Machinist needs some reworking

[Remarus]

Quoting what I said in the other thread as what I feel would be a nice compromise without going back to the clusterflux that was Stormblood MCH.

It's not like we couldn't do both. We can look back at HW MCH, i.e. it's Gun Mage iteration and find that we could bring back it's iteration of gauss barrel to turn our instant casts into Blast Charge. Maybe utilize PvP WF with it, so our WF Window is lining up Blast Charges that auto-detonate after 3 hits. To encourage both playstyles, after X number of Blast Charges, we auto-overheat, do our Heat Blast combo and go back to instant cast 1-2-3s until our next WF window.

It'd bring together a nice, hectic, but ping friendly WF window while adding a little complexity to the job.

[Jirah]

Quoting what I said in the other thread as what I feel would be a nice compromise without going back to the clusterflux that was Stormblood MCH.

Ugh can we stop crapping on a dead play style? It’s clear they won’t go back to it. While I’m on the subject I disliked a lot of elements from SB era but still found it better than SHB/EW era which is basically button mashing with a side of 1-2-3 but I’m aware of my positioning being in the minority, I’m also aware of the community sticking to their guns and let others think for them “it’s wrong because I was told it’s wrong” but I digress

What SB did right was the heat element being Unique rather than a shallow 50 and spend skill, with 2 gauges effecting only 1 skill each both not being very interesting.

Ammo by itself was decent BUT desperately needed a side factor, a guarantee if you will if your RNG is bad. DNC STILL lacks this and Ammo to my mind is still a better balance of RNG than it

Turrets being more hands on aswell, rook isn’t nearly as flashy as Queen but least you can detonate it and debuff enemies and the AI didn’t bug out with multiple enemies.

Actual speed with rapid fire instead of that fake speed with charges

Wildfire rounding out the kit rather than the most afterthought skill in the game second to Mug.

I prefer to see these elements revised, as SHB and EW all have to offer is just a bunch of same GCDs

[Remarus]

I will absolutely talk about how poor SB MCH was. It was the worst designed class we have ever had and, as a player from the East Coast, was far more punishing for ping than any other. I also won't forget how the devs completely and totally ignored our ping issues and then decided to make them almost worse in ShB with the rework. You *still* can't line a Drill up into a WF window if you have high ping and have to settle for a normal GCD and mis-aligning your buffs. Getting 6 GCDs into WF along with all your oGCDs and turret damage during SB was a physical impossibility over 100 ping.

SB MCH had a super interesting heat mechanic at launch where we had to keep our heat between 50 but below 100 but they literally changed that for the first patch and turned it into "line up WF, Overheat, all your ammo, all your oGCDs, turret overdrive, and 6 GCDs and screw you if you live in 75% of the united states." Not to mention trying to manipulate heat ticks with FT before all that. Looking back at it in any other way is wearing your ruby colored goggles visored down.

[WiccaP]

Maybe we stop fighting over which mch was better, the SB or ShB. Both versions did some things really well and some things really badly. The old mch was flavorful and had some meat to it but was super clunky and the new mch is streamlined and easier but has almost no flavor or identity to it. Mechanically there are issues that have been going on with mch since the start basically, those issues need to be addressed first, such as ping. Then the flavor and rotation issues can be handled together. Personally, the easiest way to fix mch is for the devs to actually acknowledge the ping issue and not blame our equipment/connection and then take what worked and gave mch its identity from SB, tweak it and bring it into current Mch. It would not be that hard. We've all seen or offered opinions on the numerous threads and ideas on how they could fix it or implement changes. We aren't all gonna agree on the specifics of what needs to be done with each ability and the direction mch should go in, but I think we all agree on some core issues that need to be addressed.

- Ping/ latency issues
- Heatblast
- Wildfire
- Queen A.

