May I present, "LMG - Light Machinist Guide for PvP"

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Lace Trim -
LMG (Light Machinist Guide for PvP)

I ran out of time/space to put the song credits in. It's "Midnight Closet", the customization menu theme from Tekken 7. The info source is the PvP guide on the FFXIV Lodestone, and my own experience as a MCH main in PvP.

And because the question keeps popping up, "Lace Trim" is the slightly punny name for my shorter video edits. Sometimes highlights, sometimes weird stuff, but this is the first done as a tutorial. Please enjoy it.

[Geryth]

Hello! You had to know I would chime back in on this topic

I've given your advice a solid try and I will say this - I concede that in most cases it's better not to pre-load ammo. Preloading ammo works best in very niche strategies that if you aren't actively going to try to employ, then just don't do it (I don't think anyone else preloads ammo with the intentions I have for it).

==
/Edit: I did some rough number crunching. Pre-loading is actually not a DPS loss. See my post on the next page:

number crunch post

/EndEdit
==

The reason I pre-load ammo: I intently watch the map for the first ice spawns. I always go for further ices in contested territory (nestled in equidistant between bases or even ones closer to an enemy base). I burst those ices to steal as many points as possible. Preloading ammo and instantly overheating with stun gun to burst an ice can easily grab you 15-20 points on an ice solo in the first 15 seconds (don't forget that stun gun is a 1000 potency attack that adds to your burst - just be in range). This absolutely can be game winning in close games, and I know I've carried wins for my team with this strategy by stealing 20-30 small ices points. The other great thing about running for contested ices is that many of them sit high on cliffs, and you have a lovely knockback for an easy kill :P

A great example of where this strategy shines are ices that are in the middle field corners. Both teams with many players will get there quickly, that ice is NOT going to live very long. Without pre-loaded ammo, wasting 2 full global cooldowns on hot shot is going to result in a lot less damage from you on that ice, rather than jumping in at 10% damage from being overheated and tons of ammo to use which also lowers your GCD + the extra damage from using stun gun.

But when doesn't it work? Well, if the initial ice spawns are not in any contestable location, the pre-load slightly lowers your initial damage when a fight breaks out. If you don't attack players before the 19:00 mark to build heat, you'll do slightly less damage to the first big ice. Or, if you wait to do your burst combo for the big ice by using stun gun to overheat - the big ice might live long enough for that to be a damage wash or even a reduction in damage because of the 10 second no-heat lockout.

So it comes down to how often ices spawn in contestable locations - which is actually pretty often. BUT, without preloading ammo, you just have more flexibility and options in what to do at the start of the match. You just won't be stealing as many small ice points at the start of the game.

That said, I will go on to say that there is still a good and valid reason to pre-load ammo, and I'll probably continue to do so in some of my future matches. And while sure, most people probably aren't intending to transfer those pre-loaded ammo into stolen ice points for the team, but you never what their intentions are. So I still disagree with your emphatic "Don't. Do. This."

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Again, Stun Gun is the only aoe stun in PvP, and one of two cc tools MCH has remaining. Even with a 60 sec cooldown, it's not worth wasting just to overheat and do more damage for 10 seconds as opposed to sustained high damage indefinitely and still having one of the best cc skills avaliable. And especially not to ice of all things.

If you were to go after ice in contested territory, and let's say I happened to be close enough to see it. I could easily wait out your overheat then attack you with my full kit readily available to me while you're in the forced lockout, and once dealt with, just let the ice reset and get full points from it anyways. It's a lesser known fact that damage by source is what resets, not the damage dealt. So even if you burst it down to 1% and I take you out and let it reset, the full 70 is mine. Same goes for large ice too. But a 10 second burst isn't even going to break a small ice, and let's not carry that mistaken impression any further.

