Machinist is no longer fun

[Idolon]

4.0 machinist was the most fun I've had playing the job, ever since I picked it up as my main in 3.0. Sure, the damage wasn't great, but using ammo and Cooldown to manage heat eliminated the monotony of the space between Wildfires.

My only complaints about the job were:

• Accidentally overheating was too punishing. There were very few ways to rebuild heat, so you were stuck below 50 heat for a long time. 4.05 went a long way to fixing this by reducing the cooldown of Barrel Stabilizer.
• Rook Overdrive did so little damage as to be barely worth it on most phase transitions. 4.05 completely fixed this.
• Bard dealt more damage and had more support. This has been beaten into the ground elsewhere, and is unrelated to my point, so I'll skip over this.

Heat generating too quickly is notably absent from that list. Heat generating quickly, adding an element of risk was what made the job fun. Reducing the heat gain per shot to 5 has removed that fun. With all the ammo you get, heat generates so slowly now that you only get to use Cooldown about once per Wildfire. There is no more element of risk. You have all the time in the world to keep your heat down. This begs the question, what is the point of managing heat now?

To try to answer this, I set up an experiment. I ran the Susano extreme SSS dummy with two different play styles 5 times each. I tried to keep everything as constant as possible except how I managed heat. I used the Stone Sky Sea DPS Calculator to estimate my damage on each trial. I also alternated between styles to try to prevent one style from benefiting more than the other from any improvements in play I made over the trials.

Play style 1: try to keep heat as high as possible for more Cooldowns inside Wildfire, but do not overheat.

Play style 2: do not use Cooldown at all after the opener. Allow overheats to happen at any time. After an overheat, reapply Gauss Barrel and reset to 50 heat with Barrel Stabilizer as soon as possible without delaying GCD skills.

For both styles, I used ammo and all damage abilities on cooldown with the exception of Flamethrower. This keeps the rate at which I generate heat approximately constant between the two styles. I also started with the following opener:

Preload 2 ammo > Gauss Round + Hot Shot > Barrel Stabilizer + Hypercharge + 1 > Reload + Flamethrower (4 ticks to 90 heat) > 2 > 1 > Rapid Fire + Wildfire + Cooldown > Reassemble + 3 > Quick Reload + 2 > Gauss Round + 3 > Ricochet + Cooldown

I'm sure there are better openers out there, but I chose this one because I can execute it consistently, and it resets to 50 heat at the end.

Trial#  Style 1 DPS     Style 2 DPS
1       3475 (20s)      3370 (15s)
2       3497 (21s)      3497 (21s)
3       3411 (17s)      3391 (16s)
4       3587 (25s)      3542 (23s)
5       3454 (19s)      3391 (16s)
Average 3484            3438

Conclusion: managing heat properly is a 1-2% gain over simply overheating at random. Machinist's core mechanic is almost meaningless.

Square Enix, please revert the changes to Machinist's heat generation. If the old system leaves too little room for less skilled players to work with, then a much better solution would be to set the point at which heated shots activate, Cooldown becomes stronger, and Barrel Stabilizer resets heat to 40. This would serve to slightly increase the amount of time you have before overheat without trivializing the heat mechanic entirely, and it would also make recovering from an overheat without Barrel Stabilizer slightly less punishing.

[Elnidfse]

I was tentatively happy when I was told they were going to adjust how it was to manage heat. I couldn't have been happier. I was a bit "eh" with hotshot changes but thought it would be a net gain.I thought that they were going to fix flamethrower and make it worth using for any period longer than 2 ticks, and that overheating would be more worth it for wildfires, or that wildfires would be better. I thought literally anything would change but what we got. But the job, something that used to be one of the most complex, is now one of the most mundane.

