Machinist is in a rather unfortunate spot all around if you ask me. Not only did it lose the deep and soulful design it originally had, the flavour that was stapled onto it in its Stormblood revamp isn't even coherent anymore.

That's why you have things like a barrel stabilizer that doesn't even stabilize your gauge at 50 like its name implies - it's a just a generic gain resource cooldown. Heat and Battery resources that don't interact with each other, and are often awkwardly tied to skills that have nothing to do with heat or electricity. You have a robot that looks like it came from Overwatch instead of the consistent design the old turrets had. It's the epitome of the post-Heavensward job revamp model - gameplay depth stripped out in favour of pure spectacle, all form and no function.

Quote Originally Posted by Atmaweapon510 View Post
If Machinist has to build robots, then they should be drones that fire when they do like teeny ships in shoot-em-up games.



Fun fact, the old gauss barrel was almost assuredly a reference to the attachments your ships could get in shmups like R-Type. People hated it for how difficult it was to glam around, but I for one appreciated the thoughtful reference. Just another thing machinist has lost from then.