Machinist is no longer fun

[Elnidfse]

Alrighty this is about to be a block of text. Sorry in advance

I won't say concerns expressed here are unfounded. But I think we've hit a point where we're all starting to wallow in despair unnecessarily.

Unnecessarily? MCH want a change that seems balanced. Then they're changed in the wrong way for little to no gain while also killing what little gameplay there was. This was done by a supposedly 5 star balancing team. This right here is the reason PTRs are generally a thing. What a joke

that DOES mean numbers talk.

If you're quoting HW you should also note that people outright quit the game, some of them I know were BRD players. I'm not going to say that's happening here or will happen. But you should also note that people were so dissatisfied, either with A3S or their current job choice that they stopped playing.

I believe they said in the Live Letter that they're now rethinking their base idea of "more job complexity = more damage

For Samurai. That is why samurai did more damage.

if only because gameplay metrics (and more importantly, hopefully, player feedback) will be the biggest determining factor in seeing positive change.

Yes and while you're waiting for that change I could be having a lot more fun than I am right now playing MCH. I mean if you feel keen to wait for another 7 months for a change power to you. BUt I wipe my hands of this.

They killed our weaving, they killed our cooldown use and timers, they killed our damage and utility. If you want a job where you hit buttons as they come up then congratulations, MCH is now your dream job. Sure accidentally overheating was amazingly frustrating, but as I stuck with the job and became better it felt better.

The new dismantle exists for people who can't tell the difference between physical and magic damage but mitigates either WORSE than old dismantle (situations like double AoE's that don't snapshot debuffs come to mind). New dismantle is a bad disable and a reprisal with a longer cooldown.
Our level 70 ability exists for no other reason but to get 20 or 30 heat. Why was this even a level 70 ability? It's AoE damage is barely stronger than ammo powered grenado shots. It has no interesting dps doing dynamic like foul or bahamut or ten chi jin or even friggin brotherhood.
They took all our weaving skills away but then stuck them in cross roles. Oh man I sure do love having to slot abilities that were stuck in my kit as a baseline. Or I would but they do no damage and have no reason for being taken. And many of them are WORSE for abilities that you have to sacrifice something to even take. Are you serious?

not-so-complex job

I don't want that. If you want "not-so-complex" the doors right there for you to go engage yourself with BRD/RDM. An MMO will never be proportional. All jobs were created with different playstyles in mind. Not all jobs were balanced with equal difficulty. That's the point. That's why SAM is (allegedly) complex. Otherwise every job would have abilities that functioned the same way with similar support. You should stop hanging on to the words "not-so-complex" and "stormblood" vision and reread the interview from famitsu.

Ranged DPS jobs will feel almost new

So next I'll ask about ranged DPS, but in a nutshell, it feels like they've been completely screwed with (laughs).

Yoshida: Sorry, they're almost new jobs (laughs).

On machinist, you've added the "heat" mechanic. What was the idea behind that?

Yoshida: Similar to bard casting, previously there was a risk associated with casting which we've now reversed. Since we've made machinist a bit easier to handle, it's fun to be able to move around and fight with style. Machinist was at a point where all of the machinist actions, along with the enemy's actions, the turret, and additional actions like Hawkeye and other abilities that affect DPS with different recast timers made it difficult to know what to do and when to do it. It's worth noting especially for machinist that the removal of additional actions will make a significant difference.

Another issue was that there was a long period of downtime which could be a bit boring to get through in battle after unloading everything with Wildfire, so to go along with reducing the number of things to manage and making the job easier to understand, we added the heat gauge to add another thing to consider besides just Wildfire.

So that was the intent.

Yoshida: I think the challenge of the job has changed. With the removal of the casting time to raise damage, we added the heat gauge. It will be fundamental to the job to maintain a high heat gauge without overheating. The feeling should be like a temptation to overheat to achieve burst damage, but with an associated disadvantage of doing so. You can use Flamethrower as an AoE attack, but it will be more important to use it to manage the heat gauge.

The effect of bard's songs have also been changed a lot.

Yoshida: Yeah. The action to support the party to recover MP and TP of party members can now be set as a role action, so we've eliminated the need to have that same effect for both jobs. With that, we were able to give a bit more flexibility to each. Without providing the effects of MP or TP recover to both bards and machinist, the rate of utilization of one or the other might be biased, so that was one constraint we had to work with for ranged DPS.

That would be the case.

Yoshida: By making those common, we were able to add some specialized elements for each job to take their place. Additionally, by eliminating the cast times and the way these elements are intertwined, machinist became a totally different job. To be honest, we didn't really have a choice but to make the adjustment. For bard, it might have been easier to envision because there was originally no casting, but that wasn't the case for machinist, so I'm sorry to have made the sudden change.

It's hard to envision the change, so it may be a bit confusing.

Yoshida: If I had to say something about it and just said it's different than you might imagine, it might cause you to think about all sorts of things changing compared to the current level 60 job. So I think it will be better to actually try out machinist. You can say the same for other jobs as well, but you can't really compare the current level 60 job to the way it was when Heavensward was implemented.

Indeed, that's true.

Yoshida: If you're to compare, you should look at the current level 60 vs. the new level 70. Anyway, there will be a lot of new things to figure out when Stormblood launches. With Heavensward, the patch 2.55 rotations changed due to the new actions that were implemented and it eventually become a job that differed by level 60. However, Stormblood includes many changes even at level 60 that will continue up to level 70, so I think the experience will be quite different.

https://www.bluegartr.com/threads/13...ew-Translation

The heat gauge (and by proxy the redesign) was designed to solve a few problems.
1) For novice MCH it was hard to adopt to cooldown timers in relation to boss length
2) With the removal of our additional actions the job became less finger dexterous with all the weaving you did
3) With the change to the heat gauge our cooldown management was replaced to heat management
These things were supposed to BALANCE each other. Not completely kill the job's complexity. By his own admissions and interviews besides this one the job was supposed to be difficult but in a different way:

Naoki Yoshida: I think Bard and also Machinist is dramatically different. Especially with the Machinist, you might think that it’s like a brand new job.

In terms of the Bard, it’s almost as if your playing field has gone back to the good ol’ days. You may feel a bit of nostalgia from handling the Bard [if you’ve been playing since A Realm Reborn].

Going back to the Machinist, it was introduced at Heavensward initially and had that cast time that was required for some of the actions, and now we’re taking that away and we’ve implemented the new job gauge, the heat gauge for the Machinist and it will be a lot of managing that gauge, how do you maintain a good level on your heat gauge. So there will be a lot of technical aspects of trying to maneuver with that job. We’re hoping that players will try it out and see how it works.

http://twinfinite.net/2017/06/ffxiv-interview-e3-2017/



You want to know what's unfounded?
Telling people that their concerns are unnecessary when the change they got are something most MCH agree are terrible.
Like me some people were cautiously optimistic about a 1.05 change. We didn't get anything for 1.01 and thought that 1.05 would see a change to potency and numbers or at least to hypercharge. We got nothing but the dumbing down of the job.
There are so many mod deleted comments in the JP forums that it makes me laugh.
Most people who could play the job proficiently in any region do not like these changes. They're horrible.

TL;DR
Nobody has any right to tell people adopt a wait and see when the previous wait and see gave MCH exactly what they didn't want.