ShB Machinist personal retrospective after 4 months

[MyakotApelsia]

Flamethrower is purely aoe move, like bioblaster. What is the reason you would ever use it in single target? Oh, you want it to give heat? You know that one of the reasons mch was so hated in sb aside from wildfire is because flamethrower was just channel ability used just for heat?
Bring back normal 1-2-3 combo that would become heated at 50+ heat? Oh, remember how fun it was in stormblood, when you dropped after burst phase to 0 heat and had to sit around doing weak shots for 10 seconds?
Latency existed before as well, but before even i with my ping couldnt fit everything in my wildfire, while now i can use it at top damage reliantly. Oh, burst phase with putting all your gcds and ogcds in 10 second 25% dmg up window was completely ping friendly and not clunky at all, which made the job most popular job in the game.
I suppose devs should bring back sb iteration and make mch the clunkiest, unforgiving and the least played job again. Cuz thats what was fun about it, right?

[Ayanumi]

Flamethrower is purely aoe move, like bioblaster. What is the reason you would ever use it in single target? Oh, you want it to give heat? You know that one of the reasons mch was so hated in sb aside from wildfire is because flamethrower was just channel ability used just for heat?
Bring back normal 1-2-3 combo that would become heated at 50+ heat? Oh, remember how fun it was in stormblood, when you dropped after burst phase to 0 heat and had to sit around doing weak shots for 10 seconds?
Latency existed before as well, but before even i with my ping couldnt fit everything in my wildfire, while now i can use it at top damage reliantly. Oh, burst phase with putting all your gcds and ogcds in 10 second 25% dmg up window was completely ping friendly and not clunky at all, which made the job most popular job in the game.
I suppose devs should bring back sb iteration and make mch the clunkiest, unforgiving and the least played job again. Cuz thats what was fun about it, right?

Noones trying to say that the SB iteration didnt need changes, try not to get too worked up about it, the 1-2-3 combo being perma-heated is fine and its fine that theres no RNG. But lets not pretend that the issues MCH had couldnt have easily been fixed by:
1. making Flamethrower immedietly overheat you instead of requiring heat ticks, and have the cooldown period just return you to whatever heat you had at the time of pressing flamethrower. Now you have overheat thats less clunky and a cooldown period that isnt punishing, doesnt require you the reequip gauss barrel and wouldnt be the only function barrel stabalizer could serve.
2. the change to wildfire is good, and people had been asking for it the entire SB expac. It was nice that they listened to the feedback but not so nice that they totally changed the job to be unrecognizable in rotation and gameplay to what it had been before.
3. the only thing that made old MCH unforgivable was the having to use everything on CD, a issue that becomes non-existent with the addition of the charge system to shadowbringers, if you had given old MCH charges of 2 on gaussround and ammo then it would have immedietly been more forgiving.

[MyakotApelsia]

1) Flamethrower instantly overheating you on one hand would make job more fluid. However, if flamethrower was not a dot ability (like pvp version), it would still be channel and would still be clunky and awkward to use. Altho even as dot ogcd it would still be awkward, since at the start of overheat you would need to use gcd instantly and then apply wildfire. With channel ability you could interrupt it with ogcd as soon as overheat started, preventing you from losing delicious damage up; on ogcd it would delay your gcd, which would only be fixable by increasing wildfire duration by 1-2 seconds (which people begged for during several patches, with sqex saying "lol no wait for 5.0"
Cooldown time returning you to whatever heat you had (and i suppose you meant it returning you to everywhere between 0 and 95 instead of just 50) would kinda make job smoother as well, however, overheating at 50+ would keep your heated level up all times, making everything before 50 heat (and normal shots) completely useless. And barrel stabilizer, with its only function to just return you to 50 heat after cooldown, would turn useless as well aside from using it at start of the fight to get to 50 heat instantly and then overheat. You could make it serve another function, but the job was loaded enough to add anything else to it.

2) To be honest, its a change that had to happen if job mechanics of 4.x were to be fixed. Did bullets bring much to the gameplay? Well quick reload maybe, but reload, as far as i remember playing it, always had strict usage. Remove that, do we need proc based combo anymore? Since wildfire is not glorified 25% damage buff anymore, but 200 potency buff to gcds, your best bet would be to just fit as much gcds as possible, right? Rapid shot is not that reliable thanks to it being only 3 gcds and you having to fit everything else in one wildfire. Making it 5gcds like current heat wave would just make matters worse since people would find it hard to press more than 3 buttons one after another. Heat waves being too latency dependant? Maybe, but waste all your gr and ricochets and then you would have to, at most, weave only 1 ogcd into heatwave, making it just matters of spamming one button over and over. Ofcourse, one way to fix it would make wildfire last longer and then remove rapid shot (or keep it), it wouldnt become much better than what we had right now
Hot shot was a useless buff mostly, because it didnt bring anything to the table aside from 30 seconds of damage buff. It didnt have its own damage. Why keep it as damage up if you can just make it deal lots of damage?
People asked for complete rework, people got it.

