ShB Machinist personal retrospective after 4 months

[Valence]

I'll not bother talking about damage balance as it is being discussed in many other threads already. Ranged physical damage is a problem.

No, I want instead to share my feedback on how I see the job in Shadowbringers after theorycrafting for it a bit on the balance and after 4 months playing it at high level in savage. I want to also point out that I played it at high latency in Stormblood for 2 years, as well as one year during Heavensward.

1. Latency

First, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: MCH is still the highest latency punishing job, and has been since Stormblood. It has gotten even worse in Shadowbringers: removing the flamethrower overheat very tight trick didn't improve anything since the real culprit, Rapid Fire, was turned into Heat Blasts and is used 6 times more every minute.

Added to that, when hypercharge ends, it disables the use of heat blast, making it a hard cap for players clipping heavily due to lag. This creates a huge amount of stress for players with bad internet or that just are infortunate enough to live away from the game servers. Missing the last Heat Blast because of latency feels horrible, since the skill just deactivates and nothing happens, leaving you dead in the water with nothing that went up.

On top of this, you have wildfire every 2 minutes. Wildfire is tighter than hypercharge/heat blasts by essence and proves very finicky near the very end of its duration, which hasn't changed since Heavensward. And as if it wasn't enough, we can't end Wildfire on tools like Drill or Anchor because those seem to have a delay in registration, which can cause them often not to be compiled into WF.

I've been for years on the MCH balance section and see countless players showing up with latency issues, trying to find how to reduce the amount of stress they face when dealing with a mechanic that constitutes more than 25% of our uptime during any fight. And unlike Stormblood MCH, there is a clear limit where the job just stops being playable, and it's when you can't weave any charge anymore during hypercharges. You start overcapping badly on gauss round and ricochet, and 6 weaponskills under wildfire just turn into a pipe dream.

Then you have the simple double weaves. If you can't double weave without clipping, then you're in for a treat, since MCH gained around 5 more APM in ShB (highest or one of the highest APM job right now) and requires a huge amount of double weaves.

Overall, I can safely say that the job becomes stressful and infuriating as soon as over 50ms of latency (overall), and when you reach 150ms you're getting very close to the point of no return when you are trying to play it seriously. Compared to ShB MCH, SB MCH was a cakewalk with strong, viable, even if less optimal, high ping solutions.

[Valence]

2. Job design: one trick poney

The pros: hypercharge and heat management, as much as heat blasts are crippling for latency internet, is definitely an interesting mechanic and I believe that most players find it fun. It was also on the theorycraft side of things, a really challenging and complicated thing to optimize properly in order to find good rotations, especially when it came not to waste any heat with barrel stabilizer.

Overall, hypercharge feels nice to activate because you're free to do it as long as you have the required heat, you can delay it or move it around, while still respecting some rules like not delaying Drills or Anchors.

Heat Blast spamm though, I think the class design could do less brainless than this, but overall, the MCH new hypercharge is a nice new mechanic.

However, that's about it. Machinist in 5.0 only has one fun mechanic and that's basically it. The rest is composed of high potency dumb moves that are just on a certain cooldown that you press and forget when they get up again (Drill/Bioblaster and Anchor).

Moreover, the heated shots were turned into a bland generic combo that has no depth to it either and fits rather weirdly into the rotation, just used a filler of sorts that you just take care not to brake with hypercharges and tools in between.

Ammo was removed and it was the only thing that kept machinist as a job seeing a small amount of variation during fights. Now, you'll just perform the exact same thing over and over. If this is meant to be played like some melee straightfoward rotations, then I feel that this is not the kind of design i'm after. I liked MCH as a job where a small amount of variation was a big part of it. I miss my procs and I miss my ammo dearly. They really made the job less boring to play.

Wildfire is now an afterthought and we also have a ridiculously low amount of abilities and weaponskills compared to other jobs. We barely fill up 2 hotbars. The job feels very simplistic and basic if not for hypercharges. The difference between a skilled player and a low skilled player is ridiculously low, even if of course, it's there. As long as you press your high damaging cooldowns without any thought behind it, you're already doing okay...

