Thread: 5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

1. Latency, the elephant in the room

Stormblood MCH suffered a lot from latency derived issues that prevented a lot of players with mediocre or even average latencies to play it fully without using an alternative, suboptimal rotation. This was of course due to flamethrower use / interrupt and double weaving abilities, but the main and major culprit has always been rapid fire and its 1.5s GCD. When Square Enix says that the game can be played up to 200ms of latency, well, I guess it depends what you mean by "playable" I guess. For most of those players, it feels horrible.

Shadowbringers MCH brings the Rapid Fire back with 4 times more uses every minute. How could that even pass the design process and not be scrapped considering the pain and stress it caused to players in the previous expansion already? Why are we still dealing with that? Do we have to all move within 1000km of game servers to finally stop stressing ourselves out over this? Why weren't MCH players actually listened for the countless feedback we gave about that critical issues for TWO YEARS now? You chose to remove ammo instead, nobody considered ammo to even be a problem. Rapid Fire is.

Just remove that mechanic or reduce the amount of stress it puts on internet connections and server distance. This is just not sustainable. I'm open to many suggestions, like increase the GCD speed to 2s with heat blast instead of 1.5s, and adjusting potencies accordingly. This could go a great way to still retain the speed increase burst identity of the job without making it absolutely unfair for half the globe.

I have dealt with that for two years now, and while I moved servers now and am perfectly fine, I know how it felt. And as a a personal feedback on which many will probably agree, it feels AWFUL when your latency doesn't follow.


2. Hypercharge and carpal tunnel tedium

We spend our time being literally using Hypercharge and overheating, spamming heatblasts like madmen by weaving an ungodly amount of abilities (our 2 charged abilities, Gauss Round and Ricochet), which also get recharged faster by using Heat Blast. Close to half our time is literally spent under overheat doing that. I like the concept behind Hypercharge because it fits MCH job identity, which is about big bursts of targeted damage.

I don't like at all how it was implemented in Shadowbringers. For one, we spend our time doing that and it feels incredibly repetitive, taxing and boring fast. It's actually tedious for me now and i'm not even max level. Second, it doesn't even feel rewarding. We literally spamm abilities with mediocre damage and awful numbers (which is understandable considering the insane amount of hypercharges we have to use with so much generated heat). I have always considered MCH identity to be about big, meaningful, rewarding bursts of meticulously applied damage every minute (tied to the old wildfire). Those hypercharges feel like anything but that.

3. Wildfires, from job core identity to afterthought

Wildfire got neutered and I don't even understand why. Maybe the reasoning was that it made too much of MCH damage dependent on raid buff windows? Either way, it got increased to 2 minutes and it feels ridiculous to me. The ability isn't even impressive anymore, and we barely get to play with it. Even a Reassembled Drill, Drill being a very common ability in our kit, deals way more damage than any Wildfire.

Wildfire isn't even remotely rewarding anymore.


4. The job became a literal stress generator

For not to waste casts of Drill or Air Anchor, you have to make sure to fit your hypercharge windows properly between every Drill instance (every 20s). This makes you constantly have to watch the timer remaining on Drill and Air Anchor not only to refrain from using hypercharge at the WRONG TIME, but also not to miss the moment when those weaponskills (Drill and Anchor) come out of cooldown. They are not Off global cooldown abilities, so you don't just have to press them when they come out of cooldown. You have to watch carefully WHEN THEY WILL come off CD to be ready to use them at the next GCD. This is made unclear by the visual feedback we have, but will always feel unclear and require a lot of brain processing power and attention, constant babysitting to watch a timer ticking down.

This is generating A LOT OF STRESS for players that have to constantly stay glued to their hotbars when fighting instead of paying attention to the actual fight itself. Not only you have to watch for those when they come off cooldown at the risk of desynching all your rotation, but you also have to watch the timers left on your charged abilities as well, especially since they get recharged VERY FAST by overheat windows, that are sprinkled literally all over.

