildfires to give them a boost to damage. The in betweens of these instances had temporary satisfaction given with reloads and quick reloads which guaranteed procs and felt good.
The wildfire centric gameplan tied into wildfire and turned it into a mechanic all it's own. More on this later.

4.0: In Stormblood you use ammo for every part of every rotation in every situation. Wildfires and mildfires are the same thing lending to no deviation. And the time between wildfires are sprinkled with exorbitant amounts of ammo use. This gives the playstyle fewer downtimes between reload and from that reload to wildfire. As a result, though you weave less, the rotation is more "active". However as the rotation is more active the window for acceptable mistakes is smaller. You don’t get the 1:30 to think “now how am I going to sync blank back up with wildfire”

Cast-times Gauss Barrel and even more Procs

I know Bards were not happy about their cast times. The so called bow mages made it very clear how they felt about casting their arrows. However for MCH our entire gameplan worked dramatically different. After they fixed up Gauss Barrel we had a few ways to manage our cast-times

• With Procs
• With Ammo
• With Rapidfire

There were 3 different mechanics that were brought in that were part of relatively short cooldowns that helped manage your gameplan. Rapidfire was almost always used for wildfire but ammo and procs were used in between them. "Use" is a bit much for procs as they were much more of a "happen" than an "activate" but it was something that you consciously stacked up so that if a fight demanded movement you had shots stored to cover the GCDs you would normally have loss when moving from one place to the other and rapidfire protected your wildfires.


Difference:

• Because of the change in mechanics, there are no wildfire/mildfire dynamics.
• The reward for procs and ammo are both diminished. Unliked before where proc's felt like a lucky bonus and using ammo felt good. Proc's are just something that happens before you use more ammo that you'll always have access to. Making procs more redundant and less satisfying to get. With the removal of casts the importance of procs has diminished.
• The need to constantly use ammo as a whole means that not having a rotation based around it from start to finish of any given uptime gives you drops that increase in severity.
• The gameplan is far more rotational than it was reactionary because the procs in our rotation often won't change the order or sequence we use things.

TL;DR
I don't particularly mind the swap from casting to instant. As a whole I still prefer 3.x MCH for reasons I'll list later. I should note that I do like 4.X MCH. On one hand it does feel nice having "true" mobility. I'm almost certain that if the rest of our abilities remained they same and/or proc's carried something BESIDES just being another step in the combo my opinion would change dramatically. But, we were designed with cast times in mind and the rest of our kit didn’t make the change with us. So a lot of it feels like dated mechanics slapped into a new body. They have a word for that. Refurbishment.

2) The Heat Gauge “problem”

Now that that's out of the way. Let's talk about exclusive new MCH things.

Job Mechanics and the Heat Gauge
Now I'm sure we've talked about this to death but I'll mention it again. 4.x MCH felt extremely punishing because of the heat gauge. However I believe the changes in 4.05 were made for good reasons but didn't really end up working too well for job feel.

Heat and the Heat Gauge
4.0: The heat was extremely punishing at launch. At any point you were at risk of conflagrating so maintaining the so called "sweet spot" ended up being more important. This put a lot of pressure on MCH because unlike other jobs they had to constantly fight with their job gauge. However it also felt like the heat gauge was a replacement for cooldown timers and management. All to often in 3.x I always used to ask my FC "how long until next mechanic" or if we were in a dungeon "how many pulls before the boss" so I knew how to manage my cooldowns. Instead of constantly worrying about times in a fight or instant you know worry about heat level. It was a lot more visual. Because unlike the problem with managing long cooldowns the heat gauge was very visible. Which is why it stung a lot more when you overheated versus the hypothetical potency you could lose in the background in 3.x from not managing your cooldowns well enough. These problems were amplified by the still low return of MCH at that time. You had to work hard and essentially focus on 3 things at once (cooldowns, heat, and mechanics) and had to do all three perfectly to not far significantly into last place.

The heat gauge was a replacement to the things we lost from HW but consolidated into one mechanic and made transparent. All the weaves we lost from OGCDs and the cooldowns we no longer managed in B4B/HE/RS were what the heat gauge replaced. So losing it hurt "more" because essentially it's like flubbing all at once, but it shifted the difficulty from the former to the latter. This was a good thing because it meant MCH didn't lose it's relative edge when it came to being execution heavy.

4.05: The heat gauge changes were a solution to a problem. Effort vs Reward
Managing Heat Gauge was High Effort : Low Reward.
There was two ways to fix this

1. Go High Effort : High reward
2. Go Low Effort : Low reward

Switching to a low effort low reward probably resulted in MCH that had problems with managing heat gauge, but for others who dealt with and conquered that frustration it was more of an inconvenience and an abrupt defanging of our job gauge. It would be a lie to say that managing heat was so frustratingly terrible. I hated having to deal with it because even if I did manage it well, the return was low. I (and most other people I imagine) would have been happier with it if the return was higher. That’s not to say the change was exclusively bad. On one hand it made the job more accessible to play. Has this drawn more people to the job? Doesn’t seem that way. But that's another topic altogether. Did it make players like myself a bit annoyed? Sure. But that's unimportant. The bigger changes are to what our class mechanic is what we’re talking about now.

