Media Tour MCH issues: MCH is now 4 times more punishing

[Kitfox]

Hello,

I'm Lynn Nuvestrahl, one of the MCH theorycrafters on The Balance Discord. After about 30 hours of going through footage and tooltips, formulating and testing options for rotations we've gotten a pretty good grasp on the changes shown at the media tour build.

There's two main issues that have come up repeatedly while theorycrafting:

1. Rapid Fire Weaving aka spamming Heat Blast with 1.5s gcd and weaving ogcd results in latency issues that are 4 times more frequent than in Stormblood.
2. Drill and Air Anchor being tied to gcd rotation results in forced Wildfire drifting that causes MCH to fall out of raid buff windows should they remain as strict as in Stormblood.

Ping dependency was one of the major issues in Stormblood that caused a lot of grief in the MCH community. The old rotation uses 3 Rapid Fire gcd with 2-3 required ogcd weaves per minute. In the media tour build the number of Rapid Fire gcds, or Heat Blast, has increased to 12 per minute because of the new Hypercharge burst window containing 6 gcd and happening twice each minute. This alone would be fine but in addition to being a gcd with 1.5s recast time, Heat Blast also reduces the recast timer of Gauss Round and Ricochet by 15 seconds. These abilities can now hold 3 charges but that doesn't entirely solve the issue.

Using Heat Blast 6 times in a row reduces the cooldown of Gauss Round and Ricochet by a massive 90 seconds in total, completely restoring their cooldowns and charges. Even in the best case scenario where you have spent all your charges before Hypercharge window, you will end up overcapping your charges if you don't weave a single one within the burst window. So in minimum, you have to weave at least one Gauss Round and Ricochet in order to not lose charges. This is assuming the window is not used for raid buffs. If it's also a raid buff window, there's a dps loss associated with using your charges outside of it instead of taking advantage of the multipliers.

So the best case scenario is that you have to now weave 2 to 4 times more often during 1.5s gcd burst window. Not weaving at all results in a loss of one Gauss Round and one Ricochet per Hypercharge, a loss of about 300 potency depending on how the timers are aligned. Failing to hit the 6th Heat Blast results in a loss of 150 potency from the cooldown reductions and a further loss of having to use a slower gcd. Both of these losses now happen twice as often due to having two Hypercharge windows per minute instead of one Rapid Fire window.

The second issue has been trying to find a rotation that aligns nicely with Wildfire timer. The Drill and Air Anchor being tied to the gcd coupled with their slightly unconventional cooldowns results in alignment difficulties. Even if their cooldowns do scale with skill speed, that doesn't help when the Hypercharge windows don't. Heat Blast is a solid 1.5s gcd that doesn't scale with anything. That means that any segment between Drill and Air Anchor casts gets thrown off balance when a Hypercharge window is added into it.

In Stormblood if the rotation didn't quite fit the Wildfire window, we could just add or remove one gcd and be done with it. But Drill and Air Anchor are tied to the gcd and if we want to reduce clipping between their usages, we have to add gcds between every instance, resulting in fairly large delays between the usages as well as Wildfire and Reassemble usages. It also makes the fact that Drill and Air Anchor scale with gcd completely pointless. You can't use them more often, only less often.

Potential fixes:

1. Reduce or remove the cooldown reduction of Gauss Round and Ricochet when Heat Blast is used. With this change players with worse latency would be able to get through their Hypercharge windows without losing charges. Alternatively get rid of the 1.5s gcd timer to allow for more weaving room or double weaving. This is a MAJOR issue and needs to be fixed.
2. The gcd rotation should be more flexible and work better with fixed timers such as Wildfire. Taking Drill and Air Anchor off the gcd and making them abilities could help with this but I'm unsure of other complications it might cause. If they were to remain as weapon skills, then they would be again forced to be weaved during Wildfire.

These are my personal issues and the main ones that have come up while working on the single target rotations. Other possible issues that I haven't had time to delve into:

• AoE rotations
• Potency calculations
• Automaton Queen starts attacking extremely slowly

There might be something we're still missing with the alignment issues and raid buff timings with other jobs and it might be as bad as it seems, but the major issue of 1.5s gcd and ogcd weaving really needs to be fixed asap.

To emphasize: Remove the 1.5s GCDs or ogcd weaves! The MCH community is already dead and if we have to wait another 2 years for the job to be fixed there will be nothing left.

Edit: These issues are also getting a massive response on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._4_times_more/

Edit 2:

After spending more time musing about the rotation the alignment issues of the new rotation have been resolved, we're only worried about how Hypercharge and Heat Blast work anymore. There's another really bad issue associated with locking Heat Blast behind Hypercharge that I completely forgot about when I made the initial post. Currently if you use a heated shot near the end of the Overheat window and you lose the buff during the animation, your heated shot gets cancelled because it's not available without Gauss Barrel or 50+ heat. The same thing will happen with Heat Blast unless it's made available outside of Hypercharge at lower potency like Cooldown is currently. This is actually a major issue considering how tight the new Hypercharge timing is and how big the ramifications of losing that last Heat Blast are.