Then since Wildfire is now on 2 minutes cooldown, and reassemble still on one minute, you now also have to watch carefully the mark when reassemble gets out of cooldown as well. If you're unlucky enough to have some amount of skillspeed, you might also see all your GCD structure be desynced completely with the reassemble, barrel stabilizer and wildfire timers. This is an absolute nightmare and makes the job punishing you for no reason other than that you're going too fast.

5. Design coherence and kit interaction

A lot of abilities don't interact well with each other, and everything feels very clunky due to that problem. We have Drill and Air Anchor on the global timer, which means they'll have to be used on timer, and we have on the other hand a bland, standard 3 steps combo (which removed the uniqueness of the old ammo system by the way...). Fortunately using Drill or Air Anchor doesn't break said combo. But the combo doesn't fit into the rotation well at all. You put it on hold all the time to pop all those hypercharges all the time. You also have to take care not to use more than one tool before or after hypercharges because it WILL BREAK your combo since you'll have held unto it more than 15s. All the GCD structure feels completely disjointed due to Drill and Air Anchor being on the GCD.

Just remove Drill and Air Anchor from the global cooldown (you can keep them as weaponskills, like the old bard empyreal arrow so they continue benefiting from Reassemble and can be included into the end of wildfire).

Also, we get a new gauge, which is the battery gauge. This gauge is boring. There is noting interesting mechanically behind. You charged it by using 2 abilities, and then fire and forget. As said above you also have to time it with raid buffs in raids, and the timer for it is variable depending on the amount of battery used. This also generates stress because it makes it rather arcane to see exactly when to use it so it falls correctly under those buffs. Other than that, the turret or queen automaton just don't interact much with the whole MCH kit at all. It feels completely disconnected from it.

Flamethrower also suffers from the same problem. The ability isn't bad per se and actually does decent damage, but it doesn't interact with the kit in any way, and actually see its use be counterproductive to heat generation that you actually want for hypercharges and Autocrossbow. Seen like that, Flamethrower actually CONFLICTS with the AoE kit of the job.

Another problem, why does Heat Blast reduce the charge on Ricochet and not Autocrossbow? You'd think that overheating with the AoE equivalent, which is autocrossbow, would actually interact with the AoE charge we have, and not the single target skill (heat blast)? Why Ricochet and Gauss Round don't share a recast timer between each other? That way for single target you'd use Gauss Round with Heat Blast, and for AoEs you'd use Autocrossbow with Ricochet?


6. Damage dealt

Not being lvl80 yet, I cannot properly judge of the actual damage caused. I actually think that the damage you get out of the job in solo and quests is very misleading because you have immediate access to all your burst tools and only nuke. But overall on actual, longer fights (dungeons, trials, etc), the damage dealt right now feels rather underwhelming, besides Drill and Air Anchor who are the only thing that really feels rewarding.

IMO, all that needs to be done to fix Hypercharge is to reduce the animation lock of Heat Blast, Gauss Round, and/or Ricochet. It seems you're intended to alternate between heat blasts and oGCDs, which I find fun. You have about a second of leeway for ping to delay things without losing a heat blast, but still any delayed GCD throws off the rhythm and feels bad.

I agree that the recast timers for Hot Shot, Air Anchor, and Drill need to be made more noticeable. Unlike abilities, their icons turn dark every time you use a GCD, so it's easy to miss when they're available. I've stuck icons for them in the middle of my screen and still forget to use them.

I don't know what would be a good solution to this. Maybe they should have a slightly different icon appearance when ready to use, similar to the dotted border for combo actions. Having them come off cooldown half a GCD early might also help, and it could alleviate some of the issues where hypercharge misaligns the GCD from these cooldown timers.

I'd much prefer fewer hypercharges with bonus to potency, than having to spam weak abilities all the time, especially since all these ogcds do a lot of animation canceling which makes it look weird and visualy noisy or glitchy, why do we need flashy acrobatics on every shot if we cancel it with gauss most of the time.
Having two charges on ogcds is annoying for no real gain, same as with the hypercharge, I'd prefer having fewer but stronger ogcds.
Neither turret nor queen deserve a gauge. I don't understand why turret has to be a gauge relient DoT, and why queen relies on a gauge that does nothing else and is basically a timer, since we have no batery managment queen could as easily operate on a cooldown.
If we had skills that use batery alongside the queen, then yeah, the gauge woud've been more interractive at least. As it is now neither turret nor it's upgreaded variant feel any good to use, and you only see them if you'd use them outside combat for a screenshot. And i don't think qeen should replace the rook, there's no reason for it.

