Machinist is no longer fun

[SlayerOmega]

Agreed. I don't even care if less CD use is a dps losst right now. But what I DO know is that the current changes make MCH less fun to play now and thats a bigger issue.

Someone at SE needs to make ACTUALLY TESTED changes to the class. Dont just change numbers on skills withkut testing it and juat hope that the dps goes up, or that the class is still fun to play.

Get on a test machine, log in, and actually play the class for a bit to make sure it all works together you dumb puts.

This shouldnt be this hard....

[ArcanaPunk]

The only things that MCH needed from 4.05 were

potency buffs
barrel stabilizer to 60s
quick reload not reducing heat, and
overheat being more than a marginal gain

I really don't think we're going to see the heat values going back up to 10 each, but I hope to god they are reversed, if rng sucks and you get 4 split shots in a row you can actually do something else, never mind the fact that it does more damage than regular split shot. Let me press a different button. Please.

If they increase the damage but leave the heat gauge as is post 4.05 I don't know if the Job will be as fun again, but it will at least be worth playing so I don't feel like dead weight.

[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.

[KuroTenshi]

Eh, Machinist was the first thing I capped in SB, but once I got there I found the heat system far more boring than engaging. Everything became about not overheating and you could only use four abilities max before having to use cooldown if you didn't have/use ammo. It didn't feel like a class to me, it felt like a heat gauge, and that was entirely disappointing. Could I have learned to do it? Sure, but it was far too much effort for the mediocre returns. I was originally going to main it because I gave up the class I wanted to play to someone else I was going to raid with. However, they're not coming with us anymore, but if they were I'd likely pick up MCH again due to these changes.

All in all, I tried the changes out as soon as I got up on patch day and I find the class much more fun. Sure I'd feel less special for learning master it than I would have before, but I'd at least have fun getting there rather than just feeling like I was slogging through a chore like I would have with it's original design.

[Elnidfse]

Sure, but it was far too much effort for the mediocre returns.

So by your own words if the returns were higher you would have been happier. Heat gauge management was easier than 3.x boss timer and cooldown management. We've gone from a solid 9 to complexity to a 2. And while I'm all for making a job accessible, there are already plenty of accessible jobs. If you want to glamour a MCH than feel free to do so but leave the mechanics intact for the people who are invested in the job at the level they balance at.

Everything became about not overheating and you could only use four abilities max before having to use cooldown if you didn't have/use ammo.

More cooldowns = more damage
3 cooldowns was a guaranteed 1-2-3 without the use of ammo
See the thing about being hard to play is that is a problem that is only a problem once. Boring is a problem that lasts forever. And the problem with taking one and forcing it to the other is the same problem you get when you overnerf a class. You disturb the core playerbase of that job/class and punish those who put forth that effort. It's the same logic used when people were discussing if Royal Menagerie should get nerfed. If the job was recently released or played that RDM from the get/go in the effort:return ratio, I wouldn't be playing it to begin with. I played it because I liked the play style. People didn't play it because of it's playstyle. Fully satisfying one side of that equation is not fair to anybody.

With BRD they wanted to strike a balance between approachability for new players and the ability for veterans to optimize. And that is indeed true. For MCH they took it all away and shoved it so that only new inexperienced MCH can play it casually and that would be fine if it didn't also have damning effects for people who picked this job up in HW.

Edit:
I should mention that all I wanted was a change to damage. The job had extremely frustrating moments when I was starting out that felt worse because our personal and rDPS was the lowest of all jobs and our defensive utility was outright bad. What I didn't want was for them to murder the complexity of the job. And this is why you never use any of the 3 wishes a monkey's paw gives you

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

First, calm down.

No seriously, calm down. I'm as frustrated a MCH player as any, but my "unnecessarily" comment simply meant we're just sulking and posting repeated topics lamenting the change. It changed, we don't like it, it's not gonna change soon and that SUCKS. I get that. At some point however, we're either gonna work with what we got, switch to something else, or simply quit. What we decide, what we do, that's all up to each and every MCH. But topic after topic after topic gets old.

I'm not saying sit and wait either. Speak up. Tell them what you don't like. SHOW THEM what you don't like. Those are the numbers I alluded to. That's what got BRD changed. That's what will ultimately effect MCH changes. But the sky isn't falling, the sun will rise tomorrow, and if MCH is in a bad spot now, it won't always be. Look at the end of Heavensward. Look at ANY job that has ever fallen behind even a little. No, true balance is never going to happen. But seriously, enough doomsaying, enough wallowing.