• So they remove our cooldowns so players didn't have to work on fight timings. That's fine whatever.
• Then they sped up wildfires so there was less empty space between them and removed OGCDs to make it easier to play. That's fine too
• The Heat Gauge was supposed to be the replacement so Machinist still had an intense playstyle that revolved around managing your resource.
• But then they removed all need to even care about the heat mechanic while making the job feel worse.

So we go from an extremely engaging job. To an extremely unfulfilling one.

I know this isn't exactly conducive to this discussion. But I know it's going to be months before we see any kind of change or revision. Part of me hopes there's going to be a 3.07 but that's not going to happen. And given how this change was, I doubt it'll be anything good. We're raiding right now and while I do think the fights are interesting, I can't be satisfied with MCH anymore.

[Khattar]

I was fine with being under-tuned and less utility than Bard. The play style was fun and engaging enough to stick with it. For some reason SE decided to destroy the fun part by reducing Heated shots from 10 - 5. That means less Cooldown weaving, less managing, less dps, less fun.

The overdrive abilities are still garbage and situational. Flamethrower has so much potential and is still garbage. Overheating is still garbage. Its barely worth the trouble to overheat so why is that even a mechanic?

All of these issues aside, they need to revert those heat changes they made to our 1-2-3 combo ASAP and start over.

[Oxmodial]

Literally all they had to do on top of hotshot 8% was give us some small potency buffs (or just hotshot to 10%) and then make overheat damage buff from 10 to 20% and I'm pretty sure nearly all MCH would have been quite content.

Currently in savage, there is absolutely no reason I would ever bother with overheating. If I execute it perfectly it's barely a dps gain and it requires SOME thought compared to braindead never overheat which makes it harder to pay attention to mechanics. Another reason is that if you overheat, barrel stab afterwards and then die to a mechanic you are literally fucked. There is no conceivable reason I would ever want to overheat in savage while trying to clear. If you do never overheat rotation perfectly it's going to be good enough for the dps check.

[Enla]

.

This, I LOVED the original 4.0 changes but the Heat Reductions to all of our skills just make me shake my head and wonder what the hell they were thinking. Yes keeping your heat balanced was complex, but it was /fun/ once you knew how to do it right. Now MCH is back to being the same mundane mess it was before hand, only with a slightly different coat of paint and WAY less damage and utility. They really need to either rework the role system entirely and give us back our Promotion abilities /or/ get rid of the proc chances entirely and up the potency to some of the skills. Either way 4.0 and 4.05 have shown that SE really /really/ has no idea what to do with MCH.

[MomoOG]

The 4.0 heat management was supposed to be the MCH tax for now having full mobility with casting gone. Now that they have simplified heat management they are probably going to make our damage our tax. Boring and low dps class. Perfect...

[D3VNT]

The 4.0 heat management was supposed to be the MCH tax for now having full mobility with casting gone. Now that they have simplified heat management they are probably going to make our damage our tax. Boring and low dps class. Perfect...

I have the same fear, especially with the shared role actions now.
"It's super easy and you have some utility, so you shouldn't have big damage!"
Meanwhile, Bard continues to outDPS and out-utility MCH while not being difficult. RDM is ridiculously easy and has amazing damage and better utility than MCH. I understand the motives behind SE's painfully slow balancing process, but it leaves players everywhere feeling disenfranchised or worse, which leads to less players.

[Kleeya]

I dont really like all the cliches about casuals being so whiny that they make the devs dumbed their game down, but it seems like that's what we got here. I can remember the heat reduction from 10 to 5 being proposed on this very forum.

The heat jauge system is now braindead, even the biggest retard can not overheat without wanting it. I am spamming my skills endlessly with a little cooldown from time to time and here you go, no need to even loook at the heat jauge. Bye bye the thrill of knowing that if you not stay concentrated enough you get penalized for that by going into overheat at the wrong time, or that you can lose the heated shots a while by using quick reload at 50 or 55 heat. I could stand with the low dps because the job was fun to play, but now it is kinda boring.

What we needed was some tweaks to make wildfire worth to go into overheat, and a bit of dps increase, but not that.