Do I like 4.05 MCH. Not exactly. Yes it's a lot easier for me to do well. But it keeps me noticing my lack of notice for the heat gauge. The heat gauge in general is simply boring and unengaging now. Some people like that. I do not. I don’t mind if it’s easy to handle but it needs to be engaging. "unengaging" is not why I mained MCH in HW.

Tangent Time

I should mention that ironically I came back to FFXIV and have been subbed since when heavenward launched. Initially I was sold on AST. And mind you while I do have an AST at max and will always level one, what I fell in love with was MCH. Everything including Gauss Barrel (ignoring it being not… optimal on release) was great. I don't think I ever played a job that clicked more with me than MCH did. The reason I say it's ironic? Look up the brightest star in Orion and the brightest star in Leo

Heat Gauge vs Other Job Gauges
With the aforementioned changes to the heat gauge. I can't help but think about what the MCH is compared to other jobs and how our job stacks up with its special mechanics. To borrow from myself:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Elnidfse

There's also the overheating payoff in an effect different than pure numbers. People are forgetting special job interactions. A thing that non healer roles have in spades. MCH is just flat out boring in this regard.
On the top of our new UI
BRD: Pitch perfect
DRG: Nastrond
NIN: Hellfrog, Bhavacakra, Ten Chi Jin
SAM: Hissatsus
BLM: Foul
RDM: Enchanted melee (never you mind their proc based gameplan in general)
SMN: Bahamut
MNK: The Forbidden Chakra
DRK: Blood Spiller, Quietus, (and Delirium to a lesser extent)
WAR: Steel Cyclone, Upheaval, Onslaught, Fell Cleave, Decimate

And then on the complete friggin opposite side of this spectrum
MCH: 30 potency increase for 3 attacks
And if you overheat?
MCH: Negligible DPS gain followed by a DPS lockout
And that's it. That's all we get. Sure our abilities change but they're the same abilities. Just slightly stronger.

So other jobs get unique abilities and we get nothing.

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Nothing is a bit much. I mean we as MCH get Cooldown. This ability was more engaging in 4.0 and not engaging at all anymore in 4.05 because you hardly ever get the privilege to use it often outside of wildfires and the single cooldown that you'll use (on the assumption that you never overheat ever) is pretty mediocre on its own. Would you compare cooldown to Foul in regards to satisfaction to use? Of course not.

TL;DR
The heat gauge as a mechanic as of 4.05 feels redundant and the abilities that interact with it feel lackluster. The fact that it’s not a buildup mechanic like every other job makes it feel especially worse/boring because there’s no big payoff and only sustain.

3) Abilities or (“Man flamethrower kind of feels like it sucks”)

The Burning Issue

Flamethrower against the 70
The job gauge of other jobs allow or add things that interact with them in meaningful ways. MCH job gauge is just a meter that allows you to continue behaving normally but changes your animations a little. It's not like it rewards "extra" damage. So then what other comparisons can we make? How about level 70 abilities!

Quote:

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• BRD Refulgent Arrow
• DRG Nastrond
• MNK Brotherhood
• RDM Verholy
• SMN Bahamut
• BLM Foul
• NIN Ten Chi Jin
• SAM Hissatsu: Guren
• DRK The Blackest Night
• PLD Passage of Arms (aka can I passage of arms this)
• WAR Inner Release
• SCH Aetherpact
• WHM Plenary Indulgence
• AST Sleeve Draw
• MCHFlamethrower

Regardless of how people feel about PI and Aetherpact each difference either adds something or contributes to large role specific contribution. For DPS and Warrior (our fellow DPS) it's damage. For tanks it's mitigation of some sort. For non AST healers it's heals. For AST it's the amazingly amazing Sleevedraw. For MCH its hands down the weakest (if not most lackluster) level 70 in the game. To get damage comparable to even foul (a single ability) it requires 10 seconds of channeling and LOCKS, YOU, IN, PLACE.

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I think the one person who's with us in this is MNK. Or I would like to say but my MNK friend is pretty okay with brotherhood. Much sought after rDPS increases? An ability to shove more stacks into you by having your allied physical DPS toil away. No... Flamethrower is a class all on it's on.

https://www.famitsu.com/news/201705/31134240.html

Quote:

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Yoshida: I think the challenge of the job has changed. With the removal of the casting time to raise damage, we added the heat gauge. It will be fundamental to the job to maintain a high heat gauge without overheating. The feeling should be like a temptation to overheat to achieve burst damage, but with an associated disadvantage of doing so. You can use Flamethrower as an AoE attack, but it will be more important to use it to manage the heat gauge.

