Issues with MCH since Stormblood Rework & Ideas on how to fix them

[Kitfox]

I feel like this will be another wasted effort but here goes anyway. I'm mainly going to focus on usability and playability. There's a lot of opinions people can have about the design or feel of the class, but whatever the design ends up being, the most important thing is that the experience isn't hindered by usability or accessibility problems.

Machinist is a fun and exciting class to play... when you have perfect connection and a party composition that supports your dps. I understand what the dev team is going for with the combination Rapid Fire, Overheat and Wildfire, the rush of a high speed burst rotation. However, I feel like this should be done more in the manner of RDM or SMN burst, without excessive ogcd weaving or latency depended timers.

In my opinion, the main usability problems causing the class to be unpopular can be summarized as follows:

1. It's difficult to use ogcd abilities in conjunction with Rapid Fire
2. Wildfire is too short and requires too many abilities to be used in it
3. Overheat is too short and requires too many abilities to be used in it
4. Almost Every ability can, and thus must, be used for Wildfire making all the above problems compound each other
5. Almost every single ability affects Wildfire burst, thus any mistake has a significant impact on dps
6. Flamethrower is an awkward ability
7. Machinist is too depended on party composition to maximize damage

The main culprit behind latency problems is Rapid Fire in combination with ogcd weaving. Rapid Fire lowers gcd to the floor value of 1.5s similar to RDMs' melee combo. This is fine on its own, but it becomes problematic when ogcd weaving is required during it. With animation locks being roughly 0.70-0.75s in practical gameplay with good latency that leaves almost zero room for lag. Double weaving ogcds during slow gcd is already too much for many players but this is far worse. Since this is a compound problem with the combination of Rapid Fire, Overheat and Wildfire, any of the following solutions would help alleviate the issues.

1. Reduce the required ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire
This would require combining abilities, such as reloads, direct damage abilities or wildfire+overheat, into a single ability or changing them to have longer lasting effects so that they can be applied outside of burst, like Hypercharge. Alternatively, a SMN-like approach could be used, locking some of the abilities during Overheat so that they can't be used. The downside is that the rotation might become more bland or feel boring with less abilities used.

2. Significantly reduce animation locks
I feel that this would be insufficient for most players, but it would retain the current structure and feeling the gameplay has. This would help alleviate issues with ability weaving but only if it was possible to implement fluidity similar to NIN mudras.

3. Change how Rapid Fire works
If Rapid Fire gave a damage boost through other means besides reducing gcd timer, it would allow for double weaving ogcds more easily. This would no doubt have a big impact on gamefeel, and the excitement of a fast burst rotation might be lessened.

4. Make Wildfire and Overheat longer so that ogcds are not required during Rapid Fire
This would give more ogcd space between gcds simply by extending the buff period. This would introduce an old problem with Wildfire, the difficulty of delivering the payload damage before phase changes or interruptions. It would require a mechanic similar to Deathflare or Eartly Star to explode the collected damage before the Wildfire timer is up naturally, a manual detonator.

5. Make Overheat and/or Wildfire work based on gcd count instead of timer
As suggested in the OP, this would alleviate issues with the tight timers and large damage loss due to latency, although the problems with ogcd weaving would remain.

6. Make Overheat timer not tick down before Flamethrower is interrupted.
This would get rid of the human error with the timing and actually make the Overheat window comparable to other buff windows. It would also allow Flamethrower to actually be used for AoE damage instead of a simple heat tool.

Flamethrower is an awkward ability overall. It is obviously meant as an overheating tool, yet must be used nearly in melee range, yet Machinist doesn't have abilities for easily moving in and out of range like RDM. It's also a fairly powerful AoE attack, yet the heat gain makes no sense for AoE rotation and makes it difficult to make use of the Overheat buff. This would work better as an instant AoE attack with good potency that would also Overheat instantly regardless of previous heat. MCHs' AoE power feels lacking as it is. Overheat could also be baked into Wildfire, similarly how Berserk and Inner Release were combined, and Flamethrower could be given a more specific purpose.

Another awkward ability is Gauss Barrel. Not only is it ugly visually, hardly fitting for any gun model in the game, it's a forced ogcd double weave with Barrel Stabilizer. There's no reason to not have it always activated besides forcing another pointless ogcd weave in the aftermath of an already convoluted burst phase. Manual reactivation after the lockout period should not be needed.

A word needs to be said about party compositions as well, specifically DRG and Disembowel. This is seen as a requirement for any Ranged dps and makes playing without one very displeasing if one wants to compete or compare performance with other players. DRGs don't often recognize this as a gain for them, but every ranged will see the lack of DRG as a detriment for them. It's not fun and forcing this synergy is bad for party composition flexibility. Honestly, all attack type debuffs should be removed or rebalanced as universal damage boosts.

There's a lot more that could be said about leveling, aesthetics, totally new abilities or reworks, but most of those end up being very opinionated or up to personal preference. However, usability problems can be objectively analyzed and fixed for any design goal. Given the small size of the MCH community and the unpopularity, it feels very hard to have the real problems pushed out there, not to mention in the midst of all the opinions of what the class should or shouldn't be. I do hope these thoughts reach the dev team because these problems have existed for a long time now.