3) So you are saying that having to overheat before every wildfire (every 60 seconds) with flamethrower, and then in 10 seconds of overheat place wildfire, do 3 rapid fire gcds, then fit heated clean, slug shots, cooldowns and ogcds (including turret overload and reassemble) was more forgiving than having to use gcds on cooldown? Well maybe, but i would rather take doing ogcds on cd rather than losing my damage just because i couldnt fit last gcd in my wildfire.
That isnt to say that if you kept old wildfire with charges to gauss round and ricochet, it would be even worse.
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All that doesnt mean that i hate sb mch. I enjoyed it, but it doesnt mean that job wasnt just busted completely at that point

[Ayanumi]

1. Simple fix that people had already been asking for, just make it work like acceleration or rapidfire used to. "Flamethrower instantly overheats you, the effects of which end upon using x GCDs" naturally this buff would still need a time restriction on it, but much like new acceleration you can give it an insanely long buff time if you wish and it doesnt matter because at the end of the day you can only use it for 5 skills. The benefit of having overheat stay in the job had they not reworked it was mostly due to its interaction with cooldown (being that you could use cooldown as many times as necessary in overheat windows and it would maintain its higher potency). Cooldown time returning you to whatever your heat was before overheating I suppose would only function well if the heat gauge was changed to just be fuel for using a buffed cooldown (would need higher potency) instead of it being a gauge that unlocked your access to the improved 1-2-3. Sorry I should have specified that I agreed with them making the heated 1-2-3 permanent and instead having heat being used only for cooldown, much like esprit is. (or some other skills they could had added instead of it just being purely used for hypercharge+heatblast spam)

2. I agree, I dont think the RNG combo was necessary to have at all, esspecially since apparently it made the skill floor too high for whatever reason. Honestly the 1.5s recast is going to be a problem in the job for as long as it exists unless they prevent you weaving during its windows. Regarding your chime in, who actually asked for the complete rework? Thats a very throw away claim but I havent really seen anything to suggest that considering SE arent exactly the most transparent on WHY they do anything, or what they base their decisions on.

3. I'm not saying that it was more or less forgiving that new MCH, new MCH is an incredibly simple job that has barely any complexity or optimization to it at all outside of queen usage. I cant even compare them sorry. (by the way the last GCD in your wildfire was actually incredibly hard to miss unless you were trying to do the low ping rotation on high ping, at most the only thing you should have been missing was 1 overheated GCD right?)

I dont have anything against the people who like new MCH, and I agree that SB MCH had a lot of issues that needed to be looked at but its a shame they didnt even bother to try and make the QoL changes, almost all of SB people were giving feedback and suggestions to SE on stuff they could do on the job but the only response they ever got was an apology during a live letter from yoshi.p followed by the job being totally reworked with the people who didnt even play old MCH in mind. Almost non of the original kit the job launched with in HW has survived long enough to see ShB, now its just an extremely empty hotbar and equally empty feeling job. But thats just my opinion obviously.

[MyakotApelsia]

1. If you put your idea like that, yeah, makes sense i like it. Cant argue with that, would make an interesting addition to mch

2. I dont really think that problem of weaving mid heatwaves happens unless you have 1+ charges on any of those, or if cd left on one of those is less than 15-20 seconds. At least from what ive played, if they are freshly cd-ed , you wont really need to weave anything in 1.5s window. Altho i would much prefer heat waves to not reduce gr and rc cooldowns and increase potency of those twofold (as an example)
I dont know about official forums, but on reddit there was a lot of stuff like "MCH needs complete overhaul", "Devs should bring it back to drawing board" and stuff like that. Plus iirc yoshi-p on one of live letters said that they will be able to do reworks of mch and mnk only in 5.0 even though high demand for it was there (not so sure about monk, but i remember it being mch and some job that didnt really need any adjustments)

3. MCH being simplified is what made this job have 3-4x more players on it as opposed to how it was on stormblood (comparing between fflogs omega savage clears and eden savage clears). Cant say its bad result.

On matters of overheat and wildfire. You didnt put 6 gcds in wf. What happened is you put 6 gcds in overheat, 5 of them in wf. You never do wildfire outside of overheat.
When you overheated with flamethrower you would instantly cancel it with first gcd, then you would apply wildfire and then insert 5 more gcds (with rapid fire). All and all, last gcd would enter just almost at the end of overheat, with all that taking 9.5 seconds (if your gcd is 2.5 seconds) out of 10 seconds of overheat. Any small mistake with weaving or luxury of having ping issues (applied to mch it meant you didnt live next to the server) would make you land your last gcd out of overheat.
Overheat is 20% damage buff, wildfire is glorified 25% damage buff, so if i dont suck at math, it would make up for 50% damage buff (excluding hot shot, with hot shot its another 8%). Most of your damage on mch comes from overheat, so if you cant put all 6 gcds in one overheat with all ogcds, you should just go and play bard. Great forgiving mechanic btw.

They could of course fix it (and i would like to see how they would fix it, idea of sb mch was really great, but was gone deep down in the trash can in practice), but i think at that point they thought that better to just "get back to drawing board"
Most popular suggestions were actually brought into the game, no matter how you look at it. Rifle Tumor (aka gauss barrel) was removed, wildfire is fixed, button bload reduced, job itself is streamlined, clunkiness reduced, reassemble is now direct crit, there is actual good aoeing now (crossbow, flamethrower and bioblaster make aoeing stuff really satisfying, spread shot is not sh-bad anymore). On top of that, machinist is actually machinist now, and not gunner.

[Kimstar]

pssst, hey there, Warrior of Light. May i interest you with, brand new Mog Station items? Don't look at the poor balance of the game, nononono Warrior of Light, look here, Yeeeeees, now ... about those new items on Mog Station ... - Square Enix, 2020 circa.

[Guurzak]

I'm going to throw a different perspective out here: As a relatively new player who never experienced earlier iterations of the job, I love the MCH design and it's my preferred DPS out of those I've tried so far. I love the mobility it has versus positional-based melees and cast-bar locked casters, and I love the lack of random procs vs dancer and bard.

I'm playing with 80ms lag (US east coast to west) and have no latency issues with singleweaving during hypercharge. However, it seems like the latency issue could be completely resolved by changing hypercharge to simply give you 5 charges of a resource that you could then consume whenever convenient for either heat blast or autocrossbow.

Honestly the only thing I personally would like to see added is an AOE battery spender.