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

[Jonnycbad]

Correlation doesn't imply causation. MCH isn't bad, it's just harder to play than BRD in high stress situations (for not much pay-out). Micromanaging heat is obnoxious on MCH and doesn't feel fun or good. People just don't like playing MCH as much as BRD--also BRD has Repelling Shot and MCH has no movement skills.

[HyoMinPark]

BRD has Repelling Shot and MCH has no movement skills.

This doesn’t matter, as BRD is completely free in terms of movement so they don’t even need Repelling Shot. Most I know don’t even have it on their bar, as the skill itself is worthless.

[Lastelli]

It wouldn’t matter—both BLM and SMN are pushing 8,500 and 8,000 DPS respectfully now, and we aren’t even at a point yet where they could have full BiS. On the flip side, BRD is pushing ~7,600, and that’s with the +5% piercing and Litany a DRG gives them.

The problem is...BRD provides more or less 1k rDPS via requiem, battle voice and songs. Just napkin math, but it's pretty safe to assume that brd pDPS - disembowel contribution + refresh dps value + rDPS enhancing tools would more than compensate for the pDPS difference between BLM and BRD.

So, let us really assume that BLM are at 8.5k while BRD are at 7.6 with a DRG in their party. Without a DRG, it would be around 7k pDPS (I'm clearly overestimating disembowel/litany here). Add 1k rDPS due to songs, voice and requiem...8k. Now, I personally believe refresh is worth more than 1k, especially in a very good party with very good healers. So unless the mana constraint is significantly relaxed in the future expansion, making both refresh and mana shift useless or situational, the dev team either has to significantly nerf BRD personal damage or rethink how synergy works in the game if they ever want to achieve a semblance of balance. Because in the current raid environment, BRD is obscenly op. It's no surprise that xivrdps consistently shows that BRD has among the highest rdps contribution in any fight...and this is taking disembowel's contribution away from brd and giving it back to DRG. Of course, refresh is not considered as a DPS tool on that site as it's extremely hard to translate healer's MP to actual DPS,, but any raider knows that at the end of the day after progression that's what it reduces to...a dps tool.

[Aeliott]

This doesn’t matter, as BRD is completely free in terms of movement so they don’t even need Repelling Shot. Most I know don’t even have it on their bar, as the skill itself is worthless.

It has niche usage in cancelling pushbacks like the side-pushes in Phantom Train if you have to for whatever reason. But I agree it's not really a major selling point over MCH.

As for the topic. I don't think anyone's surprised? There were no adjustments in 4.4 so people aren't going to pile on board now. We've been kicking and screaming for the last 15 months about it, and it's clear they won't change it in the way we'd like until 5.0. Even if they changed the overheat/wf timers or made flamethrower instant overheat or whatever, even if the omega gun didn't have skill speed, you'd still have Bards with 8x more clears.

[Dualgunner]

I need to post this correction to my math last night.

~12,000 mp generated every 3 minutes
~5750 mp shifted every 2 minutes

I said it became ~24k vs 11,500 for their least common multiple, 6 minutes, but I multiplied both numbers by 2 like a derp.

It's actually ~24k vs ~17,250 mp gained for the healers every 6 minutes. I apologize.

[Kabooa]

I need to post this correction to my math last night.

~12,000 mp generated every 3 minutes
~5750 mp shifted every 2 minutes

I said it became ~24k vs 11,500 for their least common multiple, 6 minutes, but I multiplied both numbers by 2 like a derp.

It's actually ~24k vs ~17,250 mp gained for the healers every 6 minutes. I apologize.

First one is a triple melee, 1 ranged comp, second one is a two melee, two caster comp.

Then there's two ranged comp and one ranged, one caster comp.

[Dualgunner]

First one is a triple melee, 1 ranged comp, second one is a two melee, two caster comp.

Then there's two ranged comp and one ranged, one caster comp.

I was applying a worst case scenario on Refresh in these calculations; Refresh generates in ticks of about your lowest costing spell according to one post in my original citation, so it won't be ~6,000 for everyone hit by it. But assuming 1 caster and a paladin, that ~24k every 6 minutes goes up easily past ~30k.

