Machinist playstyle is frustrating

[ChloeGrace]

It's a fun job, and the burst is nice, but I find myself staring at my hotbars 75% of the time checking for procs when I'm waiting on reload cooldowns. It's gotten me killed a couple of times.
The reliance on RNG is extremely frustrating. How do you deal with it?

[MauvaisOeil]

I watch buff gains in battle text hovering around the character. Procs appear there.

Honestly that's not the problem for me about MCH, just the plain "your heat is perfectly managed over 60 second and Cooldown is just a tool for overheating damage dish" that creeps me. We are already a low Skillspeed scaling job, this makes it even worse.

The ping crap is a bit annoying, I can't really get more than 5 overheated shots.


Gauge managing, proc awareness and such, usually comes from training your peripheral vision. You end up watching things withouth looking at them, just like driving or any activity that seems though at start and clean easy once you practiced enough.

[Idolon]

Set hotbars to hide unused slots, then put an unused hotbar closer to the center of your screen that just has slug and clean shot on it so the procs are always in your peripheral vision. Putting short cooldown skills like quick reload and gauss round there helps too.

Once you can easily see the procs, just as MauvaisOeil said, it will become second nature after enough practice. Then it starts to become boring half the time, as with heat syncing up with Wildfires automatically while just hitting things on cooldown (so long as you avoid as much skill speed as possible) the job feels like it's on autopilot between bursts.