Wildfire could be deleted at this point and we'd loose nothing bar some potency, it doesn't alter anything we do and does less damage than a two skill "combo" that only has a cooldown for its requirements.

We gain nothing from loosing ammo, no interesting mechanics, not even ease of use. Instead of ammo ogcd we now have extra charges on gauss and ricco, so we still press ogcds in place of reloads, we just lost some job flavor for nothing really.

Reassemble drill is fun though.
But it doesn't work well with hypercharges, of which we have a ton now.
And i doesn't work with wildfire.
And the queen doesn't work with anything.
Nothing synergises, the job feels spammy for no real gain. Fun in open world and questing though.

I was waiting for this post since your last one about the media tour. Maybe it's just my hype levels still being very healthy about these changes so I probably won't be as objective looking at the current MCH but I do have a few peeves about it:

- Weaving during OH:

GR isn't so noticeable but Ricochet has a longer animation that clips the HB spam and doesn't feel good.

- Drill and AA:

Like it was said, it's VERY easy to forget to use these and the GCD rolling animation doesn't help. I had to make a mental exercise of always check these two after an OH window so I wouldn't just go straight to 1-2-3 combo. I have these in the middle of the screen as well so I can get better used to them.

- Flamethrower:

I don't understand why they would remove the heat generation and keep this potency, it does feel very weak currently.

Now some thoughts of my own that don't agree with some of your other points:

- Gameplay revolving around OH and not WF.

I'm happy about this, it gave this really fast paced gameplay that no other job comes close too (possibly GNB with the continuation combo), if they can improve the weaving somehow, then it's perfect. I don't mind the lower potencies in exchange for faster gameplay, it's a necessary trade-off to keep things balanced. Dancer already has the big hitters so it's nice to have MCH with a contrasting identity and Bard somewhere in the middle with their dots. One of the things that pushed me away from MCH in SB was the clockwork rotation around WF windows, one cooldown cannot define a job's gameplay and boy it was frustrating if one little thing went south or god forbid having your WF lost in a boss downtime jump, now WF is part of a variety of burst cooldowns and its place feels right.

I enjoy that the new MCH has flexibility but I feel like the price for that has been too great in terms of how rewarding the class feels to play.

With the old machinist you were always rewarded with a big payoff every minute for keeping your rotation on track, even if you didn't feel very powerful between WF/Overheat phases it felt meaningful to do so. Very methodical gameplay, easy to get a grasp of but had a lot of potential for minmaxing when you get into the nitty gritty of specific bosses. It always felt like you were building towards that tasty nugget of damage at the end of your rotation. It had a lot of flaws but it still grew on me after a while if you disregard the inconsistent Overheat timings when playing with less than optimal latency.

The new MCH fixed a lot of the issues that the old iteration had. It's way, way less risky to mess things up and lose your alignments because of a single wrong press of a button due to how flexible the new heat mechanic is. It's also way, way, way less rewarding to play due to such a big portion of our damage being slapped on press and forget abilities like Drill and AA/Queen. Like many others have said, Hypercharge doesn't feel very impactful to use, it went from being the window that defined our damage to being something that is just used to weave together the gaps between our "big red button" skills. I can only speak for myself of course, but having damage handouts in the forms of single button presses is very boring and unrewarding. Ricochet and Gauss Round spam is pure button bloat. I'd much prefer if they were double the potency and twice the cooldown to make them feel more strategic to use.

TL;DR: Too many buttons to press for the sake of feeling more busy, feels unrewarding to play, no setup needed for Hypercharge other than making sure AA/Dr are on cooldown already. MCH feels much more like a rhythm game where you smash buttons as they come up even though technically it's less so than it was before. PS. remove the weird cooldown indicator for AA/Dr, just put them on cooldown like other skills, it's redundant and makes it difficult to see.