I just want to get out there that there's a lot of misinformation being spread about MCH, primarily due to the discussion surrounding MCH being spearheaded by people who don't play the job much. That's fine however, as MCH is the least popular job right now by a fair margin, so the goal for SB would be to make the job appeal to a much wider audience. The main misconception I want to get out of the way though is the notion that MCH is a hard job.

It isn't, straight up.

Optimal MCH gameplay boils down to pressing buttons off cooldown and learning potential WF setups. Heat management is negligible. If you're using 3-ammo, you press Cooldown once when not overheated. If you're using 2-ammo, you're not pressing Cooldown at all outside of WF. The other belief is that MCH is very punishing, which once again, there are easy workarounds for mistakes, just like how there are for every other job, which result in only small losses in output. People say that because of how 'difficult' MCH is to play, it would be a nightmare to prog with, where in reality, the job plays quite similarly to RDM, where you're just reacting to procs the majority of the time and then executing on a burst phase every so often, albeit a harder one. I prog the majority of my content as MCH and also through pugs.

The next misconception I want to address, and this is quite controversial, is that for the level that the majority of the playerbase plays at, ping doesn't play a big part in your DPS. The differences in DPS based on ping is only very relevant at top percentiles. This, of course, is only referring to complaints about DPS based on ping, and not clunkiness based on ping which is a valid issue. The majority of your damage as MCH will be based on RNG, team comp and padding, with the top 5th percentile being based on your ping.

Also, one quickie that I want to throw in, MCH AoE is very good but somewhat boring.

Anyways, the previous points segue into some complaints that I think are completely valid, which are MCH being clunky, MCH having no room to optimise, and MCH being repetitive.

1. Clunkiness
All the complaints about MCH feeling clunky are perfectly valid, with the main issue I run into being 1-tick overheats. To put it simply, if your ping is high or spikes, your 1-tick FT won't generate heat, and that's really annoying. This issue alone is what turns me off using 2-ammo rotation. If you have to 1-tick overheat, you will FT in the later half of your GCD in order you give yourself the best chance to fit the last CD under overheat, but half the time the tick wont generate any heat. You could alternatively FT at the start of your GCD to guarantee an overheat, but then you won't be getting the last CD under heat. This issue could be completely offset by overheat not starting until Flamethrower ends. One thing I would like to touch on here is that people attribute this to MCH being poorly designed, whereas I would have to disagree. Having a job be centred around a burst window, managing a resource until that window then overcapping that resource to get a temporary damage buff the same time as your burst makes a lot of sense design wise. Just thematically, doing it through a Flamethrower doesn't do the fantasy of using a Flamethrower any justice. There are a few other clunkiness issues with MCH that I also notice, such as Gauss Barrel > Barrel Stabiliser double weave and also placing down your turret.

2. Optimisation
MCH has by far the least opportunity to optimise out of any job. It has no DoTs to snapshot, no cast times to greed, no specific uptime strats like with melee jobs, it doesn't even have things like holding oGCDs to align with raid buffs. It only has Turret Overdrive and proc optimisation for WF, and those are arguably a part of the basic MCH rotation. As such, trying to personally optimise MCH at an end game level is quite frustrating as all you can do is hope for a good team comp, stable ping and a bunch of direct crits at the right times. What they can do to make MCH more able to be optimised I'm not sure of, and it's one of the things I would like to be addressed going into 5.0.

3. Repetitiveness
The MCH rotation is definitely repetitive due to, as mentioned previously, no way to change your rotation to optimise which results in pressing buttons ASAP almost always being the optimal way to play. Honestly though, every job is quite repetitive. When you throw yourself at the same content over and over again, you'll find that you'll be pressing the same buttons at the same time every run. I feel like with MCH however, the repetitive nature of most rotations is especially apparent due to how barren the 60s MCH loop is. You have 10s where all your buttons are pressed, then 50s of downtime. That 50s can be further broken down to 1 Reload, 4 Quick Reloads and 3 Gauss Rounds, maybe a splash of Hypercharge. I agree that it isn't terribly compelling gameplay. However, the main suggestion I see to combat that is the make the 123 combo guaranteed to proc, and that makes such little sense to me. All that would serve is to make the job more repetitive. At least reacting to procs adds some level of variance to the rotation. Personally, and I've thrown this suggestion out before, I would like to see more actions originate from the turret so they become completely independent of WF, which can be used to fill in the downtime between WF. I understand that pet response in this game is quite slow, but I think this will probably be the best way to go about it without making arbitrary rules as to what skills do and don't affect WF.

The only thing we know is that MCH is getting substantial changes going into ShB, which I'm kind of sad about because I really enjoy the current iteration of MCH, but can also understand that MCH needs to change in order to appeal to a wider audience. Many people in this thread have expressed that they want MCH to be more tech-based, and I'd be all on board for those kinds of changes. However, I think WF is a perfectly fine ability that should stay as part of MCH (after all, it's basically a 25% damage buff for 10s), and all the new tech stuff can be incorporated into the 50s of downtime between WF. The other thing I would like to see is a re-purposing of Flamethrower, so that it's beneficial to get a full channel of it single target. If we were to keep the same framework that MCH has now, perhaps it could only be used when Gauss Barrel is OFF, so it can be used to fill the 10s of downtime after overheating. We would need another way to overheat, I was think of an oGCD skill that makes your next GCD overheat or it could be used to re-purpose Reassemble.