To FFXIV Team From a Concerned Machinist

[SomethingCool]

There have been several posts with well written documents, several bug inquiries, the main contender for mch’s slot has consistently been creeping past mch, and the number of mch clears have consistently been low. I mean it shouldn’t take a lot of complaints for devs to see that brd has been dominating the ranged slot for the entire expansion.

[Valence]

Please SE, help us. We still have one patch left to go and are relatively early in 4.4. If there is a next expansion, it's still 9 months away. There is still plenty of time to help us somewhere.

And don't tell us that because we've been able to handle this for more than a year that we'll surely be able to do it until 5.0.Until now we mostly had (serious) mechanical and usability issues, but now that on performance alone we're also being utterly and finally destroyed by bard and a ridiculous itemization, and also heavily penalized by that silly mobility tax (which bard isn't even suffering anymore with their insane crit scaling), the job is going down the drain fast this tier.

[kobe-sabi]

who cares about the clears, just make the job better, and less on small windows of burst especially since server tick sucks for people who bad connect due to server location. they could added a few seconds to wildfire, buff a potency here and there, give turrets a buff and added back an old skill to hold people over. while giving a service apology on the few who played the job, hell i barely see any play Mch, SE act like people are asking for too much. Sure expert players will gain the most from buffs, which will make expert Brd players come out and say Mch needs nerfs.

I think that's what wrong with FFXIV people are always ready to say nerf, remember mediocre players and casual players don't benefit nothing from nerfs. they tend to go to the job people are asking for instead of playing a job they want to play, causing them to feel alienated or disgusted in playing due to people want the optimum jobs. lets be real Casual's pay the bills, i don't see that many veterans pay $30 dollars on mounts, but i do see a lot of casual and mediocre player spending that big money on these over priced mounts and clothing. So SE can act like they hear the public on jobs who need a little love because lets face it,their is no such thing as OP jobs, just OP players who know their job from top to bottom.

[Matthew_Fox]

At this point, we know we won't get any big changes before 5.0. The probability is 0. If there's anything I just want right now is for the SKS of the raidgun to be gone and put HC back at 6%. It's all im asking for. Dont make me play with Skillspeed and give us more damage than bard...

[Darkpaw]

At this point all I'm asking for is official recognition of the machinist community's concerns. There's little to no hope that we will actually get any solutions, but acknowledgement would be welcome. Though I freely admit Sks off the raid gun and 6% back to hypercharge would be welcome. If I had to ask for anything it'd be to take the timer off WF and put it on a gcd counter, and just make OH wait to start counting down until we break channeling with our next gcd.

[SomethingCool]

I don’t even understand why they buffed HC then nerfed it again right after. It’s not like it made mch hella overpowered

[Darkpaw]

Fact is nothing they've done about machinist in this expansion makes any logical sense. It's just a patchwork of concepts not even any full fledged ideas. there are so many systems in place that seem like they should work wonderfully together but have not been thought out.

As for the comment about the Ravens, I see your argument and sure it is a breach of trust with the vets, but I offer a single counter argument. How is ignoring an entire job community within this game any different or any less important than a pair of ear rings? Yes, it's a breach of trust with the legacy players, but at what point did catering to the legacy players become more important than acknowledging the current players? I won't sit here and belittle the legacy players for what they did because without them we wouldn't have the game we all enjoy playing right now, and I appreciate the struggles they went through and agree their loyalty should be rewarded, but at the same point. I am unwilling to give in to the notion that their concerns over an item are more important than the entirety of the FFXIV team acknowledging the machinist community, because ultimately. The relaunch happened the game is successful now the 1.0 players got plenty of rewards for their loyalty. So now it's time to stop looking at the game's past and to it's current iterations and it's future, and this silence on the machinist problem shines a rather obvious spot light on a current glaring problem. The perception that player opinions only matter if it's things the creative team feels is important enough to address. Which brings me to my next comment.

