Patch 4.05 Machinist Rotation: To Overheat or Not to Overheat? Here are my findings.

[Elnidfse]

It's late so I can't look through all that math, but yes you're pretty close to mark. Some of us have looked over the numbers elsewhere and basically even if you overheat a wildfire (as intended?) you gain such a minuscule amount of damage over pretending overheating doesn't exist at all, that I'm really not quite sure how they thought this was okay from a tuning standpoint.

It ends up being 8 potency per overheat (net-wise). Over a 10 minute fight you'd do as much as a single auto attack.

The only reason to bother would be to sync up your cooldowns I suppose.

[Caitlyn]

You gain 10% more damage for overheat for 10s, but gain 0% more damage after overheat vor another 10s + no heated combo for 10s, which is also a loss of 30 potency for the next 3 skills. Especially you have to put your GB back on your gun manually.

No, I dont recommend to overheat, other than for AoEs or shortly before phase transitions.

[Leticro]

That's why it took me multiple days to figure out the actual math for, of which you can see in the spreadsheet. Its actually better to overheat because you get more damage out of it overall! As explained in my initial post, the logic for it is that the though there is a better overall damage buff on average by not overheating, we overheat because it allows us to control a specific window for an even higher buff, even though it's less overall damage on average. Being able to output our off-GCDs in that window is how overheating allows for higher net damage.