Overall, my general feeling is that MCH now feels like a one trick poney, doing hypercharges over and over, because there is just nothing else to do besides.

[Valence]

3. Job Design: Flamethrower

What's the big deal with flamethrower again? It feels like nobody knows what to do with that skill. The irony is that in Stormblood, while the flamethrower trick to overheat was highly debatable, it was mandatory for the single target rotation. As for AoE, Flamethrower, while still doing way less potency (60/s) than in ShB (100/s), was dealing more damage than the old spreadshot, and was actually very powerful used as a snapshot at the very end of overheat (that also covered the barrel downtime).

Now in Shadowbringers, we have Autocrossbow, which is way more potent than flamethrower. Flamehtrower doesn't generate heat so it directly conflicts with autocrossbow that requires it for hypercharge. It means that mathematically, using a flamethrower rotation or an autocrossbow rotations brings about a similar amount of damage. It makes flamethrower completely useless and only used as a meme before a boss comes back from downtime to try and squeeze in that one tick before you resume your rotation...

Or I guess you can just use it when you want to rest your fingers and go afk for 10s...

Why is that skill not any better? You could buff it up to 120 potency (in order not to become better than the base heated combo) and make it useful, even if bland. Or you could add extra and unique effects to it to make it worthwhile AND fun.

4. Job Design: party utility

Machinist used to be a strong party support. I agree that nobody expects it to be a party support like bard or dancer. However I feel that it lost a huge part of its identity by being turned into a (very bad) selfish personal damage dealer like Black Mage and Samurai.

Where are our tools and mechanical gimmicks to support the party? Where has gone dismantle and our wrenches? It certainly doesn't help the job to feel wholesome and complete, and only contributes in making it feels extremely basic.

5. Queen is clunky and bugged

Queen is unable to switch targets unless the one she attacks is dead, which causes issues in Hades ex with adds, or Titan savage during goals, or Titania ex. Basically, any fight with adds can become a stressful problem to deal with

Queen still doesn't benefit from dragonsight (like the old turrets and pets in Stormblood). Any reason for that?

Queen is bugged when facing arena and terrain deformation like in Titan savage: she can miss shots or even pile bunkers under bad combinations of situations, like being on the to platforms and trying to dash down, or when the player is punted up in the air, or when she just can't reach the target she's trying to attack.

[zonol]

Omg yes this is so true. I hope square enix sees this post

[Kabooa]

Feels like Flamethrower should be the aoe version of Hot Shot/Air Anchor

Or at least an AoE use of Battery Gauage or something.

[Ayanumi]

I'll not bother talking about damage balance as it is being discussed in many other threads already. Ranged physical damage is a problem.

No, I want instead to share my feedback on how I see the job in Shadowbringers after theorycrafting for it a bit on the balance and after 4 months playing it at high level in savage. I want to also point out that I played it at high latency in Stormblood for 2 years, as well as one year during Heavensward.

1. Latency

First, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: MCH is still the highest latency punishing job, and has been since Stormblood. It has gotten even worse in Shadowbringers: removing the flamethrower overheat very tight trick didn't improve anything since the real culprit, Rapid Fire, was turned into Heat Blasts and is used 6 times more every minute.

Added to that, when hypercharge ends, it disables the use of heat blast, making it a hard cap for players clipping heavily due to lag. This creates a huge amount of stress for players with bad internet or that just are infortunate enough to live away from the game servers. Missing the last Heat Blast because of latency feels horrible, since the skill just deactivates and nothing happens, leaving you dead in the water with nothing that went up.

On top of this, you have wildfire every 2 minutes. Wildfire is tighter than hypercharge/heat blasts by essence and proves very finicky near the very end of its duration, which hasn't changed since Heavensward. And as if it wasn't enough, we can't end Wildfire on tools like Drill or Anchor because those seem to have a delay in registration, which can cause them often not to be compiled into WF.