[Geryth]

Again, Stun Gun is the only aoe stun in PvP, and one of two cc tools MCH has remaining. Even with a 60 sec cooldown, it's not worth wasting just to overheat and do more damage for 10 seconds as opposed to sustained high damage indefinitely and still having one of the best cc skills avaliable. And especially not to ice of all things.

Most of the time, you're right. Head the middle, maybe an ice will be where you're going. Maybe you'll poke at some enemies. Maybe your team sits around waiting for the big ice. In those situations, hitting hot shots to start off the dance to keep in heated status allows you to have decent sustained DPS. Nothing wrong with this, but you put way too much stock into "gotta save stun gun for CC". It overheats you for a reason, and it gives the ability a lot of flexibility. It was obviously designed and intended to be used in some situations as a get-over-heated-quick button, I don't know why you're so against using the ability for that function.

One thing I love about machinist is all of the tools they have to keep enemies at bay. Sprint, Leg Graze, and Blank are all still available to me. With stun gun that's 4 abilities that allow me to zone myself into a preferable position in relation to an enemy. I hardly ever die in frontlines, especially as a machinist, and it's because they have so many ways to put distance between themselves and enemy players. Reserving Stun Gun solely for CC isn't make or break. And let's take this argument back to the core of the point of contention - pre-loading ammo before the match starts. We're only talking about having or not having this CC in the first 1 minute of the game. It's really quite negligible, being 1 of 4 tools we have. If I get killed, it's because I made a positioning mistake and had a lack of map awareness. Not because I used Stun gun for burst.

If you were to go after ice in contested territory, and let's say I happened to be close enough to see it. I could easily wait out your overheat then attack you with my full kit readily available to me while you're in the forced lockout, and once dealt with, just let the ice reset and get full points from it anyways. It's a lesser known fact that damage by source is what resets, not the damage dealt. So even if you burst it down to 1% and I take you out and let it reset, the full 70 is mine. Same goes for large ice too. But a 10 second burst isn't even going to break a small ice, and let's not carry that mistaken impression any further.

I'm a lot smarter about picking my battles - if I have a strong suspicion I'll end up dead I won't engage. If I'm solo I'm not going to just walk into 3+ enemies on the ice. If it's a 1v1 then I'm probably going to use my burst to kill the one enemy before hitting the ice anyway (and they'll be dead, no one can outdamage pre-loaded ammo machinist who pops stun gun within 10 seconds). Then we can get into well what if there's healers around or more teammates and/or enemies etc. etc. I can sit here and mull over scenarios where I make very different decisions in each of them, but this would be too big of a wall of text. Overall, I've never felt like I made a mistake by not having the stun gun available for CC in the first 1 minute of the game and machinists have plenty of tools stay out of harms way. You can downplay not having the CC all you want, but I've done it for probably more than 200 games, and I hardly ever die at all in frontlines, much less in the first minute.

Again, for the masses, your advice is best. But I still stand firm that there's a good reason to pre-load ammo before a match starts, and there's nothing wrong with trying out that strategy. It can work quite well and has won me games when I was able to pull off stolen ice points.

[saucyshortcake]

So, stand in a giant cluster of teammates and farm frontline bots

~pvp~

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

Okay. . .

1. Whether ice or a player, generating 50 heat with 2 GCDs is really nothing. Being locked out of doing that for 3 GCDs and having to rely on a strong cc just to do what could've been done indefinitely before, and just for 10 seconds before ending up right back where you started? Hmm. . .
2. Your team shouldn't be waiting for ice. No one should just be waiting for ice. That's how you end up in third.
3. I never said you HAVE to save Stun Gun for cc, but think about it. . . you have the only aoe stun in PvP. And you want to use it as a shortcut for what you can achieve through simply dealing damage? And for ice? Trying to validate it by saying you don't die isn't quite a counter-argument. I don't die much either, and that's because I've survived some pretty epic moments by using Stun Gun and not wasting it for damage I can otherwise achieve normally. And I've done this for far more than 200 games.

