5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

[memepapa]

Yeh you've brought up a lot of good points. Ping is always going to be the main enemy in ffxiv (and all MMOs for that matter haha) and I wouldn't want it to become a homogenised mess

[Drayos]

Ok thank you! So opening with wild fire is technically the way to go and usuing hyper charge and cooldown and spam it. I'm disappointed that it does such negligible damage.

Tbh the strongest opener I’ve found so far is.

To go into air anchor —> double weave 2x gauss rounds —> reassemblance —> Drill —> use ur last gauss round and 1 ricochet double weave —> stabilise barrel —> hyper charge —> wildfire —> into the heated shot + 1 weave it doesn’t matter which u do as it’s counts abilities not damage now. Just whichever’s accessible. —> into standard rotation.

Hold Drill for reassemblance use anchor on CD always use hyper charge on available. And use golem at 100 and instantly blow it up for maximum potency

Always line up hypercharge up with wildfire each time.

And it’s just going into standard rotation into hypercharge spam into hypercharge+wildfire spam,

It’s quite easy to play it’s just keeping everything aligned and playing it at the pace desired.

[Drayos]

Yeh you've brought up a lot of good points. Ping is always going to be the main enemy in ffxiv (and all MMOs for that matter haha) and I wouldn't want it to become a homogenised mess

Yeah it’s sad but true.

Slowing down every job is fine, til you see it will exclude a lot of players. We have to remember compared to most MMORPGs FFXIV combat is slow for most jobs compared.

And while i suspect a lot won’t play the job. But a lot also will and bard is a really good alternative for those who don’t desire taking up such a speedy level of gameplay

I think this was genuinely SEs intention. And tbh I think adjusting bard to match the machinist on a more stabilised gameplay option was prolly the best way they could counteract the problems that would be assiosated

While ideas are always good, I don’t think there’s any avoiding it, to create a fast paced combat class in FFXIV requires a lot of things which don’t bold well with high ping.

[Galliford]

My $0.02 on the new MCH:

I’m really enjoying it, honestly. I’ve long wanted this to be a main job of mine, but could never jive with the punishingly restrictive feeling of SB MCH. The sheer number of plates one needed to keep spinning was daunting, especially since it felt like a small error could get your whole alignment out of whack in major ways.

ShB’s MCH gives me the feeling of revving up a big steampunk motorcycle at the start of the fight, making minor adjustments as I cruise — fiddling with dials, opening up the engine, whacking something with a well-timed wrench — and occasionally flooring the gas pedal. You can definitely get a touch out of alignment if you’re not on top of your major cooldowns (Drill and Hot Shot/Air Anchor), but I never feel the sense of rapidly cascading failure that I used to in
SB.

That said, I agree with the fact that some changes could definitely be useful in making the job feel more engaging, particularly by adding some secondary resource spenders to avoid overcapping on Battery/Heat.

Other than that, here are the things I’d like to see:

1. Some sort of change to Flamethrower. A potency increase, and maybe an enemy debuff? Applying a Slow effect could give it great use during big pulls. It’s just so underwhelming as is. A really middling potency increase over Spread Shot with the opportunity cost of building less heat. This ability looks so freaking rad, and which it felt as powerful to use as it seems like it ought to.

2. Honestly, bring back some more utility. If they want to keep DNC the star here, which I understand, maybe we could instead be the debuffer — give us Dismantle and Rend Mind! The animations are still there! I don’t want to be purely selfish. -__-

3. Wildfire needs... something. While I’m honestly happy it’s no longer the job’s defining ability, it feels so oddly unimpactful with its current potency and CD, especially since the process of using it is almost exactly the same as the regular Hypercharge windows. Here’s my buck wild idea for how to organically boost Wildfire’s damage... and have it feel very distinct from Hypercharging:

[Galliford]

(The rest is basically theorycraft fan fiction. I know it’ll never happen, but it’s fun to think about.)

So, we all know that Hypercharge is about kicking things into Sonic mode, jamming your foot in the gas and zooming through your Heat Blasts and GR/R weaves. What if Wildfire... was the exact opposite? What if it were the equivalent of jamming on the e-brake and executing a perfect, graceful drift in the eye of a storm?

That’s right. What if Wildfire was used in tandem with Flamethrower?

Stay with me. For every tick of Flamethrower, Wildfire’s potency increases — and let’s have it work on an exponential scale, too: your first tick is worth 160 pot, second is 170, etc., working up to a final tick worth 250. This gives a total Wildfire potency of 2050 that’s weighted toward the back-end of the combo’s execution. (Plus, of course, Flamethrower’s base potency of 1000 over the 10 seconds.) [Basically, this would mean that every two minutes we’d have the potential for the equivalent of dealing a bit more than 4 Drills in a row. In other words, pretty awesome but probably not gamebreaking.]

Wildfire would become about playing a tactical game of chicken: how long do I dare to ramp up my damage while the battle and its mechanics are raging all around me? Are there times when it’s smarter to go for just six or seven Flamethrower ticks during a hectic phase, or do I delay WF slightly until I’ve got more freedom? Is there a perfect little spot I can find at juuust the right angle from the boss in order to stand my ground throughout several mechanics? It’s the perfect feel for a job boasting a move called Tactician.

Plus, can you imagine the warm, fuzzy feeling of seeing the numbers pop up for a 2050 potency move? I dunno. It seems like it could be fun, to me. ^__^

[Genbe197]

Why are people saying use torrent when ever? Using at 50 gives you more pile drivers/overdrives. Which is more dps since the durations increase. At the same rate as battery gained. Am I missing something?

[Drayos]

Why are people saying use torrent when ever? Using at 50 gives you more pile drivers/overdrives. Which is more dps since the durations increase. At the same rate as battery gained. Am I missing something?

The potency of pile drive increases if ur battery level is higher when he explodes.

[Kitfox]

Not a day goes by that I don't see someone ask about how much ping you need to play this job and not a day goes by that someone isn't disappointed when I'm forced to say that this class is still ping gated and unplayable for them after 2 years. Putting all other annoyances aside, I just can't understand how SE could've ignored the number one complaint through the whole of Stormblood and doubled down on the things that caused problems. Rapid Fire weaving was a problem with just 3 gcds and a couple of weaves. What do they do? Now you have 4 times more Rapid Fire in the form of Heat Blast and the same amount of ogcd weaves but why on earth would it be a problem!? What, the buff window is slightly more lenient? The core problem is still exactly the same and just as bad for higher ping players! Extremely frustrating that feedback is straight up ignored. They could've fixed this job in so many ways, even kept up the exciting speed aspect in many ways, but they decide to do it in the worst way possible, in way that was already given negative feedback about. But hey, at least everybody so busy pressing a million buttons and roleplaying with their cool robot that they won't have time to notice the problems.

[Meryl-ZT]

The potency of pile drive increases if ur battery level is higher when he explodes.

And use golem at 100 and instantly blow it up for maximum potency

That's not how it works. The duration of Automaton Queen and the potency of the skills she uses are linearly increased the more battery level you have. Exploding it early doesn't increase the damage. You can test this easily.
Even the tooltip of Pile Bunker specifies: 'Potency increases as Battery Gauge exceeds required cost at time of deployment". It has nothing to do with how much duration or whatever is left.

[Ayanumi]

I played stormblood as a high ping mch the entire expansion and could still optimize and parse well.

Shadowbringers is FAR more punishing to high ping players than Stormblood ever was.

1.5s recast times have been a complaint about machinist for as long as they have been a thing and a pretty universal ones at that, they really have to go if they dont want to force people off the job.

To any low ping players saying that they would leave the job if they slowed it down: Id rather you had a CHOICE to leave the job due to not liking it than others being FORCED off the job due to their latency. Its not fair to people who live on the other side of america to design a job like this in a game with instances which are so inconsistent. Not to mention they put their servers on the very west edge of america which just destroys anyone on east coast.

Very unfun to just be told "its our class now go find something else to play" after 4 years.