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

[Taranok]

How does ping effect overheat now? I.5second and 8sec duration the max you can fit is 5 you can’t instantly cast heated shot as you cast overheat. At least it’s not letting me even if I spam the buttons. If you can my ping must suck if so easy solution. Make overheat five 5 charges of heated/crossbow. With a 5 charge cap so you can’t stack 10. Or just make each shot cost 10 resource and have wildfire explode after 6 weapon skills or something.

The class also could use something for the heated shot Gauss Round/Ricochet stacking. Anyone above a ping of ~50-60 basically can't single weave during that, and that makes mch functionally unplayable for them.

[Idolon]

According to Windows' Resource Monitor, my ping ranges from 65-110 ms. I've still been fairly consistently able to get five heat blasts with single weaves between each, and the times I couldn't were probably just me hitting Hypercharge too early or fumbling something else.

By "can't single weave", do you mean that you can't weave without clipping at all, or that you lose an entire heat blast if you weave? The former is pretty minor compared to the latter.

[Azerhan]

I would like something like 0.5 sec more for the last Heatblast. Sometime I just smash the button and nothing happens...

[Kintsuki]

I main SAM because i play with 145ms and if I dont weave in Gauss/Rico with exact timing, i can lose a HB cast during my HC window. Even though I'm pressing on because I really want to play this cast whose Fantasy i completely adore. I really hope SE listens to this valuable feedback and do something ASAP.

[LunaProtege]

The new MCH is more to theme than before, but it doesn't really feel very smooth to play. It feels off to have both Drill AND Air Anchor, as they fight for attention in the rotation; and then with the Wildcharge, everything comes down to a frantic button spam for Heat Shot, and desperately trying to weave in both Gauss shot and Richochet AT THE SAME TIME.
Old MCH used to make me feel like I was managing the flow of combat, and weighting the odds of the burst window by picking the best moment in the rotation to use Wildcharge, saving up the reassemble for that same moment, and maximizing the use of bullets by always using them for combo procs and NOT on the final part of the combo that won't proc anything. The fact that Direct Hits and Crits in that window were an uncertain variable was a bonus, not a hindrance.
I mained MCH during Stormblood up until things started getting ready for Shadowbringers, so I prepped a lot of stuff to go Gunbreaker... And at this point, I'm glad I did, because everything that appealed to me about the old MCH is present in Gunbreaker. (Well, aside from not being ranged DPS, but eh)
I will say that Overheat being something to activate rather than its activation being based on pushing it over the limit is the ONE good thing that's changed; as I purposefully avoided overheating in my rotation because it was almost impossible to activate at the same time as OLD Wildcharge, and the cooldown afterwards was more of a hindrance than a boon.
I still would rather play MCH than Bard or Dancer, just for theme reasons... But I'm probably going to wait until its a bit more manageable before I come back to it.
(Also just noticed this thread seems to mostly focus on the latency... But yeah, that does feel like an issue. I'm not sure if the button presses for the Gauss shot and Ricochets are registering or not during the Wild-charge phase. This is while also being worried that the Heat Blast itself isn't registering.)

[Kitfox]

With the advent of "more adjustments" coming up next week, I'd just like to bump up this thread. While we avoided the absolute disaster of 6 Heat Blast Hypercharges, every bit of feedback in the first post is still valid, just adjusted for 5 Heat Blast windows. Ogcd weaving continues to be a problem at 1.5s gcd, and not just because of Gauss Rounds and Ricochets, sometimes you might want to use Automaton Queen, Barrel Stabilizer or Tactician within the Hypercharge window as well.

Things are not better than Stormblood. Feedback was ignored and the rework was built on shoddy foundation that was already found faulty. Things could be easily fixed if SE could just let of go of their obsession with 1.5s gcds and animation locks long enough to conflict with it, but I reckon these issue will continue to be ignored because of the warm general reception of the changes. Some of the changes have been good and have added a lot to the quality of life for the class, but the ping and latency issues remain, the main complaint through all of Stormblood. Please fix them.

[osutin]

The class also could use something for the heated shot Gauss Round/Ricochet stacking. Anyone above a ping of ~50-60 basically can't single weave during that, and that makes mch functionally unplayable for them.

Hi, I'm new to MCH and wanted to ask you about your comment here: my ping sits between 80-90, and I am able to throw in 1 oGCD between each Heat Blast, as well as getting all 5 Heat Blasts to go off before the buff ends. Is there more to this than I think, or am I successfully "single weaving"?

[Hezzlocks]

The class also could use something for the heated shot Gauss Round/Ricochet stacking. Anyone above a ping of ~50-60 basically can't single weave during that, and that makes mch functionally unplayable for them.

