The State of Machinist in DT - Let's talk about it (again).

[Connor]

snip

‘Utility’ / ‘support’ is how they’ve designed physical ranged though; it literally says so in their own job guide. The purpose of physical ranged is ‘sustained damage’ and ‘providing support’. Until Dancer came out Machinist had (almost) just as much support capabilities as a Bard, they just gave it up entirely because they wanted everyone to play Dancer (and they tried to do the same to Bard but got heavy backlash). Hell Machinist initially even used MP to support the party the exact same way a Bard did.

Even their role skills are largely geared towards crowd control and a party movement buff; hardly an indicator of them being heavily dps oriented with little support. RIP Palisade, Refresh, Tactician. Shame we only kept the useless ones but that’s another issue lol

The problem isn’t that Machinist ‘has no precedent or design intention to provide’ support. It’s that the game so braindead now that support and utility has been homogenised, simplified into dust then distributed evenly across roles for absolutely no reason thus creating a situation where effectively every job is a ‘support’ job unless you’re a Machinist lol (or BLM/SAM/VIP).


Machinists having support/utility capabilities was never a problem in the past; it’s just the devs absolutely awful ‘balancing’ decisions completely messing up party roles. I mean, look at tanks and healers lol. Just because the game is currently badly designed for role responsibility doesn’t mean we should encourage them to double down on those awful choice. Let Machinist be something more than a TEMU melee with even less support than the real ones.

And I mean, it’s literally always going to be inferior to melee and non-Raise casters because it’s a phys ranged, so it’s not like the dream of ‘top dps output’ MCH will ever amount to anything. Outside of having its own support/utility the best it can ever be really be is useless? Why bring a job that gets outdone by BRD and DNC once you account for rDPS (cDPS?), is inherently inferior to other roles, and has no support or utility capabilities. Isn’t that just asking for Machinist to die? And what if they add a new phys ranged? If it’s support like BRD/DNC then Machinist looks out even more out of place. If it’s pure dps like Machinist then you have the Pictomancer problem where the job balance is potentially thrown entirely out of whack. Because either the ‘pure dps’ is stronger than all 3 and thus invalidates them or it’s own personal dps falls so short of rDPS contributions that it stops being an advantage.

Tl;dr it’s not that ‘phys ranged was never about support’ - it always was, the devs just stopped giving a shit. Just like how they stopped caring about the healing role being about healing, tanks about tanking. They don’t seem to give a shit about basically anything that isn’t ’just DEEEEPS (on a 120s cool-down, of course)’

[Carighan]

(something)

Did you reply to the wrong post? I never said 'phys ranged was never about support' or Machinist 'having no precedent' or so.

[Stasya]

RIP Palisade, Refresh, Tactician.

Good. Lol, the more i read about this .... how people can call this "support". You like support bad toilet paper system?