MCH Overheat should activate automatically

[Rongway]

From a programming aspect it is completely different, because the use of Geirskogul puts you into Life of the Dragon and then is replaced with the ability that can only be used in Life of the Dragon. It would be more difficult to program this with MCH unless you had 2 separate abilities (One that ate 50 heat gauge and put you into overheat and one that can only be used in overheat), unless you just make it "This ability costs 50 heat gauge and grants 'Overheat'" and have Overheat be "abilities that cost heat gauge are free for the duration".

I think you're overestimating how difficult this would be. The game has plenty of examples of action mechanics that can be applied to this.

• Actions can grant a status effect.
• Actions can silently upgrade while under the effect of a status (Fire) or after satisfying some condition (Wheeling Thrust, Fang and Claw).
• Actions can explicitly upgrade to other actions while under the effect of a status (Raiden Thrust).
• Actions with different cooldowns can share a button (Geirskogul & Nastrond).
• Actions with different types can share a button (Standard Step & Standard Finish).
• Actions of a type other than Weaponskill can trigger the cooldown of weaponskills (DNC steps and NIN jutsus).

These are all things that are already in the game and it should be a trivial matter to implement something like the following:


Action: Heat Blast (icon version A)
Type: Weaponskill
Cast/Recast: Instant/8s
Range/Radius: 25y/0y
Deals damage with a potency of 190. Releases the energy building in your firearm, granting 5 stacks of Overheated.
Overheated Effect: Increases the potency of all single-target weaponskills by 20.
Duration: 15s.
Heat Gauge Cost: 50
Additional Effect: Reduces the recast time of both Gauss Round and Ricochet by 15s.
(Hidden details: Potency is 190 to account for not being affected by its own Overheat effect. Triggers a 1.5s cooldown on all weaponskills. Upgrades Heat Blast (icon version A) to Heat Blast (icon version B) and Auto Crossbow (icon version A) to Auto Crossbow (icon version B) while under the effect of Overheated. Recast timer is always 8s.)


Action: Heat Blast (icon version B)
Type: Weaponskill
Cast/Recast: Instant/1.5s
Range/Radius: 25y/0y
Deals damage with a potency of 170.
Additional Effect: Reduces the recast time of both Gauss Round and Ricochet by 15s.
Recast timer cannot be affected by status effects or gear attributes.


Then do the same with Auto Crossbow. The two icon versions are necessary indicators for the player so they don't unintentionally start a second Overheat at the end of the first. The version A actions could also be Abilities, but then you'd have to add "Triggers the cooldown of weaponskills upon execution," and they wouldn't work with buffs that grant buddy gauge from weaponskills.