Quote Originally Posted by Aiscence View Post
I absolutely loved SB's mch, it wasn't as random as people made it to be, a red mage or a dancer are wayyyy more random, and it wasnt impacting you as much, as the biggest dps was during 10 seconds. i'm totally with you for the lag part tho, not like people asked for a 11 sec WF/gcd based to compensate it for 2 years. I actually didnt mind flamethrower, as it was adding a layer of complexity and it asn't actually that bad after getting used to.
There isnt really any complexity left to mch anymore, I think it's the dps with the lowest different between a low percentile a high one? you can optimize the use of Barrel stab to have one more hypercharge, summon your turret to catch the buffs and that's it.
I'd argue ShB isn't that different from StB for Mach in terms of overall depth.

If you didn't crit during wildfire, it didn't matter what you had as a set up going into it. 5 Crit Cooldowns beats double Clean non-crits.

The variance is pretty easy to explain. The Hypercharge/Wildfire window in StB was much more strict, and as it was where we shoved something like 40% of our damage, it swinging high or low widened the end-result band. Mucking up wildfire was the only thing we could really do wrong, but doing it wrong lead to massive differences.

Also given it measured primarily by tDPS, party composition influenced this more. Did you get cards? Was there a Dragoon? A ninja? Were buffs lined up? The perfect comp opener with a 5-crit wildfire could jump your final tally so high that perfect execution by someone without would never be able to compare.

So in ShB, we have a flattened wildfire result (6 GCds will result in a standard 1200 potency for everyone), no RNG combos (not a big deal, but it could matter), two big potency dumps to cornerstone the rotation around, and a flexible dump in the Robot. The higher cast of repeated actions means they're much more likely to normalize, and you'll note your best runs are going to be disproportionate DCrit strings on AA and Robot.

The shift of measuring metric for our data contributes as well. I bet if older data were recalculated using current methods, you'd see Mach's band tighten considerably. Not to the extent now, due to the above mentioned, but tighten none the less.

A dragoon alone was close to an 8-10% boost, and despite claims to the contrary, parties existed without them, and Machinists were in those parties, and that data was uploaded.