Quote Originally Posted by Zamii View Post
first off, we dont actually know if machinist will be piercing, im hoping it will be blunt as they seem to have more musket type weapons than they do typical bullets, but we'll see.
While I guess it's not impossible that they're using potato guns and bean bag launchers, from a purely lore standpoint, the machinists of Ishgard are fighting dragons. The idea that they'd be fighting giant creatures with armored scales with blunt rounds instead of piercing makes, literally, no sense, by any metric, and if they did do it, it would be for literally no other reason than making mnks feel better about themselves.

Quote Originally Posted by pandabearcat View Post
So, regardless of how you look at it, one additional set will lose you either mitigation or threat, because of the opportunity cost of doing a second maim inside of the maim buff window. You can make the case that you don't need the threat, but the cost is there.
It may seem that way, but honestly, the extra 30% raw damage (20% from maim and 10% from eye) actually fairly well balances out the loss of a butcher block round. And if you can hold hate fine while keeping eye or path up, there is no actual loss. If you can't keep hate and maintain your chosen storm move, you are seriously undergeared. That is not a debate. that is a fact.