Machinist extinction in 4.0?

[SaitoHikari]

Machinist to me feels like a class that requires more technical knowledge than most, a large portion of their damage comes from their opener and burst rotations around their buff timers. Considering we all know by now that the vast majority of the community doesn't know what an opener even is, that shuts off a big portion of the playerbase in terms of accessibility. The RNG just exacerbates that even further.

It also doesn't help that there's a perception that the class is way too similar to Bard mechanically. This was made especially clear during 3.2-3.3, where BRD players were encouraged to swap to MCH to be more effective during that raid tier. When Bard got buffed and we went into 3.4, I imagine many players that played MCH during the previous raid tier simply went back to Bard.

As someone that runs roulettes solo every day, I'm lucky if I run into even ONE Machinist in a week. Hell, the last time I saw one in an EX dungeon run was during the very first day of 3.5 (my very first run of Sohm Al HM - which somehow ended up being a 12 minute speedrun that I've yet to replicate).