[Serenaya]

Bumping to make sure this thread keeps getting seen (:

[MikoRemi]

I document how I would like Machinist to go here; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

The ideal is to make Machinist into a less mobile(but still more mobile than say, Black Mage or Samurai where it can be more difficult given cast times or melee range lockout) but much more powerful job where you get more buttons and damage to compensate for Blast Charge charging in instead of the comboes. There would be some risk to being forced to walking around that is mitigated with Heat, being more of a tool akin to Triplecast than the burst windows it is known for currently. It would also get some support back with Dismantle, thus keeping the identity as a Physical Ranged(less buffs than the likes of Bard and Dancer still), but having an excuse to be more powerful since most of the time I hear about naysayers on the idea of buffing the damage, it's because of the mobility. This should ensure it's full identity as a selfish DPS inside of the Physical Ranged space.

More details in the document.

[CKNovel]

Alright so...

2 weeks since Dragonsong Reprise is out and there isn't a single MCH clear registered as of now.
Of course, there will be MCH clearing the content later on.

But I believe it's great to point out the MCH problems in DSR:
-Lack of utility or mitigation to compete with Improvisation, Cure Waltz and Nature's Minne and Warden's Pean that all proved to be valuable in Ultimate.
-Gauge based gameplay that suffers from long downtime, 13-15% comes from the AQ, a good 10-12% comes from heatblast.
-Crap damage that doesn't make it for its "pure DPS" status, especially against multiple targets where BRD and DNC will naturally cleave.

I believe it's important that SQEX aknowledge the state of MCH not being appealing.
If they still refuse to buff MCH, they should at least look into shifting the power from the AQ/Heatblast into non-gauge based.

The job feels worthless and unrewarding, playing it feels like griefing the party. Please do something.

[TankHunter678]

So what do you think of this thought: remove heat blast and make Hypercharge reduce all GCD to 1.5 sec, make it so that out of Hypercharge your 1-2-3 generates heat (and a large amount at that, the idea should be you bounce in and out of hypercharge often) but no battery and in Hypercharge it transforms the 1-2-3 into new versions that generates battery instead of heat. Change Automaton Queen so that it spawns above the target and drops on them for damage so that it does not waste time needing to stand up and charge to the target.

Probably would be a decent idea since we will be generating extra battery to throw in some new battery spenders so that the gauge is more then the Queen gauge. Perhaps rework Railgun Shot to be a casted linear AoE with damage fall off after the main target that scales up in potency with battery spent.

[Tsumdere]

Alright so...

2 weeks since Dragonsong Reprise is out and there isn't a single MCH clear registered as of now.
Of course, there will be MCH clearing the content later on.

But I believe it's great to point out the MCH problems in DSR:
-Lack of utility or mitigation to compete with Improvisation, Cure Waltz and Nature's Minne and Warden's Pean that all proved to be valuable in Ultimate.
-Gauge based gameplay that suffers from long downtime, 13-15% comes from the AQ, a good 10-12% comes from heatblast.
-Crap damage that doesn't make it for its "pure DPS" status, especially against multiple targets where BRD and DNC will naturally cleave.

I believe it's important that SQEX aknowledge the state of MCH not being appealing.
If they still refuse to buff MCH, they should at least look into shifting the power from the AQ/Heatblast into non-gauge based.

The job feels worthless and unrewarding, playing it feels like griefing the party. Please do something.

I was progging DSU on MCH at first. I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the frequent boss jumps and my Tact barely doing anything when there is tons of raidwide damage.

I swapped to DNC for funsies, and suddenly my entire team's DPS skyrocketed. We met the Knights/Thordan DPS checks easier, I had more mobility to correct positioning mistakes in towers, and I brought more mitigation that actually made a difference to the healers so much they don't want me to go back to MCH.

This felt terrible. I've always cleared savage/ultimate on MCH as it's my favourite job. I've so much experience on MCH - I parse in high purples/oranges. I picked up DNC for a single day and two hours of hitting a dummy and I was already steamrolling over my MCH DPS and easing the stress put on my team to make up for my lack of damage and mitigation.

Please buff MCH. Please give it the selfish DPS that it needs.

[TankHunter678]

I had an idea to help with MCH's ping issues in regard to Wildfire. Make it an infinite duration debuff that builds up stacks when you hit the target and at 6 stacks it auto-detonates and clears itself. This way regardless of ping it will achieve its maximum damage every time consistently.