Machinist needs help.

[Jirah]

Heat blast spam needs to be removed the only job where it feels nice to spam is Fell Cleave, no Ranged should have a spam mechanic crappy ogcd weaving not withstanding. And the ping issue goes without saying, it was bad in 4.0 it’s worse in 5.0 and I doubt a skill like Bunchin or Perfect balance would make this fun, which is the ultimate goal for all jobs.

Frankly MCH is no longer support so it shouldn’t get a Shield Samba and they should focus on diversifying it from Troubadour. This is a DNC and BRD thing not a MCH thing.

Numbers are moot, wildfire biggest issue is its fragmented appeal. In 4.0 it was the center of your damage and all skills complemented it now it’s just a dud. It must be reworked to be apart of the kit again instead the the bland 5 button mash.

MCH main identity, I think. Is a more dps focused Ranged job so it shouldn’t be able to need utility. The thing with MCH among other things is it has a identity crisis worse than any job in the game. Is it support? No. Is it selfish dps? Compared to BLM, SAM, SMN? No, is it a pet job? No. Does it even use its Gun most of the time to be a gunner job? 5.0 gave it no new gun skills and replaced it’s heavier hitting jobs with a can opener concoction but that’s a idk.

MCH is primitive and needs all the help it can get.

[AvenoMatt]

SMN shouldn't be part of that selfish dps list since it has utility in Aetherpact and it's Res. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it numbers says otherwise.

Anyway I personally feel like MCH being a selfish DPS is the wrong way to go. Original MCH was a debuff utility king. It had a heavy, bind, silence, stun, magic down, and physical down but now all that has been stripped away and made into role actions. I say give MCH back it's utility and make have it be the debuffer of ranged dps.

[Endariel]

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.

Your calculation is flawed because you debut your first shot on 1.5 second mark when in reality it starts as soon as possible (ideally 0 secs.)
0 | 1.5 | 3 | 4.5 | 6 | 7.5
Now of course with animation lock and other matters the final shot will be offset at most by 1 second.
And we can see that 6th is possible within 9 seconds window.

But yes, i do agree that those kind of abilities should follow bunshin route. Be it hypercharge or delirium

[Kitfox]

MCH design has remained pretty much the same since the start of Shadowbringers. While it was an improvement over the Stormblood design on many aspects, I feel there are still some aspects that are problematic that SE doesn't understand. I'm sure everyone has their opinion on the visual and flair aspects of the job so I'll cover mostly technical issues since these are problems that objectively go against the game design and the skill rotation design as a whole.

Ping dependency

It came to light that SE had been only testing jobs on their internal servers with 0ms latency and only realized the effects of ping once covid forced them to work remote. Stormblood MCH had really bad problems with this up to a point where we had 0.50s error of margin our main burst window. Shadowbringers improved this margin to about 1.25s on Hypercharge and 1.00s on Wildfire. Now that's an improvement for sure, but they also made the oGCD weaving problems much worse.

Hypercharge now requires mandatory oGCD weaving between 1.5s GCDs. That is a very, very tight margin of error for anyone playing overseas. Internally the game uses 0.60s regular animation lock timer to space out actions, that would leave 0.90s left for the oGCD animation before the next GCD. However, the game doesn't have a working ping correction system for oGCD weaving (apart from forbidden 3rd party programs), so the ping comes on top of the animation lock, screwing up players with slower connections. The limit of ping effects lies at 150ms, that makes the animation lock 0.75s long, which leaves 0 room for error between abilities during Hypercharge weaving. The effect of ping isn't quire linear either, from listening to people's troubles on the Balance MCH chatrooms, the problems usually start when people have ~100ms ping to the servers. MCH isn't the only one who suffers from tight oGCD weaving, although the effects on MCH are much more pronounced. The game desperately needs ping correction for oGCD weaving if it intends to keep its current design.

Other ways to solve the weaving and tight buff timer problem would be to use the Charge system we have for Gauss Round and Ricochet or a stacked buff system such as Bunshin on NIN that pre-determines the number of GCDs it lasts for. Alas, this was not addressed for the whole expansion even though the charge systems were introduced for all classes right at the beginning.

Another Wildfire related ping issue that emerged with Shadowbringers was animation length affecting GCD calculations. Wildfire only accepts GCDs into the buff potency after the GCD has fully carried out as opposed to how buffs and debuffs usually snapshot their effect before the animation even begins. I understand that this is to prevent ghosted or interrupted GCDs from counting in on the damage, but this has the unfortunate sideffect of making Drill and Anchor a very poor 6th GCD choice in Wildfire, because it makes the whole error margin over 0.30s tighter than any other GCD action, just because the animations are longer.