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Our level 70 attack ability. Which application is already limited by being a subpar AoE that's a dps loss to use single target (unlike, bahamut or foul or anything) is designed to be used the least amount of time possible for as little damage as possible to simply make your heat gauge rise a tick. And this is our level 70 ability. If they removed this ability I guarantee you MCH would find ways to adapt just fine. And that's the problem.

It’s rather useless besides. Sure you need it now in 4.05 to overheat but back in 4.0...
Oh you overheated and barrel stabilizer is down? Better use hotshot because it's actually a better idea than to even touch that flamethrower button because that will be a DPS loss to use. And mind you I don’t think barrel stabilizer and flamethrower should be equal. But flamethrower should have been at least a better option than spamming hotshot…

But the worst part is. Flamethrower feels like it's the reason the rest of our kit in regards to AoE feels so neutered. We lost our super sick grenado shot. We lost potency on spread. We lost a strong hypercharge. Bishop got shipped to nerf island. And what we gained was an AoE attack that comes with so much baggage you don't or can't use it in add situations in the raid that has them and begrudgingly use it in dungeons because the flames have as much impact as these threads have in contributing actual job changes.
If all it’s meant to be is a utility tool, then why do we get it at 70? It’s not even as large impact as barrel stabilizer and is terrible for its job outside of pushing for two cooldowns in your wildfires that you don’t overheat. A whopping 80 potency. Ironically the same amount of potency you’d get if you used it to overheat bringing us to a hypothetical 160…
I don't want flamethrower as it exists if it's only a thing because they took away other abilities and nerfed the existing ones.

And outside of pre-wildfire heat management it's still useless even IN AoE situations we have now because it's married to heat management. You're not about to crank out a flamethrower even FOR the ninjas in V3S because netwise you end up suffering from your lockout from overheating and the loss of fine tuning for your wildfires which will impact you greatly immediately after the adds drop and much larger for your next overheat. Not to mention what happens when your cooldowns desync if you DO take an overheat to optimize flamethrower damage. So in general it feels like we're balanced around staying in 50-90 heat at near all times. "But what about overheat" you say? We'll talk about that next.

TL;DR
Flamethrower doesn’t measure up to any jobs unique 70 ability and feels terrible to use. This is ignoring that it’s terrible to use in single target and when stacked against other level 70’s that do AoE, is an outlier in that regard.

4) It’s another “Is overheating worth using” episode.

Overheating and the lack of Clarity

Overheating
People spent large amounts of time figuring out if overheating is worth it. It's not even a local issue. Players around the world have been musing if they should ever bother with overheating. The job manual says nothing, the numbers paint a puzzling picture, and the actuality is far different than mathematical theory.

Gun Cat said is best so I'll leave it here:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gun-Cat

The sole fact that people need to spread sheet out diferent scenarios to ascertain if a class mechanics is useful or not should tell the development team that they need to look at this again.

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If you deal with lag or have any sort of execution hitch, Overheating ends up being far not worth it. And even if you execute it perfectly it's less substantial than every job action listed above. It's not even on par with a gain from using an extra weapon skill. And that's when you pair it with wildfire. But the worst part? Nobody knows still. Like everybody “knows” Mathematically where overheating stands. But nobody “knows”. In reality things differ far greatly than in practice. Mathematically overheat is a (small) gain. But in practice that gain is so low that people don’t even know if it’s worth it. Leitcro in this excellent thread spent time running it through spreadsheets.
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...e-my-findings.
Aiuri talked about it in a post in an excellent thread here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._weak/dkev7or/
And I’ve thrown together my own sheets that ultimately just make me more confused. Even if you go by parse alone the benefit of overheating by itself is not enough to push you out of your min-max ranges. Which means it’s very possible to notice no gain from overheating. Assuming it’s even meant to be a gain

TL;DR Nobody knows if overheating is worth the effort. Lots of people ignore overheating as a mechanic and suffer little to not at all for it.

5) Wildfire/Mildfire/Not So Wild Fire

Our poor poor wildfire.
Remember when I mentioned I would talk about wildfire later? That is now.

Wildfire

Wildfire
The only indisputable part of this entire shindig is that wildfire has been defanged. It's not an event that happens outside of your rotation that you set everything up to. It's PART of your rotation and a rather low one at that.

In 3.X

Wildfire was the end all be all and why our jump presence was high. Sure you couldn't take your wildfire with you and go but you sure as heck could design rotations around having it up when it comes up . It felt great having a wildfire blow up and a boss gets flat out chunked. Even as a mechanic Wildfire was fun. You threw this thing on an enemy and you got to have your own personal DPS race to pack in as much damage as you could in as little time as possible to see it explode spectacularly for 28k and such. It was gorgeous! The optimization of Wildfire was so omnipotent that you could put an entire rotation on it's back and it'd take that and smile. Wildfire was so important to MCH that our entire rotation was revolved around them.