At least i am using overdrive from time to time now, as someone was telling elsewhere it is true that it is worth the use now that it hurt a bit more than the sum of auto attacks.

[AmandaLashaquoa]

Yes, yesterday was a really disappointing day; I was "happy" with 4.0 MCH and I didn't know it.
Now I am actually struggling to even more to keep my DPS as good as it was before, this isn't a buff nor a nerf, its just a dumbed down gameplay of MCH; There's not much to manage, its all about hoping for procs, you barely need to "align" anything or think too much/press too many buttons to get a decent WF.
And until WF is up, I see myself pressing "1-1-1-1-2-1-1-1-2-3" repeatedly (sling split clean combo)
The job is not fun anymore, yesterday I saw myself pressing "1" 4~5 times hoping for a proc, back in 4.0 I could have used a Cooldown, now I am actually having more fun on my lv51 BRD, which is much more engaging than my Lv70 MCH.
I liked the complexity that the job had, late-HW opener was E N G A G I N G and very rewarding (25k WF), now it is too simple, perhaps way too much for someone who enjoyed MCH because it was a "hard" job and its "fun per second" was extremely reliant on your playerskill, it was far better and more fun than 4.05 MCH, which probably the easiest job in SB now and the less engaging, less damaging, less rewarding, the job is all about that 10s WF window; Even crafting/gathering jobs are more complex because managing GP is a thing.
Yesterday I buried my MCH until something new comes up.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

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.

I say this while thinking about how the mass complaints and exodus from BRD in HW was a large reason it became what it is now, or how HW's underperformers (AST & MCH) were rocketed to near OP levels by the end of the expansion. That doesn't mean we should just wait for the end of Stormblood hoping for great changes, but that DOES mean numbers talk. Let SE see that the changes made were not enough and MCH players are generally disappointed and low/declining in number, and hope for positive change sooner than later.

I should also note their entire methodology this expansion seems to be establishing unique identities for all the jobs, and trying to narrow the skill gap between players of said jobs. I'm FAR from an SE apologist, but expect some missteps in this process. I believe they said in the Live Letter that they're now rethinking their base idea of "more job complexity = more damage", perhaps if only because some of the current best jobs wildly defy that idea, or the playerbase shows it's not such a great idea by design. BRD has never been a difficult job to play (except when suddenly, wildly changed from what it was), and when returned to the way it was while keeping all the good things it gained during its "difficult" time, you now have a job that's easy AND as damaging as when it was complex.

MCH - the Stormblood MCH - on paper isn't a bad idea, but implementation of it seems to have been a complete hit or miss when pit against the core approach to jobs in this expansion. The Heavensward MCH was complex, but mastery of it (and some improvements) made it a powerhouse, but a shining example of what to "fix" in Stormblood. I think it was quite unnecessary to change it so drastically from what it was, especially when finally made into a workable, enjoyable job, even if a bit complicated. Yoshi P's "Expert job" comment always stood out in my head for that very reason. But if the job wasn't played all that much (and I should note, it wasn't entirely its complexity as to why it wasn't played), that didn't mean it wasn't good as it was. I would openly say SE missed the mark on that one, and made an unnecessary "fix" to an already unique job that had its place.

Ultimately, I love the job enough to be (somewhat) patient with SE's missteps, if only because gameplay metrics (and more importantly, hopefully, player feedback) will be the biggest determining factor in seeing positive change. I would consider 4.05's changes to have established a foundation to rebuild MCH from as a unique, not-so-complex job (as per their overarching Stormblood job vision) which can be capable of either significant damage or strong party support. I would even be fine with having MCH become the first "pure DPS" physical ranged job - which would definitely establish a unique identity and not impact on BRD's identity as ranged support at the same time. This does NOT mean I or anyone wants the job to be too simple/complex, but it's safe to say we all want MCH to be proportional, viable, and enjoyable above all else.