Machinist: The "Selfish" Physical Ranged that is not allowed to be Selfish

[HyperiusUltima]

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.

I don't think that'd be a great idea necessarily since our bigger damage is in Reassemble anyway during burst. Not to mention, original MCH focused on dumping into Wildfire because that was THE go-to from Heavensward MCH. Honestly they could easily revert back to old Wildfire and leave it at that instead of limiting it to 5 GCDs(already done via Hypercharge Stacks). This way, MCH can actually do the damage it needs to and be selfish during burst.

Outside of burst, probably just buff potencies to a point it's up there just below Melee and competitive with the likes of DNC/BRD.

[Valence]

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.

[Ramiee]

Snip

I remember the old wildfire CD but I didn't play MCH outside of very early in HW. It sounds like the problem child for damage in MCH could be temporarily fixed in DT by potency buffs and knocking down the CD for WF to 60 seconds, though I could imagine this adding a bunch of drifting with the tools CDs (probably be a lot of holding of Excavator to use after the wildfire hypercharge, I think.)

I like how current machinist plays but I would like to see 8.0 either retune it into a really strong DPS only option or some sort of compromise to be like buffing melee level of damage with a raidbuff (maybe make WF like old trick attack or something.) I think it's damage placement should be around RPR and DRG at the very least.

[Valence]

Old Hypercharge was doing exactly that, inflicting a target debuff Trick Attack of lower power but over 28s. Or AoE from the bishop turret depending on which you used.

[HyperiusUltima]

Old Hypercharge was doing exactly that, inflicting a target debuff Trick Attack of lower power but over 28s. Or AoE from the bishop turret depending on which you used.

Essentially it was a Ranged Pet Job like SMN, just with Physical Damage instead of Magical. It was really good back then, but honestly if they can just revert back to old Wildfire and allow it to contend with Melee on aDPS, I'd be down. We already know how ridiculous that sounds, but it's really what MCH needs now to at least stay out of obscurity.

[Carighan]

Pet jobs as a whole are unlikely to come back.

That's just a constant about MMORPGs, as they age they remove/neuter/trivialize their pet classes. It's always a cool idea, and as a player the concept is lovely, but as the community pushes for tighter and tighter balance with an aging game and hence more time to balance things, the reliance on server timing, pet AI and most importantly the limitations on fight design it imposes always eventually win out and pet classes are either removed or trivialized.

Examples:

* Most MMOs, famously WoW that originally had a magical caster tank spec on Warlocks, remove the need to manually guide your pet around boss AoEs and abilities. Removing the true feeling of controlling the movement of two entities in return for having to do less actual damage output as a huge portion of yours is automated.
* In a similar vein, pets eventually lose the need to dodge raid abilities entirely as with an aging game abilities get trickier and trickier to handle. Some of this is understandable: Does a full-feature pet count as a 9th possible target for abilities? Or is it maybe the target, but the summoner can never be one? And how is the summoner supposed to handle complex movement abilities if they end up targeting the pet?
* With this, usually pet healing / revival is trivialized or removed.
* Then, most MMOs go a step further (* We are here) and remove all elements of the pet being a unique entity, making it a DoT (or HoT) with external graphics. But factually they are no different than a buff on the controlling player that provides the same effect, say Scholars just had a trait that healed the lowest-health person every few seconds.
* Even more workable pet job designs like DAoC's Necromancer (who became the pet, in a way) get removed, as the reliance on server movement/action code once again hinders tighter and tighter fight design and class balance too much in an aging game where more and more complex designs and tighter balance is simply expected by the playerbase.

Which is a shame. I love pet jobs. But if you want good pet jobs, you got to look towards single player RPGs or tactical turn-based games or so. These, due to the highly limited nature of their duration, can really go wild with this stuff.

[Zakuyia]

You know looking back aion did a good job with its gun class

[Valence]

Essentially it was a Ranged Pet Job like SMN, just with Physical Damage instead of Magical. It was really good back then, but honestly if they can just revert back to old Wildfire and allow it to contend with Melee on aDPS, I'd be down. We already know how ridiculous that sounds, but it's really what MCH needs now to at least stay out of obscurity.

Asking to contend with melee on the damage front is essentially asking SE to remove the ranged tax and I don't think this is ever going to happen unfortunately, as much as I wish it could, because it would also fix BRD and DNC.

And then make all the melees mad because they're doing "more effort" or some silly nonsense.

Pets

I honestly think pets were literally the least defining factor for MCH and that we have one or not, I'm really not concerned about it, as much as seeing the tank step over it during a buster and while the turret was hypercharging was a funny unfortunate incident that happened.

BUT, that being said, current Rook/Queen is utterly boring, is on autopilot, has wonky battery plans that are borderline excel spreadsheet optimization per fight kind of deal (and if full uptime, learning at which specific amount of battery to resummon it every minute...), and still doesn't even have AoE. The only actual pet that I appreciate for the agency behind is Bishop in pvp.

[Ramiee]

I would honestly want Rook/Queen to be transformed into a nuke or something over this robot. Its feels so bad to use, just do anything to make it more satisfying and fun please cbu3 at least give it better sound effects.