Man & Machine: a MCH Thread

[Jirah]

Some Backstory, I actually bought the game with the intent of maining MCH back in 4.0 as I fell inlove with the steampunk aesthetic complimenting Ishgard's more traditional environment nicely and have been a proud sister of the Machine..up until 5.3. MCH isnt a well designed job..where to begin..

Gauges

MCH has two, Heat and Battery. One used for turret summoning and the other for overheating. Both equally toothless. Lets start with battery to put it bluntly this gauge shouldn't exist its nothing more than a shackle to our turrets and doesnt compliment any other skill. we dont interact with it (besdies Overcharge which is only logically used when the mob is close to dying IE detonator/Tornado Kick) just yet another button to press. As for Heat. in 4.0 Heat increased your damage dealt,along side turret hypercharge debuff and MCH other tools like rapid fire, in order to deal the most damage possible under the wildfire window. Heat got demoted to a bland speed boost with a very redundant damage boost that only concerns two skills Heat Blast & Auto Crossbow as if your press any other weapon skill that can potentially aid wildfire in this window your speed decreases. MCH Gauges are disjointed at best and lackluster at worst contributing not to the job but to 1-2 skills which weren't really complex to begin with.

continue...

[Jirah]

Rotation
MCH has the most uninspired rotation in the game, DNC has flourish opportunities, BRD has dots and songs to worry about, SAM technically has 3, DRG and MNK has weakening and buff rotations, even tanks like WAR and GNB have more unique rotations not being DD. its saving grace is its abilities and its 2 not OGCDs. MCH flows so unnaturally as more often then not your 6 freebie skills are on empty as theirs no benefit to keeping them and the only optimal way to use them is to spam em, waste not style. To recharge them isn't so fluid either as its combined with the "optimal" wildfire button so awkwardly and is rather disjointed from the rest of the kit. As for Drill and Anchor, they are GCD skills so they feel like 20 sec/40sec extensions of the rotation but not apart of the rotation and unlike Anchor which gives you 20 Battery, Drill does nothing but halt your rotation every 20 seconds, and for reassemble to pair up with. When your not doing that, your pressing a button, either to summon Queen or its time to Wildfire! Latency issues has been done to death so it goes without saying. As you overheat and Wildfire you do the exact same thing you have been doing Recharging your G/R but make sure to press a 6th weaponskill and as your doing this waste your G/R inbetween blasts. No Guass and Rico dont contribute to wildfire..nor does your turret, and doing any other skill punishes you for some reason and heat blast is locked and acts as literal dead weight on the hotbar instead of transforming from a previous skill since we arent aloud to use anything else with overheat speed. MCH has many of these odd skill choices and its logic comes to question the more you think about it. A good Job flow like a river with every crease ascending the stream, while MCH plays like a 3 different ponds with no link to connect them yearning to be whole.

AOE
A underrated topic is a Jobs AOE capabilities. and as for MCH ...well its better than 4.0 but has the same "disjointed" issue. Ricochet is my personal favorite skill concept and all but doesnt work well as a AOE as MCH has no way of recharging it in a AOE situation unless you Heat Blast a target at least twice but even then it just ends up being clunky and not worth the effort. Flamethrower used to accumulate heat now its one of MCH forgotten skills outclassed by Spread shot+ Auto crossbow. I doubt it would break the game to allow flamethrower to gain 5 heat per tick (55 Heat) with its restricted mobility and every 60 seconds it should suffice for what its doing. Also why does Auto and Spread do the exact same damage? More importantly why is this skill gated behind overheat? When Skill bloat is a common issue youd think SE would replace it, but it wouldn't feel as great to overheat it? idk also Bioblaster is fine as is, its a dot thats its purpose even if its only tie to the rest of the job is sharing a recast timer with Drill.

