Ayy MCH has 8 times less clears on the Final Omega than Bard.

[Sethani]

I still love playing my mch, even with the clunkiness, I still love the WF windows.
The current state of the mch/brd won't make me switch, but the pressure from raid partner might...
This feels awful cause brd is each patch closer from god and the mch is now aknowledge by most as a garage class cause of his gameplay.
They gave smn and dk some sort of rework.
They even rework war in 4.2 when he absolutely didn't need it.
Why is mch still the ugly duckling ?

[Caitlyn]

It will never get in my mind, why SE decided rework MCH with Stormblood. No MCH asked for it. It was good in Heavensward. I mean, this job was meant to be some kind of half-caster. But what do we get instead? Less ammo, extremely weak wildfire, punishing overheat mechanic and very delayed turret overdrive.

But its too late. Its 4.4 and SE wont change anything until 5.0.

[Elleia]

I’m sure this is mostly because BRD seems to flow much better than MCH. For me, I dislike the WF windows and how hectic they feel, especially with my high ping. I’m also a sucker for a bow and arrow in a fantasy setting. I’ve never really been a fan of guns in most games, but I’m not sure if others feel the same.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Simpler put - get rid of piercing / slashing / blunt.

This would kill MCH completely. Without Piercing, MCH offers next to nothing compared to Casters. It's biggest selling point is higher overall damage. Taking away 5% means it's pulling substantially less than even RDM. Coupled with its immense unpopularity and you now have a job no one will even look at, let alone get invited to any static. Frankly, all three will need something to compensate for a 5% damage loss. BRD may have great synergy with DRG but it will struggle to make up the difference a SMN or BLM offers. DRG will be in an odd spot since Slashing and Blunt are, technically, stronger than Piercing.

[Kabooa]

Weird, it's almost like it's the same ratio as the other 'less favorable jobs' because why switch to Mach when you've done the past two tiers as Bard.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

This would kill MCH completely. [...] Frankly, all three will need something to compensate for a 5% damage loss.

I suppose I kept the extreme tl;dr a bit too short - removing weapon type vulns would imply an across the board compensation to make up for the removal of those.

Special cases:
Dragonkick and Yukikaze could simply get an effect similar to pvp - a debuff that only boosts damage of the debuffer. If DRG potencies wont be upped, same deal with Disembowel.

Jobs that benefitted greatly but cant cast it should gain a buff of whatever seems fitting to keep balance.

[Sunako]

This would kill MCH completely. Without Piercing, MCH offers next to nothing compared to Casters. It's biggest selling point is higher overall damage. Taking away 5% means it's pulling substantially less than even RDM. Coupled with its immense unpopularity and you now have a job no one will even look at, let alone get invited to any static. Frankly, all three will need something to compensate for a 5% damage loss. BRD may have great synergy with DRG but it will struggle to make up the difference a SMN or BLM offers. DRG will be in an odd spot since Slashing and Blunt are, technically, stronger than Piercing.

That only tell mch is either too weak or bard is too overpowered. Mch is not supposed to compete between other casters. If one ranged have permanent spot and other 3 casters and mch compete from one spot, something is really wrong.

[HyoMinPark]

This begs the question - why BRD and not MCH? Simple - synergy.

Synergy with DRG aside, BRD just offers the same stuff MCH has plus more: Nature’s Minne, Troubadour, a passive +2% crit buff for the party (which is more important than ever this tier since critical hit is back to being the best substat for just about every job out there). The only thing it doesn’t offer is a cooldown like Dismantle, but everything else about it more than makes up for that fact—Troubadour may have a longer cooldown, but it covers 3x the duration Dismantle does, plus any sort of raid damage that may originate from a target other than the main boss (this was the main reason why it was so favored in UwU, because you could Troubadour primal mechanics during Ultima; you couldn’t use Dismantle on them due to them being untargetable).

BRD is far more enjoyable in terms of gameplay for a lot of people (especially after the SB rework), and has always been one of the most popular jobs in FFXIV due to it’s low skill floor (and the bow-and-arrow love a lot of players have). It’s also not a job that is affected by a person’s latency, something MCH’s Wildfire (the core mechanic of the job) suffers from. From what I can remember, MCH has never been a job overflowing with popularity, even in HW. But I would have to review the amount of uploads to be absolutely certain on that last point.


Removing piercing is a double-edged sword for the physical ranged: on one hand, it removes their reliability on a DRG for 5% of their damage (though BRD would still favor DRG if they kept its Repertoire mechanic as-is because of Litany); on the other hand, without a buff to personal damage, both physical ranged would suffer because their personal damage output sans piercing would not be enough to outweigh the casters. Even if you considered the rDPS gain from Battle Voice/Critical Up and Hypercharge. Groups would probably still take BRD for prog for a Refresh safety-net, but MCH would outright die, in my personal opinion; it’s already extremely unpopular, and it suffers more without a DRG compared to BRD—at least BRD’s DoTs are not affected by piercing outside of the initial application, but MCH has nothing like that short of maybe the turret if it’s not affected by piercing (on that, I am not sure; but the turret doesn’t do the same amount of damage a BRD’s DoTs do, I believe).

MCH needs a rework come 5.0 to make it more desirable to play. What said rework would entail, however, I can’t say. I’ve personally never liked the job; the press-all-your-buttons-during-Wildfire mechanic never appealed to me.

That only tell mch is either too weak or bard is too overpowered. Mch is not supposed to compete between other casters. If one ranged have permanent spot and other 3 casters and mch compete from one spot, something is really wrong.

BRD would also suffer if they removed piercing, as it has even lower personal damage compared to MCH, and its rDPS gains wouldn’t be more than the raw damage of SMN or BLM. I don’t think that’s between MCH being underpowered and BRD being overpowered, though; that’s just BRD being more desirable in terms of aesthetic and gameplay—which is already how it is now. MCH started being phased out for a caster back in 4.1 when SMN was buffed to the moon, and you didn’t even have to bring a caster for UCoB like you did UwU.

Something is already really wrong with MCH. This has been the case the entire expansion.

[Lastelli]

BRD has been better than MCH in basically any department since the beginning of this expansion, so it's not really surprising. Also, troubadour is very useful in o12s (and dismantle is not).

@HyoMinPark Even assuming they completely remove disembowel without making any adjustment to brd pdps, brd would more than likely still be meta because of refresh, since in a speedkill environment healers' combined dps is basically as high as a blm's. Refresh alone is worth at least 1k combined healers dps. Which is way claiming that BRD is dependant on DRG is not really correct. It actually is the other way around.

[Duskane]

Simpler put - get rid of piercing / slashing / blunt.

Probably be better if Bard and Mch just did flat damage rather then remove all those debuffs