Shots Fired: A Machinist Guide

[Myon88]

Did anyone catch any MCH changes on the live letter? Someone elsewhere mentioned Quick Reload getting a cooldown change (no idea if up or down) but I'm not seeing that corroborated anywhere else.

It's already fairly quick at 30s, although I certainly won't complain if they want to reduce it.

[Ryaz]

Saw nothing on MCHs in the live letter update forum. The only classes they really talked about were ast and mnk.

[Bissani]

Wildfire was accounted for, but don't know if it factored into the parse or not. I did notice a couple of times Wildfire went off and my dps didn't budge, which makes no sense. I don't have a ton of luck with Wildfires. I think my highest burst was in A4 where I hit 8.5k with no food or pots and a drg. On one of my parses today, I hit like 5200 on the opener, despite a perfect rotation and then later in the same fight, I messed up a bit and hit 6900. It just seems very random for me. I've been practicing multiple opening rotations, but without pots or anything else, I can't seem to break more than 7.2k with with most around 6.8k.

For the opener i found this one http://youtu.be/fFm5WWJQEso that helps me to get higher number on wildfire (around 6.5k average w/o party) and higher initial bust. Due to my latency issue, using the opener in the op of this thread i lose too much time between the gdc.

[Ephier]

snip.

Actually wanted to talk to Aurily about that opener. Alterations +_+

Moving rapid fire to the prebuff instead of using it mid rotation means losing 1 skill off the wildfire, but in my testing has shown higher opening burst.

[Myon88]

The opener in this thread is rather outdated anyway. It's not like it's terrible (ok, maybe a little terrible), but things have been optimized a lot since then and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

It's just the nature of class forums like this unfortunately, if the OP never gets updated and there isn't a centralized information source it can be tricky for newcomers to find up to date information. I don't envy the guy having to search backward through 116 pages to piece together relevant bits.

If you ask me, it's more useful these days to compile these things in Google Docs or something. Easier to update, simple to share as links to people looking for information, and you can always read someone else's if you disagree with a particular author.

[Griffeth]

The opener in this thread is rather outdated anyway. It's not like it's terrible (ok, maybe a little terrible), but things have been optimized a lot since then and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

It's just the nature of class forums like this unfortunately, if the OP never gets updated and there isn't a centralized information source it can be tricky for newcomers to find up to date information. I don't envy the guy having to search backward through 116 pages to piece together relevant bits.

If you ask me, it's more useful these days to compile these things in Google Docs or something. Easier to update, simple to share as links to people looking for information, and you can always read someone else's if you disagree with a particular author.

Do we have anyone putting this stuff in a doc and updating it? If not I can look at starting that as long as people are willing to work together to keep it updated.

[Myon88]

I run pretty much the same opener, except with a small alternation because I still believe in double Gauss Round openers.

BFB, HE, RS, Tank pull, Gauss Round, Hypercharge
Hot Shot, Potion
Lead Shot, Reload... the rest of it is pretty much the same except Gauss Round will come back off cooldown before the end of Wildfire, so you get a second one.

A nice bonus is that the first Gauss Round will turn on your attack and cause your turret to immediately fire a normal shot, Hypercharge will reset its attack swing (as pointed out awhile ago) and immediately a fire a charged shot - effectively letting you easily cheat an extra turret shot out.

I'm beginning to see the merits of not putting Hypercharge in the pre-pull section too. Apart from the above benefit, you could also make an argument for 1 GCD of raid wide 5% physical vulnerability being worth more than 1 GCD of personal damage buffs uptime (when deciding which to cast before the other).

Funnily enough, I recall a chat I had elsewhere with someone also suggesting I move Rapid Fire to the pre-pull section. I haven't looked into it, but I can see the merits and it's on my to-do list.

[Ryaz]

The extra turret shots would be nice... If they counted as part of Wildfire. Everything I've read says turrets don't add any damage to Wildfire at all.

[Myon88]

The thing though, is that Wildfire damage is just one component of the more important thing which is total damage done. For example, would you rather have a Wildfire that hits for 100 extra damage, or an extra turret shot for 300 damage?

It's a lose the battle, win the war thing. The boss doesn't care where your damage is coming from.

If you're just comparing Wildfire damage numbers you will certainly get larger numbers with an opener optimized to produce that, but that's not the whole picture.

A better way to compare them would be to compare total damage done by each opener in ACT after the same set period of time (say, 25 seconds each to allow for a full opener to conclude). Ideally you'd run this thousands of times in a simulator to smooth out RNG, but you get the idea.

[Ephier]

If you're just comparing Wildfire damage numbers you will certainly get larger numbers with an opener optimized to produce that, but that's not the whole picture.

I don't think you understand what I am saying. The opener that is not optimized for wildfire had more burst than the one that was optimized for wildfire.