Machinist needs help.

[ReiganCross]

I got a couple of questions and let me know if that's too crazy.

What would happen if Hypercharge got one additional second to it?
I don't think you could execute an extra Heat Blast on it given 9 seconds, in theory you can but using Hypercharge by itself would already use some animation lock that would make the 6th Heat Blast impossible. But on the other hand, I'd be able to land my 5th Heat Blast more reliably without it being a window this tight?

Why aren't Tactician/Shield Samba/Troubador just role actions?
I mean, at this point they essentially already are. They do exactly the same thing under different names. If you make it all the same action, you wouldn't have to say anything about them stacking or not. People don't complain about Repriesal not stacking... Is it because that would mean it reaches lower level content? Can't play Sastasha with Bard giving 10% temp mitigation?

Does Wildfire really have to do this little damage?
I mean, the numbers for Wildfire are actually good. Technically fully executing a Wildfire allows you to go for a 1200 potency attack. But it can't crit. Neither can it even land a DH. Yay. So your average Drill shot or Air Anchor will just out-damage the one skill you're going bazookas for. A 20s Cooldown that you can just freely throw out is outdamaging a 120s Cooldown that you have to press keys as tight as mechanically possible. And I dunno, that feels kind of depressing that I'm putting so much work on a skill that I'll probably deal more damage when I finish the Hypercharge and just press Drill again, especially with Reassemble.

Can I get some party utility?
Clearly Ranged DPS aren't made to do enough personal DPS to even reach close to any Melee DPS. And some of those also come with party-wide crits or raid-wide damage increases. If we're not gonna be able to reach those guys, if I'm not gonna be able to be, like, right under Black Mage and Samurai, trying to reach those huge damage numbers... Why bother? Could I at least join the guys under them, like Monk and Ninja, and get some party utility?

[Endariel]

I'm fairly certain with one more second we would be able to squeeze in 6th HB.
It's already this close, like 0.5 seconds off.

But it will make people more mad because "i can't fit 6HB with my ping, increase the duration" and the cycle will repeat itself

[Rymi64]

Really they just need to add the PB charge system to Heat blast and it'd be fine. Which will probably be done in EW with every other job that has something like that. (Like war prob)

[CKNovel]

Hypercharge: I think you should be able to land a 6th one with 10 seconds. 6*1.5 = 9, you have a whole extra second for mistakes.
They need to add a PB/Bunshin charges system with a bit more generous set duration to fix and not break the MCH.

Tactician/Troubadour/Samba: Back in Stormblood, MCH and BRD used to have 2 different mitigations. BRD had a longer one on a longer CD (with extra complexity), MCH a shorter one on a shorter CD. They removed many support tools from ranged and SQEX probably thought that it would be too visible if they made the mitigations a role action. On top of that, Tactician is a recycled animation, Tactician was a TP regen used by both MCH and BRD when TP was still a thing. It's designed like a role action but somehow it's not a role action. In short, yes it should be a role action.

Wildfire: Wildfire has a bad history of being massively RNG dependant. Before, every damage you did for 10 seconds was accumulated and a percentage of the total damage was reinflicted. But due to crits, it had unreliable damage and was the core of MCH DPS, you could have a 10/20k discrepancy. It was a request for MCH DPS to not be massively dependent on Wildfire, they delivered a bit too much.
I see that you are lv72, at lv78 Wildfire will have stronger potency but it will remain your weakest DPS tool in many content. And weak by far, it won't do half the DPS Air Anchor offers. A handful of players asked for Wildfire buff, cooldown reduced at 60s for example, but SQEX didn't touched ranged since the measly ranged buff.

On top of that, it became boring. Simply put, it's a button to reinforce your next hypercharge.

Utility: But you have utility! Remember that, if your party has at least one ranged, everyone gets... A 1% buff to all their primary stats! (This applies to all roles, Tank, Healer, Ranged, Caster, Melee)
Yes, it's crap, it basically forces every 8 man comps to have a ranged on the team for the purpose of min-maxing, so all roles are played. Ranged dps is fine, it won't die if it doesn't gets a buff. But it deserves a buff or more utility.
This forum has been full of complaint about those point since ShB release but all we got from SQEX is that they didn't knew what to do about BRD and that they are satisfied with balance.

