Overheating should be capitalized, not ignored to make MCH fun

[Raikai]

I'll join the chorus and say so:

1) Rework overheat! It's boring and the usefulness is only marginal and prone to error. Best without it.

2) Rework Flamethrower! For our lv70 skill we'd expect something BIG. I'm not even talking about the bugs that need fixing.

They need to shove in more debuff utility in the MCH job or just plainly buff it's dmg to be on par with the other dps!

[Elnidfse]

IMO: MCH are sorely in need of something big we build to. With the defanging of wildfire I'd hope that our heat gauge could have been something we built up for and had unique attacks used only when we overheated. But maybe that's asking for too much? At any rate it certainly is the most boring of mechanic based gauges to manage. You could flat out remove it and there'd probably be no difference

[Kabooa]

Flamethrower should have some sort of DoT effect, or even a Vulnerability effect. It should also ALLOW YOU TO TURN, like god damn.

Thinking more on it, Overheat needs either a drastic increase in damage, or a way to extend its duration, or a way to reduce the 'cool down' period.
Case A) A damage spike, a skill speed spike, removing combo requirements on the shots, or something along these lines
Case B) 'Cooldown' effectively extends the duration of 'Overheat', staving off the eventual shut down.
Case C) 'Cooldown' usage reduces the penalty timer, allowing you to get back into Gauss Barrel territory .

[MomoOG]

Flamethrower should have some sort of DoT effect, or even a Vulnerability effect. It should also ALLOW YOU TO TURN, like god damn.

Thinking more on it, Overheat needs either a drastic increase in damage, or a way to extend its duration, or a way to reduce the 'cool down' period.
Case A) A damage spike, a skill speed spike, removing combo requirements on the shots, or something along these lines
Case B) 'Cooldown' effectively extends the duration of 'Overheat', staving off the eventual shut down.
Case C) 'Cooldown' usage reduces the penalty timer, allowing you to get back into Gauss Barrel territory .

Totally agree about the stupid Flamethrower. The fact that a slight breeze will make it cancel or sometimes it just glitches out by itself makes it a terrible designed ability.

Personally I think they need to buff overheat to 20% and Wildfire accumulated damage up to 30% from 25% and I think MCH would be in a good place.

[Elnidfse]

Well. I mean they did fix the flamethrower bugs so you never have to worry about it cancelling for all tick (as there is only one) you have it active after your opener.
I mean. I guess it's okay in dungeons when you snapshot it during an overheat. Or rather, credit where it's due it's marginally better than grenado shot without using TP. So there's that.

[Shurrikhan]

1. Revert the heat changes. Start the "Heated" variants at 30-40 Heat, or remove them outright and/or center base gameplay around trying to keep the weapon as hot as possible, which should itself become far more difficult, while the (now variable) bonus for Heat, rather than gauss barrel alone, makes up the difference.
2. Flamethrower usable while moving, counted simply as a series of self-aimed (i.e. skillshot) conical AoEs dealt every 1.5 seconds (at base GCD), for 4 ticks total. It now deals significantly more damage, but damage falls off with targets affected (10/20/30...), and duration reduced to 6 seconds. Tick rate, and therefore maximum duration, now affected by Attack Speed. Cooldown reduced to 40 seconds.
3. Gauss Round now affected by Attack Speed in the same fashion as Empyreal Arrow.
4. Reload and Quick Reload affected by Attack Speed.
5. Wildfire now an AoE.

[Flarisu]

Most of these suggested changes are too complex, I think.
Best left to 5.0, IMO.

Adding dots (to cooldown, wildfire, flamethrower etc) is not a good idea. MCH is not a dot class, and most classes got their dot removed to clean up the rotation. IF you add a dot, you have to add a meaningful reason to have the dot.

The problem is that, while there is a mathematical answer to overheating, the answer is not obvious, and a studious MCH can look and not find a clear and concise answer.
If the overheat bonus was, say, 20%, the answer would be clear - and I think that's better for the class overall.
The trick, I think, are small easy to make changes that don't overhaul the class, but bring it to where it needs to be.