The devs really need to be more careful with how the networking issues affect overseas players and players in general who play with slightly worse connections than 0ms ping internal servers.

Rotation structure issues

One of these was very apparent at the start of Shadowbringers. Reassemble was a 60s cooldown while Drill was 20s, but also scaled with skill speed. This resulted in an impossible scenario where the Drill cycle became faster than 60s with any amount of skill speed and Reassemble no longer lined up with it. This meant that while skill speed was supposed to increase the efficiency of Drill and Anchor, it did not, because Drill needed to be delayed for Reassemble anyway. This problem was solved by making Reassemble a 55s cooldown, giving skill speed scaling a whole 5s of leeaway. Same sort of adjustment was made for SMN as well.

However, this didn't solve the issue with Wildfire. Wildfire is locked into a 120s cooldown and you're required to user Hypercharge with it to get the maximum allowed GCDs into the window. This means you are not able to use Drill or Anchor in the middle of it. That essentially locks MCH GCD rotation to the Wildfire timer and doesn't allow skill speed to affect Drill and Anchor scaling like they were designed to. The problem is less pronounced since it only happens every 2 minutes while Reassemble happened every 60s but it's still there. Skill speed scaling is still somewhat useful since you can get extra heated shots every 2 minutes, but the skill speed scaling on Drill and Anchor can not be taken advantage of in order to use Wildfire effectively as we're limited by the cooldown timer on it.

The GCD rotation should not be locked into the timers of oGCD actions because that makes skill speed a useless stat for a class when the rotation only works at the base 2.5s GCD speed.

Another structural issue comes from Heat management. The rotation and the amount of heat works on a perfect loop every 2 minutes, as you would expect. Until you get Barrel Stabilizer. The problem with Barrel Stabilizer is that it throws the whole heat management into chaos due to granting 50 heat, which sounds logical, Hypercharge costs 50 heat to use after all. Or does it? When you use Hypercharge, you actually replace a normal 3 hit combo with the Heat Blast sequence, which means that you lose out on another 15 heat. This means that the perfect 2 minute heat rotation is now 15 heat short. This leads to awkward patterns where sometimes you have enough heat for 3 Hypercharges every 2 minutes, sometimes 4 Hypercharges, and sometimes you're forced to overcap your heat gauge in order to use Wildfire. Skill speed muddles the waters even further since you get extra GCDs in the rotation.

This just shows again how messed up the rotation becomes when you have the skill speed scaled GCD rotation locked with oGCDs timers and gauge usage. Fortunately, the rotation is at least entirely deterministic and you can tweak it to fit every encounter you fight in the game, but it is nonetheless a real headache sometimes.

A good example of how to do things right would be the Battery gauge and Queen interaction. The GCD rotation builds battery, Queen doesn't have a cooldown and can be used at any moment after 50 on the gauge, and the damage scales with the amount of gauge making it extremely flexible. You even have skill expression with the initial 5s windup animation where you get rewarded if you know how to summon it before a buff window starts. Good job on this one.

Other issues

Flamethrower is too weak and too hard to use effectively. Also, the heated shot flips are dumb, give me Heavensward animations back.

[CKNovel]

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.

Sorry, it was sarcasms towards the job design team but I should've been a bit clearer about it.
Yes, I've been complaining about that aswell, MCH has been removed way too much utility and it has been replaced with nothing. There's no need for TP anymore, there's no need for MP regen anymore and all there is left is legs to run around the arena.

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.

1.5s cast and occasionally free cast? Like back in HW?
Hell yes, I want the cast back. Mobility is a joke, I've been memeing previous teammates about how crazy mobility was by running in circles in front of the bosses.
It's been said and said again, ranged lacks something akin to positionnals and casting.

MCH design has remained pretty much the same since the start of Shadowbringers. While it was an improvement over the Stormblood design on many aspects, I feel there are still some aspects that are problematic that SE doesn't understand. I'm sure everyone has their opinion on the visual and flair aspects of the job so I'll cover mostly technical issues since these are problems that objectively go against the game design and the skill rotation design as a whole.

That's a great take, I'd add that Wildfire is boring and it's perfect.
Bozja and the special armors really show how stupidly bad the SKS works with MCH. You get so much SKS but it throws your whole rotation away by giving too much heat and refreshing Drill too often to align with reassemble.
Overrall, the rework goal has been to take away HW/SB Wildfire away. It was too much of a core in the rotation.
It was also meant to remove a lot of micro management.

They managed to do it but they were too effective. Wildfire is in its most terrible iteration and among the most boring skills, Heat gauge don't need Flamethrower anymore and that skill just... Exists. Either an emote or your button to press if you want to grab a coffee.

