Machinist Breakdown and Thoughts

[Alchemii]

So do to my controller being stupid, my progression is slowed down. However this will not stop me from a bit of theory crafting I've been doing in the areas of party configuration and interactions. So I highly recommend that any 8-man party with a MCH in it have some form of communication, which should really go without saying but you never know.

Now I was reading through the forms and noticed someone saying how if a dps is not being aggressive then there doing it wrong, this got me thinking about some of the times where I was doing pretty good playing MCH and I realized..... This is wrong, when I was doing exceptionally well as MCH I wasn't being aggressive at all, I was being calculative. At these points I never threw up a buff or debuff because it was off it's CD, infact I held onto them until the moment I could get the most out of the skill. So with that in mind I came up with a few theorycrafted parties where a MCH would beable to get the most out of the skills and could actually be viable. So here I'll be going into the party make up, and how each member of the team interacts with each other.

The Melee Team:
Tanks: War and Drk, or War and War, or Pld and War (needless to say off-tank War)
Healers: Ast and Sch, or Ast and Whm
DPS: Mch, Nin, Drg, Brd
Now first off I'd recommend your tanks be War and Dark, though a strong argument could be made for Pld do to survive ability, that way you can minimize the argument over gear. At least over weapons. So your War will be your off Tank for that high damage it's capable of, just have it dps until a time that the tanks need to switch, pretty straight forward, for now. Also please have the War maintain the slashing debuff as the nin is going to be worrying about other things.
For healers I'd say grab an Ast for those card buffs, mostly hoping for that balance card, then you'll want Whm or Sch, either one will do, just based off what the fight calls for.
Now for the dps, this is where the complicated mobo jumbo comes in.
Let's start with Brd, now sticking to what I said above about the regen, Brds are on Regen duty. Most Bards are already familiar with this role, so no real change here.
The Drg in the team is your heavy hitter, I know a few nins will argue this but based off current layout Drgs are more often higher up. So Drg is the heavy hitter for the party, but beyond that it will also be buffing the damage of the Mch and Brd. So all around win.
Now onto the important duo of the party MCH and Nin, so unlike the others MCH and Nin are going to have to do some coordination along with Ast, in the hopes for that balance card to proc at the right time, as the Mch and Nin are going to be having to time Trick Attack and Hypercharge Rook Turret to over lap. This combo right here will allow an amazing 15% damage boost for 10seconds, 25% if the Ast can get the balance card at the same time, with an extra 5%-15% boost for 5 seconds after that. It is important in this kind of party make up that each time this happens, once every 2mins, that everyone dpsing gets the best burst they can.

Now to maximize on this, a Mch is going to already have to be focusing on his burst 5-6 sec before the burst actually starts. The reason for this is Wildfire, Wildfire has duration of 15sec and at the end of the 15sec deals the 25% compiled damage. If I am understanding how this damage works out, your going to want that to end during the 10sec window. This means that if the Mch and Nin can coordinate it correctly, the Mch could being his 15sec 5% debuff before the nin, and have the 2 overlap that way as well.

Now of course for the other interactions, like the interactions with the dps was all the Mch has to worry about it and coordinate with. So for the next round, let's talk about keeping a tank alive from a particularly hard hit. So in the case where a tank has to take a hard hit, there are plenty of raids where this happens, the response to this is simple your tank will activate there damage reduction ability and so will the Mch. So let's say your MT is a War, big attack about to happen, your tank activates Vengeance and your mch activates either Disassemble or Rend Mind, and bam 35% damage reduction, then your healer pops Virus, and even more. At this point your about cutting the damage from that attack in half.

Extra Thoughts for the Melee Team:
This is an extra bit of an idea for the melee team, but it is possible to drop the Brd and pick up a Mnk. This will allow for more damage, but it should be noted that this means that should any Regen emergency happens the Mch will have to cover it, and that generally means using Hypercharge. If the party is ok with that, then it is total possible for some extra high damage burst that way.

The Magic Based Team:
Ok so the interaction between the healers and and tanks and all that are going pretty much unchanged. Except for the fact that you don't necessarily need to drag a warrior along this time. So I won't go into that, I will however go into the DPS layout for this.
So the DPS layout will be: Blm, Blm/Smn, Brd/Nin, and Mch
So this is pretty simple, Brd uses Foes, Mch uses Hypercharge Bishop Turret, and the Casters burst to there hearts content. I feel this is the most viable of the magic based team, with a nin being able to substitute in for a Brd if you can't find one, which means mch double duty again. The basic run through numbers wise is a bonus of 5% or 15%, of the Ast got the card at the right time + the extra damage from the enemy having his elemental resistance lowered by 10%.

So as I said while that one is the most viable, I think I have one that might be more entertaining to watch happen..... Not sure about actually being apart of though.
DPS layout: Mch, Nin, Brd, Blm
Ok so this ridiculous lay out I call the Ultimate Black Mage Burn, the entire idea is to make a single Blm hit for as much as possible. So for those pesky numbers first it's the 5% from Mch + 10% from Nin +10% from Ast, so once again 25% damage increase + 20% elemental reduction on the enemy. And from that point, sit back and watch as your Blm goes full on supervillian on the enemy.