5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

[Sentinillia]

I enjoy that the new MCH has flexibility but I feel like the price for that has been too great in terms of how rewarding the class feels to play.

With the old machinist you were always rewarded with a big payoff every minute for keeping your rotation on track, even if you didn't feel very powerful between WF/Overheat phases it felt meaningful to do so. Very methodical gameplay, easy to get a grasp of but had a lot of potential for minmaxing when you get into the nitty gritty of specific bosses. It always felt like you were building towards that tasty nugget of damage at the end of your rotation. It had a lot of flaws but it still grew on me after a while if you disregard the inconsistent Overheat timings when playing with less than optimal latency.

The new MCH fixed a lot of the issues that the old iteration had. It's way, way less risky to mess things up and lose your alignments because of a single wrong press of a button due to how flexible the new heat mechanic is. It's also way, way, way less rewarding to play due to such a big portion of our damage being slapped on press and forget abilities like Drill and AA/Queen. Like many others have said, Hypercharge doesn't feel very impactful to use, it went from being the window that defined our damage to being something that is just used to weave together the gaps between our "big red button" skills. I can only speak for myself of course, but having damage handouts in the forms of single button presses is very boring and unrewarding. Ricochet and Gauss Round spam is pure button bloat. I'd much prefer if they were double the potency and twice the cooldown to make them feel more strategic to use.

TL;DR: Too many buttons to press for the sake of feeling more busy, feels unrewarding to play, no setup needed for Hypercharge other than making sure AA/Dr are on cooldown already. MCH feels much more like a rhythm game where you smash buttons as they come up even though technically it's less so than it was before. PS. remove the weird cooldown indicator for AA/Dr, just put them on cooldown like other skills, it's redundant and makes it difficult to see.

[Morra]

I can only speak for myself of course, but having damage handouts in the forms of single button presses is very boring and unrewarding.

And in turn it also makes the skills like wildfire, that requires more input, feel worse, because of how much stronger reassemble drill is.

Also i want to add that weaving ogcds of 150 potency on pretty much every gcd is a poor replacement of the ammo system in my opinion.
Basically we get 4 charges of +150 potency that we can spend willingly (outside HC of course) which if you'd change the animation to loading a bullet into your gun that adds +150 potency to your next skill wouldn't really change a thing mechanically (aside from being able to double weave for 300 or dump everything for 600 obviously).
So why do we need so many weaves for +150 potency each when we could have just one reload for 3-4 bullets with +150 potency, that'd do the same but for only one weave. On top of that we could still have spammy rico and gauss on hc if they want them so much, but actively separate them from our regular 123 and would add 1 skill to our bars that do feel rather barren now.

Weaving weak ogcd just feel busy for no real gain in my opinion, they don't feel impactful enough for me to care if i miss one, which maybe was the idea, to make mch less punishing by dumping the big dmg on two button "combo"

[Atamis]

Things I would like to see kept going forward, but improved:
Flamethrower should build heat, It should also allow movement, albeit slowed as well as be manually aimed. I don't see how shooting flames out of your gun wouldn't build heat, and standing still while you flail around just feels like an arbitrary restriction. I think flamethrower would have a particularly good spot as an AoE opener to quickly build heat to transition into crossbow, and also as a damage boost when used with overheat on. (make it blue high-pressure flames) - This could only be used after the initial pull as flamethrower would still be on cooldown obviously.
Autocrossbow spamming the button and the animation resetting so soon looks and feels rather jarring. I think it would be better if this was a long cast thing like flamethrower that just continually fires until overheat is over or you override it with another ability. See Monster Hunter Heavy Bowgun Wyvernheart ability for inspiration. I also feel it should also provide the cooldown reduction heat blast does, atleast for Ricochet.
Bioblaster should be available at the same time as Drill. AoE low level feels terrible as all you can do is spam Spread Shot and with how much power creep there is most content devolves into AoE slug fests.
Reassemble renamed Reload/Charge-Shot and the old reload animation used instead of current one. Maybe make it cost 50 battery instead of a cooldown.