MCH vs BRD (And why MCH need serious help)

[Makajin]

I can't speak for Bard, but I've been MCH since around halfway ish through Heavensward. Been playing a fair amount of Stormblood and a couple things i would like to bring up.

1: Flamethrower is incredibly niche and the potency isn't worth using (Nevermind how buggy it is) In an AOE situation, you almost never wanna raise your heat. The only real use this has is recovering from an overheat, but we have Barrel Stablizer for that.

2: Overdrive. The only use this has is if you're dealing with heavy movement that would cause you to move the turret or, if it was about to be destroyed. Two problems with that though. The potency, and the turret lockout. Removing the lockout would probably help bring it in line.

3: This is more nit picking about the effectiveness of our abilities. Hot shot needs to be brought up from 5% damage. Raise it to 10 or 15% and maybe increase Wildfires duration to 13 or 14 seconds.

[Greedalox]

1: Flamethrower is incredibly niche and the potency isn't worth using (Nevermind how buggy it is) In an AOE situation, you almost never wanna raise your heat. The only real use this has is recovering from an overheat, but we have Barrel Stablizer for that.

I wouldn't say Flamethrower in your opener + every wildfire every minute to get to 90/overheat depending on which Wildfire is occuring is niche, at least not anymore niche than Wildfire itself. Plus you never want to recover your heat from 0 with Flamethrower- it's one of those counter intuitive things, you lose out on damage this way.

[Kill3rkoi8082]

As a MCH alt I really think we could use a major buff in potencies. BRD has its utility while MCH is just all about damage. It pains me to see MCH being hated. Everything about this job is really fun IMO especially in PVP (Top kills every time I play ). Just raise the potencies PLEAASE I'm begging SE!!

[photometrik]

I wouldn't say Flamethrower in your opener + every wildfire every minute to get to 90/overheat depending on which Wildfire is occuring is niche, at least not anymore niche than Wildfire itself. Plus you never want to recover your heat from 0 with Flamethrower- it's one of those counter intuitive things, you lose out on damage this way.

This is my problem. FT feels so clunky to throw into an otherwise rhythmic rotation that I can't wrap my head around using it this way. I know OH helps maximize your DPS with WF, but I'm really hating this as meta. In Heavensward I could easily grasp what I was supposed to do with WF rotations. Now, I look at the suggested opener and my eyes cross. I'm not exactly sure why it seems so weird to me, but I don't know if I can viably play MCH anymore without some significant changes to the way mechanics like Ammo, FT, and WF synergize with one another. It's kinda depressing.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

This is - like I said in the other thread - the big disparity between BRD and MCH right now. Damage and support utilities aside, the BRD kit simply has no conflicts whatsoever, whereas the MCH kit is full of things designed to work only under specific situations and conflict with each other besides. Reloads for potency increases and heat management, only it hampers heat generation if you're under 50. Penalties for using your damage increases, with or without Barrel Stabilizer (one of your longest cooldowns). And the removal of some of the better tools we had while BRD barely lost any of their good ones.

MCH is still playable and enjoyable, but even a few seconds on a dummy today showed me there's far less management in BRD, and for all it's capable of - for what MCH should be just as capable of - we have to work entirely harder for it, sometimes against ourselves. Hardly reason for me to switch, but let what I've said be taken as feedback for the sake of positive change.

[Ossom]

Flamethrower is such a bad skill, I refuse to even do the opening rotation other MCH are pushing around because of that skill.

I wouldn't even use Flamethrower because it cancel's your Auto Attack too. So after 3 Seconds of using it you've done 180 Potency, compared to 100 (AA) + 230 (Average between H. Split Shot, H. Slug Shot, H. Clean Shot, Cooldown).

330 - 180 = 150 Potency. So you have Sacrifice 150 Potency just to get the Optimal Opener going, only for you to lose your main buff directly afterwards.

Overdrive is even worse, in the duration of a normal 12 Minute fight, you'll use this skill once, maybe twice. At the end when the boss dies. 300 Potency over the course of a 12 Minute fight is pretty much nothing. So unless they plan to bring back A3s and crazy DPS checks like this, why even slot this skill? I have it on a hot bar but I can count on one hand how many times I've used it.

And these are our Lv70 and Lv68 skills respectively. It's pathetic.

Reload and Quick Reload even hurt us when we are under 50 Heat.

[EdwinLi]

MCH is still playable and enjoyable, but even a few seconds on a dummy today showed me there's far less management in BRD, and for all it's capable of - for what MCH should be just as capable of - we have to work entirely harder for it, sometimes against ourselves. Hardly reason for me to switch, but let what I've said be taken as feedback for the sake of positive change.

Yep MCH is very heavy on management which is why i think some additional things need to be added and adjusted to reduce the management needs.

Hot Shot, for example, should have the ability to add additional seconds to the Hot Shot Buff per heat generated in gauss barrel thus every heat added refills the Hot Shot buff such as 5 heat adds 5 seconds to the Hot Shot buff and 10 Heat adds 10 seconds to the Hot Shot Buff.

Potency increase also seems to be required atleast because MCH is designed to focus more on DPS.

Another aspect is that the Gauss barrel remains on even after Overheat as the removal and reattachment part of Gauss barrel is just there to be a annoyance to the majority of players.

Overheat needs a lot of reworking as I find maintaining the heat between 50 to 99 heat so I can maintain the Overheat 123 skills a better gameplay and less punishing than the Overheat Burst gameplay certain players are aiming for.

[Elnidfse]

It's not "far" better at all. 0.4% isn't huge (though it's something) and Dismantle is much better than Troub in most cases due to its freedom of timing and short cooldown, at least in historic fight designs where big persistent damage is rare.

It is far. A period of a single GCD can tank your entire wildfire. But I'll get into that later.

And I'd question how you think Machinist is more messed up by non-jump mechanics. Do you mean turret death? That's the only thing that comes to mind. It's not like Bard can't get completely gutted by a poorly timed stun or whatnot.

By a poor timed stun? Let's use a situation that can happen right now. You lime up your timings as a MCH perfectly. Susanoo does rocks. You have to DPS rocks. You're fine, your WF will line up when he starts making people do runs back and forth. You 121, FT, WF.

[Elnidfse]

And you get stunned. That stun lasts 7 seconds. You lose your 3 and 2, you lose 80% of your wildfire, and you (if you are doing the fight right) don't have a GB on, as well as having your CDs unsync'd. You've just lost over 1k potency for doing a mechanic right.

We'll focus on the CD unsync portion for this example, but mind you that if you're really interested in this entire hypothetical I urge you to read my post here where I go in depth about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...h_job/djm3v4a/

[Elnidfse]

Because this is going to erode into two or far more posts we'll have to do this in shorthand. Because your cooldowns are shorter now than they were in HW, you suffer to lose more damage over the course of an entire fight by not using them. Every step dropped or GR loss equals to a larger and larger DPS deficit that sometimes can be caused just by doing a mechanic right. And the nature of wildfire means that we need 21 seconds to apply the thing.

It's not like how you can refulg + barrage and get your on demand burst out the GCD straighter shot procs or even how PP can be gamed around but is extra damage on top of good consistent damage, and because damage from dots are constant, short of them falling off from not being refreshed you being stunned for 7 seconds is not the same as me losing my wildfire.