Can someone help me understand the heat gauge?

[Georashi]

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.

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.

[Greedalox]

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.

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.

[Georashi]

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.

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.