As for how darks and black mages got their changes and machinists still haven't gotten theirs.. I'd offer this.. How many players do each of those jobs have compared to machinist? Oh right probably double or triple at minimum.. And out of those how many percentage wise actually cried out for the changes? Not nearly as much from a percentage standpoint as machinist, there are countless forum and reddit threads about machinist but because it's such an unpopular class we don't get the same amount of views or replies on the forums because the community at large doesn't care. Since machinists make up such a small part of the community it's harder for us to raise enough of a ruckus to actually warrant attention and that's the point of this thread. To put a spotlight on the fact that despite being a small community in the larger player base our opinions and our concerns should still matter. This job and it's players should be acknowledged just as much as any of the more popular jobs. Either that or none of the player input should matter and the dev team should just continue doing whatever it is it wants to do while pretending to actually care about the player base.

[HyperiusUltima]

This may be coming from a BRD Main, but I understand the difficulties associated with Machinist. The rotation itself feels too restricted and doesn't flow well like how BRD and other DPS Jobs run. It's like a rusty machine if you ask me. If they're going to change it though, they need to consider what the playerbase has already shown out there on the Forums. Given Machinist's current state...it doesn't stand a ghost of a chance in end-game content due to how restrictive it is; its DPS basically makes or breaks the job itself, so to say and that's where you run into your problem we had in Heavensward:

Job Disparity.

Remember BRD and Wanderer's Minuet in Heavensward? Yeah, that caused a lot of controversy over how to use Wanderer's Minuet, and caused a gigantic skill gap in play, let alone caused the job to be considered broken by the BRD Community at the time. It's the same basis with MCH's current job mechanics.

The dev team probably also needs a reminder of how Heavensward turned out given that the meta is very similar to Creator, just without the inclusion of MCH due to how it functions currently with the Overheat system. Given that Overheat increases your damage output by a set percentage, it's definitely a buff used to boost MCH's damage during burst phases; yet, if you don't know how to balance Overheat, you wind up losing out on lots of damage for Wildfire.

We also run into the problem with Wildfire being strict in terms of time, since you need to fit a handful of GCDs and tons of oGCDs just to get a proper Wildfire...and all under Overheat no less. It's almost similar, if not the same, as the DRK issue where they have an over-reliance on oGCDs for their damage output. Since Stormblood was meant to reduce the amount of buttons required to press, it hasn't felt like it with MCH: It's only increased.

[SomethingCool]

the total number of buttons has definitely been reduced on mch with SB. Arguably mch actually doesn't have a difficulty problem, it's just very punishing if you have high ping and also brd does everything mch can do but better. 3.0 had an issue with both brd AND mch, they both repeatedly got buffed throughout HW until they became very powerful. BRD was actually a lot harder to optimize than mch in both HW and SB. So I don't really see how the issue has anything to do with difficulty. It's pretty much everything but that.

[Aeliott]

I don't expect any mechanical changes before 5.0, as many say, but as it stands there are 0 situations where a MCH is worth taking over a Bard. Even Samurai and Black Mage can be justified now. It used to be that it had higher personal damage but that's not the case any more.

I just feel like the community analyses every job to death, do the work on secondary stats and such; but the people who work on the game just completely disregard it. As if they know some crazy secrets that the players don't - which is tremendously unlikely. The Machinist community knows that they can tolerate some degree of Skill Speed, but in several cases it becomes arguably a negative stat - actually making us perform worse than without it. This is the case for other jobs too, but MCH most of all. And yet because they seemingly randomly choose substats for gear, MCH is hurt even more than it already is. If it wasn't factored into their simulation it's disregarded. I often wonder how many factors were missed when designing the class. There was that glaring mistake on 4.0 launch where everyone was shrugging at each other like "well....are we supposed to OH or not? Not even worth it unless you can time it before a jump". But then you also had horrendously unintuitive and punishing CD timers on Stabilizer and such. Like....what even is that.

If it seems messed up at the start of 5.0 yet again, at risk of sounding melodramatic (but hey it's the OF!), we really really really need to make it clear that we're not waiting until 6.0 for another chance for it to be right. Obviously the landscape will change a lot in a new expansion in ways we can't predict, but they also really badly need to pay attention to what players discover and adapt to it, whether it be nerfs or buffs. They're so terrified of conceding anything in terms of them giving any hint that they might admit something is more optimal or whatever but then we end up with stuff like skill speed on the best weapon for a job where it harms them, and left with an exponentially stronger crit playground for Bard to strike a nail in our coffin, let alone our unfriendly OH/FT skills.