Do as you will if it works for you. I do plenty of unorthodox things myself because I know I can do it. But pre-loading is just. . . not a good idea.

[Kalia]

I've been doing a handful of frontlines on machinist and I completely agree with Lace about not starting ammo. It's a great lesson - starting with ammo will greatly delay your heat gain unless you're willing to lead with an early stun gun, which has the gauss barrel lockout drawback which greatly reduces your overall output.

However...

I do see what Geryth is getting at. Let's bring some numbers into the argument. Let's argue a situation where you go into enemy lines to get to an ice, solo, to try to get credit, and you get roughly 11 seconds of uptime on the ice before it shatters. Small ices have roughly 55k HP (could use an update if anyone knows the exact value), and are worth 70 points. That's roughly 785 damage per point. Forgive my makeshift "burst opener" and any errors in it - I'm not much of a Machinist. This assumes 5 QR uses (so no enliven) and 0 TP at the end for blank.



The damage gain over this VERY SPECIFIC AND IDEAL FOR 3 AMMO situation is massive - more than 5000 extra potency (4000 if you subtract stun gun as the 0-ammo rotation still has that available). It falls of very fast after the 11s mark though, but this is meant to be a hypothetical where the damage after 11s isn't important (since the ice is dead and you're now running for your life). Alternatively, if you're dueling a player, the 3-ammo rotation will kill significantly faster. Am I missing something?

Anyway the damage drop-off is huge without gauss (250 potency per combo action and 5% on top of that for 10 seconds, followed by the 2 hot shot ramp-up after to get back to 50 heat), but I think there is merit to 3 stored ammo + 5 QRs in overheat for outer-map skirmishes, 7 points can definitely be significant.

Edit: 2k potency on BTE with stun gun, not 1k, whoops

[Guesswhat]

Yes, the meta should be not to pre-load ammo.
Keeping heat at 50 or above at all times isn't hard, and is best for most sustained damage.

However, wit the "situational" nature of frontline there are times pre-load+stungun can come in handy, but don't rely or gamble on it.

Personally I find it fun to pre-load and use stungun at start of a frontline match, as it will usually burst my 1st target down. It's not the smartest thing to do, consideing overall damage, and loss of utility, but it's fun to try. I wouldn't do this if I knew the skill level of enemy teams was high, but in most cases they aren't. So why not lol. There often is a mindless monk or sam running straight to their stungun-death early on.

[Geryth]

snip

I'll load up advanced combat tracker and whack on some wolves den dummies and run some tests with both rotations, to see how your charts hold up. I might have slight differences in the rotation.

Other scenarios are when I can land all my burst on an enemy ice before too many enemies start showing up and then I high tail it out of there. With the amount of bots in this game, you'll almost never lose those points to them letting the ice reset because people just don't know about that mechanic and the bots don't care. I've tried many a time to let ices reset after killing enemies on them but dumb teammates just wail on it anyway.

[Syrus_Draco]

Main issue with pre-loading on ammo at the start of the match, is that you're asking for a few ideal situations to occur:

1) You will have Ice within some reachable distance and that will be the first thing you target
2) If you are going to use the Stun Gun, you're banking on the fact that the enemy team will not rush you and they will not CC you
3) You do not need to contribute any major damage after the ice has fallen (both teams decide to engage)

There's a few more variables, but those are the main ones that stand out. If those conditions don't all land in your lap, then you are delaying your DPS by a large margin. To use the Stun Gun at the start of a match right away, you are banking that the enemy team doesn't notice you've used your biggest AOE CC, and that you'll become very vulnerable. In this, you're under estimating your opponent. While you can be confident that you are a really strong player, you should still respect the fact that your opponent can be wise to your tricks and take advantage of the flaws in it. (Till it's proven in battle that your skill level is higher than theirs)

All in all Frontlines does have various RNG elements to it that require the player to adapt as necessary, but for a majority of those situations, the pre-load on ammo is still highly advised against. That's said as a generalization.