Man & Machine: a MCH Thread

[CKNovel]

Heat gauge and the GCDs
Here we are, reaching the core of the job.
And the most problematic part.
Heat gauge is bad. Fill up to 50, spend 50 to spam the same GCD. It works for Auto Cross Bow but like previously said, it won't be used at all if there is not 3 targets.
The skillspeed + Cooldown refill is a mistake, but if we remove one of those, we fall in the boring gameplay. And it's already boring.

Limiting the combo to 1-2-3 is exceptionally boring. There is no DPS that has GCD combos limited to 1-2-3. It worked in HW/SB due to the RNG nature of MCH but doesn't anymore. Another remnant of the lazy, half backed rework.

Barrel Stabilizer is a SB remnant aswell, the 50 heat is supposed to synchronize with Wildfire but it doesn't works. Every next wildfire will never be synchronized with Wildfire as Barrel Stabilizer needs to be delayed due to heat already being over 50 everytime. A very easy fix would have been to make the next Hypercharge Free instead of 50 heat. But there was no testing, no changes, so it falls into the lazy rework.

I truly hope 6.0 won't come in with a Confiteor skill to end Hypercharge. No one ever liked the "Stance spam", it hurts more DRK/MCH gameplay than giving them anything. It works with PLD Requiecast and WAR Inner Release as there isa bit more setup required.

To Continue…

[CKNovel]

MCH iterations
Overrall, ShB MCH is a good step in the right direction, but its rework felt as there was nothing gained from Stormblood. You have the 3 new GCDs, the Barrel Stabilizer, Heat blast and the Flamethrower. All of them have been reworked, but none of them feels like they define the Machinist.

The job suffers way too much from past iteration.
In HW it was designed with casts in mind, rapidfire gave it instant casts.
In SB they removed casts, MCH was not designed with permanent instant casts so they added the horrible heat gauges.
in ShB they realized they screwed up and forgot what a Machinist was, so hey, machines after 2 expansions. But they half reworked the job and we now have that empty shell of a job that suffers from a pointless 1 2 3 combo, a bad heat gauge and no interaction with the Automaton.
It feels like a SB job in ShB. One expansion was missed, they erased and redid.

Next to that, you have jobs that are way too loved.
SMN, gets a new pet and it has a full kit. SMN is bad to play due to pet behavior, but it received way too many attention.
BLM received massives QoLs, their traits defined their core and corrected massive problems (0 PM Ice spell, Polyglot charges, Dynamisation cooldown), not simply "MoRe DAmAgeS" traits.
DRG had many of its problems fixed, there was not many, but the Jump is faster, life and blood of the dragon are now maxed which eases the rotation...

MCH remains with a boring rotation and cooldowns completely useless.
There is certainly a bias towards Casters this expansion, some Melee DPS bears great sufferings. MNK will never be forgotten, but DRG, NIN and SAM are definitely complete kitwise.
I also plays SAM from times to times, still learning but the rotation is very smooth, each cooldowns has their uses, except maybe one we know has Kaeshi Higanbana. Funny enough, SAM had a quick response to fix Shôha but MCH was ignored.
Also during SB, MCH was a mess and completely ignore, but SMN and NIN had insanely quick response.
To Continue…

[CKNovel]

My wishlist for 6.0 is simple, it may be slightly too early for that but they might be in the process of imagining what they'll do with the job next:
-Rework Flamethrower, don't make it a trait, rework it, it's a shame to see this cooldown defining most Machinist in such a state.
-Better heat gauge, no one like spamming one ability and Machinist spams the most of it. It's bad, no one likes it and it's not friendly towards latency.
-Wildfire, rework it or delete it, either goes in the trashcan or rework, it's a bad 120s cooldown with no interactivity and no thought process beyong Hypercharge.
-Don't make another Choice GCD there is too much of it on MCH, you'd better not make Noise Blaster useless with a shared cooldown on Air Anchor. Also don't even dare about creating a choice between AoE and Single Target Automaton.
-Interactivity with the Automaton Queen, I know MCH have been asking for Lead Shot or a dot since its removal in HW, but giving a cool looking Automaton to MCH then making it a glorified dot is as fun as making turtle races between each other for a salad.
-Test the job and its rotation, how comes there is no one in Square Enix trying Machinist job and not pointing out how Wildfire has no interactivity, how there is a heat problem with Barrel Stabilizer and how you can't fix it for a simple QoL?
-Show us the "Love" for machines, there is many times where Yoshi-P claims the teams loves Machines but Machinist had to wait a whole Stormblood expansion to fix a broken job and barely any changes happened on Machinist during ShB? Shôha was reworked when it didn't needed to be and could work this way for a whole expansion without bothering anyone.
-Rework the ranged rôle, in HW, ranged were the top of the support DPS. In SB, ranged were the top of the support DPS. Support was the keyword but the rangeds are now in a mess of a spot where they don't have damages, no support and all they can do is bring a 1% bonus stat to the team. MCH is limited to Tactician when it had Refresh, Palisade and Dismantle.

