Machinist needs some reworking

[CasterSvarog]

I’ve been leveling Machinist again so I wanted to give some thoughts on it.
The rotation itself, is not that bad. There’s clear things you need to focus on, making sure Air anchor, Drill and Chainsaw stay on cooldown without clipping. Plus it doesn’t suffer from the Ninja/Dark knight Feast and famine flow which keeps the job from being to boring. Aoe is alright, Auto-crossbow is neat, and Automaton Queen looks pretty cool. It’s a simple job and it works alright for what it is.

But I do have a couple of issues.

The entire Battery system does not exist for Aoe scenarios due to everything involving battery being single target only skills.
They should either give Air anchor/Hot shot(?) damage fall of so they can be used in Aoe, or, more boringly, make Aoe versions of those skills. I’d rather the former honestly, similarly they should either bring Bishop auto turret back and upgrade into a Knight or King Automaton, or give Queen automaton Aoe fall off.

And speaking of the Automaton, there does not need to be such a long wait between the queens summoning and attacking with a timer going down. Either speed up the animation, remove it and have the queen just warp in and do the charge or not have the timer go down while it’s doing it’s summoning animation, it would just start counting down when it’s gotten up. Personally the last one should be the go to option. And fix the snapshotting on it, it’s a needless punishment honestly.

Flamethrower, kind of sucks honestly. It looks cool but there’s no power behind the attack, and let it generate heat when it’s being used. There was an idea I read a long while back where you could apply Bioblaster, use flamethrower and effectively detonate the dot to deal a small burst of damage. It would be neat to see that happen.

Finally the one everyone talks about, Heatblast and wildfire. The skill that is so rigid, not that well built, easy to lose track of, has no power being it and punishes you for not living in Squares basement. The fact that they haven’t made the heat gauge last longer and give 5 charges back in Shb is just plain dumb and should be implemented already.

And Wildfire, the huge 2 minute cooldown skill, has pretty weak damage behind it, poor sound and animation design and punishes less then perfect ping. Honestly, this should honestly be fixed or just flat out reworked, it’s the most blatant example of a fire and forget ability.

But it’s definitely hitting a corner on where it could expand to in the future, unless they really crazy enough to just gonna go and just buff potencies. Maybe alternative heat gauge spenders or possibly another resource to build up? I’m not sure honestly.

Also buff it’s damage for gods sake. It’s worse then Bard and Dancer on a good party, and that should not be the case. Give it low caster level damage after making it more complex at the very leastThis jobs needs and deserves it
Edit: Maybe bring back the old Ammo system and make upgrades for that. By default it could buff potencies, then change the 1-2-3 combo completely into pvps Blast Charge.

[CKNovel]

Fall off damage is the same as creating AoE versions. Except you don't have 2 buttons for it, therefore no button bloat.

Automaton Queen should have a fall off on Pile Bunker and Crown Collider. I believe it was intended to have aoe on arm punch as you can see the Bishop attack animaton on each arm punch.
Wildfire should get reworked for 7.0 (Honestly it was due a rework for 6.0...) but as for now, explosion after 3 GCDs, timer longer for extra room and AoE fall off would do great. The joke is that it's exactly the version used in pvp.

Now the problem with these fall off, is that they're all targeted.
BRD has line AoE fall Off, DNC has line aoe and very wide aoe around it.

Flamethrower could be reworked to be the cone AoE MCH definitely needs.

As for the performance of the job, yes... MCH slightly shine in single target situation. And even then, the DNC/BRD utility outshines MCH. The job being consistent and all is cool, but consistency is something many other jobs can pull off with many other advantages.

[CasterSvarog]

Fall off damage is the same as creating AoE versions. Except you don't have 2 buttons for it, therefore no button bloat.

Automaton Queen should have a fall off on Pile Bunker and Crown Collider. I believe it was intended to have aoe on arm punch as you can see the Bishop attack animaton on each arm punch.
Wildfire should get reworked for 7.0 (Honestly it was due a rework for 6.0...) but as for now, explosion after 3 GCDs, timer longer for extra room and AoE fall off would do great. The joke is that it's exactly the version used in pvp.

Now the problem with these fall off, is that they're all targeted.
BRD has line AoE fall Off, DNC has line aoe and very wide aoe around it.

Flamethrower could be reworked to be the cone AoE MCH definitely needs.

Oh I would absolutely prefer to just have Aoe fall off for the sake of future proofing, but current MCH could likely get away with it currently given how it has a fair amount of extra hotbar space.

Honestly, they could so easily get away with doing a straight 1:1 port of PvP wildfire and it would be the best change mch would get in recent years. Heck there’s a lot of things that pve should take from pvp like Analysis, Blast charge and Marksman's Spite, with some slight touch up to be more then just another gcd with a cooldown, could work great as a future capstone skill.

[Payotz]

I'd personally want a whole Phys Ranged rework and have MCH be reverted back to its Heavensward or Stormblood state and go from there. The state of MCH and Physical Ranged as a whole is just so bad, that if you make all 3 of the jobs limited like BLU, it wouldn't even make that much of an impact. In fact, nobody would get a ranged physical if it wasn't for the 1% buff. We saw this on Shadowbringers launch, when all 3 physical ranged wasn't even worth the 1% buff that people just took two BLMs instead.

Introduce actual decision making in the rotation for MCH. Give 123 procs back. Give ammo back. Give back lead shot and make me reconsider if I should be using a bullet on lead shot or should i just keep this for procs.
Give utility back. Give refresh back. Give palisade back. Add stuff like combat peloton to ranged physicals, not fucking Scholar.