In short:

• Wildfires were our entire gameplan
• Wildfires blew up for big pretty numbers
• The Wildfire / Mildfire dynamic helped break up monotony
• There was less to plan a fight around with the only things you cared about being "time to plan around this boss jumping so it doesn't take my wildfire"

And now you have new wildfire.

in 4.x

Alongside less bullets and less time, this shorter cooldown Newfire (because that's what I'm calling this now) makes even Mildfire roll in it's grave. Whereas Wildfire was the destination Newfire is the journey. In 4.x Newfire is just another part of your rotation, and a rather soft hitting lackluster one at that. I've seen stone fours crit for more than my Wildfire. I know it's a small complaint because MAYBE mathematically it ends up equaling out. But it sure doesn't feel like it. Newfire just feels like something that will lose me my DPS if I don't engage perfectly without any of the satisfaction. It doesn't even feel like a DPS race. Just something I throw that out and because my other cooldowns are conveniently also up, I just use them as well.

In conclusion:

• The loss of the wildfire mildfire dynamic made all wildfires the same
• They last short so feel less awesome to activate
• A pro is that you don't have to worry about an enemy jumping away with your wildfire
• They are a part of our rotation, not the core of our game plan

It’s mostly about the mentality of a hit. Wildfire felt great because it FELT like it contributed a larger portion of our overall damage and it felt like every tool the job had was meant to feed into Wildfire. We put our eggs in the Wildfire basket, optimized around it, and were rewarded. Even our sad sad Mildfires felt pretty good because it made procs feel better. It also softened the blow of a single miscast in your normal rotation because as long as that cast wasn’t Wildfire related it didn’t matter as much. This took some of the edge off and in general felt great.

TL;DR
New Wildfire isn’t that satisfying to use. It blows up for low damage and having more of then makes each individual one feel weak.

6) Obligatory suggestions part

Suggestions
Most of the ideas I have for changes really don't exist well. There's also a ton of change threads. But because I was told these are necessary I'll try to apply some.

• Make heat gauge management a kinetic experience again and raise the reward for doing it well.
• Give us something that rewards 50-90 heat management that isn't the equivalent of "able to do normal damage".
• Give cooldown back
• Find a way to make proc's engaging again. In 3.x this was removing cast times. Maybe let us use a empowered cooldown or something like that.
• Give us wildfire back. I know I know. I can't compare different abilities in a vacuum. But many jobs can pull out of their basic rotation an ability that hits as hard or harder than my hardest hitting wildfire. Hell old wildfire hit harder than my hardest hitting wildfire.
• Find a way to balance flamethrower.
• Give us our AoE back.
• Return the wildfire/mildfire dynamic.
• Adjust overheat to either make it clear we shouldn't do it or make it clear we can do it
• Remove the massive potency losses for having even a single cooldown clipped by a GCD

TL;DR
Changes are hard and any suggestion by me is useless because I don’t even know if changes in any capacity that affect mechanics are possible this expansion.

I know that’s relatively hard to do since the only thing we really have is tweaking numbers right? In that case I just want wildfire back. Whatever is necessary, even if our sustain takes a hit. I want wildfire back and I want to use cooldown again and care about using it. I want the ability to FEEL rewarded for managing my gauge and not feel like I’m fighting against it (or in the case now, ignoring it).

6) Conclusion or "it's finally over"

Conclusion
When I say I prefer 3.X MCH. I mean I prefer certain aspects that it had that current MCH is missing:

I miss the elation from getting procs. The constant weaving. The feeling of landing that wildfire just right. The relative forgiveness and fluctuation of your rotation. I miss the stellar AoE and the small things like promoting in between pulls in a dungeon so I can put up my TP just a bit to get me to the end of the next super pull. I miss the big numbers that was wildfire and the slow burn down from it that was always just a slow moving fuse to the next big wildfire. Remember how good it was when you did a mildfire and your procs landed just right that once in a hundred chance? I want that back.

I DO like 4.X MCH:
I do indeed enjoy the "faster" rotation even if it's lost a lot of things you weave with it. I liked the initial concept of the heat gauge, even if the payoff wasn't that big. And if overheat was better I'd enjoy that too. If they replaced barrel stabilizer to its 120 second it'd give us our wild mild dynamic it be terrific if they buffed overheat. But given how that mechanic works I’m not sure if that’s even possible. Finally flamethrower is cool (too look at). Just not to use. I wish it was our “big cooldown” or was even desirable to use outside of heat management but as that’s not why it’s made, I hope it gets removed from our level 70 and put where we normally got grenade shot.

I hope a solid balance can be reached so that the things that a lot of people take for granted from the 3.X MCH is returned. Or at the very least I want to be able to have places to go. The “rotation” now is rather simple and boring. Making it accessible for players who are curious and yet interesting to people who like nuances or a modicum of difficulty that’s not just exclusively “never messing up any part of the basic rotation ever” would be better. Because the alternative is not fun for anybody.

A bit wordy and probably going to be the last time a make a post this large. But I figure for something that I feel a certain way about, there’s no better way to do it than to do it as in depth as possible. Here’s hoping that the feelings of all MCH reach Yoshi and he talks about any part of this. The thought of waiting until an undisclosed point in August for changes that (probably won’t) happen isn’t appealing, but it’s all we have. Thank you for reading and/or skipping straight to the end.