SAM isn't complex. Seriously, that job is so straightforward in just dealing raw damage, I'd argue that's what makes it enjoyable. Granted, I don't need simplicity to feel like the job is fun. . . Guess what I was before I was a MCH? Why would I trade an "easy" job for one more complex? At that, I also don't go looking for complexity to validate my sense of fun. I try the job, if I like it and have fun playing it, then I'm going to excel at it regardless of how simple/complex it is.

I want to chime in on the interview, but I typed a page before, so I'll just say this: I interpreted it differently, tried things differently, and effectively reached the same end point. Maybe it was optimal? Maybe it wasn't. It got the job done, even with the imperfections the job itself had, and that's that. Did I top charts? Sometimes. Did I struggle, make mistakes, and hit rock bottom at times? Definitely.

Is MCH perfect as is? No. It does need more. But where others cried nerf, I saw the change and adapted so quick it actually felt good, even if the results weren't astronomically higher. Is it complicated? No, MCH never felt complicated to me because I pushed myself to learn it even back in 3.0. Run 5 miles a day and it doesn't seem so tough at one point. The simplifying didn't make the job "boring" to me either because I never found the job boring. I don't even find the nearly 2-button gameplay of MCH in PvP boring now. But "complexity" was never the draw or the flavor of the job for me. I like guns. I like tech. It's the techy gun job. I liked it when it was "bad", and I liked it when it was "good". I like it now even as imperfect and in need of improvements as it is. The problem with MCH wasn't going to be simply fixed by increased potencies, otherwise they could just buff everything to Overload levels and put no thought behind it whatsoever. They could give us double the support of BRDs and that still wouldn't be a proper fix. Was anyone really expecting a huge buff before the savage content?

Okay, rant over. I shouldn't have typed half of what I said. My bigger point is that we can sit here and make pity party threads, or we can put our heads together and figure out what needs to change and how. SE themselves noted that the playerbase had differing opinions on what to fix; maybe if we come to a consensus and express a shared desire for changes, they'll happen. At that I should note that I'm probably among the more unpopular mindset right now that MCH is neither fine as is, nor ruined and boring. That's my opinion, and nothing more. If everyone wants it "complex" again, I'll adapt to that too and be about as affected by that as I've been by these changes.

[Idolon]

feeling like I was slogging through a chore like I would have with it's original design.

If you didn't enjoy the heat mechanic, then maybe Machinist just wasn't the job for you. That's okay! I leveled Dragoon to 60, decided I didn't care for the way it played, and then moved on to other jobs.

Machinist could maybe have used a small increase in the time to overheat, but what we got was by no means small. It now takes so long to naturally overheat if you are using ammo on cooldown (which you should be for the extra damage) that Barrel Stabilizer comes back off cooldown at about the same time as you finish overheating. There is no longer any risk associated with keeping heat high, because mindlessly pressing buttons as they become available will never cause an overheat with any meaningful consequences. As I showed in the original post, there is no noticeable drawback to overheating at random versus managing your heat.

Worse yet, managing heat is actually harder that it was before. An ideal Wildfire goes something like

Reload > 1 > 2 > 1 > Wildfire + Cooldown > 3 > Quick Reload + 2 > 3 > Cooldown

Pulling this off before, without dropping you below 40 heat so you can immediately recover to 50 with Hot Shot if necessary, required 80+ heat. With the changes to Quick Reload and shots only providing 5 heat, you can only drop to 45 heat, so you now need 85+ heat to do this. It used to take 3 non-ammo GCDs to reach optimal heat and up to 2-3 more after every Cooldown, but now it takes 7 to reach optimal heat and up to 5 more per Cooldown. If your heat is not in the proper range while approaching Wildfire, it takes significantly longer than before to correct it. Similarly, if you actually intend to overheat, such as for burst damage before a phase transition, it takes twice as many GCDs to do so. Flamethrower could be used to offset this, but you can only use it to generate 10 heat before you start losing damage from auto attacks and GCD skills.

[Elnidfse]

But topic after topic after topic gets old.

Do you know how you keep an issue alive? By keeping it relevant. By talking about it. Who cares if the information is old, if it's kept current people will continue to chime in. Do you know how useful friggin "idea" threads have ever been in an mmo? Gets old? For whom? If you don't like seeing them don't open them. MCH are trying to bring the attention to square in the only way that's possible. By TALKING about them and why we don't like them. It doesn't matter if there's 1 thread or 500. That's the point. You say to speak up but then you say to not speak up. A change thread is far less useful than threads listing in no uncertain means the reasons things feel as they do.

