Thread: 5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

Originally Posted by Drayos

It would not fix. Reguardless to how they set out heated shot or hypercharge. You can’t weave beneath the 1.25 GCD you can’t actively double weave either.

Your dps wouldn’t be any higher realistically. Because if ur pings at a level u cant physically weave, ur missing DPS Throughout its entire gameplay

It’s not about fixing it, it’s about minimising the issues it causes. Of course a low ping player is going to have a better experience, but it will very much increase the damage of a high ping player.

Look at it this way. As a high ping player, you press heat blast, it activates the GCD because it registered you as having pressed the button. Hypercharge then wears off, suddenly the server changes its mind and says you didn’t press heat blast in time, cancelling the action. You’ve just lost that entire GCD because you can’t make up the time lost to the action cancelling, you’ve lost 15 seconds off both ricochet and gauss round AND you’ve lost 200 potency off wildfire, all because 1 action didn’t go off in the .5 seconds you had to use it.

If heat blast was charged based, even if you are a little slower, you will always get that 5th heat blast, it will never start casting and then cancel on you. At worst you’ll miss a GCD during wildfire (not lose a GCD entirely, just miss getting it into the wildfire window) losing you 200 potency, that’s a significant step up for high ping players while changing nothing about the job for low ping players.

As for your previous post about charges causing MCH to need pre-loading. This is no more an issue than current hypercharge, because you can’t build heat outside of combat and if there’s trash packs beforehand, current MCH and pretty much any job already has that issue because they’ll all want pre-filled job gauges.

Now that I'm finally 80, it's time for me to give my 2 cents on machinist.

The good:
From a marketing standpoint I think I like the revamp. The new 700p gcds are fun to use, and the job is visually more appealing than it was in HW and SB.
Would be nice to have the option to continue using the rook autoturret at 80 though, or perhaps a glamour system similar to the one summoners have. Some people have said the robot looks out of place in the game's aesthetic and I kinda agree. I'd rather have a faust from the alexander raids.

The heat and battery gauges being usable at 50 but capping at 100 is nice from a gameplay standpoint. Gives some flexibility as to when you want to overheat/summon automaton. It's very valuable for quality of life when in places like dungeons or fights with random combat timings. I'm enjoying this way more than the super scripted stormblood rotation where you had to time your heat to reach 100 at the same time wildfire came off cooldown, 50 gauge is much easier to plan around.

Improvements:
Wildfire feels like it doesn't do enough damage for a 2 minute cooldown? It's strange that it can no longer crit or direct hit too. The reason old wildfire couldn't do so was because it scaled directly from damage you did; so if it took in a crit, and the final number could crit as well, it would have basically double crit which mean it could double dip from crit/dh. The current version that just deals flat potency increments doesn't have this issue, there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to crit or direct hit.

Air anchor and drill are integral to keep on cooldown in the current rotation, and as others have said the cooldown isn't easy to track from the small icon. I think giving both 2 charges would be an easy fix. It would make the job slightly easier to play yes, but I don't think anyone will argue mch isn't one of the hardest jobs to play optimally right now - definitely way more so than bard and dancer.

Flamethrower is still a very underwhelming level 70 skill. While it's true that at 250p per gcd for 4 gcds it's our strongest aoe after bioblaster, losing autoattacks and heat from other skills cut into those gains slightly. It feels like it needs to do something else to distinguish itself. In the first place it's kind of weird that a move called flamethrower doesn't interact with your heat gauge at all too.

Would it hurt to have autocrossbow reset the cooldown on gauss round/ricochet as well? MCH's niche is more burst aoe compared to bard that excels at sustained multidotting, they should at least excel at that. Even though autocrossbow is a dps increase over spread shot and heat blast in aoe situations, knowing you're losing the cd resets on those ogcds feels bad.

They could stand to do a bit more dps in general too. As the numbers look currently, it looks like they are behind monk and dragoon in certain fights right now. As the 3rd 'selfish' dps, they should be at the very least the 3rd highest dps only behind blm and sam. And before you tell me about 'ranged tax', this is from real fights already; monk and dragoon are losing uptime to mechanics and still doing more damage than mch.

Random:
I think barrel stablizer could be more interesting too. It's very useful to ensure you can wildfire quickly at the start of a fight of course, but I feel it could do a bit more.
What if worked in two ways: if below 50 heat, it works as normal and gives you another 50 heat, but if you were at 50 or more heat, it drains 50 heat and gives you 50 battery instead? It's a stablizer after all, it's more thematic if it works in both ways.

Currently there seems to be an issue where you actually generate more heat than you need from weaponskills, and when the time comes to wildfire you need to use barrel stablizer afterwards instead of before it, which is kind of weird and out of sync. It might alleviate that issue somewhat and give it more flexibility.
For people complaining about hypercharge ping dependency, if it was a dps gain to trade 1 hypercharge window for 1 extra automaton summon, it would at least reduce the incidence of hypercharge in the rotation a little when used like that.

I actually got carpal tunnel from MCH after a long binge in game haha. A change I'd like is possibly making Hyper charge make all of your weaponskills 2 sec GCD , Heat blast on a 4 second recast but reduces the CD on rico/gauss by 30 seconds and overheat last for 10 seconds to be slightly forgiving on heat blast.

I feel it would be much more fluid with the class as a whole that way and a bit more lax on peoples ping. Makes it a bit more forgiving too in case drill comes off CD and you need to go into hyper charge. I also sorta like it because I get an immediate feedback from heatblast to auto give 1 charge of gauss/rico instead of every 2 attacks. flows a bit better.

Things I would like to see kept going forward, but improved:
Flamethrower should build heat, It should also allow movement, albeit slowed as well as be manually aimed. I don't see how shooting flames out of your gun wouldn't build heat, and standing still while you flail around just feels like an arbitrary restriction. I think flamethrower would have a particularly good spot as an AoE opener to quickly build heat to transition into crossbow, and also as a damage boost when used with overheat on. (make it blue high-pressure flames) - This could only be used after the initial pull as flamethrower would still be on cooldown obviously.
Autocrossbow spamming the button and the animation resetting so soon looks and feels rather jarring. I think it would be better if this was a long cast thing like flamethrower that just continually fires until overheat is over or you override it with another ability. See Monster Hunter Heavy Bowgun Wyvernheart ability for inspiration. I also feel it should also provide the cooldown reduction heat blast does, atleast for Ricochet.
Bioblaster should be available at the same time as Drill. AoE low level feels terrible as all you can do is spam Spread Shot and with how much power creep there is most content devolves into AoE slug fests.
Reassemble renamed Reload/Charge-Shot and the old reload animation used instead of current one. Maybe make it cost 50 battery instead of a cooldown.