Amazing thread; Out of all threads being made for MCH's, this one is great because it covers just about everything and it also brings irrefutable evidence with math and top players.
I like how you leave it clear that this is not meant to be how good MCH is in DUNGEONS because DUNGEONS and TRIALS are not to be taken into consideration in end-game, the real considerations are in Savage RAIDS with high-end gear and not even our japanese overlords are pleased with how MCHs are at the moment.

The optimal-rotation for the long wildfire we had with these abilities I no longer recall their names was something so satisfying to do back in HW, reaching above and beyond 20k at the end of the explosions really put MCH in their place as a "DPS-checker", right now peoples say we still are all about bursts, but SAM's can hit 25k with apparently no effort, but just a 1-2-3 rotation.

I agree that suggestions are useless at this point because apparently SE can spinoff/misunderstand anything.
I particularly do not enjoy the "faster" opener because apparently it is meant also to be low-rewarding, the HW one was long BUT extremely satisfying and playing MCH well back then meant actually something, now you can't tell when a MCH is good or not because I am still waiting for a MCH holding 4k AVG DPS. (If anyone knows any, please link me to it)

I don't know what MCHs are supposed to be anymore because we aren't supportive like others, we don't burst well enough to be DPS-Checkers like the others, we are more like jack-of-all trades but known for nothing?

I deeply love this job but I wanna feel like I'm doing more for my static.
I am NOT satisfied with MCH position right now and I am doing something about it, which is Lv Up my BRD, which I hope I'll be taking it to raids by the weekend!
I am not part of the 1% first-day-completionist but I sure AM competitive and I do care about being useful in my raid, being just "good" doesn't cut for me, I wanna be pulling numbers like the big kids (aKa BRDs pulling 4k avg).

If my job doesn't allow me to be pair the "good player" AVG dps (which I assume its 4k) then I am swapping.
I've quit WoW because they killed BDK and it was the only class I truly enjoyed in that game, it started suffering the same issues as MCH is right now, in PUGs peoples would start threatening to kick you if you weren't as good as a "x" class.
Where exactly is the fun in being marginalized?

I am talking about SAVAGE RAIDS here; I am not complaining that I can't kill Zenos under 2 minutes, I don't even run dungeons with MCH, it is what I RAID with.
I also do not care about PvP. (BDKs were good at PvP too, despite being the best of the trash tanks in end-game content).

Savage raids are pretty much the only reference I care about. Yoshi said "wait till savage". I waited till savage. I still don't like how MCH feel and perform in savage. There are tons of threads on here and reddit that talk about MCH mathematically so it's a bottomless well to pull from. I did my own numbers but I didn't apply them here because I'm not as good as one of the best MCH in the world.

Funny then that you mention our Japanese Overlord. I read a statement talking about how MCH wasn't fun.

To paraphrase

Quote:

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It's because Machinist is not fun.
Players don't play because it's strong or not.
It's because Machinist is not fun

While Bard plays the flute
Machinist slap the lunchbox

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I didn't even know all we did was give the lunchbox a smack. But that statement gave me the idea to talk about the flavor of MCH in everyway that I thought was important. Though I should state that I don't think MCH is "unfun" like he does. Just that it could do better.

decent talk least you are not third child saying its ok blah blah blah.
but as someone whose basically mch 100% since hw launch till basically the first week act was out and counting everyones numbers.

HEat needs to be changed I don't mind sitting between 50-95 heat at all times I like managing heat 4.0 was fine 4.05 made it shit
Wildfire hits like shit my lvl 60 sam was out dmging wildfire every midare
overheating has basically been confirmed at this point to not bother as you basically need a perfect wildfireoverheat every 60 seconds to not get a dps lose.
overdrive seems to be the only fix that mch got but even that could still use another bump

back in HW Casting was just terrible while some say ya it worked for mch doesn't mean it was good for mch it was still terrible mechanic to slap onto brd and mch.
Mch along with everyone just got a rework and mch badly needs a whole nother rework there is frankly to much wrong with mch right now

Hi, if you got something to say, I'm right here.

P.S. I've never said the job was perfectly fine as is, but I neither tore it down as unplayable, made it sound entirely unviable for endgame, or said it was boring. You can look and several times I have said along with others that the job needs some improvements. Needs improvements, but plenty of people are still playing it, some better than others as it always was.

So don't put words in my mouth.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shhikasan

decent talk least you are not third child saying its ok blah blah blah.
but as someone whose basically mch 100% since hw launch till basically the first week act was out and counting everyones numbers.