Here's a compilation of all the possible fixes that we've come up with:
- Make Heat Blast available outside of Hypercharge at lower potency and without cooldown reduction effect.
- Reduce the effect of cooldown reduction to 10s or less (down from 15s).
- Increase the maximum charges of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 4 (up from 3).
- Increase the recast time of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 40s (up from 30s).
- Increase Heat Blast gcd to 2.0s or to an even slower speed (up from 1.5s).
- Increase Hypercharge duration to 9 seconds (up from 8s).
- Lower the animation locks on Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet to well below standard levels.

Lost potency should obviously be made up somewhere else. I would recommend adding it to Gauss Round and Ricochet.

Edit 3:
This post was written pre-release and some things changed for launch. We didn't get 6 Heat Blast Hypercharges, but pretty much everything else in the post remains relevant: 1.5s gcd and ogcd weaving is a problem. All the fix suggestions are still relevant and even more could be added if we wanted to do some changes to the core mechanics of the job. Hoping for improvements with the release of Savage, but very discouraged to be ignored once gain even with the amount of support these issues have got from the player base.

[Hussain]

As a MCH main who started this game as a MCH and went through hell in SB because of the tight OH window with rapid fire I only wanted 1 single thing.
I wanted this job to not rely on very low ping anymore and what did SE do? gave x4 the amount of rapid fire gcds in a min than we had in SB , I'm one of those MCH mains now who actually cannot play this version of the job for many reasons all covered in this thread , I'm not gonna talk about how Air anchor and Drill recast times feels weird because it doesn't matter when I can't play this job optimally
Not all players have 20ms and are able to weave with a 1.5 gcd recast
I know that even players who got a good ping clip in the current version we have in SB with only 3 rapid fire gcds so imagine with 12
I really hope SE would react to this issue ASAP , rapid fire was the single most annoying ability we had to deal with and now we get x4 the amount of that
This is frustrating ngl
I'm not gonna play this job simply because SE decided to make it more ping dependent , and please don't tell us "play what you enjoy" because this is something no one with higher ping can enjoy

[SomethingCool]

Clearly if it’s visually pleasing it means the clipping problems are fixed right?? Let’s hope they fix mch before 6.0

[Bec]

How did they possibly come to the conclusion that this would be a good change at all, they've had almost 4 years of people telling them that 1.5s gcds with any ogcds at all are not playable on even moderate ping???!!

[Oreos]

I sincerely hope SE listens to these valid complaints and doesn't dismiss them as more "doom and gloom" that accompanies each expansion. The job deserves to be thrown a bone after SB.

I don't play MCH, but the more people that do means the higher chances I get to play DNC. Please fix the steampunk cowboy job.

[Levy9]

I mean, even if you have a low enough ping for it, the combo itself seems pretty stale and jank.

Heat Blast -> oGCD -> Heat Blast -> oGCD -> Heat Blast -> oGCD -> Heat Blast -> oGCD -> Heat Blast -> oGCD -> Heat Blast

I originally took issue with the combo itself, assuming that this would be the optimal Wildfire combo, according to theory crafters. I hadn't even considered the possible ping issues yet.

[Elnidfse]

Conceptually it'd be pretty cool to have that many riccs and gauss rounds but the future might be kind of hard. Rapidfire already is a major pain in the rear and now we're kind of working with SUPER rapid fire.

[Cordilla]

Bumping for awareness.

I'm sure that the devs had their best intentions at heart when they came up with the changes to MCH. However, as it stands, it seems like it's only going to be worse for us. I hope that they really take a look at what's being said and make the appropriate changes.

[Jprime777]

Remove the cooldown reduction effect, and up the potency of Heat Blast to compensate plz!

[Trich]

I started playing around sigmascape and quickly got into raiding after I hit 70. I started on nin but because a static needed range I fell into playing mch. I fell in love with the class despite the clunky nature. There was something special about the instant feedback of wildfire and how the class had a perfect 60s flow so long as you played well and your sks was low. Even though I love sb mch I was ready for a new rework and I was so excited when the actions trailer started. However when I saw the class being played i was immediately worried about the new overheat window. I saw the 1.5 gcd, saw the amount of gauss rounds and ricochets coming back up and I knew that was not gonna be possible to optimize.

By no means am I the best mch and my ping is passable where I can play current mch with a high rate of success. My weaving in rapid fire is not perfect however. It's fairly frequent I notice some clipping just not enough to drop anything. With the amount of rapid fire windows in the new rotation I doubt I'll be able to have as much success on mch. It breaks my heart as it's a job I love to play but unless the overheat window changes I just can't play mch