What if MCH was a full blown pet class?

[Shurrikhan]

when a tank goes to dodge an AOE and never comes back

Something about this line just feels so hilarious... The universal emotions, the incredibly niche situation...

Here is a link to what i was talking about. Im not saying to copy pasta by no means as i do want FFXIV Mechanist to have its own identity. That said, it would be cool to have the class feel more like a mechanist that.....ya know, builds all kinds of stuff to actively help them fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-N47MkOMIQ

I'm a little too distracted by this 'Mechanist' fighting in a true bunny suit?

Seriously though, I'd still like the master itself to have more prominence than shown here. To me, a temporary pet that moves across an area and fires at enemies within its short range is no different than, say, a wide, slow-moving projectile linear AoE. That may be a step up from the auto-swapping DoT gameplay of current turrets, but it doesn't feel any more "pet" than our current turrets do. They are still capable of only one procedure, and have no dynamics of their own.

Compare that, for instance, to each pet having its own mana and heat pool (the latter gained from attacks, damage taken, and ability use, and gradually damage the turret at higher levels while increasing its attack speed) and abilities each with mana costs and slight HP that cool over time, allowing for rapid fire but at cost to sustainable damage, where each of those abilities also has stacking or ramping effectiveness, synergizing both with itself and you, the master. A Rook Turret, for instance, could have five simple skills, Reposition, Return, Salvo, Discharge, and Sacrifice. Reposition is as one would expect, allowing rapid movement via side-thrusters and the central propeller without interrupting attacks; Return returns the turret, to allow you to summon something else; Salvo fires a flurry of attacks, each benefiting from Rook's Tracer Fire trait, increasing crit and direct hit chance of itself and the Machinist for each crit or direct hit landed; Discharge causes the turret to raise up, vertical to horizontal, and fire a gauss round down its length for heavy damage based on heat; Sacrifice launches the Rook as a rocket, dealing linear AoE damage at self-damage, circular around the enemy that destroys it, and conical damage behind said target. The time it takes a particular turret to be ready to be swapped back in is based on its HP missing when unsummoned. Normally, you can choose to resummon it before it has been returned to maximum HP, but it will come at logarithmic (slight) stat loss. If the turret is destroyed completely, it you cannot rush its return.

In that way you actually have something to build windows around, both in microrotation and macrorotation. A Bishop turret could take this a different route, passively generating Heat and discharging mana over time, equipped with abilities such as Overflow (splashes nearby enemies to cause them to take flat bonus damage from magical attacks dealt by the Machinist, turned into a powerful DoT if ignited) and Compression (increases Heat to regenerate mana, also drawing in nearby enemies), with a standard self-circular AoE Sacrifice (that also paints all affected enemies with Aetherochemical Spill, causing bonus damage taken).

You could go further with the various turrets by changing Gauss Barrel into Gauss Accelerator, a turret type that hovers between you and your target to increase the damage of shots fired down it. It can gradually expand, requiring additional range to be taken advantage of, until you can jump through it to launch yourself across the room.

In place of the Gauss Barrel attachment, allow for Heat Capacitor, which stores the heat built by your gun (from starter level onward) to allow for additional windows of burst (returning the stored Heat at will) or Flamethrower at will (a reward, rather than a shoddy build-up gimmick). Or keep the Gauss Barrel, but let it actually do something "gauss-like", and perhaps making Gauss Round and/or Ricochet its reward in place of Flamethrower.

Just my few cents.