HEat needs to be changed I don't mind sitting between 50-95 heat at all times I like managing heat 4.0 was fine 4.05 made it shit
Wildfire hits like shit my lvl 60 sam was out dmging wildfire every midare
overheating has basically been confirmed at this point to not bother as you basically need a perfect wildfireoverheat every 60 seconds to not get a dps lose.
overdrive seems to be the only fix that mch got but even that could still use another bump

back in HW Casting was just terrible while some say ya it worked for mch doesn't mean it was good for mch it was still terrible mechanic to slap onto brd and mch.
Mch along with everyone just got a rework and mch badly needs a whole nother rework there is frankly to much wrong with mch right now

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Normally I would agree that casting was bad for MCH but our entire kit worked with it. Rapidfire, ammo, procs all ignored casting. BRDs didn't get to ignore all of their casting like we ignored all of ours. That's without even mentioning all the weaving we could do with gauss round, head graze, and blank. BRD has to conform to casting while we thrived through it. Not as if we ever had to respect cast time anyways.

I will agree that I don't like heat now but only because it made our job gauge boring. Don't get me wrong. It probably needed to change. It was punishing, almost too much so, and that certainly needed to be addressed but I think they went too far or changed too much too quickly.

I applaud this thread. Well written, well organized, and how most of us feel about the job, especially those who played MCH main from 3.0. I hope developers at least know that MCH are not in a great position at this time and take action besides just making the job easier.

The issue with changing wildfire back how it was before (Specifically, having a 15 second duration) creates the issue of problematic boss timers (again). Off the top of my head, I can immediately say that this will disallow me from getting a second wildfire on Susano, and a third on Lakshmi before their phase change (and made even worse since they go completely invulnerable and whiff it completely).

It's fine the way it is, but if MCH's overall damage really does need tuning...Which imo, should be done towards the (over)heat aspect rather than wildfire.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

The issue with changing wildfire back how it was before (Specifically, having a 15 second duration) creates the issue of problematic boss timers (again). Off the top of my head, I can immediately say that this will disallow me from getting a second wildfire on Susano, and a third on Lakshmi before their phase change (and made even worse since they go completely invulnerable and whiff it completely).

It's fine the way it is, but if MCH's overall damage really does need tuning...Which imo, should be done towards the (over)heat aspect rather than wildfire.

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This problem would be now as it was mitigated then. With bigger damage. And just like then we could adjust how we deal with that like we could do now, by just using your wildfire more properly. In the raids that exists that wouldn't be a problem anyways, and if it was reverted to how it used to be we would just be one of the many people that have to deal with the so called problematic timers. SMN and DRG deal with that now. Mind you I'm not advocating simply raising the timer.

Having a wildfire you use often is not as fun as having a stronger wildfire that hits harder once. It's what makes an ability special. Having a wildfire jumped on sucked but it felt that much more rewarding when I blew up

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Originally Posted by Elnidfse

Having a wildfire you use often is not as fun as having a stronger wildfire that hits harder once. It's what makes an ability special. Having a wildfire jumped on sucked but it felt that much more rewarding when I blew up

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I don't know, i feel like having it up every minute makes MCH more engaging than doing my 1-2-3 for 70 seconds after a wildfire, on top of it not lining up with reload. Like I mentioned earlier, if they want to bump up MCH damage, I'd rather it be done through their heat mechanic and give that more meaning than just tacking it on.

Machinist is suffering what Bard suffered in Heavensward.

Bard was given cast times because Machinist had them. This wrecked how Bard played because the job wasn't designed with cast times in mind. The job felt like it was fighting against itself.

Now, Machinist had its cast times taken away because Bard lost theirs. This has wrecked how Machinist plays because the job was designed with cast times in mind. Now the job is fighting against itself.

Their attempts at trying to balance both jobs together ends up ruining one of them.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

I don't know, i feel like having it up every minute makes MCH more engaging than doing my 1-2-3 for 70 seconds after a wildfire, on top of it not lining up with reload. Like I mentioned earlier, if they want to bump up MCH damage, I'd rather it be done through their heat mechanic and give that more meaning than just tacking it on.

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I don't think 3.x wildfire was tacked on and it worked that way.

There are other ways to make the job more engaging, as with the aforementioned heat mechanic. Wildfire should not be something that's just part of the rotation because that brings us to 4 buttons we only use when wildfire is up. Wildfire, Reassemble, ricochet, and Rapid Fire. It also lowers the impact of each individual wildfire. Wildfire should be an impactful part of our rotation, not just another bit of it. It's worked that ways for years before it was arbitrarily assigned the role of DPS filler. It's not even the hardest hitting ability in our arsenal, that goes to turret overdrive, which also has the benefits of being able to crit and/or direct hit. (though I should mention that this is only in a pre jump situation. Of course turret overdrive doesn't even compete normally)

That's backwards.

Wildfire should always be the most damaging ability in our arsenal. This isn't a MCH damage statement. It's a wildfire damage statement. I'm not saying that "to raise MCH damage they should focus on wildfire". I'm saying "wildfire should do more damage no matter what in our damage they have to cut". It should return to it's 3.x days because it sure as sin was what we were balanced around. By removing all impact/punishment from wildfire it removes it's bite. A MCH absolutely should be affected if a boss jumps on a wildfire. Making everything easy for the sake of convenience is not good design. It cheapens the reward for doing well.