I've been for years on the MCH balance section and see countless players showing up with latency issues, trying to find how to reduce the amount of stress they face when dealing with a mechanic that constitutes more than 25% of our uptime during any fight. And unlike Stormblood MCH, there is a clear limit where the job just stops being playable, and it's when you can't weave any charge anymore during hypercharges. You start overcapping badly on gauss round and ricochet, and 6 weaponskills under wildfire just turn into a pipe dream.

Then you have the simple double weaves. If you can't double weave without clipping, then you're in for a treat, since MCH gained around 5 more APM in ShB (highest or one of the highest APM job right now) and requires a huge amount of double weaves.

Overall, I can safely say that the job becomes stressful and infuriating as soon as over 50ms of latency (overall), and when you reach 150ms you're getting very close to the point of no return when you are trying to play it seriously. Compared to ShB MCH, SB MCH was a cakewalk with strong, viable, even if less optimal, high ping solutions.

New expac, same old issues, rework did nothing to fix the jobs problems, just changed the kit to something unrecognizable.

[Jonnycbad]

I don't understand why Flamethrower can't be changed to a simple conal AoE DoT like Circle of Scorn/Bow Shock.

[Vulcann]

three things i would love to see for Machinist

1) a buff of some sort to the flame thrower ... it should be a powerful DPS tool since it has a long cooldown, we have to channel it and we have to stand still or it cancels. with all those limitations it should be one of the hardest hitting skills in the game if we get the full duration of it. Or add something to it to promote us to use it, maybe have it debuff enemies hit by flamethrower and for the duration of the channel.

2) i would love to see the permanent turret return. probably the minority but that was one of the things that drew me to the machinist class.

3) utility of some sort ... i am personally fine doing less DPS but as long as my class brings something else to the table. Bard and dancer are buffers make machinists debuffers.

[Ayanumi]

three things i would love to see for Machinist

1) a buff of some sort to the flame thrower ... it should be a powerful DPS tool since it has a long cooldown, we have to channel it and we have to stand still or it cancels. with all those limitations it should be one of the hardest hitting skills in the game if we get the full duration of it. Or add something to it to promote us to use it, maybe have it debuff enemies hit by flamethrower and for the duration of the channel.

2) i would love to see the permanent turret return. probably the minority but that was one of the things that drew me to the machinist class.

3) utility of some sort ... i am personally fine doing less DPS but as long as my class brings something else to the table. Bard and dancer are buffers make machinists debuffers.

Personally was a big fan of the turrets too when coming to the class, reality is if you were one of the people who picked up MCH in HW there is almost nothing about the job thats survived into ShB from its core kit that may have first appealed to you. Ammo is gone, turrets are gone, rng is gone. Truely a totally different class from what was first offered. The job wasnt even unpopular in HW when it was released so I dont think the fundemental idea that they had for MCH was disliked, but clearly the jobs been redesigned with the people who didnt even play the job in the first place being the intended demographic.

[Kaiserdrache]

Things id like to see

1) return the two permanent turrets, let us combine them with the Queen Mech together with their overcharge skills

2) Change Tactician to either a different buff effect or into a aoe debuff that weakens enemy offense by 10%

3) Remove Heat and make Energy the sole mechanic to activate machina skills

4) merge the basic combo to a 1 button combo skill to safe two skill slots for better more useful skills

5 ) remove Role Skills from the game snd merge their effects into normal Job Skills, fill created skills up with new skills and those current pvp only skills to become useable in pve too

6) remove gaussShot and raise the charges of ricochet from 3 to 6 and remove the damage reduction of it to multiple targets or lower the reduction by half

7) turn Bioblaster and Drill into skills with oen seperate cooldowns, not a shared one, increase therefore cooldown of snchor and make snchor hit harder then the other two, therefore do bio n drill increase now energy by 10, snchor hets energy increase removed