[Valence]

AOE
A underrated topic is a Jobs AOE capabilities. and as for MCH ...well its better than 4.0 but has the same "disjointed" issue. Ricochet is my personal favorite skill concept and all but doesnt work well as a AOE as MCH has no way of recharging it in a AOE situation unless you Heat Blast a target at least twice but even then it just ends up being clunky and not worth the effort. Flamethrower used to accumulate heat now its one of MCH forgotten skills outclassed by Spread shot+ Auto crossbow. I doubt it would break the game to allow flamethrower to gain 5 heat per tick (55 Heat) with its restricted mobility and every 60 seconds it should suffice for what its doing. Also why does Auto and Spread do the exact same damage? More importantly why is this skill gated behind overheat? When Skill bloat is a common issue youd think SE would replace it, but it wouldn't feel as great to overheat it? idk also Bioblaster is fine as is, its a dot thats its purpose even if its only tie to the rest of the job is sharing a recast timer with Drill.

While I want to state that I fully agree that ShB MCH is a disgrace of a braindead and bland job that removed all the cool things we had (ammo, procs, piano wildfire every minute, very high burst phases followed by lulls, etc) and also agree with what you have said in the OP, and how at the opposite of this I loved the job epitome of concept (Stormblood MCH, even with the metric ton of QoL problems it had), I still want to point out that SB MCH AoE was actually a very interesting thing that nobody seemed to quite know how to play properly. It basically worked similarly to single target except you overheated manually then proceeded to do a rapid fire "dump everything" under overheat, followed by snapshotting flamethrower at the very end of overheat for that sweet damage buff that covered all of the barrel lockout phase. The damage you got out of this was actually pretty high and I miss it too.

[Jirah]

While I want to state that I fully agree that ShB MCH is a disgrace of a braindead and bland job that removed all the cool things we had (ammo, procs, piano wildfire every minute, very high burst phases followed by lulls, etc) and also agree with what you have said in the OP, and how at the opposite of this I loved the job epitome of concept (Stormblood MCH, even with the metric ton of QoL problems it had), I still want to point out that SB MCH AoE was actually a very interesting thing that nobody seemed to quite know how to play properly. It basically worked similarly to single target except you overheated manually then proceeded to do a rapid fire "dump everything" under overheat, followed by snapshotting flamethrower at the very end of overheat for that sweet damage buff that covered all of the barrel lockout phase. The damage you got out of this was actually pretty high and I miss it too.

Bishop-> Hypercharge-> Pray the tank stays in the bishops line of fire->Hot Shot --> Reload-->Flamethrower->Rapid fire--> Reassemble-> Spread Shot/Ricochet-> if the mobs are still alive overdrive

compared to 5.0 the dps was alot of prep work but that first line of mobs completely melts with good aoes. After that its just spread spam and a occasional Ricochet and deploying Bishop next to the tank.

5.0 has no wild factor but is more consistent even if its most likely the most boring job to aoe even after its new tools which are a dot, ricochet charges that do not blend well what so ever with anything since heat blast is a single target action, auto cross to work with heat and spread shot. ...i see your point i guess its debatable as 4.0 slows to a crawl but 5.0 never really hits any highs

[Valence]

Bishop-> Hypercharge-> Pray the tank stays in the bishops line of fire->Hot Shot --> Reload-->Flamethrower->Rapid fire--> Reassemble-> Spread Shot/Ricochet-> if the mobs are still alive overdrive

That's the thing... Everyone was so focused on overheating with FT for AoE in SB that they passed right by the more potent FT snapshot at the end of overheat. I had no small end of debates with people on the balance in that specific case scenario (aka dungeons especially). Overheating manually was way superior for the simple reason that it allowed you to keep FT as an actual potent damage tool (over 200 potency per GCD once overheated back then) instead of an overheat trigger like on single targets. The first pack was annoying since you had to build heat from 50, but past that point you often ended with 80-95 heat after every other pack which allowed an instant manual overheat (build up the remaining heat while the tank pulls if necessary).