It absolutely *is* playable. If you ensure that both your charges are at 0, preferably with still 25+ seconds until the next charge, then you can do a full Hypercharge Heat Blast wave without doing *any* weaving, and you won't waste *any* recharge time, at worst a couple of seconds, which isn't much of a loss at all. Five Heat Blasts are 2.5 charges. Factoring in the 10 seconds to pull off those 5 Heat Blasts, you have 5 seconds of wiggle room at 0 charges.

ShB MCH is LEAGUES more playable with ping than SB MCH was, where it was *required* that you weave between every single shot during the Wildfire rotation, which with ping all but guaranteed you were losing a GCD with every Wildfire rotation, which was a heavy loss. ShB has it set up in a way where you can account for your ping and adapt your rotation so that you don't need to weave at all and don't lose a GCD during Hyperdrive / Wildfire. And if your ping is good enough that you can weave just two shots without losing a Heat Blast, you're absolutely gold.

EDIT: I had a brain fart with Hypercharge duration. It's an 8 second duration with a 10 second cooldown. This means you actually have 7 seconds wiggle room at 0 charges, not 5. That makes it even easier...

[Hezzlocks]

With the advent of "more adjustments" coming up next week, I'd just like to bump up this thread. While we avoided the absolute disaster of 6 Heat Blast Hypercharges, every bit of feedback in the first post is still valid, just adjusted for 5 Heat Blast windows. Ogcd weaving continues to be a problem at 1.5s gcd, and not just because of Gauss Rounds and Ricochets, sometimes you might want to use Automaton Queen, Barrel Stabilizer or Tactician within the Hypercharge window as well.

Tactician is a possibility, but why would you ever need to use Automaton Queen or Barrel Stabilizer during the Hypercharge window? Neither of them contributes anything to the Hypercharge window. Automaton Queen has no CD and you aren't generating any battery while in the Hypercharge window so there is no loss in not using it. If you are referring to Trick Attack timings, chances are you've timed your Hypercharge window to align with Trick Attack, in which case the loss is on you for not deploying Automaton before engaging the Hypercharge window.

As for Barrel Stabilizer, there is only one possible loss for not using it during a Hypercharge window, and that's just a few seconds worth of cooldown time not running. Considering the cooldown for Hypercharge is 2 seconds longer than the duration, there is absolutely no need for having it ready *immediately* after a Hypercharge window.

You're really reaching with those two. You can already do a Hypercharge wave without weaving a single oGCD and not waste a single thing, I'm fairly certain the odd time when you might want to throw in a Tactician won't hurt at all.

[Kitfox]

snip

It's not reaching at all. It's a common occurrence to have Hypercharge windows very close before your Wildfire window and depending on the amount of battery you have an how you've aligned Wildfire with raid buff windows, you might have to summon it in the middle of Hypercharge to align perfectly for the buff window. Fight mechanics can further force you into weird alignment situations.

Citing aligning Hypercharge with Trick Attack is not a solution in favor of the "job being fine" because then you would have to weave between every Heat Blast to make use of the buff window, not to mention aligning with Hypercharge like that actually doesn't happen that often because you also want to fit in Drill and Air Anchor into those windows with another normal gcd to avoid breaking combos. Sometimes you have half a Hypercharge in the Trick window, sometimes none at all.

Barrel Stabilizer is weird in the way that if you use it on cooldown, you'll overcap heat every 6 minutes, most of the times the first occurrence happening at 2 or 4 minutes in to the fight. If you want to avoid this overcapping issue, you would have to delay Barrel Stabilizer until you've started your Wildfire Hypercharge sequence and to avoid further delays you would pop it as soon as possible inside Hypercharge, though delaying might not cost you extra usages, but that's fight dependent as well.

You can only avoid overcapping Gauss Rounds and Ricochets with no weaves in Hypercharge if they have more than ~20s on their cooldowns, otherwise you start overcapping some of the duration. It's actually a very unlikely scenario if you start mapping it out properly, and again, fight timings and downtime can push you to use ogcds at different times than what you're used to.

Avoiding weaving within Hypercharge is all well and good, but it costs you a lot of flexibility. Not to mention, while leveling you only have 2 charges on Gauss Rounds and Ricochets so the obvious design direction was to intend you to weave them within Hypercharge. Intention is irrelevant though, but it's a thing to consider when we're trying to think where the job is headed and this is not a good direction to head into.


At the Balance Discord we've mapped a lot of the rotations and situations up to 400s, some aspects up to 16 mins while trying to find patterns in the rotations. Flexibility becomes a real issue when avoiding weaving in Hypercharges, overcapping happens a lot, and it's very possible to have conflicts with Queen timings and raid buff windows. Of course, if you don't care about any of the optimization for the class, then none of this matters to you, but then I also don't understand the need to criticize the feedback without knowing the full picture. While they may not be issues to you personally, they're very real issues nonetheless and I think they deserve to be brought up.