Machinist is no longer fun

[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.