Moreover:

Out of the entire raid only V4 has any kind of jump that you have to care about. Alte Roite, Catastrophe, and Halicarnassus have very few things that would end up negatively impacting your wildfire in any significant way. And it's not as if the lower timer allows us to throw it on burn targets anyways (like V3S adds) as they die faster than that 10 second timer on top of whatever setup you have left. Of course primal's have jumps and that's been a thing we've dealt with for years but when balancing passes are expected, what do we always hear?
"Wait until the raid." Primal fights matter very little when it comes to balance, it seems.

And on the topic of engaging, we had that in 3.x too with our ability weaving, fight timers, and an actual proc based gameplay that you actually could take advantage of.

Doing the same thing every wildfire at all times is not engaging, it's binary. And that's what a simple heat tweaking would be. More binary changes to what was once an engaging job.

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Originally Posted by Elnidfse

I don't think 3.x wildfire was tacked on and it worked that way...

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Well this is a matter of perspective. You'd see wildfire as something that should be "MCH's hardest hitting attack", I see it as a inverse of a damage cooldown where it builds up 25% of your damage dealt rather than buffing your damage by 25% for 10 seconds. Just as your example of turret overload being your strongest hitting attack, it also comes at a cost of disabling your turret for the duration (being an equal tradeoff, and only a net gain if you had outside damage amplifications or downtime), a frontloaded damage cooldown if you will.

I honestly felt the 3.x rotations was a lot more binary than what we have right now (before 4.05 anyway) because of the longer cooldowns inbetween. Sure we have more weaving, but that's a buttload more buttons for the sake of having buttons

And yes I'm considering outside of raids. While raids are where balancing really matters, I'd like to very much be able to enjoy my wildfires actually going off on primals and dungeon bosses.

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Originally Posted by RiceisNice

*snip*

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That's what I'm saying. Landing a wildfire wasn't any more complicated to hit then than it was now. It wasn't some unlandable thing you know. And the payoff was far proportionately larger. And I'm not talking about the rotations, of course the initial 4.0 MCH felt a lot more dynamic but the wildfire game was far far different. Here you use the same wildfire every single time. And if you're trying to keep your rotation tight to stack up with your cooldowns and raid cooldowns it won't change ever. Even if you get a few procs it'd end up being better to just bulldoze right over that proc and ignore it so that QR comes back up in time. The old wildfire/mildfire dynamic is far better than just putting 100% into every wildfire every time in the exact same way. Because even in 4.0 that never changed about your wildfire. And that's boring.

I also don't think weaving is fluff. It gives the job more to press instead of 1-2-3, and outside of refreshing hotshot that 1-2-3 is indeed what we're pressing most of the time with a single gauss round sprinkled in every 15 seconds. I liked the old jokes about playing the piano to play MCH. I preferred a MCH that had that many button presses. It may be fluff to you but landing them was an integral part of the old gameplan.

Wildfire had a large payoff because it still had a large risk, and it still has that large risk. There aren't many dungeon bosses you throw that far out of the loop. Out of everything I can think of maybe Yojimbo is like the only one because he leaves so soon that if you didn't fire him in 10 seconds of pull you wouldn't be able to land that explosion. Everything else is still going to be leaving regardless of your 5 seconds or not. You won't be throwing that on adds at a high enough damage in dungeons because you'll melt them way too quickly or be pulling them in a large group. For bosses, the few of them that do jump don't do so for nearly any amount of time that would ruin your wildfire timing. It extends to bosses to. Lak has a very large grace period before she jumps away and your post jump Lak is still something you'd probably be better of saving your wildfire for group buffs after the confusion. Take Susan as well: you'd still be able to land 2 fires with just enough time leading directly into swords and have another one for the phase after sword. 15 seconds on a 90 second timer isn't as restrictive that you think it is.



That said I think this is one of those "agree to disagree" things. I'm not so haughty to not realize that I'm extremely biased because of my affection for 3.x MCH. Which I enjoyed greatly. I like 4.x MCH as well, but I wish the impact of certain job features (i.e; wildfire) wasn't so dramatically altered from what it was. And as I mentioned (i think I mentioned?) before; it's just me musing. Regardless of how long wildfire lasted. It wouldn't be able to function longer than 10 seconds because none of our new adjustments(bullets, overheat, hypercharge to a lesser extent) would be able to accommodate it. So of course I wouldn't actually hope they increased it's duration to 15 seconds. Nothing would work with it. But a man can dream, no?

The reason Wildfire was so significant in 3.x wasn't just that it lasted for 15 seconds, but also because you stacked up to 66% damage buffs for the same duration. In 4.x, we can only achieve 21% with Hypercharge and Overheat.

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Originally Posted by Idolon

The reason Wildfire was so significant in 3.x wasn't just that it lasted for 15 seconds, but also because you stacked up to 66% damage buffs for the same duration. In 4.x, we can only achieve 21% with Hypercharge and Overheat.

