Shots Fired: A Machinist Guide

[Lavieh]

Stance-Dancing.

You ideally want to be out of stance for at least 3 GCD's or so to ensure that it is a DPS gain.

On that note as well. Stance dancing is not always, and most of the time, a mobility tool. In order for it to be a DPS increase YOU need to keep facing the boss with either strafe or simply not moving. If you turn your back once you could easily have thrown away the stance dancing dps gain. Instead your backward movement should only take place with GB on with stutter stepping.

[Cloacers]

Thanks for this guide. However I'm quite disapointed with MCH. Its require a confuse and long rotation, one where buff is a requirement and also its RNG based. You go through all this and still gets a very meager damage. I'm still working out my job, but so far, I felt like MCH is the botton feeder of FFXIV, and I don't see no future playing this job.

Stance dancing is not always, and most of the time, a mobility tool. In order for it to be a DPS increase YOU need to keep facing the boss with either strafe or simply not moving.

On that note, I found simply having a /facetarget macro with nothing else is incredibly helpful here. Tying it to gauss is a bit much, but it does help a lot.

[KilluaKhan]

any feedback from the pro mch page on my opener would be appreciated

http://imgur.com/gallery/o1Hpb

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vek...ctjkdTltrpb1Wn

pretty much starts of with GB off and first buff being hotshot(due to lowest buff 5% but also the longest)then as you proceed to start buffing, you will notice that you AND your turret are attacking the enemy as you are buffing, so instead of wasting time standing there prebuffing, you could be buffing and double attacking same time.then ends off with pushing off too unneccessary OCD in the rotation after buffing stage, i get my buffs all the way till the second clean shot n last buff ends at last attack. (got rid of QR cuz u can jus preload 3+ and push "reload" further one gcd for the xtra 20 potency or not becaus you will still have the buffed up clean shot) and got rid of hot shot for during or after buffs, biggest waste of buffed time imo. but im no expert, jus thinking aloud. lemme kno if you guys got suggestions for more tweaking

[Aiurily]

to break this down there's 3 points to it that are different from most openers, from my pov

1. doing buffs after pull instead of pre-pull on the basis that you will get turret shots+autos during your buff period

a main concept of doing buffs prepull, is that your dps/damage only starts counting after the enemy is actually pulled. by doing hotshot->hc>bfb>rs>he>dex pot>gauss barrel, you spend 5 seconds, after the pull, purely just doing auto attacks/turret shots while buffing; maybe about 35% of your sustained DPS while you are buffing, after the pull starts; after the DPS starts being tracked.

by doing these buffs prepull, you spend those 5 seconds instead just doing your regular GCDs and regular 100% DPS; maybe at the cost of some of the buff duration going to the (fairly worthless) hotshot at the start, but i think it's a pretty big win towards prebuffing because of this. you normally do prebuff before the pull so that you can get your lead shot fully buffed after all.


2. putting reload+wildfire after lead shot and clipping GCD to frontload a GCD with buffs rather than getting that GCD at the end with no buffs, with no GCD clip

the concept is fine; but you end up losing buffed GCDs anyway because of GCD clip

3. using feint to get a last hit in during wildfire

in this situation, just drop gauss+use split shot instead. it does more damage with the auto and it costs less TP. so you'd do clean shot->drop gauss->auto+split shot and it'd be more dmg than gb feint.

--

and then to compare it to other openers with purely wildfire GCDs.

wildfire>split>slug>clean>split>slug>>dex pot off>clean>all buffs off except your last buff>feint/no gb split>detonate. total=3 split shots, 2 slug shots, 2 clean shots, 7 GCDs
wildfire>slug>clean>split>slug>split>clean>all buffs off except RS>slug>rs off>no gb split>detonate. total=3 split shots, 3 slug shots, 2 clean shots. 8 GCDs.

if you want to discount the split at the end because of tight timing, then it's 2 splits, 3 slugs, 2 cleans, making the difference 1 split vs 1 slug shot.

overall the difference at that point, is

your opener - clean shot with all buffs, no dex pot, 1 split shot with full buffs, no gb split with 1 buff
normal opener - clean shot with all buffs+dex pot, 1 slug shot with only RS, no gb split with no buffs

so. fairly small difference even in the wildfire. the 8th GCD split shot at the end of the normal opener puts it over imo. if i do your opener then adjust the wildfire placement (so, hotshot->hypercharge->buff buff buff GB+dexpot->lead shot->reload->split shot->wildfire) the difference, is that a the slug shot that had RS on it, gets 1 additional buff on it. that's it.

[Elizabeth]

Guys, i was practicing my opener last night and i couldn't surpass a 6k Wildfire. I know that i'm not landing much critical hits, maybe 2 or 3. Playing on PS4.
I'm trying to optimize the rotation to land the most powerful hits inside the WF window, but it's not working at all.
Here is the opener that Hax Etc shows in this guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNmFlIbdu2I . Dunno what's wrong, maybe my latency (over 170)?
My static is trying A1S and my dps on Faust is over 1050 (Incoming damage on Faust, does not count adds, check ACT configuration for that) and 800 on Oppressor.
Inside the raid my best WF was a 8.2k hit and 6.5k is my usual cap. The point is that i'm seeing lots of people posting opener videos parsing on dummy and landing 8k+ with no party buff and lots of crits. My overall damage is quite good but my openener does not impress me at all.

ilvl193

[Myon88]

so instead of wasting time standing there prebuffing, you could be buffing and double attacking same time.

It's not possible to 'waste time' pre-buffing because DPS only counts after the boss is pulled, as that is when enrage timers start being meaningful. These buffs increase your damage yes, but the GCD you spend casting them itself deals no damage, so you can actually think of it as a smart thing, to stuff all these 0 damage GCDs into the pre-pull period where the DPS loss doesn't count.

It is true that you are wasting their duration slightly because if you go, "BFB, HE, HC, RS, Pull" for example, BFB has ticked for 3 seconds without benefiting anything, HE for 2 seconds, and so on. But in your case the only difference is that they're being applied to Turret shots and autoattacks - probably only 1 of each, maybe 2 autoattacks. In my opinion it's not a good enough upside to sacrifice being able to DPS at full tilt from 0:00 of the fight.

When you use them pre-pull it's like basically getting a rolling start in a race versus someone who starts off from the block and has to accelerate.

[Griffeth]

i'd fix the single target 2 ammo opener, and personally i'd rule out the double GR opener entirely for most cases

buff order for single target opener is written as bfb>he>rs>hc; it should be HE+BFB>HC>RS. putting RS 3rd means you lose it for 1 GCD during wildfire; putting HC 4th does not get you any benefits over putting it 3rd

Went ahead and update with this.

[NyssaElf]

Guys, i was practicing my opener last night and i couldn't surpass a 6k Wildfire. I know that i'm not landing much critical hits, maybe 2 or 3. Playing on PS4.
ilvl193

I'm in the same boat and also on ps4. It is latency at this point. Psn already has natural latency and add Internet on top of that. I've tried 4 different rotations with the same result.

[NyssaElf]

Also meant to add a way to see the latency is look at your ticks. Like wildfire, lead shot. The numbers will jump from say 7 to 6 then back to 6, then count down.
Stupid mobile phone and no edit button

[Elizabeth]

Also meant to add a way to see the latency is look at your ticks. Like wildfire, lead shot. The numbers will jump from say 7 to 6 then back to 6, then count down.
Stupid mobile phone and no edit button

LOL i have the same issue! That always happen, the dot stay 7 then 6 then back to 7 then 5. . .