Anyway, the most ironic thing ever is that while FT almost doubled in potency in ShB, it remains barely, slightly better than your standard AoE rotation and conflicts with everything you have. In SB, while FT was pretty low potency it was still insanely good once overheated in AoE, and in FT, while it was clunky as fuck, it was still mandatory as an overheating trigger.

Now though, it's just... there. Good skill to spamm in Limsa to impress sprouts I guess.

[Jirah]

That's the thing... Everyone was so focused on overheating with FT for AoE in SB that they passed right by the more potent FT snapshot at the end of overheat. I had no small end of debates with people on the balance in that specific case scenario (aka dungeons especially). Overheating manually was way superior for the simple reason that it allowed you to keep FT as an actual potent damage tool (over 200 potency per GCD once overheated back then) instead of an overheat trigger like on single targets.

Anyway, the most ironic thing ever is that while FT almost doubled in potency in ShB, it remains barely, slightly better than your standard AoE rotation and conflicts with everything you have. In SB, while FT was pretty low potency it was still insanely good once overheated in AoE, and in FT, while it was clunky as fuck, it was still mandatory as an overheating trigger.

Now though, it's just... there. Good skill to spamm in Limsa to impress sprouts I guess.

I usually rapid fired as soon as i started to overheat combined with invul Motar did well enough. But I agree on that point that a skill used to immediately overheat was a blatant given, even the PVP skill "Stun Gun" did this to much praise and was odd MCH never got a skill like this until the following expansion

I wouldve loved to see them fix 4.0 as it has alot of skill fat and QoL adjustments away from being great instead of just quit and delete 40% of the job. Like remove rapid fire and combine it with overheat, have Hot shot, Blank, Cooldown, and Clean shot not absorb Ammo, add a new skill to trigger overheat rather than relying on flamthrower, remove Gauss barrel and just have it as a permanent skill gauge. Remove Heartbreak and blank, par for the course. with the tp skills removal and role actions removal This alone would've gave them plenty of elbow room to spice up MCH having only 19 plus its role skills being Peloton, Arms length and second wind being 22 skills left out of the 32 slots while 5.0 has the same amount suspiciously but the skills added were toothless like Tactician drill and Bioblaster and downgraded or increased CD to some like Wildfire or hypercharge or "Heat Blast". Id love to talk about the potential of a actual revision of 4.0 but everyone seems either doesnt care or moved on

[Jirah]

Highlighted Issues

Heat and Battery redundancy- Can very easily be replaced with a shallow speed skill IE Rapid fire which was removed in 4.0, Battery as a resource for 1 skill that used to be limitless is a waste of a gauge.

Clunky/Disjointed Skill design- Heat blast has no reason to exist but to trivialize the job. Aoe is poorly designed with some confusing implications like Flamethrower and Ricochet. Drill doesnt flow as well as G/R within the rotation, recharging G/R is awkward and doesnt mesh well being tied to heat blast strict 5 button spam and Wildfire being long and inconsequential

Overzealous Skill distribution: Having 6 OGCDs and 2 GCDs skills right off the bat is a mess in job design and lacks proper job structure, having the heated rotation skills split up between 54-64 is very odd

Loose Turret Contribution- Lack of control or substance to the rest of the kit

lastly latency- been recorded serveal times MCH is not a freindly job to play with bad ping and gets irritating from unplayable real quick


any comments id be happy to hear em as i tried to post my thoughts several times but get too flustered, and if u like 5.0 MCH good for you!

[Cetek14]

I believe 5.0 MCH looks like a few duct taped parts. It feels really lazy, but we already know that devs hate Machinist. MCH deserves final rework to make it work fine, but the biggest issue for me are awful animations. All well made animations with loud gunshots were removed. Gunner is 4th most demanded job according to Official Forum job poll (https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...highlight=poll), and i'm not surprised. MCH was half a gunner in SB, and in ShB its not a gunner at all. And its definitely not Ishgardian Machinist it was supposed to be. Show me one NPC Machinist which is master of acrobatic arts. I will wait.

[CKNovel]

Note: I’m truly sorry about that pâté I am about to serve.

