Machinist latency issues need recognition akin to Ninja

[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.

[Kisshu]

Remove the recast reduction part of Heat Blast and give us a buff that goes up by one per heat blast, capping at 5 stacks. When using Gauss Round/Ricochet it removes one stack instead of the normal charge.
This way, people can either weave the stack between Heat Blast if they want the old style, or save the stacks for after the Heat Blast spam to avoid clipping.

[Aiscence]

One day ... one day we will get recognition for that ...

[Ayanumi]

Agree with everything on here, when the changes first arrived I made some pretty salty stupid posts but looking back on it now, all I want is to be able to play the job again.
in SB I played MCH through both ultimates and the savage tier, but since the change to its core gameplay I've just had to move over to DNC.

My latency is about 160-180 depending on the day and the job is just unplayable at a high level. Sure I could just play the job 4head and miss out a GCD every 2 minutes or whatever but when you enjoy high percentile raiding and ultimates its kinda a joke for you to come on a job where you play so poorly simply due to latency requirements.

[Yani-Madara]

With the live letter approaching on the 15th, I'd just like to remind the devs that while NIN is getting latency fixes, MCH has also been suffering for 2 years with no recognition for their latency problems. I hope we can at least get some sort of band-aid fix until they have time to tackle the issue properly after all the dps balancing issues they've got to deal with. After getting some of the band-aid fixes that were covered before, we could go towards better overhaul of the current toolkit interactions, one suggestion below.

Heat Blast Charges, Wildfire stacks
- Make Hypercharge load the gun with 5 charges of Heat Blast (shared with Auto Crossbow) that can be used freely with other gcds in between.
- Make Wildfire count gcds with stacks instead of a timer and explode it when it reaches the desired (6?) amount.

These two simple changes would allow people to space out their Heat Blast casts and Gauss Round / Ricochet charges according to their latency and weaving capability as well as further emphasize the flexible strategic nature of the job. Drills and Anchors could be used more freely in different party configurations and skill speed would cause less issues with Wildfire alignments. While it might make Hypercharge easier to use, since it doesn't require as tight of an execution phase, we would get another resource to manage while taking nothing away from the currently established playstyle. One could play the job just like they currently do but also be free to customize their rotation to suit their latency better. Potency and cooldown values wouldn't even need to be changed (apart from the 5% buff that all ranged jobs need as a whole) with these changes because they would be more like a quality of life change than any sort of potency advantage.

This change would basically fix every current problem with the class:
- Fixes latency issues
- Fixes skill speed issues
- Keeps job fast paced
- Extra layer of strategy
- Minimal change to current core playstyle
- (Flamethrower still needs a buff though)

I really, really hope we can look forward to a QoL update like this!

I beg the devs to listen to THIS suggestion.

These stacks would make high and low latency players happy.

I left Ninja because GCD ninjutsus bored me so much, so please don't slow down MCH. I have bad ping and would be happy with stacks. That way I can use 5 heat charges without worries and won't get bored waiting for the gcd.

[Ekimmak]

So, levelling MCH from 70 to 71, there was something off feeling about the class, but couldn't really put my finger on it.
Took MCH into a Trust dungeon, and it became pretty clear. It's built for people with ping times WAY higher than mine.
And whoever keeps trying to put "weave OGCD into high speed GCDs" needs to move to Australia to realise just how awful they're making life for me.