Effects of ping/latency on animation lock and ability to perform rotations normally.

[Kitfox]

There's an additional random delay that can make animation locks even worse: moving. The server is unable to process the movement update packets at the same time with attacks and sometimes this results in an extra +50 ms spike on top of all the problems mentioned in the OP. I recently had a discussion with a third party plugin developer that told me about this. There have been rumors about this before in the MCH community but it has been very difficult to test properly.

There are at least two third party plugins that help mitigate ping issues but I'm afraid that posting information about them is likely against the forum guidelines and I'd like to keep my account intact. This highlights another problem with providing feedback about the issues: providing feedback without breaking the Terms of Service is extremely difficult because of the technical nature of the problem. This isn't a problem with locations and ISPs, this is a problem with game code.

It's extremely disheartening to hear that Yoshida feels that there is not enough information about these issues. Personally I've been talking about them for at least 3 years at this point. Here's a few threads and posts from my own history:


2021:
Problems in MCH design I hope are addressed for Endwalker

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.

2019:
Machinist latency issues need recognition akin to Ninja

I've been the main theorycrafter and mentor for the class on the Balance Discord for almost two years now, since early Stormblood. In my role, I answer a lot of questions and talk to a lot of people who have problems understanding the class, their rotation or general knowledge of the game.

During Stormblood, the most common topics regarding the difficulties with the class were:

"How much ping do I need to play this class?"
"My ping is too high, what can I do? Do I need to find another class?"
"Can you make a rotation for high ping people?"
"How much damage am I losing because of my latency?"

Endless questions of all variations about ping problems and they still get asked daily. The answer is often disappointing. The only solutions we have are using VPNs, accepting the sub-optimal performance or simply choosing another class to play.

...

Ninja's mudra problems were finally acknowledged but I'd like to firmly emphasize, with kind words, that Ninja is not the only class suffering from latency problems. Please give some recognition for Machinist as well for the latency issues the class has been suffering from for two years. The technology for solutions obviously exists with the new gcd actions, dance steps, animation changes and the charge system. Please, just do something to make the Hypercharge, Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet interactions smoother!

Thank you for your time and many thanks to the developers for the efforts in providing an ever better player experience!

MCH 5.05 adjustments are totally out of touch with the game

...

And ping problems got no fixes. How long has it been since we've been complaining about those? Where are the fixes for those issues? How long are you going to ignore actual problems with the class?

...

Problems that remain unfixed:
- Heat Blast 1.5s recast doesn't allow enough room for latency for reliable oGCD weaving with current animation locks.
- Recast reduction of Gauss Round and Ricochet causes overcapping issues if weaving is avoided in Hypercharge because of previous problem.

...

- Drill and Air Anchor have increased delay in damage application which makes them hard to use in Wildfire.

To make MCH more ping friendly wouldn't it be easier to...

Just cap how many times you can max WF and just increase the length by 3 seconds? Keep everything the same, then people can weave 2x in between heat blast and not have to worry about anything? The damage would be the same, they would just be able to get in 1 more attack thus solving the whole problem.

Capping Wildfire with stacks and giving Heat Blast 5 charges would be the best change. Changing Wildfire alone won't fix the issue because the issues is with clipping during Hypercharge. Clipping is a dps loss regardless if you manage to hit your 5 Heat Blasts and 6 gcd Wildfires and it adds up as you have to repeat it often. The core issue is the 1.5s gcd and animation locks. It has to be possible to avoid weaving completely during gcds that fast if we want to fix the problem, so either the gcd needs to be longer or there needs to be another work around for avoiding the weaving. Giving Heat Blast charges would mean that you can do a couple, then do other gcds while weaving and spend more Heat Blast charges without weaving. More about the topic here.

Media Tour MCH issues: MCH is now 4 times more punishing

Here's a compilation of all the possible fixes that we've come up with:
- Make Heat Blast available outside of Hypercharge at lower potency and without cooldown reduction effect.
- Reduce the effect of cooldown reduction to 10s or less (down from 15s).
- Increase the maximum charges of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 4 (up from 3).
- Increase the recast time of Gauss Round and Ricochet to 40s (up from 30s).
- Increase Heat Blast gcd to 2.0s or to an even slower speed (up from 1.5s).
- Increase Hypercharge duration to 9 seconds (up from 8s).
- Lower the animation locks on Heat Blast, Gauss Round and Ricochet to well below standard levels.

Lost potency should obviously be made up somewhere else. I would recommend adding it to Gauss Round and Ricochet.