Look at ANY job that has ever fallen behind even a little. No, true balance is never going to happen. But seriously, enough doomsaying, enough wallowing.

True balance? Nobody expects that. What people want is relative balance. We're not asking that all jobs are balanced to within less than 1% of each other. We're asking that we were balanced at all. Do you know how much gain you get from overheating on WF versus not overheating at all? Never you mind 100 potency it's closer to 10 than it is 20. Why is the job with the lowest personal rDPS contribution also the lowest damage. Why are our defensive CD's one of the worst? These are questions that needed answers to. What we got wasn't an answer, it was a change that led to the same destination but in a worse way

At that, I also don't go looking for complexity to validate my sense of fun. I try the job, if I like it and have fun playing it, then I'm going to excel at it regardless of how simple/complex it is.

You think these things are mutually exclusive and they're not. I enjoyed the job not only because of aesthetics but because of game feel. I like the aesthetics of black mage but have no desire to play it because it doesn't feel entertaining to play. This is linked and lined up with complexity. I wanted a job that requires varying levels of attention and found MCH the answer to that. And we'll talk about "excel" later. I came back after my lul in playing before HW launched about a week out. I came back specifically because I liked the idea of Astrologian. My name is the combination of two stars (one being a word taken from a two word name). And mind you I like AST but I liked MCH even more. It clicked. For all its faults it felt like a great job with lots of things for me to do and care about. Coming up with cooldown timers per fight felt really fun and doing napkin math and spreadsheeting it when I was out and about doing other things was engaging.

No, MCH never felt complicated to me because I pushed myself to learn it even back in 3.0.

I liked it when it was "bad", and I liked it when it was "good".

That's nice and all but that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the number of things you care about, manage, and press has gone down. That is the problem. Good on you that you find it fine regardless. Unfortunately that appears to be a bit of an outlier opinion. Furthermore. These changes when it was "bad" and when it was "good" did not affect core gameplay past 3.01's change to Gauss Barrel. It played almost the same moving from 3.1 to 3.55 with the great increase in power coming at 3.2 and the biggest change happening to our rotation. This change is the equivalent of them taking away HE, B4B, and RS and calling us square. We're not square. And I'm not about to stop talking about the problems it has and why I or others are dissatisfied.

Was anyone really expecting a huge buff before the savage content?

Given that numbers were present in large capacity for susan, lak, and normal modes as well as in casual and hardcore content. Given that there is hard MATH available right NOW such as this example from our brothers on another forum (which to help show reference: the leftmost is not OHing, the right most is OH the difference is 8 potency)

why yes. I would expect that in the face of so much evidence at least a friggin 5% flat buff to ANYTHING would be fine so we weren't the worst at everything. But even if things remained as they were, I liked the playstyle and the management because it breathed life into what was essentially a skeleton of the job from HW. Heat management kept the edge on what you would be doing when you were weaving shots and lining up CD's in the 1:30 rotation from HW. What I did not expect was even that to be removed so I can actually FEEL the lack of thought involved. I didn't start this job in HW because of this.

And you think this is a pity thread? OP listed what he thought should happen after expressing why he felt the changes weren't good. This is the opposite of a pity thread. A pity thread would be the "i'm shelving summoner thread" but even that has well thought out arguments. If these threads bother you so much then feel free to not contribute to them.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

I've been PvPing in this game since long before the current changes. . . Let's not even touch on the subject of keeping things relevant. I practically live in the PvP section.

And in the interest of not typing another bloody page, let me just say I understand we're both are unhappy with the job, especially knowing what it WAS like, and how drastically it's been changed. I didn't like the conflicts in the kit when it came to heat management, nor the awkward flow to it, but that's my opinion. I feel like - at least what I'm doing and how I'm doing it now - has an excellent flow to it, and I'm both utilizing OH as effectively as I can and feeling no drastic hit to heat management. Basically, nothing lost, and nothing really noteworthy of gain for me.

What IS of note however is my opinion of what makes the job fun isn't even factored into what I feel the job actually needs right now. I may like the better flow, but it still needs more than that. It still needs more than simplified heat management. Don't take it as trying to invalidate anyone's opinions.

[Dregenfox]

I was personally looking forward to trying the class out due to it's complexity but it may be that the changes will pan out as more content gets released. I'm still going to give the class a try once I'm finished with my DRK's gearing.

Granted I don't play MCH but I was also unhappy about DRK until I tried the changes out for a few weeks and ended up really liking it. Until the fflogs get released for all the new content I don't think we can make an accurate assumption about exactly where MCH is at.

IMO this patch's focus was really over tanks and healers.