Many others were against any buffs thinking everyone would play 2 ranged because of mobility but that was easily dismissed through actual past scenarios.
Mobility, SMN has a ridiculous mobility right now, RDM has always been mobile and BLM being a turret is a false idea.
Jobs are also mostly played based on how enjoyable they are, not how they perform and we have data from HW where the "meta" was MCH/BRD/DRG/NIN, BLM and SMN were quite fairly played.

[ItMe]

Utility: But you have utility! Remember that, if your party has at least one ranged, everyone gets... A 1% buff to all their primary stats! (This applies to all roles, Tank, Healer, Ranged, Caster, Melee)
Yes, it's crap, it basically forces every 8 man comps to have a ranged on the team for the purpose of min-maxing, so all roles are played.

A 1% buff doesn't "force" anyone to bring anything, not even in Ultimate.
Next someone'll tell me that raiders also match their race to their prog class.

Heck, I think it's actually closer to a 3% buff, but it still doesn't force anyone because the stats that bringing a ranged DPS buffs are relevant almost entirely to ranged DPS.

[Rymi64]

Many others were against any buffs thinking everyone would play 2 ranged because of mobility but that was easily dismissed through actual past scenarios.
Mobility, SMN has a ridiculous mobility right now, RDM has always been mobile and BLM being a turret is a false idea.
Jobs are also mostly played based on how enjoyable they are, not how they perform and we have data from HW where the "meta" was MCH/BRD/DRG/NIN, BLM and SMN were quite fairly played.

So you agree they should at least give mch and brd some form of cast times again? Common thread between all three of the casters is that they have cast bars at some point of their rotations. Smn (if played correct) is half its rotation Rdm every other spell and blm for majority of its rotation. And it might not be as much of a turret as before still takes learning the job to effectively use its mobility well while still outputting good numbers. I dont even think giving Mch and Brd cast times would change the meta again since no more piercing debuff.

[Sqwall]

Wildfire is incredibly disjointed with lining up with Hypercharge, reassemble, drill, etc, etc. Even with Barrel Stabilizer being on the same 120s cooldown it doesn't make up for the fact that it does lack luster damage. The MOST I have ever seen on my wildfire is around 105k, and have yet to even come close to 100k since.

Wildfire just doesn't compliment the job at all imo. Sure it's cool to use and that is technically a mch "real" burst window. But the fact that I can't use it for AOE, or every trash pack is boring. Make it wildfire actually EXPLODE!!!!!!!! Toss it on a mob, do my dps thing, let it blow up in a trash pack. The remaining mobs get a DOT applied from my wildfire exploding.

These things need to happen to wildfire:
1. Make it wildfire actually EXPLODE!!!!!!!! Toss it on a mob, do my dps thing, let it blow up in a trash pack.
2. A shorter cooldown that would line up better with reassemble, drill, air anchor. Wildfire would be much more predictable if I could use it for every other hypercharge and finish with a drill or air anchor for increased potency. (been playing around with numbers on this and it seems reassembled drill adds quite a bit of potency over
3. The explosion counter doesn't start until a weapon skill is used. Then the potencies from those skills are then added. Auto attack doesn't apply. (For me this would give more flexibility when applying wildfire when delaying my GCD to match up with Heat Blast)
4. Automatically detonates when the mob dies.
5. Flamethrower buffs Wildfire upon use, and applies a DOT of 30 potency applied to all enemies caught in the blast.

[ReiganCross]

I'm fairly certain with one more second we would be able to squeeze in 6th HB.
It's already this close, like 0.5 seconds off.

But it will make people more mad because "i can't fit 6HB with my ping, increase the duration" and the cycle will repeat itself

Hypercharge: I think you should be able to land a 6th one with 10 seconds. 6*1.5 = 9, you have a whole extra second for mistakes.
They need to add a PB/Bunshin charges system with a bit more generous set duration to fix and not break the MCH.

Yeah, I'm not asking for a 10 seconds Hypercharge, I'm asking for a 9 seconds... Current one is 8. It would literally be impossible to throw 6 charges of anything given you'd need EXACTLY the 9 seconds to throw 6 charges and activating Hypercharge already locks you into an input by itself. Although yeah, I like the idea of giving it charges way more than just giving the window an extra second.