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Oh no I'm fully aware of that. This I guess is more in line with talking about the feel of overheat. If they really wanted to give it it's 3.x buff snowball they would have simply buffed it's interaction with overheating. It's not meant to be that strong.

Wildfire and Flamethrower should have been heat consumption buttons.
Wildfire needs to be charge based rather than timed. Example being, activating Wildfire puts a stack of 5~ on the target, Hitting that target with shots would cause the Wildfires to explode, dealing (Insert number here)Potency damage per detonation.
Flamethrower should consume Heat to deal its current effect, draining heat rather than generating it, with no cooldown, As it would be dependent on your Heat level to keep using it.
Cooldown as a skill is fine as is, basically a single target Flamethrower.
Heated Shots should have flat out replaced the regular shots as long as GB was equipped and should be a ramp up in power or Skill Speed based on Heat level. 1% bonus damage per point of Heat, as an example.

Overheating would be left as is, As i believe its current effects only exist due to the 10 level gap between getting GB and Cooldown. If its made any stronger, It would destroy the concept of managing heat at a high level to get the most out of our shots.

As it stands, The 'optimal' way to play MCH, to get the most damage out of it is to sync Reload, Rapid Fire, Disassemble and Wildfire. Every. Single. Time.
Failure to do so results in a Wildifre as much as 50% weaker than a Wildfire used with all all CDs active.

I enjoy MCH's general rotation, Though i am rather unhappy about the reduction in Heat per shot, since i found Cooldown to break up the monotony of bad luck streaks on Split Shot. I just dislike that i have to use 3 cooldowns all at once to do reasonable DPS, and if i screw anything up and those CDs go out of sync, my DPS falls to laughable levels.
Whats the point of having multiple damage bonus type CDs that do different things when you literally use all at once always and doing otherwise is plain stupid.

I think we can use one more oGCD, the reason Bard feel more fluid than MCH is because of how often then can spam their oGCDs.

Without the cast time, we do need a little more to do during 1 - 2 - 3. May be make Cool Down an oGCD with a 5s CD, then buff the heat regeneration. We can't spam it outside of Overheat because of the heat reduction anyway, and the 5s is to prevent some overheat shenanigan.

I am still a supporter of making Overheat stronger thou. The animation is good. The counting down in the gauge is vert racy, fitting well with Wild Fire. It gives the feel of "Gotta go Fast!!!"

BS should remove the lockout afterward too.

If all thing fail, they can give us 5% piercing debuff :D

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The animation is good. The counting down in the gauge is vert racy, fitting well with Wild Fire. It gives the feel of "Gotta go Fast!!!"

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I wonder if at any point that gauge wasn't used to be a wildfire gauge. Trigger overheat with wildfire or something and have your explosion tick down to 0 or whatever.

If you look at the top mch Vs the top brd numbers for all 4 savage fights, there is a 500+ difference. 500. Bards are rivalling top ninja damage. As much as I want them to buff mch, they may also need to
nerf Bard

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Originally Posted by RLofOBFL

If you look at the top mch Vs the top brd numbers for all 4 savage fights, there is a 500+ difference. 500. Bards are rivalling top ninja damage. As much as I want them to buff mch, they may also need to
nerf Bard

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Keep in mind that there are so much more people raiding as BRD, which means there are more bards getting savage gear than MCH, which in turn means those geared up BRDs do a lot more damage than usual.

I did some math and testing about Wildfire. I\\'ll post my work this evening when I\\'m at my home computer, but for now here\\'s the short of it.

Overheat WF:
WF - 3 - QR - 2 - Reasem + RF - 3 - CD - Rico - CD - GR

Non overheat:
WF - CD - Reas + RF - 3 - 2 + QR - 3 + Rico - CD - GR

Assuming 4 GCDs after an overheat are procs, so you (Split, Slug, Clean, Split) and you can double weave GB + BS the difference between the two amounts to about 50 potency. That\\'s it. Less than the damage range of your attacks which means a single crit can make one better than the other.

The big issue that SE is facing for machinists is the only way to make overheating a worthwhile buff is to raise it above 15% and by "worthwhile" I mean more than the potency of a weapon skill. Really, SE should make it more plain and just make overheating a debuff and increase the potencies of heated shots (and include turret damage in WF just to make overdrive useful).

I think I posted the math for wildfires in the OP but yeah, it's pretty low. And if you mess up by clipping or weaving or delaying an OGCD i.;e Quickreload/GaussRound or anything when it comes time to put GB back on you suffer a loss greater than the lackluster gain. People mention static buffs for overheat but I'd rather it just last longer. When you consider what it (might be) supposed to have replaced in our B4B, HE, and RS, it lasts way too short to compete with any of those buffs while also being woefully ineffective besides.

Like I want to think that overheat was made exclusively to be capitalized on by wildfire but it might just exist as a mess up prevention mechanic, which is why it gives a marginal DPS gain like if you accidentally overheated during a wildfire or something.