[Grimoire-M]

As someone who's played a BRD with all of the different pairs of the melee dps in raid except the meta DRG/NIN and not at all meta NIN/SAM, I can say BRD is extremely busted if they have access to crit-based raid buffs at the moment. That needs to change in 5.0. The only reason BRD was able to break ahead of MCH in DPS at all is because you can give them up to 45% crit from raid buffs, which completely flips the variance on how reliable their crit procs are. You only really need Chain/Litany to pull ahead of the rest of your group, AST feeding you spears and DRG giving you tethers on top of Chain/Litany is frankly disgusting.

I feel that in 5.0 BRD should either move to static chance procs or Direct Hit, with the assumption that there can never be another direct hit based raid buff added into the game if the latter change is made. Bard is frankly too good when these crit buffs are present. Having Refresh, Bardsong, and Battle Voice on top of that (the latter of which essentially replaced HW/ARR cross-class Raging Strikes for your entire party) is just ridiculous. MCH is going to need a lot more than innate Piercing and TA to compete with it on the personal side and the raid DPS side isn't even coming close to matching it at the moment.

I'm in favor of giving BRD and MCH piercing in general. For BRD it's done via Straight Shot while MCH gets it via Hot Shot (which would replace that meaningless 60s damage buff and free up that gauge for tracking your turret timer post-overdrive).

MCH's core clunk issues are still going to be there even if you extend the Wildfire window slightly. You need to remake it into stack-based debuff, and have Overheat operate in a similar manner as a stack-based buff. If that means both can only factor in weaponskills to work then so be it. Then they can see a giant potency increase to make up for the loss of Hot Shot's damage buff and the oGCDs people have to squeeze in. This would only leave Flamethrower as a problem, and that can be solved too. Just make it instantly cap heat. With the overheat timer removed it works just fine for that purpose and wouldn't feel bad if used as an AoE tool either. That's the bare minimum required to fix their issues. A nice bonus would be to make Gauss Barrel into a trait. Or you can make Gauss Round and Ricochet into independent weaponskills (Like Empyreal Arrow on BRD) as well so they scale with skill speed and can be factored into Wildfire and Overheat still.

Finally, muck with MCH's heat generation. Make them work at managing it at 10 heat per shot again but let Gauss Round lower it and Clean Shot ignore it altogether to make it more bearable. SE could upgrade Hotshot to be a heat generator that deals damage similar to Cooldown too. If Hot Shot gave 50 Heat then post overheat you've got a great opportunity to reset your heat to 50 for piercing and get to enable using Barrel Stabilizer/Flamethrower for recovery and/or DPS. That would make their rotation feel less awful with more skill speed too, which is the only problem that would remain from all of this.

If all of that happened, it would be pretty hard to screw MCH up again as long as tame stuff was added, liked a slightly higher Ammo cap, or a 4th combo shot with massive burst.

Regardless of this Refresh needs a nerf and either Mana Shift needs a buff or Healers need more mana management tools. My proposal for this is to merge Mana Shift and Refresh together to make Mana Goad (single target, current Refresh potency per tick, Ally Only), then give that to the casters and ranged dps, and give Goad to ranged DPS as a replacement for Tactician as well, so they can get Diversion as a replacement for their aggro dump. That would be a little more fair, especially on the caster side, since how good the current Mana Shift is depends massively on which caster you're using it on thanks to the MP penalty on it.

[Matthew_Fox]

Correlation doesn't imply causation. MCH isn't bad, it's just harder to play than BRD in high stress situations (for not much pay-out). Micromanaging heat is obnoxious on MCH and doesn't feel fun or good. People just don't like playing MCH as much as BRD--also BRD has Repelling Shot and MCH has no movement skills.

hahahaha sure buddy. "obnoxious" to manage heat aka pressing cooldown once every 50 seconds.
Saying bard has repelling shot and MCH has no movement skills is probably the worst arguement i have ever heard in my entire life.

[Sethani]

Actually, timing repelling shot right let you dodge bump