The Burning Issue
Flamethrower against the 70
The job gauge of other jobs allow or add things that interact with them in meaningful ways. MCH job gauge is just a meter that allows you to continue behaving normally but changes your animations a little. It's not like it rewards "extra" damage. So then what other comparisons can we make? How about level 70 abilities!
- BRD Refulgent Arrow
- DRG Nastrond
- MNK Brotherhood
- RDM Verholy
- SMN Bahamut
- BLM Foul
- NIN Ten Chi Jin
- SAM Hissatsu: Guren
- DRK The Blackest Night
- PLD Passage of Arms (aka can I passage of arms this)
- WAR Inner Release
- SCH Aetherpact
- WHM Plenary Indulgence
- AST Sleeve Draw
- MCHFlamethrower
Regardless of how people feel about PI and Aetherpact each difference either adds something or contributes to large role specific contribution. For DPS and Warrior (our fellow DPS) it's damage. For tanks it's mitigation of some sort. For non AST healers it's heals. For AST it's the amazingly amazing Sleevedraw. For MCH its hands down the weakest (if not most lackluster) level 70 in the game. To get damage comparable to even foul (a single ability) it requires 10 seconds of channeling and
LOCKS, YOU, IN, PLACE.
I think the one person who's with us in this is MNK. Or I would like to say but my MNK friend is pretty okay with brotherhood. Much sought after rDPS increases? An ability to shove more stacks into you by having your allied physical DPS toil away. No... Flamethrower is a class all on it's on.
https://www.famitsu.com/news/201705/31134240.html
Yoshida: I think the challenge of the job has changed. With the removal of the casting time to raise damage, we added the heat gauge. It will be fundamental to the job to maintain a high heat gauge without overheating. The feeling should be like a temptation to overheat to achieve burst damage, but with an associated disadvantage of doing so. You can use Flamethrower as an AoE attack, but it will be more important to use it to manage the heat gauge.
Our level 70 attack ability. Which application is already limited by being a subpar AoE that's a dps loss to use single target (unlike, bahamut or foul or anything) is designed to be used the least amount of time possible for as little damage as possible to simply make your heat gauge rise a tick. And this is our level 70 ability. If they removed this ability I guarantee you MCH would find ways to adapt just fine. And that's the problem.
It’s rather useless besides. Sure you need it now in 4.05 to overheat but back in 4.0...
Oh you overheated and barrel stabilizer is down? Better use hotshot because it's actually a better idea than to even touch that flamethrower button because that will be a DPS loss to use. And mind you I don’t think barrel stabilizer and flamethrower should be equal. But flamethrower should have been at least a better option than spamming hotshot…
But the worst part is. Flamethrower feels like it's the reason the rest of our kit in regards to AoE feels so neutered. We lost our super sick grenado shot. We lost potency on spread. We lost a strong hypercharge. Bishop got shipped to nerf island. And what we gained was an AoE attack that comes with so much baggage you don't or can't use it in add situations in the raid that has them and begrudgingly use it in dungeons because the flames have as much impact as
these threads have in contributing actual job changes.
If all it’s meant to be is a utility tool, then why do we get it at 70? It’s not even as large impact as barrel stabilizer and is terrible for its job outside of pushing for two cooldowns in your wildfires that you don’t overheat. A whopping 80 potency. Ironically the same amount of potency you’d get if you used it to overheat bringing us to a hypothetical 160…
I don't want flamethrower as it exists if it's only a thing because they took away other abilities and nerfed the existing ones.
And outside of pre-wildfire heat management it's still useless even
IN AoE situations we have now because it's married to heat management. You're not about to crank out a flamethrower even FOR the ninjas in V3S because netwise you end up suffering from your lockout from overheating and the loss of fine tuning for your wildfires which will impact you greatly immediately after the adds drop and much larger for your next overheat. Not to mention what happens when your cooldowns desync if you DO take an overheat to optimize flamethrower damage. So in general it feels like we're balanced around staying in 50-90 heat at near all times. "
But what about overheat" you say? We'll talk about that next.