Edit 3:
This post was written pre-release and some things changed for launch. We didn't get 6 Heat Blast Hypercharges, but pretty much everything else in the post remains relevant: 1.5s gcd and ogcd weaving is a problem. All the fix suggestions are still relevant and even more could be added if we wanted to do some changes to the core mechanics of the job. Hoping for improvements with the release of Savage, but very discouraged to be ignored once gain even with the amount of support these issues have got from the player base.

The above post had over 100+ likes on the OP and the Reddit thread over 700 upvotes. These issues are wide spread.


5.0 Machinist Launch Feedback

We avoided the worst ping nightmare when we couldn't fit 6 Heat Blasts into Hypercharge, but the job is still about as ping dependent as in Stormblood. The issue can somewhat be alleviated by spending all charges before entering Hypercharge, but that's not possible in all scenarios. It just feels bad to play when you keep clipping with Heat Blast and weaving oGCDs.

2018:
Usability evaluation of Machinist

The main culprit behind latency problems is Rapid Fire in combination with ogcd weaving. Rapid Fire lowers gcd to the floor value of 1.5s similar to RDMs' melee combo. This is fine on its own, but it becomes problematic when ogcd weaving is required during it. With animation locks being roughly 0.70-0.75s in practical gameplay with good latency that leaves almost zero room for lag. Double weaving ogcds during slow gcd is already too much for many players but this is far worse. Since this is a compound problem with the combination of Rapid Fire, Overheat and Wildfire, any of the following solutions would help alleviate the issues.

1. Reduce the required ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire
This would require combining abilities, such as reloads, direct damage abilities or wildfire+overheat, into a single ability or changing them to have longer lasting effects so that they can be applied outside of burst, like Hypercharge. Alternatively, a SMN-like approach could be used, locking some of the abilities during Overheat so that they can't be used. The downside is that the rotation might become more bland or feel boring with less abilities used.

2. Significantly reduce animation locks
I feel that this would be insufficient for most players, but it would retain the current structure and feeling the gameplay has. This would help alleviate issues with ability weaving but only if it was possible to implement fluidity similar to NIN mudras.

3. Change how Rapid Fire works
If Rapid Fire gave a damage boost through other means besides reducing gcd timer, it would allow for double weaving ogcds more easily. This would no doubt have a big impact on gamefeel, and the excitement of a fast burst rotation might be lessened.

4. Make Wildfire and Overheat longer so that ogcds are not required during Rapid Fire
This would give more ogcd space between gcds simply by extending the buff period. This would introduce an old problem with Wildfire, the difficulty of delivering the payload damage before phase changes or interruptions. It would require a mechanic similar to Deathflare or Eartly Star to explode the collected damage before the Wildfire timer is up naturally, a manual detonator.

5. Make Overheat and/or Wildfire work based on gcd count instead of timer
As suggested in the OP, this would alleviate issues with the tight timers and large damage loss due to latency, although the problems with ogcd weaving would remain.

6. Make Overheat timer not tick down before Flamethrower is interrupted.
This would get rid of the human error with the timing and actually make the Overheat window comparable to other buff windows. It would also allow Flamethrower to actually be used for AoE damage instead of a simple heat tool.

Moderate Latency (150~) + Impacts of Double Weaving

After looking around the forums for DPS that is good with a high latency, these are the common responses:

SAM/BLM - Least affected
MNK - Moderately affected
RDM/DRG - Abit more moderately affected
NIN/BRD - Don't even try.
SMN/MCH - Didn't see any responses so no idea.

I'm getting into the DPS role and have raided with BRD/NIN/MNK/SAM. With 150 ping I cannot fit 2 ogcds most of the time without clipping into the next gcd.

So my questions are:
How much damage am I losing if I don't strictly follow the optimal openers and just try to spread everything out evenly (single weave everything), over the entire fight.

Second, are dragoons really that dependent on double weaving? I've looked at the CPM for DRG and it is fairly low for most fights.

Should I just play whatever class I want and single weave everything or change to a slower class like DRG/BLM? (All my friends are playing SAM already).

MCH biggest issue?

Another personal gripe I have is forced ogcd weaving during Rapid Fire which is caused by the tight OH/WF window, it's cancer especially for high latency people. Ogcd weaves during Rapid Fire have zero room for latency (gcd anim lock + ogcd anim lock = 0,75s + 0,75s = 1,5s = gcd during RF) which is even tighter than double weaves during normal gcds (0,75s + 0,75s x 2 = 2,25s < 2,5s base gcd) and even those can be a pain for people with high ping.

Been gone a bit: is MCH still crippled by latency?

I observed back when playing XIV some months ago that MCH was literally crippled by latency because it meant you couldn't get the maximum number of attacks off during an overheat if you simply lived too far away from the servers. Others confirmed this as well.

Is this still the case or have they actually fixed that?