Another thread about MCH or in other words "Yoshi Please!"

[Elnidfse]

So I've been toying around with figuring out how to start a thread like this. There's really only one way I can think of that works first. These are my opinions laid in no uncertain terms about the problem with MCH as a whole. I states these knowing that people will disagree, and that's fine. For this I'll show what I felt from 3.0. How I feel about 4.0. And my overall difficulties and problems. In no order anyways. Note that this is not talking about it’s player strength and instead talking about the Feel of the Job.

I should state that this is going to be a bit wordy so I’m going to be making liberal use of the edit function to try and categorize this in bite sized ways. Those that want to cut to the chase should just skip to the end. Make special notice that I won’t talk about the dungeon experience because Yoshi stated in a live letter that lower level content is getting some sort of pass.

It's almost impossible to talk about this at all without talking about how wildly different MCH are now than they were in 3.0. Which goes far FAR beyond losing cast times which we never respected in the first place. So this brings us to our first topic.

1) Machinist how I understand it and why I think 4.X could use some work

How 3.x and 4.x MCH felt for me

Reload, Rapidfire, and Wildfire

We're going to talk about the proc based game plan and what this means to the Machinist gameplan as a whole.

3.0: In Heavensward a MCH had cast times that were managed by ammo. Ammo also helped deal with your otherwise unassured 1-2-3 combo. You used ammo for Wildfires(!!). Used procs for mildfires(...). The proc based gameplay was a deterring factor for some, but getting a proc gave a better reward. You got the ability to fire a shot without a cast time. This improved your wildfire by number of procs. You had ways to ensure better wildfires by using rapidfire to circumvent this. And your procs lined in with wildfires to give them a boost to damage. The in betweens of these instances had temporary satisfaction given with reloads and quick reloads which guaranteed procs and felt good.
The wildfire centric gameplan tied into wildfire and turned it into a mechanic all it's own. More on this later.

4.0: In Stormblood you use ammo for every part of every rotation in every situation. Wildfires and mildfires are the same thing lending to no deviation. And the time between wildfires are sprinkled with exorbitant amounts of ammo use. This gives the playstyle fewer downtimes between reload and from that reload to wildfire. As a result, though you weave less, the rotation is more "active". However as the rotation is more active the window for acceptable mistakes is smaller. You don’t get the 1:30 to think “now how am I going to sync blank back up with wildfire”

Cast-times Gauss Barrel and even more Procs

I know Bards were not happy about their cast times. The so called bow mages made it very clear how they felt about casting their arrows. However for MCH our entire gameplan worked dramatically different. After they fixed up Gauss Barrel we had a few ways to manage our cast-times

• With Procs
• With Ammo
• With Rapidfire

There were 3 different mechanics that were brought in that were part of relatively short cooldowns that helped manage your gameplan. Rapidfire was almost always used for wildfire but ammo and procs were used in between them. "Use" is a bit much for procs as they were much more of a "happen" than an "activate" but it was something that you consciously stacked up so that if a fight demanded movement you had shots stored to cover the GCDs you would normally have loss when moving from one place to the other and rapidfire protected your wildfires.


Difference:

• Because of the change in mechanics, there are no wildfire/mildfire dynamics.
• The reward for procs and ammo are both diminished. Unliked before where proc's felt like a lucky bonus and using ammo felt good. Proc's are just something that happens before you use more ammo that you'll always have access to. Making procs more redundant and less satisfying to get. With the removal of casts the importance of procs has diminished.
• The need to constantly use ammo as a whole means that not having a rotation based around it from start to finish of any given uptime gives you drops that increase in severity.
• The gameplan is far more rotational than it was reactionary because the procs in our rotation often won't change the order or sequence we use things.

TL;DR
I don't particularly mind the swap from casting to instant. As a whole I still prefer 3.x MCH for reasons I'll list later. I should note that I do like 4.X MCH. On one hand it does feel nice having "true" mobility. I'm almost certain that if the rest of our abilities remained they same and/or proc's carried something BESIDES just being another step in the combo my opinion would change dramatically. But, we were designed with cast times in mind and the rest of our kit didn’t make the change with us. So a lot of it feels like dated mechanics slapped into a new body. They have a word for that. Refurbishment.