Hi,
I am wondering sometimes... Did people even notice that in 4.05, Hot Shot was buffed from 5% to 8% Only. There Is a Reason Why the increase was so small.
As a savage raider, I can tell you that Machinist's DPS can Already beat Bard's DPS (I have myself done 3900 DPS as Machinist without any Dragoon's debuff or AST's balance in Deltascape V1.0 (Savage)).
As for the Overheat; Yes, it is worth it. People just don't do the maths properly. Actually you don't even need to do the maths to see it. Just go hit a SSS Dummy and go overheat. While overheating, all my Wildfire are over 13k with very low crit and I very often get 15k ish.
Cooldown in the meantime, is simply the only skill that can reduce your heat. Slug Shot is Always better...
Believe me or not, Machinist is totally fine right now..
All we miss, is 15seconds to use procs... like Summoner has 30seconds for Ruin IV...

Give me some time and I will be posting a guide for Machinist.