Please Square Enix, it was a good beginning but give us the other half of the rework.
It's tiring to see that the Machinist only shined in only half of an expansion. It was bad in SB and brought nothing in ShB and is a bore to play. The only reason you want to bring a MCH over the other ranged is because it's the best thing in the trash can. It's not the rotten meat named Bard, it's the half eaten apple.

And that’s it.
Sorry about the pâté, but 3k characters is way too low to have a correct debate.

[Seraphor]

The problem I have with it, is that it's barely present in MCH kit. It's always either Auto Cross Bow OR heatblast, Drill OR Bio Blaster. And I really don't want to see another "choice ability" and I can smell Noise Blaster sharing a cooldown with Air Anchor. We would barely see Noise Blaster if it would happen, like how barely we currently see Bio Blaster or Auto Cross Bow: Only in dungeons. Current Machinist is locked with 2 Aetherotransformer abilities when there is 4 of them.

The "problem" here is that this is a ubiquitous choice between single target and AoE that every single job has throughout their entire rotation.
If you remove the AoE skills by making them single target, then people complain that the AoE rotation is boring compared to the single target rotation.

It's a simple fact of balancing that AoE attacks will be less powerful against single targets, and therefore redundant in the single target rotation.

[Kabooa]

The "problem" here is that this is a ubiquitous choice between single target and AoE that every single job has throughout their entire rotation.
If you remove the AoE skills by making them single target, then people complain that the AoE rotation is boring compared to the single target rotation.

It's a simple fact of balancing that AoE attacks will be less powerful against single targets, and therefore redundant in the single target rotation.

You generally solve this with a priority conflict.

Take Drill and Bio-Blaster.

You could make it so that both have a 40 second cooldown, but using one over the other sets the unused one to 1/2 the Recast. In this way, it is preferred to use drill against one target and bioblaster against more than one, but you would still use them both in either, though one would have to wonder how that'd play in practice when we have 6 gadgets across 3 shared cooldowns and trying to work that in between heatblast spam.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

I kind of disagree on Heat Blast being "spam" mostly because when you Hypercharge, you aren't just hitting Heat Blast, you are alternating between 3 buttons very quickly since you are expected to weave Gauss/Ricochet between Heat Blasts. I disagree with it being "clunky" I think the flow of MCH is really smooth, with the only problem being the Barrel Stabilizer/Wildfire thing, but I do agree that Wildfire itself does need a looking over.

Honestly, when it comes to jobs, pretty much all of them have had their complexity toned down, MCH is no exception, I firmly believe that any problems MCH has now are the result of how terrible it was in SB, which took the fairly engaging and dynamic style of HW MCH and made it unreasonably strict and rigid, with baffling decisions such as using flamethrower on a single target to slip into overheat, which was by far the worst latency problem MCH has ever faced, they basically fucked it up when streamlining the jobs in SB, I genuinely don't believe it was playtested properly, practically no one enjoyed playing it, MCH players were laughably low at this time, even when they buffed it hard, no one wanted to put up with it, the devs had to apologize for the absolute state of it and had to promise a rework to unfuck it. I played quite a bit of SB MCH and I firmly believe it was a failure in terms of design and execution. Bear in mind, this is coming from someone who absolutely adored HW Machinist.

ShB MCH by comparison is much simpler, but it takes MCH in a solid direction thematically, you play more like a master of machinery, but there were problems, like Wildfire feeling inconsequential with the rest of the kit, with it being 120s for a hit that won't even be as much as the very common drill if it crits or direct hits and even when using it with your hypercharge window, nothing really changes, you just perform your hypercharge loop as normal.

I actually enjoy the gameplay loop of MCH due to its high APM, taking a job that has fewer buttons but you have periods where you move much faster and more often than before, I enjoy the speed, even with complaints of latency, an obvious quick fix for hypercharge is giving you 5 charges of Heat Blast while changing little about it, since I actually like the resets on gauss and ricochet, my only real complaint is that Heat Blast feels like a very "meh" skill, again, blame SB MCH for this. I get that 1-2-3 can be seen as boring, but honestly, its hardly any worse than mashing Burst Shot and praying for Refulgent procs. MCH has to keep an eye on cooldown timers closely to ensure no overlap, which I do enjoy, I do think there could be a few more actions in there, still hoping for Edgars Chainsaw.