Worst it could happen would be that you'd feel bad that you can't throw 6 HBs because of a quirk of the game's design. And I dunno, I feel like that's not that bad as allowing more people to be able to throw 5 weaved HBs. At the very least it wouldn't change the damage output of the MCH at all (If anything it would likely worsen given you're allowing for more clipping in your rotation.)

[ReiganCross]

Wildfire is incredibly disjointed with lining up with Hypercharge, reassemble, drill, etc, etc. Even with Barrel Stabilizer being on the same 120s cooldown it doesn't make up for the fact that it does lack luster damage. The MOST I have ever seen on my wildfire is around 105k, and have yet to even come close to 100k since.

Wildfire just doesn't compliment the job at all imo. Sure it's cool to use and that is technically a mch "real" burst window. But the fact that I can't use it for AOE, or every trash pack is boring. Make it wildfire actually EXPLODE!!!!!!!! Toss it on a mob, do my dps thing, let it blow up in a trash pack. The remaining mobs get a DOT applied from my wildfire exploding.

I'm all about more flash to Wildfire, but I don't feel like that would solve the issue. Auto-attack already doesn't apply beyond giving Wildfire a base damage. (Throw a Wildfire without a single Weaponskill and it will output exactly an auto-attack worth of damage.) It would still be weaker than just a regular Drill because it doesn't Crit or DHs at all.

Wildfire: Wildfire has a bad history of being massively RNG dependant. Before, every damage you did for 10 seconds was accumulated and a percentage of the total damage was reinflicted. But due to crits, it had unreliable damage and was the core of MCH DPS, you could have a 10/20k discrepancy. It was a request for MCH DPS to not be massively dependent on Wildfire, they delivered a bit too much.
I see that you are lv72, at lv78 Wildfire will have stronger potency but it will remain your weakest DPS tool in many content. And weak by far, it won't do half the DPS Air Anchor offers. A handful of players asked for Wildfire buff, cooldown reduced at 60s for example, but SQEX didn't touched ranged since the measly ranged buff.

On top of that, it became boring. Simply put, it's a button to reinforce your next hypercharge.

And that's the issue of it becoming boring. 100k on Wildfire is just a single Midare, and SAM get to throw those out there twice. Hell, SAM gets to crit a 1200 potency hit every minute, NIN every half, MCH has to wait 2 to spam a skill as much as possible to be able to REACH 1200 potency that then is blocked from doing Crits or Directs. And when it comes out it feels like it just fizzled. The skills you used to power up Wildfire, which are just a bunch of 220 and 150 potency hits, deal way more damage than the big boom. I barely feel like a Wildfired Hypercharge is stronger than a regular Hypercharge.
(Also, I'm level 80, it's just the site being weird and not updating. For some reason it also is showing the entire thing in French. FF14 is weird.)

[ReiganCross]

Utility: But you have utility! Remember that, if your party has at least one ranged, everyone gets... A 1% buff to all their primary stats! (This applies to all roles, Tank, Healer, Ranged, Caster, Melee)
Yes, it's crap, it basically forces every 8 man comps to have a ranged on the team for the purpose of min-maxing, so all roles are played. Ranged dps is fine, it won't die if it doesn't gets a buff. But it deserves a buff or more utility.
This forum has been full of complaint about those point since ShB release but all we got from SQEX is that they didn't knew what to do about BRD and that they are satisfied with balance.

I was talking more about how Dancer gets to choose someone to buff for the entire fight while also having buff windows for the whole raid. Or how Bard existing in your party means you're slightly stronger according to his music. MCH is a selfish DPS, like SAM and BLM, he doesn't help anyone aside from tossing his Tactician role actions and other ranged DPS role actions, he should deal damage like a selfish DPS OR buff the people around him like he's not. He's already stronger in personal damage than BRD and DNC, I'll give you that, but that's not where his bar should be.

So if he's not going to be a high-class personal damage machine, why not allow him some for of party or raid utility? Maybe increase everyone's damage while the Queen is out. Maybe allow him to put party-wide shields on the regular and work as an off-healer. Have him be able to constantly debuff the boss with an assortment of damage-down tricks so he works as a healer's best friend and boss softener. I don't know, something to match BRD and DNC's identity of being useful to the party aside from just dealing damage to the big bad. The class's whole deal is dealing a lot of damage and it's doing that while being assigned on the position of "Easiest, therefore weaker." So at least allow him to be more than that!