Machinist latency issues need recognition akin to Ninja

[Aiscence]

Dont forget the bug where the wildfire damage register before it actually ends. I've seen many times where my 6GCD were before the end of the WF, even in the chat log the damage were registered before the end of the duration, and still only got a 5GCD WF damage

[Kitfox]

As expected, no mentions of MCH issues in the live letter today beyond simple potency increases. Meanwhile, SMN is being made "less busy" while MCH has higher casts-per-minute. NIN is getting fixes for their latency issues and charges for their Bunshin so they can use mudras without losing Bunshin gcds while MCH is still forced to put out all Heat Blasts and weaves in sequence without alleviations. We could use charges as well, for Heat Blast and Wildfire gcds, or some help with Gauss Round and Ricochet weaving.

Despite all the content updates and system reworks with crafting/gathering and the job changes coming in 5.1, it's still pretty disappointing that there's still not even an acknowledgement for MCH issues. I could understand MCH being further back on their priority list but when it's not even mentioned it gets increasingly harder to hold on to hope. Most people seem to have already given up on talking about the ping issues because the feedback continues to be ignored. Apathy is not a good state for the player base to be in. Sure, the complaints stop eventually, but the issues remain.

I really hope the potency increases include some mechanical tweaks even if they went unmentioned.

[Leukka]

I was disappointed to see that the only thing that MCH has to look forward to was potency increases.

I play at 110+ ping and it's a coin-toss whether or not I can get 6 GCDs in my Wildfire some nights. I just hope we don't have to wait until 6.0 for another pass at our job mechanics.

[Sylvain]

Can they even reduce animation lock?

[Kitfox]

Can they even reduce animation lock?

Sure. Typically abilities have a [0.6s + 2 x latency] animation lock, some abilities like RDM Displacement have a longer one so you can't double weave them. NIN Mudras on the other hand have a much shorter lock or they would be unusable with their 0.5s recast time. There has also been multiple occasions where they've reduced the animation lock on abilities such as DRG jumps, DRK Plunge and so on. So yeah, it's totally possible for them to define skill specific animation locks if they want to.

[Nemekh]

Current ogcd mudra lock's 0.5s, the game can't really cope with actions more than once per 500ms it starts to break down. I have pondered about how things could be if they reduced the baseline 600ms to 500 or 550ms just to ease up general anim lock from instants and standard ogcds, but I know that when things get too fast things will stop working.

[Renkei]

I don't know if you are aware of this, but if you queue the skill on the last .5 seconds and don't spam it, it'll still go off regardless of what your ping is.

[Cabalabob]

Live letter didn’t give me much hope that MCH is gonna see the fixes it needs, just a generic potencies buff as their response tells me they don’t even understand what the issue is.

I don't know if you are aware of this, but if you queue the skill on the last .5 seconds and don't spam it, it'll still go off regardless of what your ping is.

There are plenty of “tips” out there like this but they’re not true, it is entirely up to the whimsy of the server if your skill goes off or not, I’ve even seen the skill go off and then the game interrupted it mid action to decide you didn’t press it.

[Kitfox]

There was recently a summary of a bunch of interviews posted on reddit and one of answers Yoshi-P confirms my fears about lag testing:

Q. May i ask the difficulty of adjusting jobs in general? Using Ninja as an example, why did you decide to adjust ninja in 5.1 and not 5.0

Y: With Ninja, we didn't only test it on the dev servers, but also with typical internet available in public. But the internet was still extremely fast (note:compared to some regions) and we found out we weren't affected by bad internet during peak times.

Q. So you're saying your mudras never had clipping issues when you weaved them between GCDs in the dev environment?

Y: The network in Tokyo is fast, so there's almost never any lag, but when you go to a "normal house" during peak times or when the bandwidth is limited for some internet providers, a zero point however seconds of lag can affect the game. We thought that level of lag was somewhat forgivable, but this was where the problem was.

Basically there has been zero testing done in latency environments outside of Japan's high speed local internet. It's obvious that the devs are unaware of the effects of latency when they never get to experience playing at 100+ms latency and just assume it's "forgivable". It's not. It feels awful to play. And NIN is not the only one suffering from this latency depended design. Since they're going through the trouble of rebalancing almost all the jobs, would be nice if they took a better look at the latency dependency as well.

[Leukka]

Bumping for more exposure.

Honestly though, this is largely a relatively simple fix if they were to do any of the changes listed here.