Machinist needs some reworking

[MerlinCross]

- Completely change Bioblaster to something else like a grenade toss maybe? (why are we using a bio weapon in the first place? We alchemist?)
- Make Flamethrower the DOT instead of Bioblaster, and make this ability share cooldown with Air anchor (so we're not tempted to use air anchor anymore during our AOE phase)
- Make Wildfire an AOE. Why is this thing single target? a pack of dynamite should be powerfull enough to hit multiple target.
-The heatgauge system/hypercharge needs to be change to something like inner release, no more short timer to use heatblast. Bring back the ammo system and have one cartridge = one heat blast for exemple.

-Why'd we lose Grenado in the first place? Like holy why's our AoE just so weird? ..., Okay we have AoE but it's usually cone/cleave based. On a Ranged job. Thanks SE. As for Bio Weapons.... well, Edgar has it.
-I can buy this change.
-While Wildfire an AoE might help, I think the big problem is trying to fit everything into the window is a problem that's going to remain hovering over the job.
-Maybe I don't get it but isn't Hypercharge basically Inner Release? We get limited time to spam a man focus damage skill. The only real difference is outright damage but I don't think they're gonna let Hypercharge give us Drill for free. Also I'm against the idea of making more Inner Release style skills. I'd rather have to work Up to the burst/damage window than hitting it and having to rush to take advantage of this.

Basically I'd rather have something akin to Blood of the Dragon, where to me feels like "Oh cool time to get my Damage out" or Samurai's "Oh time to dump Setsugekka, Kaeshi: Setsugekka and Shoa into this twit."

I'd rather have to work for my damage/burst than push a button that says "Time to burst" if that makes sense. The bullets were a good way of doing that, slamming them when I wanted to for more prolonged damage and then rigging them up in a row for the burst window when heat triggered. I dunno, it's hard for me to put into words, someone probably gets the giest of it though, hopefully. I'm babbling now.

[WiccaP]

-Why'd we lose Grenado in the first place? Like holy why's our AoE just so weird? ..., Okay we have AoE but it's usually cone/cleave based. On a Ranged job

Man I completely forgot about grenado shot. I really do miss hw machinist sometimes

[MerlinCross]

Man I completely forgot about grenado shot. I really do miss hw machinist sometimes

Honestly that was probably one of the big examples of "Do you guys know what you're doing". Not just for MCH, Bard still has a couple cone AoEs. Dancer too though I'll be honest I don't know how they do their AoE attacks, never played the job.

I'm just puzzled about why Ranged needs weird cone targeting.

[Atmaweapon510]

OK so people have been asking for concrete ideas, and here's my concrete idea for a Machinist rework with the tag line summing up as: Battery powers tools

Heat Gauge

-Hypercharge's effect is no longer tied to heat.
-Heat Blast and Auto Crossbow both cost 20 Heat and generate 10 Battery. Both have a base recast time of 2.5s.
-Auto-Crossbow now reduces the cooldown of Ricochet by 30 seconds.

This forms the core of the Heat Gauge rework, it's a simple spender for two attacks, but sets up how the rest of the kit works. Auto-crossbow also now interplays with Ricochet. Also, Heat Blast and Auto-crossbow are divorced from Hypercharge's attack speed increase, easing the Ping requirement for the job. The main thing to keep in mind here is that now 20 Heat = 10 Battery, something that is used to balance the rest of the rotation.


Battery Gauge

-Certain Weaponskills and abilities are labeled as a "Tool" or "Power tool". All Tool skills are based on a charge system that don't recharge with recast times.
-When Battery hits 100, all "Tool" abilities immediately recharge.
-When Battery hits 200, all "Tool" and "Power tool" abilities immediately recharge. Battery cycles back to 0.

Combine with the above changes to the Heat spending abilities, you see how Machinist now works: You have Heat, and you can convert your Heat into Battery Gauge. In addition, the Battery Gauge is essentially split into two parts, 1 set you need to use within every recharge window, and 1 "flex" set that you can slot anywhere between 2 recharge windows. With this framework, the designers then need to give Machinist enough ways to generate Battery/Heat so that the 100/200 Battery windows align every 30/55ish seconds (this means the second 200 Battery window has some leeway going into every 2 minute burst phase.


"Tool" abilities/weaponskills: The baseline of MCH's battery rotation
All "Drill" attacks now deal 65% aoe damage.

-Hypercharge - ability: Reduces weaponskill cast, recast, and auto-attack delay by 40% for 6 weaponskills (reduces 2.5s recast to 1.5s). While active, tool weaponskills cannot be used and Heat Blast/Auto-Crossbow change to Wildfire.
-Wildfire - weaponskill: Replaces Heat Blast and ends Hypercharge on use. "Drill" attack Generates 10 Battery.
-Drill - weaponskill: Line AoE. Generates 40 Heat.
-Air Anchor - weaponskill: No other changes.

The base abilities with similar usage rates to the current ones. Drill and Hypercharge can overcap Heat if not careful. Generates 50 Battery.


"Power tool" abilities/weaponskills: The gimmicks of MCH

Anything. Melee Chainsaw, Debilitator revealing Mustadio positionals that you need to hit, Turrets/Queen, a cast time Snipe attack. Following the 20 Heat = 10 Battery conversion, there's free reign to place anything here, kind of like new SMN but even more freeform.

[Atmaweapon510]

With the above changes we could also do the following:

Personal utility: Rocket Charge
-Greatly increases movement speed for 5 seconds. (Lost Swift movement speed).


Cooldown resetter: Recharge - GCD ability
-Increases Battery by 10. Fully recharges Battery outside of combat.


Passives:
Trigger Happy I/II/III/IV
-Reduces weaponskill cast and recast times by 5/10/15/20% (Hypercharge is now a 25% recast reduction to keep cast times at 1.5s)

Improved Rocket Charge:
-Hitting a weakpoint from Debilitator increases Rocket Charge duration and lowers the cooldown.

-Clean shot now grants 10 Heat in addition to 10 Battery.
-Spreadshot/Scattershot now grant 20 Heat.

With this included with the above, you can Heat blast every basic combo and Auto-Crossbow every basic AoE. This means that every attack averages to 5 battery and a base rotation without tools recharges 100 battery every 40 seconds. With the above "Baseline" tools, Drill, Hypercharge, and Air Anchor, this changes to a recharge every 30 seconds, mimicking the current cadence of the job.

In addition, the main draw of the MCH over other ranged and SAM/BLM as pure dps would become APM. These changes would make MCH the job with both the highest APM in the game coupled with the most freeform attack order possible. The Powertool system gives you about a minute with which you can choose where to slot your melee combo, your positionals, your AI, etc... but at the same time you are constantly pressured by the speed of your rotation as you have to be constantly hitting buttons while not wasting anything.

Rework Barrel Stabilizer a bit to work better with 120 second burst cycles and attach an attack to it like Ogi Namikiri:

Barrel stabilizer
Grants 12 stacks of Barrel stabilizer. Using a weaponskill expends a stack to generate 5 heat. