Machinist latency issues need recognition akin to Ninja

[Kitfox]

First, I'd like to apologize for the harsh words in some of my recent posts. The live letter made me reflect on them and I feel bad because I love many things about Shadowbringers and the developers have done an outstanding job in many areas. The words were made at the advent of yet another patch where well documented problems remained unfixed with Machinist with the added pressure of preparing for the week of savage raiding as well as updating job resources for the class.

Since the problems Ninjas have with their mudras being affected by latency were acknowledged, I'd like to elaborate just why I'm so incredibly frustrated with the inaction regarding Machinist.

I've been the main theorycrafter and mentor for the class on the Balance Discord for almost two years now, since early Stormblood. In my role, I answer a lot of questions and talk to a lot of people who have problems understanding the class, their rotation or general knowledge of the game.

During Stormblood, the most common topics regarding the difficulties with the class were:

"How much ping do I need to play this class?"
"My ping is too high, what can I do? Do I need to find another class?"
"Can you make a rotation for high ping people?"
"How much damage am I losing because of my latency?"

Endless questions of all variations about ping problems and they still get asked daily. The answer is often disappointing. The only solutions we have are using VPNs, accepting the sub-optimal performance or simply choosing another class to play.

Along with a handful of other people we documented these problems at length and came up with various suggestion for them well over a year ago at this point, here for example. Here’s another post summarizing issues, not only related to latency. The effect of all the combined issues was that Machinist was one of the least played classes for the whole expansion. Despite our best efforts, none of the feedback was recognized in anyway.

Now, we've seen some of the suggestion being used in Shadowbringers, but not for Machinist and not to fix the core latency problems. Dancers got their fast ogcd free dance phases. This was one of the suggestion in the above thread (Reduce the required ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire). Why wasn't this used for Machinist? Another suggestion we see being used is the charge system, also suggested in the thread well over a year ago (Make Overheat and/or Wildfire work based on gcd count instead of timer). Instead of using the charge system to give Heat Blast and Wildfire charges and preserving the old reload animations of guns with some kind of ammo setup, the system was used for Gauss Round and Ricochet which only made the core latency problems worse because of the increased need to weave ogcds. To make matters worse, the amount of 1.5s gcds was more than tripled at the same time.

To developers' credit, some suggestions were implemented: Hypercharge and Wildfire windows are more lenient duration wise and Wildfire got a long-requested detonator function to make sure the ability isn't entirely wasted due to encounter design. In fact, a lot of the other issues people had with the class have been changed or fixed and that shows in the surge of popularity. The rotation is easier to understand for someone just picking up the class and the overall dps disparity within the class has shrunk considerably. However, I feel like these things are overshadowing the latency problems that have plagued Machinist for over 2 years now.

When the media tour build was revealed I was immediately horrified by new design because it went flat in the face of all the feedback about latency we had provided. I predicted the effects of the changes here, missing the mark with nightmare of 6 GCD Hypercharges, but pretty much being correct about everything else. The suggestions in the thread would go a long way in providing a temporary band-aid for the problems and they’re explained in depth in this post. These worries are not just my own as shown by the over 700 upvotes on reddit and over a 100 on the official forums.

From what I've talked with high latency players and having played the class myself now up to the point of clearing all the new savage raids with it, I can say with confidence that the latency problems have not been fixed. In fact, they’re worse for a lot of people. Personally, I have decent ping around 40-60 ms but I can still suffer from randomly worse duty instances where actions go off much slower and cause gcd clipping during Hypercharge. With such disparity in server and instance performance, I don’t feel like super tight gcds and ogcd weaving are justified as a core class mechanic.

The game used to be designed to be playable with no discernable difference up to 200 ms as the following quote from Yoshi-P a few years back proves:

FINAL FANTASY XIV was designed to be played in an environment featuring ping times of 200 – 220 milliseconds or less. Even if players experience an increase in ping times due to the data center relocation, as long as their times remain below 200 ms, then they may rest easy, for there should be no discernable difference in gameplay.

However, the difference in Machinist gameplay is like night and day when above 50 ms. The problems can somewhat be worked around, up to roughly 100 ms latency at least, but after that the gameplay becomes a nightmare. It’s literally impossible to weave any ogcds within Hypercharges without at least some clipping occurring when latency gets closer to 200 ms. At worst it results in being pushed out of raid buff windows, lost gcds, lost Heat Blasts, overcapped Gauss Round and Ricochet charges or lost Wildfire potency. Aside from the dps losses, and perhaps most importantly, it feels bad! Constantly being stopped and stuttered by latency feels awful. Comparing Hypercharge to Dancer’s Standard and Technical Steps is a world of difference in smoothness and gameplay enjoyment. I can’t understand why similar technology wasn’t used to alleviate Machinist problems.

