ShB Machinist personal retrospective after 4 months

[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.

[Yandere-chan]

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.

I've recently been playing Machinist myself. It's a lot of fun. I play on 80ms lag too. I don't really have an issue with double weaving for regular gcds or single weaving in regular hypercharges, but I do notice that the timing for wildfire is very strict with my latency. It's possible for me to do all 5 with it, but I'm much more consistently able to do it with 3~4 weaves. In a pug that isn't an issue but in a coordinated group that has stacked raid buffs, it might be an issue to not be able to do so consistently. I agree that the simple change of just making it so hypercharge gives you 5 charges of heat blast would help tremendously.

Aside from that, an AoE battery spender would be neat, although they could just have the queen do like a 50% splash damage (like ricochet) or such instead as to not have more buttons added needlessly, and I do think they should give flamethrower a 10~20 per tick potency buff so that its purpose is more defined since there is barely if any gain in its use after factoring in its lack of heat gain. These three changes alone would be great for Machinist.

[Taranok]

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.

You didn't miss much. HW MCH was defined by Wildfire megacrits, a ridiculously complicated rotation for 15 seconds followed by 2.5 minutes of downtime. It had some of the problems SB lampshaded, but mostly it was all about getting a 25k wildfire crit. Do be aware that when MCH was doing 25k wildfire crits, a well played BLM would be pulling about 2000 DPS. It was a super big number. Also gun mage with a ridiculously dumb casting animation, but at least the class played mostly alright with cast bars, it just had a major bait and switch problem because of it.

SB kept a lot of HW's MCH, but basically focused it to a point that the class broke, while throwing in a second mechanic that the devs under-developed and then in ShB deleted outright, replacing it with a rage bar. It's a very similar problem to what happened and is still happening to Summoner in ShB. The classes were and are defined around having 2 different design directions that directly compete against each other instead of complimenting each other. What's sad is that the heat mechanic in principle in SB was actually a good mechanic, it just needed about another 6-12 months in the oven while ripping out parts of the rotation that didn't work with it, because the heat mechanic worked really well with the class thematically, offered a uniqueish playstyle not seen in other classes, and if actually utilized properly could have been really fun. Instead, it was tacked on to other mechanics and the 2 mixed like oil and water. And the mechanic that broke the cohesion? Wildfire. In today's MCH, Wildfire could basically be deleted, the 1200 potency it represents distributed elsewhere, and I doubt most players would actually care. It's been a major bane and holdback to MCH's overall design, and I say good riddance to bad rubbish at this point. That said, wildfire in HW was fun, but likewise hurt the class because so much of the classes damage was tied up in a 90s (I think? Might have been 120s) rotation. All the memes about bosses jumping with machinist happened because wildfire was too important to miss, and miss it did.


In my opinion, the shadowbringers machinist is the best machinist has been. And I actually liked, though didn't main, MCH back in HW. Granted, I had a 15ms ping instead of the 80-110ms ping I have now, but that's a topic unto itself. The big thing is that it has a coherent direction and focus. Sure, it was dumbed down, but a lot of that dumbing down was busywork that made the class especially inaccessible, as well as streamlining a really, really dumb part of the rotation.

Additionally, Machinist (still) has the best pets in the game. Namely, they're fire and forget, cannot drop GCDs unless the boss jumps, which you have a button you can push to make up some of the DPS loss from that anyways, win win win. Meanwhile, over in summoner-land......

[Ayanumi]

In my opinion, the shadowbringers machinist is the best machinist has been. And I actually liked, though didn't main, MCH back in HW. Granted, I had a 15ms ping instead of the 80-110ms ping I have now, but that's a topic unto itself. The big thing is that it has a coherent direction and focus. Sure, it was dumbed down, but a lot of that dumbing down was busywork that made the class especially inaccessible, as well as streamlining a really, really dumb part of the rotation.

Additionally, Machinist (still) has the best pets in the game. Namely, they're fire and forget, cannot drop GCDs unless the boss jumps, which you have a button you can push to make up some of the DPS loss from that anyways, win win win. Meanwhile, over in summoner-land......

Got to humbly disagree, I dont understand why the pets still being "fire and forget" is a good thing when thats the main complaint people had about rook/bishop autoturrets since you only had to throw them down then forget about them. Queen's difficulty with terrain like E4s and its inability to change targets once set + losing DPS from boss jumps (meaning actual boss movement not downtime) actually make it a downgrade from rook in my opinion.

Current MCH as you said has been very dumbed down, I dont think battery really interacts with the kit at all so its just a slapped on additional gauge that functions as a DoT which I hope they change in the future so it actually matters to your gameplay.
I agree that at this point they could remove wildfire and it wouldnt really matter since its became so boring and detatched form the kit.

Overall the design feels slicker on the job but thats mostly because they removed so much of it that it would actually be HARD for them to make such a basic job feel clunky.
(even then heatblast spam still feels clunky due to the weaving and time commitment you need to put into dumping 50 gauge)

[MyakotApelsia]

I dont understand why the pets still being "fire and forget" is a good thing when thats the main complaint people had about rook/bishop autoturrets since you only had to throw them down then forget about them. Queen's difficulty with terrain like E4s and its inability to change targets once set + losing DPS from boss jumps (meaning actual boss movement not downtime) actually make it a downgrade from rook in my opinion

In sb you didnt really ignore them, you hypercharged it for damage up on wildfire, overloaded before wf goes off, then sat without turret for some time, and then threw it again until next wildfire. I prefer current queen more tbh, altho i would love to have aoe alternative to it (like bishop autoturret becoming automata king or something). Like it is huge ogcd, instead of taking part of mch's autoattack damage, partially ruining skill speed (and alphascape raid weapon) and just being general nuisance

[Ayanumi]

In sb you didnt really ignore them, you hypercharged it for damage up on wildfire, overloaded before wf goes off, then sat without turret for some time, and then threw it again until next wildfire. I prefer current queen more tbh, altho i would love to have aoe alternative to it (like bishop autoturret becoming automata king or something). Like it is huge ogcd, instead of taking part of mch's autoattack damage, partially ruining skill speed (and alphascape raid weapon) and just being general nuisance

It had more interaction sure, but hypercharge and overload were two minute cooldowns, so they werent exactly super interactive.

[Dianoia]

Instead of spamming Heat Blast, make it an ability similar to GNB’s Gnashing Claw/Wicked Fang/Savage Claw that combos off the base 3hit combo when overheated. Seems like an easy fix to the latency issue for Wildfire and the boringness of Heat Blast spam

[Jirah]

Instead of spamming Heat Blast, make it an ability similar to GNB’s Gnashing Claw/Wicked Fang/Savage Claw that combos off the base 3hit combo when overheated. Seems like an easy fix to the latency issue for Wildfire and the boringness of Heat Blast spam

Hmm interesting conecpt