I do miss some thematic elements of the job, like reload, rend mind/dismantle, old hypercharge, I really liked MCH's old identity as a debuffer, could give a vulm to the enemy with old hypercharge and lower incoming damage by debuffing the enemy with rend mind/dismantle, as opposed to protecting the party with a party buff, making a "selfish ranged dps" was never gonna work because of the ranged tax on dps.

I do echo the "choice GCD" though, I really dislike having a single-target/aoe equivalent, demonstrated greatly with Samurai with Senei, it shares the same cost/recast with Guren, literally nothing about your rotation changes in the slightest, you simply push Guren for aoe, Senei for single-target, I found it to be a very poor parlor trick by the devs to make you think you are getting more skills than you actually are (as well as removing skills and giving them back later like Divine Seal -> Temperance)

Sadly, the battery gauge being a glorified DoT is a trend in the current design philosophy, they nixed almost all meaningful interactivity with the pets for SMN/SCH and even DRK's Living Shadow is just a fancy looking DoT, its less a problem with the job itself and more how the devs are aiming to remove any and all interactivity with pets/turrets.

I don't want to write out any large essays on the subject, but on the whole, I think ShB MCH is still a very fun and fast paced job and the rework for the most part has proved popular, though really, saying its an improvement over SB MCH isn't saying much, the bar was so low to begin with, but I think MCH has a very solid foundation to work on going forward assuming they look at what works and what doesn't for the job, I don't feel it needs any sort of rework, more that it gets some kinks ironed out. It isn't like 5.0 NIN or SMN, where their rotations were flat out broken at times, MCH is ultimately working as intended, so its unlikely we will see any big changes before the next expansion.

[RocciaSolida]

I'd like some AoE tools for the queen or an additional AoE robot that you can summon in scenarios where multiple targets are on screen (of course this robot would deal less single target damage).
We had the bishop turret in SB and even just a reskin of that would be better than not having anything at all.
I'm also a fan of DoTs so a meaningful single target one would please me a lot, I'd be fine with Bioblaster not sharing CDs with Drill or it being an oGCD

[EtherRose]

Personally, MCH is decent as it is. The rotations are simple. Everything weaves together seamlessly. Everyone seems to be asking for more complexity. If i were to give my 2 cents on the job it would be as follow~

1. Wildfire - Don't see the problem behind this skill other than reducing it to 90 second cool down from 120. And it does have a purpose beyond Hypercharge for those saying there's no interactivity, etc. You are supposed to use it with the Automaton Queen AND Hypercharge. The Queen's Roller Dash and Arm Punch count as weaponskills. So with 5 Heated Blasts, 1 Heated Split Shot, 1 Roller Dash and 2-3 Arm Punches - you are looking at a potency of 1800-2000. That's some big damage. It would be a nice touch if this skill could crit though.

2. Flamethrower - This skill is boring. Instead of a flamethrower they should have made a flame turret that does the job while you can still use other AOE's.

3. BioBlaster - Remove shared cooldown with Drill. This way MCH have an actual DoT they can place on bosses without sacrificing damage from Drill.

4. Battery OverCharge Mechanic or Heat Transfer - There should be something along the lines of overcharging your battery to 120. This would increase the damage of your Queen and atk speed. Or if you can transfer the heat gauge to your Queen to increase damage and atk speed.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

You are supposed to use it with the Automaton Queen AND Hypercharge. The Queen's Roller Dash and Arm Punch count as weaponskills. So with 5 Heated Blasts, 1 Heated Split Shot, 1 Roller Dash and 2-3 Arm Punches - you are looking at a potency of 1800-2000. That's some big damage.

This is incorrect, it only works with weapon skills that come from the Machinist themselves, not the Queen, feel free to test it yourself, the Queen doesn't contribute to the Wildfire in any way, I did see a suggestion that it should be able to crit, or perhaps its like Reassemble so it always ends as a Direct/Crit, I can't really see them doing any meaningful rework to the skill other than that, it would be cool if the Queen did affect Wildfire, but alas, they really don't seem keen on making pets/turrets/robots anything more than fancy DoTs.

[EtherRose]

This is incorrect, it only works with weapon skills that come from the Machinist themselves, not the Queen, feel free to test it yourself, the Queen doesn't contribute to the Wildfire in any way, I did see a suggestion that it should be able to crit, or perhaps its like Reassemble so it always ends as a Direct/Crit, I can't really see them doing any meaningful rework to the skill other than that, it would be cool if the Queen did affect Wildfire, but alas, they really don't seem keen on making pets/turrets/robots anything more than fancy DoTs.

I stand corrected. Sorry about that. I completely forgot that i did run a test on this and it had no affect. Was a few months back and just started MCH again this week.