[ReiganCross]

Your calculation is flawed because you debut your first shot on 1.5 second mark when in reality it starts as soon as possible (ideally 0 secs.)
0 | 1.5 | 3 | 4.5 | 6 | 7.5
Now of course with animation lock and other matters the final shot will be offset at most by 1 second.
And we can see that 6th is possible within 9 seconds window.

But yes, i do agree that those kind of abilities should follow bunshin route. Be it hypercharge or delirium

I don't think it is at all possible to get a shot off at the 0 second mark. Because activating Hypercharge, by itself, incurs an animation lock, otherwise you'd be able to triple weave with it. Unless Hypercharge waits for his own weave to finish to activate and I don't think that is the case. The first shot should be somewhere on the 0.7s mark.

But that is a moot point, by making it charges you'd only be left with the issue of putting it all under Wildfire. And if it stays that weak, that isn't an issue.

Hypercharge now requires mandatory oGCD weaving between 1.5s GCDs. That is a very, very tight margin of error for anyone playing overseas. Internally the game uses 0.60s regular animation lock timer to space out actions, that would leave 0.90s left for the oGCD animation before the next GCD. However, the game doesn't have a working ping correction system for oGCD weaving (apart from forbidden 3rd party programs), so the ping comes on top of the animation lock, screwing up players with slower connections. The limit of ping effects lies at 150ms, that makes the animation lock 0.75s long, which leaves 0 room for error between abilities during Hypercharge weaving. The effect of ping isn't quire linear either, from listening to people's troubles on the Balance MCH chatrooms, the problems usually start when people have ~100ms ping to the servers. MCH isn't the only one who suffers from tight oGCD weaving, although the effects on MCH are much more pronounced. The game desperately needs ping correction for oGCD weaving if it intends to keep its current design.

God I really wish they'd just copy the code from that forbidden 3rd party software and bake it in wholesale. But those are just iddle musings, yeah, most of the time I don't try to weave the entire 5 HBs with weaves, which loses me potency during Burst Windows but seems better than missing the 5th HB.

Other issues

Flamethrower is too weak and too hard to use effectively. Also, the heated shot flips are dumb, give me Heavensward animations back.

I agree that Flamethrower could do with a potency increase, especially because you have to stop dead in your tracks to do it. But...

... I like the silly flips. I find them both adorable and cool.

[Vatom]

Mch as of now is a more pure range dps yes in the past it had utility but you gotta remember they also removed alot from every class to simplify everything. So at Mch's core now pure dps and also with dancer being a thing they dont want to step on toes so dancer is the support range note they nerfed to oblivion bards support functions, why would they slap utility back on mch a class more accustom to dmg. though I do agree that the whole party mit should just be a role action and also give them a reprisal version too like palisade back other then that no utility is needed.

Its possible they will just remove flamethrower and I honestly don't disagree with that thought it was garbage from start to end but if they keep it please make it interact with bio. I feel like it would actually be interesting if they did something along those lines.
I think they will be going in a more gunslinger direction with all of this I mean if you see the benchmark MCH had a shotgun rifle attack

[CKNovel]

I agree that Flamethrower could do with a potency increase, especially because you have to stop dead in your tracks to do it. But...
... I like the silly flips. I find them both adorable and cool.

Flamethrower, it's not a potency increase that will help. That skill must straight-up go to the bin or be completely reworked. I simply can't believe Square Enix let this skill exist in MCH 5.0 kit and approved it.
In dungeons, it's straight forward, press the button and don't move, don't do anything, that's simply wrong.
In single target content, during downtime you need to use Flamethrower right before the boss comes back to fish a measly 100 potency tick then to break it as soon as possible with a gcd.
Even if you added a synergy with Bio-Blaster the skill would still be interrupted asap or don't move for 10 seconds. It's not fun.

No matter how you look at it, it's an emote that does damage. In my opinion it's next to Wildfire as the most critical issues to be adressed when it comes to MCH cooldowns.
Both could be removed and the rotation would not change.

[Jirah]

After seeing the benchmark trailer I’m not exactly thrilled, hurray a shallow Heat blast upgrade the very skill that makes me numb to MCH, hurry even more AOE as if MCH needs more freaking fragmented aoes, clean shot appearing gave me hope somwhat but I remain pessimistic on the devs faith to make this job fun again

[Aiscence]

Tbh I really enjoyed the old wildfire, that was very satisfying to pull off, and it's the same as pulling a good no mercy window (having to know your gcd order, which was allowing experience/skill to shine), demi summons or the randomness in critdh midare. But we needed to have "something else" to do during the other 50 seconds.

At this point I just wish they would give us actual damage, or things that make us look like we actually do damage, because most of our gcd's feel weak because a glare are topping them, or just bring back utility like dismantle.