Machinist needs help.

[Kitfox]

MCH design has remained pretty much the same since the start of Shadowbringers. While it was an improvement over the Stormblood design on many aspects, I feel there are still some aspects that are problematic that SE doesn't understand. I'm sure everyone has their opinion on the visual and flair aspects of the job so I'll cover mostly technical issues since these are problems that objectively go against the game design and the skill rotation design as a whole.

Ping dependency

It came to light that SE had been only testing jobs on their internal servers with 0ms latency and only realized the effects of ping once covid forced them to work remote. Stormblood MCH had really bad problems with this up to a point where we had 0.50s error of margin our main burst window. Shadowbringers improved this margin to about 1.25s on Hypercharge and 1.00s on Wildfire. Now that's an improvement for sure, but they also made the oGCD weaving problems much worse.

Hypercharge now requires mandatory oGCD weaving between 1.5s GCDs. That is a very, very tight margin of error for anyone playing overseas. Internally the game uses 0.60s regular animation lock timer to space out actions, that would leave 0.90s left for the oGCD animation before the next GCD. However, the game doesn't have a working ping correction system for oGCD weaving (apart from forbidden 3rd party programs), so the ping comes on top of the animation lock, screwing up players with slower connections. The limit of ping effects lies at 150ms, that makes the animation lock 0.75s long, which leaves 0 room for error between abilities during Hypercharge weaving. The effect of ping isn't quire linear either, from listening to people's troubles on the Balance MCH chatrooms, the problems usually start when people have ~100ms ping to the servers. MCH isn't the only one who suffers from tight oGCD weaving, although the effects on MCH are much more pronounced. The game desperately needs ping correction for oGCD weaving if it intends to keep its current design.

Other ways to solve the weaving and tight buff timer problem would be to use the Charge system we have for Gauss Round and Ricochet or a stacked buff system such as Bunshin on NIN that pre-determines the number of GCDs it lasts for. Alas, this was not addressed for the whole expansion even though the charge systems were introduced for all classes right at the beginning.

Another Wildfire related ping issue that emerged with Shadowbringers was animation length affecting GCD calculations. Wildfire only accepts GCDs into the buff potency after the GCD has fully carried out as opposed to how buffs and debuffs usually snapshot their effect before the animation even begins. I understand that this is to prevent ghosted or interrupted GCDs from counting in on the damage, but this has the unfortunate sideffect of making Drill and Anchor a very poor 6th GCD choice in Wildfire, because it makes the whole error margin over 0.30s tighter than any other GCD action, just because the animations are longer.

The devs really need to be more careful with how the networking issues affect overseas players and players in general who play with slightly worse connections than 0ms ping internal servers.

Rotation structure issues

One of these was very apparent at the start of Shadowbringers. Reassemble was a 60s cooldown while Drill was 20s, but also scaled with skill speed. This resulted in an impossible scenario where the Drill cycle became faster than 60s with any amount of skill speed and Reassemble no longer lined up with it. This meant that while skill speed was supposed to increase the efficiency of Drill and Anchor, it did not, because Drill needed to be delayed for Reassemble anyway. This problem was solved by making Reassemble a 55s cooldown, giving skill speed scaling a whole 5s of leeaway. Same sort of adjustment was made for SMN as well.

However, this didn't solve the issue with Wildfire. Wildfire is locked into a 120s cooldown and you're required to user Hypercharge with it to get the maximum allowed GCDs into the window. This means you are not able to use Drill or Anchor in the middle of it. That essentially locks MCH GCD rotation to the Wildfire timer and doesn't allow skill speed to affect Drill and Anchor scaling like they were designed to. The problem is less pronounced since it only happens every 2 minutes while Reassemble happened every 60s but it's still there. Skill speed scaling is still somewhat useful since you can get extra heated shots every 2 minutes, but the skill speed scaling on Drill and Anchor can not be taken advantage of in order to use Wildfire effectively as we're limited by the cooldown timer on it.

The GCD rotation should not be locked into the timers of oGCD actions because that makes skill speed a useless stat for a class when the rotation only works at the base 2.5s GCD speed.

Another structural issue comes from Heat management. The rotation and the amount of heat works on a perfect loop every 2 minutes, as you would expect. Until you get Barrel Stabilizer. The problem with Barrel Stabilizer is that it throws the whole heat management into chaos due to granting 50 heat, which sounds logical, Hypercharge costs 50 heat to use after all. Or does it? When you use Hypercharge, you actually replace a normal 3 hit combo with the Heat Blast sequence, which means that you lose out on another 15 heat. This means that the perfect 2 minute heat rotation is now 15 heat short. This leads to awkward patterns where sometimes you have enough heat for 3 Hypercharges every 2 minutes, sometimes 4 Hypercharges, and sometimes you're forced to overcap your heat gauge in order to use Wildfire. Skill speed muddles the waters even further since you get extra GCDs in the rotation.

This just shows again how messed up the rotation becomes when you have the skill speed scaled GCD rotation locked with oGCDs timers and gauge usage. Fortunately, the rotation is at least entirely deterministic and you can tweak it to fit every encounter you fight in the game, but it is nonetheless a real headache sometimes.

A good example of how to do things right would be the Battery gauge and Queen interaction. The GCD rotation builds battery, Queen doesn't have a cooldown and can be used at any moment after 50 on the gauge, and the damage scales with the amount of gauge making it extremely flexible. You even have skill expression with the initial 5s windup animation where you get rewarded if you know how to summon it before a buff window starts. Good job on this one.

Other issues

Flamethrower is too weak and too hard to use effectively. Also, the heated shot flips are dumb, give me Heavensward animations back.