Man & Machine: a MCH Thread

[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

[Valence]

Ah don't get me started on how ShB made everything selfish and removed all kind of support skills we had in role actions... Losing all the MP and TP regen among other things completely moved rPhys jobs out of their niche and now it just seems that nobody is quite sure what their new role should be besides... a subpar DPS since it has nothing else to fend for itself.

Also, having CD and Clean consuming ammo wasn't necessarily a bad thing since it was necessary for it to happen during WF to get the most potency out of it.