Right now it's the least played class by a long shot, and I think more people would play if the rotation itself gave you a NICE BIG HINT as to what to do to play best.

[photometrik]

I posted these in another thread, but I think they deserve repeating (sorry). Here is what I'd like to see from MCH:

1. The Heat Gauge should be a permanent fixture, it just resets to 0 after Overheat + 10s lockout.
2. Gauss Barrel should be changed to an oGCD ability that automatically forces an Overheat.
3. Overheat should do more damage. I won't claim to know how much more, but it should definitely be more than a 10% increase.
4. Cooldown should apply a Burning DoT (you are expelling heat, after all) that does a minimal amount of damage. Not much, but just something instead of nothing.
5. Flamethrower should also apply the same Burning DoT (for the purpose of giving us better multi-target/AoE capability). In addition, make the ability much shorter and increase heat faster. I feel like it should function more like an AoE opener as opposed to...whatever it is used for right now.
6. Wildfire should last just a little longer or do a higher percentage of damage dealt.
7. Bring back the old heat generation values, and give Quick Reload back its heat reduction mechanic.
8. Dismantle needs a shorter cooldown, or should last longer (or both).
9. The Hypercharge vulnerability debuff should be removed from the ability and added as a function of the turret itself, maybe reduce it to 2% to mirror BRD's crit buff? (this is debatable, but it would bring MCH support in line with BRD somewhat)
10. Give MCH a battle res. Like, "aetheric defibrillators" or something...

I know some of these ideas may be far-fetched, but it's just what I think would make the class better and more fun to play (for me, at least).

Edit: #8 said Reassemble, when I actually meant Dismantle. Whoops!

[RiceisNice]

If you think about the overheating mechanic less as a buff and more as a penalty, it's actually kinda neat in comparison to other dps (like dropping botd) because overheating gives a unique opportunity to do more dps when used very specifically. I really didn't like how overheating wildfires worked in 4.0. It was awkward to plan out perfectly, and using flamethrower to push into overheat was annoying (especially if you got targeted with a mechanic right after and had to move). MCH plays a lot more smoothly now with the changes (imo) and not having to bother with overheating wildfires on top of the insane amount of mechanics in Omega.

It acting as a penalty creates another problem, although that has more with the tuning itself. MCH's relative damage is already lower compared to it's competitor (the BRD). The way I see overheat is that it should be a high-risk, high reward. You overheat under specific circumstances (all oGCDs and you can fit two clean shots, a single slug shot, and two cooldowns), while reckless overheating will lead to an overall damage loss (similar to a DRG letting BotD drop through GS overuse). The idea of "frontloading" damage at the cost of damage lockout should not be the in the core design of a job, we already have turret overload for that and not a lot of fight scenarios present that sort of opportunity, nor do our heat gains really allow for that either (even before the nerf).

If overheating is not needed at all, why is this even a thing if they have to nerf that to be a non-consequential factor (the lowered heat gain)? As someone mentioned, we already have abilties like cooldown and barrel stabilizer to direct manage heat, and we don't need/want those to be rendered irrelevant for persistant gameplay.

I posted these in another thread, but I think they deserve repeating (sorry). Here is what I'd like to see from MCH:

1. The Heat Gauge should be a permanent fixture, it just resets to 0 after Overheat + 10s lockout.
Agreed, there's really no point that GB needs to ever be off, and it feels completely arbritary to have to reattach it
2. Gauss Barrel should be changed to an oGCD ability that automatically forces an Overheat.
If they wanted overheat to be the sort of thing where we frontload our damage for a burst period, then barrel stabilizer should be changed to add heat rather than adjust heat.
3. Overheat should do more damage. I won't claim to know how much more, but it should definitely be more than a 10% increase.
It definitely needs to be more rewarding to offset the inherent risk
4. Cooldown should apply a Burning DoT (you are expelling heat, after all) that does a minimal amount of damage. Not much, but just something instead of nothing.
We don't need more DoTs. It's an entirely pointless fluff that would just take up a debuff slot on the boss, espesically if it's going to do minimal damage. If cooldown needs a damage buff, then we're better off just adding it to the potency
5. Flamethrower should also apply the same Burning DoT (for the purpose of giving us better multi-target/AoE capability). In addition, make the ability much shorter and increase heat faster. I feel like it should function more like an AoE opener as opposed to...whatever it is used for right now.
See number 4
6. Wildfire should last just a little longer or do a higher percentage of damage dealt.
No. Part of the reason why I disliked the old, 15 second wildfire was that most fights did not allow for it go off. I'll tell you right now that if wildfire is going to be 15 seconds, I won't be able to land a second (third for lakshmi) wildfire on Susano before he phases. 10 second intervals is more flexible when it comes to fight design the way I see it.

7. Bring back the old heat generation values, and give Quick Reload back its heat reduction mechanic.
Yes and no. Quick reloading lowering heat can be incredibly frustrating; it meant that you couldn't use it at all if you were at 50-55 heat, and made even worse that your next weapon skills would not generate heat all.
8. Reassemble needs a shorter cooldown, or should last longer (or both).
Arguable. There's no rerason to make Reassemble "last longer" considering that it fades after your next weaponskill, and it already lasts 20 seconds which is longer than any of our "proc" buffs. It could stand to be lowered to 30 seconds to line up with every reload and make it less of a fluff button
9. The Hypercharge vulnerability debuff should be removed from the ability and added as a function of the turret itself, maybe reduce it to 2% to mirror BRD's crit buff? (this is debatable, but it would bring MCH support in line with BRD somewhat)
No. As much as I want MCH to be competitive to BRD, they should not be walking the same road to providing their party contributions. A perfect example would be to buff Dismantle to be a bit more usable. The way it is right now with a 5 second duration and 90 second cooldown, you can't have it up for most of the important mecahnics (specifically in O3s, I can't apply it to all of the dark tokens), nor does it last long enough to mitigate some of the bigger raid-wide aoes (Again in O3s, Hali's x3 dimensional wave) Compared to troupadour being 30 seconds and affecting the entire party, it dwarfs what dismantle can mitigate in those scenarios, and I can't really think of a fight where dismantle would be stronger than troupadour in that context (Susano's unktei are stagnated over a longer 5 second period, and likewise with Lakshmi's final Chinchilla ability chain)

I know some of these ideas may be far-fetched, but it's just what I think would make the class better and more fun to play (for me, at least).

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

With the basic idea of building and spending the gauge in mind, what I've been doing since 4.05 dropped is (from an initial BS) I build heat through my Heated Shot combo, then at 95, I reload and set up procs for Wildfire, then push an OH by refreshing Hot Shot and perform an OH WF rotation. By the time the 10 second forced cooldown is done, BS is either ready to use again right away or within 2 seconds of coming off cooldown. Repeat the cycle. After enough experimentation, I found it works, and while I haven't seen a mind blowing increase in damage, I have seen one. More importantly, it sets a stable rhythm with which I do the dance.

The only downside - and this IS a personal gripe of mine, despite using this - is the opening burst doesn't seem to align with the rest of the party's openers/abilities. I've tried using Flamethrower to push to 90/95 faster, and it works for a quicker WF burst, but offsets the cd timers, at least where the above build/spend rhythm is concerned. It's something I'm still experimenting with but generally speaking, it just works, and with quite a pleasant consistency. I'm not selfish enough to tell my static to delay anything like Trick Attack or the like to suit that rhythm, but that overall build spend flow has worked better for me personally, as opposed to frequently trying to avoid overheating.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this is why I personally have no issues with building heat, at least under 50. I just never need to. I mean, if I somehow die after using BS, yes, but then I still have Flamethrower. I haven't really even used FT that much except for if I somehow need to build heat fast. This method - for me at least - makes the job less about maintaining heat, and more about maintaining a rhythm through which I keep damage as high/consistent as I can.