Quote Originally Posted by Ramiee View Post
I've been playing machinist in this tier quite a bit and I'm not sure how to fix the rDPS problem. Would a damage buff akin to life of the dragon on hypercharge help with this? Something like 15-20 seconds of 10% damage increase, idk how selfish roles work into rDPS that well so this might not help.
Overheat used to be the 20% damage buff equivalent to Raging Strikes when MCH lost access to it as a cross class. It was a more involved way to activate it than just pressing a buff button, and happened ideally every minute to coincide with the wildfire burst. Hypercharge has now been shifted into a more spammy resource spender than a burst oriented tool, even though it's till preferable to use it under buffs than anything else (but reassembled tools and FMF).

One of the big problems of the job by losing this identity is that it also stopped being the biggest burst in the game (which it still ironically fulfills in pvp...). With Wildfire use cut by half by being put on a 2min timer instead of 1 and turning into a still potent but otherwise unremarkable nuke in a sea of nukes, and the loss of a 20% damage buff, the job damage profile is a lot more streamlined and less burst focused. Bringing back such a focus on the job during bursts would mean that the job would capitalize a lot better on aDPS from raid buffs that would add up to the cDPS metrics of the job overall: not that it does it poorly right now, but considering it has to deal with the ranged tax on top, it scales less well than heavy raid buff givers like BRD and DNC that will just see their buffs scale well with the true top DPS jobs in the chart (unless your team literally fields SMN and RDM at the same time).

Ultimately though this is just talking about a patch up job more than anything, because the true offender is the ranged tax. Let's not pretend for even a moment that BRD and DNC are faring much better.

Note on WF, to show how bonkers the effective potency of that skill used to be, in HW where Fire IV used to be one of the biggest nukes in the game, dealing between 6 and 8k damage in Creator, you'd see people sometimes pulling wildfire detonations going over 20 or 30k.