Ninja's mudra problems were finally acknowledged but I'd like to firmly emphasize, with kind words, that Ninja is not the only class suffering from latency problems. Please give some recognition for Machinist as well for the latency issues the class has been suffering from for two years. The technology for solutions obviously exists with the new gcd actions, dance steps, animation changes and the charge system. Please, just do something to make the Hypercharge, Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet interactions smoother!

Thank you for your time and many thanks to the developers for the efforts in providing an ever better player experience!

[Anarok]

can definitely tell the difference between how many GCD i can use with my WF window when I use noping to reduce my ping down and when I dont have it on and it is a very big difference. with it I can easily get get all 6 in the window with ease no problem but with out it will be lucky if I get 4 or 5 in.

[Kniteroad]

This really needs to be addressed. i can just barely get 6 GCDs in some times and if i try at all to weave oGCDs between HBs, it bleeds into my GCDs preventing me from doing the rotation properly. MCH even in SB has been a ping dependent class, and nothing has changed in ShB even with the really awesome changes. I was asked to switch off MCH in my static for this reason because a "selfish" class should be topping the dps charts.

[Aiscence]

The problem is that the ninja community are more numerous, so it has way more impact than us, little machinists. So they probably react faster because of it, while we arent "priority".

@Kniteroad: Yeah, sadly, mch is far from toppign the dps chart atm ... a 95% mch is 12k3 on titan, while a 10% monk is 12k4, while they have raid buffs and stuff so .. yay.

[K_N]

As a Summoner main, I must wholeheartedly agree. While trying to work around the demi-pet responsiveness issues (another topic entirely), what you can do to achieve optimal performance in those scenarios often depends entirely on whether your ping is in a 1-50, 50-100 or 100+ms range - the latter often being lackluster and bad feeling.

Personally, I really like the skill expression involved in classes that require double weaving or "fast weaving" like MCH does, but if a difference of 50ms makes or breaks performance with a job, something about that job's execution needs to change. I don't like having to pay for a routing service just to play my job at the same level as other people.

[Brinn]

I really really hope they do something about this. I have mained MCH since around 4.3 and i'm seriously thinking about dropping it because of this issue. I heard that dark knight is really easy to double weave now so maybe it is something just to do with the animation locks. It breaks my heart to think about leaving it after I stuck with it for this long.

[BarretOblivion]

I am starting to level 70+ machinist and I can already see the issue with current MCH. Its absolutely heatblast/auto crossbow "haste" effect to try and squeeze all of your heat blasts as possible into wildfire while also using guass/richotet in between because of the cooldown reduction on the heat blasts. I think they need to remove the "haste" efect on heat blast and increase the time on Wildfire to compensate with the GCD number of the current Wildfire. This gives players time to get out 1 if not double weave ricochet and guass round without clipping and ping destroying you.

[Drayos]

As a Summoner main, I must wholeheartedly agree. While trying to work around the demi-pet responsiveness issues (another topic entirely), what you can do to achieve optimal performance in those scenarios often depends entirely on whether your ping is in a 1-50, 50-100 or 100+ms range - the latter often being lackluster and bad feeling.

Personally, I really like the skill expression involved in classes that require double weaving or "fast weaving" like MCH does, but if a difference of 50ms makes or breaks performance with a job, something about that job's execution needs to change. I don't like having to pay for a routing service just to play my job at the same level as other people.

The problem is it’s double edged knife.

This isn’t a advocation towards keeping or deleting these things.

But do you really believe slowing down the combat system is the right move? Would you enjoy this game still if it dropped 10+ CPM per job to trade in a static 2.5gcd gameplay.

Just imagine playing WoW on a 2.5gcd, would you log on every day and enjoy the gameplay?

Imma say a lot of people will say no to this, why? Because the reason most say pre 50 sucks for a lot of jobs is because it does feel like your playing WoW on a 2.5gcd to begin with.

Just because a solution is there doesn’t always mean it’s going fix something. If they get 100.000 complaints today, but 250,000 complaints after the change, the change was bad.

They could make the games graphics worse to aid players with lower performing pcs, but it’s recognised as reasonable not to because it will damage the game for a larger quantity of people

Are 20CPM jobs going to please a majority or be considered reasonable to be applied to fix this issue? No it won’t. It would piss off a lot of people.

The hint of putting mudras on a GCD has not gone well at all, have u not read all the thread? Theirs several there saying it’s not the fixs the job needs and pushing against it.

Looking at changes in a vacuum doesn’t determine the end you do also have to consider the negative impacts these changes would make

[Arakarn]

I don't think anyone will ask for mch to go all the way to the other extreme and become the slowest job in the game, if anything all I personally want is to be able to play the job without knowing my damage will be sub par due to something completely out of my control, knowing you're gated out of doing well on a job because you don't live right next to the servers is an awful feeling, even worse if it's something you know you'd enjoy.
If I do poorly I want to know it's because I messed up, not because I live too far from the servers.

[Kitfox]

To avoid ranting without improvement suggestions, I thought I'd go over the suggestions that were compiled in the pre-release media tour reaction thread.

Analyzing the problem

First let's examine the problem and its components

1. Heat Blast has a 1.5 second gcd
2. Heat Blast reduces Gauss Round and Ricochet cooldowns enough that weaving between Heat Blasts is mandatory
3. Between each gcd and ogcd action there's an estimated 0.70s animation lock + increased delay from latency

To reiterate: Weaving between Heat Blasts is mandatory because of the cooldown reduction effect on Heat Blast, this is why Auto Crossbow is less of an issue even though it has the same short recast time. Weaving between the 1.5s gcds is an issue because of the animation locks imposed on these abilities. The exact animation lock time is hard to pinpoint because of the latency factors involved, but usually in theorycrafting circles they're estimated to be roughly 0.70s long + any latency factors. That means even at ping as low as 50 ms, that leaves exactly zero room between Heat Blasts with one ogcd weaved between them.

This is an obvious problem for a game that has been claimed to be playable at 200 ms in the past as that would stretch the 1.5s gcd into a 1.8s one, in other words, induce 0.3s of gcd clipping. Hypercharge is used 3 to 4 times every 2 minutes, with 2 mandatory weaves in each one, with each causing 0.3s clipping that would add up to a total of 1.2-1.8s gcd clipping. Assuming the lost gcd is a heated shot, the loss is somewhere between 190-290 potency every 2 minutes. And this is when minimizing the effects by only weaving twice.

The job starts off with only 2 Gauss Round and Ricochet charges, which means 4 weaves are mandatory to avoid overcapping. If the original intent of the design was to weave between every Heat Blast, something you might want to do to maximize gains from raid buffs anyway, 200 ms latency would result in 1.5s gcd delay every Hypercharge, or 4.5-6.0s delay over 2 minutes. That's almost 3 whole gcds lost, a sign of an incredible design flaw.

Fixing the problem

As shown in the list above, this is a compound problem with three clear components. Fixing any one of these points would fix the problem as a whole, or at least alleviate the effects. This gives us 3 clear avenues to fix the issue. Next, let's examine some possible suggestions to fix each component.

Change Heat Blast recast from 1.5 seconds to 2.0 or 2.5 seconds

With a recast of 2 seconds, the gcd would allow comfortable single weaving practically any latency without allowing double weaves. This would require extending Hypercharge and Wildfire durations to retain same gcd amounts and some adjustments to the overall rotation might be necessary to accommodate the longer Hypercharges. The downside would be a slower rotation, which might not be as exciting for those that had no latency problems.

If the recast was a normal 2.5 second gcd, then double weaving would be possible. This might be preferable to keep the feeling of fast rotation since more actions can be packed within shorter time than with 2.0s single weaves. This would allow room for roughly 183 ms latency, though the room would shrink if skill speed affected the gcd speed.

Change Gauss Round and Ricochet cooldown reduction from 15 seconds to 10 seconds
OR Increase the maximum amount of charges from 3 to 4
OR increase Gauss Round and Ricochet cooldowns from 30 seconds to 40 seconds

All of these changes would have the same effect: ogcd weaving is longer mandatory during Hypercharge. The 1.5 second recast on Heat Blast would not be a problem for Gauss Round and Ricochet overcapping. The downside here is that there are other abilities you might want to use during Hypercharge, such as Tactician, Automaton Queen, Wildfire or Barrel Stabilizer. Nonetheless it would be an overall improvement.

Significantly reduce animation locks for all abilities

If the ~0.7s animation lock on most abilities was changed to 0.5s for example, this would instantly allow 200 ms more room for latency in all scenarios without changing anything else about the base rotation, ability values or timers. However, for low latency players it would allow triple weaving between gcds which could have some unforeseen side-effects. I doubt these effects would pose a larger disparity in performance than the difference between single and double weaving though.

That covers the easy solutions. Other possible solutions would be require a larger rework of the rotation and completely changing how the current job mechanics work so I won't speculate further on them, this post is already long enough. The basic requirements for improvements would still remain the same: No 1.5s gcds OR no ogcd weaving during those fast gcds.