Why the FUCK they're so hell bent in giving utility to other roles when phys ranged needs it the most is beyond me. I have no fucking idea why they're so hell bent into making Physical Ranged the most braindead and the least satisfying role in the game.
Actually make Phys Ranged FEEL like they're contributing their own shit into the party. Make it SATISFYING. I don't give a flying FUCK about balance if the job design is so dogshit that the few nuance it has is getting ripped from the role (bard dots and song interactions). FUCKING FIX IT

Making the game "balanced" by neutering an entire role, by alienating core players who's loved the role and mastered it, the people who loved the fantasy of not that much dps output, but a SHITTON of utility, is NOT HOW YOU DO THINGS.

Revert MCH and Phys Ranged back to Stormblood or Heavensward, and actually give us something that's not "Oh discord kitten. You wanna get carried through the tier? Go DNC uwu!"

I'm sick of playing caster. I wanna play my old main again. I want to play a support DPS that's satisfying and doesn't feel like I'm answering what's 2+2 in a group when everyone's doing college algebra.
I don't want to feel like I'm being carried despite me playing out of my goddamn mind.

[anhaato]

I get why people want to increase its dps but unless this is accompanied with a design change to make the rotation more difficult I don't see why a large reward should come so easily. I'm in the camp of making it more complicated because by god leveling it back in 5.x was the most boring thing I did next to 5.4 mnk, and I'd accompany that with boosted raw dps. Other than that, unless it gets more complicated, a job like brd that takes more thought should reasonably have more optimization and be able to outperform the brainless 123 job with enough work and a good enough party. If mch, as easy as it is, could output as much rdps as top tier brds with as little optimization as it has access to then we'd circle back around to the 5.0 dilemma of why even play a harder job like that if you can press 123 to win on a different job? I wasn't in that camp myself because I stuck with brd but lord knows others were whining.

[CKNovel]

I get why people want to increase its dps but unless this is accompanied with a design change to make the rotation more difficult I don't see why a large reward should come so easily.

This argument falls flat as soon as SMN is brought in the equation.
Why play RDM if SMN can bring more DPS, more mobility and a very strong utility?

I agree, I'd like a rotation that is more than watching Drills I, II, III and the heat gauge. In my opinion, MCH should've been a job switching between phases emphasizing the use of tools. A Chainsaw melee phase for example, regardless of the "Melee" problem.
Yet, remind yourself that most jobs don't have much more in term of difficulty. SAM is just watching your stickers
Job difficulty and DPS/Utility aren't tied in any ways, Yoshida mentionned it.

Regardless of job complexity, MCH brings nothing to a party and that's the most important issue right now.

[Selvokaz]

I don't see what the problem is really, if you use the entire kit, you have enough to juggle and how well you juggle it and knowing when to use certain things seems like half the fun. It's not brain dead and simplicity is relative to what you're doing.

Single Target: Split Shot, Gauss Round, Slug Shot, GR, Clean Shot, GR, Split S, Ricochet, Slug S, Ricochet, Clean S, Ricohet, Air Anchor, Reassemble, Drill, Hypercharge, Wildfire, Heat Blast x5, Chainsaw. Repeat.

Multi-Target: Reassenble, Bio-Blaster, Flamethrower (channel for duration), Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Gauss Round, cattergun, Gauss Round, cattergun, Gauss Round, Chainsaw. Hypercharge, Auto Crossbow x5, repeat.

[Seraphor]

I don't see what the problem is really, if you use the entire kit, you have enough to juggle and how well you juggle it and knowing when to use certain things seems like half the fun. It's not brain dead and simplicity is relative to what you're doing.

Single Target: Split Shot, Gauss Round, Slug Shot, GR, Clean Shot, GR, Split S, Ricochet, Slug S, Ricochet, Clean S, Ricohet, Air Anchor, Reassemble, Drill, Hypercharge, Wildfire, Heat Blast x5, Chainsaw. Repeat.

Multi-Target: Reassenble, Bio-Blaster, Flamethrower (channel for duration), Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Ricochet, Scattergun, Gauss Round, cattergun, Gauss Round, cattergun, Gauss Round, Chainsaw. Hypercharge, Auto Crossbow x5, repeat.

1. Why would you sit on Ricochet charges for three GCDs like that? Alternate Gauss Round and Ricochet. Keep your recharge rolling, that's the point of multiple charges. And while you're at it, Reassembled Drill/Anchor/Chainsaw immediately get those big cooldowns cooling down. (unless you're in a static coordinating burst windows)

2. Reassemble into Bio Blaster? When Chainsaw and even Scattergun are higher potency? The guaranteed Direct Crit doesn't apply to DoTs, only the first hit, which is 50 potency for Bio Blaster, compared to 150 for Scattergun and 580/377 for Chainsaw.

3. Flamethrower is the lowest potency AoE skill outside of just spamming Scattergun. So you want to exhaust all other resources first, this includes Reassembled Chainsaw, Ricochet and Gauss Round charges between Scatterguns, Anchor, and Hypercharge > Autocrossbow x5. THEN Flamethrower, unless any of those are coming off cooldown in under 10s, then you stop Flamethrower.

[Karious]

I just tried MCH in PvP for the first time since EW launch and uh... Why don't I see any complaints about MCH being forced to be a caster in PvP? It's impossible for me to get into range to shoot anyone, and if I can get into range, they move out of range before I get a shot off.

[ASkellington]

I just tried MCH in PvP for the first time since EW launch and uh... Why don't I see any complaints about MCH being forced to be a caster in PvP? It's impossible for me to get into range to shoot anyone, and if I can get into range, they move out of range before I get a shot off.

The major complaint of MCH in PvP is Bio being in the same attack chain as the rest of its abilities, forcing it into melee range for one part of it when the rest are all ranged.