When they reworked Machinist, I always imagine that Yoshi-P asked two job designers to do it.
One would have to design the heat gauge part, the other the battery gauge part. And they both ended up doing something simple. Too simple in fact.
The designed difficulty of Machinist resides in the number of buttons you press per minute, but let's be real, there is no difficulty pressing the same 3 buttons in a 9s window.
The job suffers a massive lack of complexity and bland rotation. As bland as a frozen steak.

Flamethrower
The most blatant issue. Imagine giving a can opener to someone in the kitchen, then a month after the team decide to not use canned food anymore.

Flamethrower is the perfect representation of the MCH rework. It's a lazy redesign, half-baked, it has the same problem as before, it's boring to use. I don't see Flamethrower giving any heat, it would simply complexify DPS optimization. For exemple, the boss is not targetable anymore, you wait exactly -10s before it's targetable again to use Flamethrower. If you manage to do it, you have 50 heat and a tick of 100 damage. The correct solution would be to give 20 heat on cast and cast alone.

The solutions is to either get rid of this artifact from SB MCH that serves more as an emote than anything else, or to completely rework it. I've already shared my dream of Flamethrower being a stance using the Aetherotransformer as an actual Flamethrower for let's say 10 seconds, replacing your GCDs. It could be an interesting way to spend heat, making it a Gauge cost + Cooldown like DRK's Living Shadow.


The Aetherotransformer
That thing is welcomed. It's the best thing out of the Machinist rework.
I love Drill, it's a strong cooldown on a 20s "GCD-CD", you have the rules and planification that comes with it.
"Drill is available in 15s, what can I do before it it available?"
It also pairs up with Air Anchor. You have that very fast process of thinking about how using your resources in that short window, I wish there would be more of it.

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.

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[CKNovel]

Battery gauge
That's a glorified dot.
Is it above 50 battery? Is the ennemy targetable for 10 seconds? Use it. That's not even the most barebone process of thinking accross the Machinist kit.
You can add "Are the Raidwide buffs coming soon?" into the process but that's it. The Queen Wind-up was thought to be a problem but it barely happens.

The Queen needs more interaction, but like Phoenix, not like Bahamut or the other summons unless they completely rework pet behavior.

Reassemble is a great tool. It reduces the dice roll on Drill but is also a great mark to know how far you are from the raidwide buffs. It lines extremely well with Trick Attack, both being 60s cooldown, Reassemble is a good cooldown that has multiple application beyond damage. Without it, you could count every 3 Drill or half wildfire.

Wildfire
Wildfire... Is in my opinion the worst of all usable/viable 60s+ cooldowns in the game.
Here's the complete thought process:
1) Is it available?
2) Do you have 50 heat?
3) Use it, then use Hypercharge.

That's it, you can't make it even less complex. The best way to describe it is an empowered Hypercharge every 120 seconds.
Or a 1200 potency cooldown with a 10 seconds delay.
Not only it doesn't has any AoE potential like the community kept asking, but being reduced to a "powerfull Hypercharge" just stripped anything that was cool about Wildfire (The setup, the execution, the result).

Solution? Get rid of it or completely rework it. I feel that the theme of a "ticking bomb" only hurts Wildfire.

Traits
Look at them.
Increase damages, increase damages, replace 1 GCD with a more powerfull version, replace 1 GCD with a more powerfull version, replace 1 GCD with a more powerfull version, grant 1 additionnal charges on GR/Ricochet, replace 1 GCD with a more powerfull version, increases damages, replace 1 Cooldown with a more powerfull version.

None of the actual traits adds depth to the MCH gameplay. GR/Ricochet should have 3 charges at the beginning, you easily bleed a charge at only 2 stacks.
Goes the same for wildfire, there's no need of gutting its damages just to add a trait "MoRe DAmAgeS" later.

Most if not nearly all traits needs to get the hell out. Again, it's the lazy, half baked part of the rework so we could still have the flips.

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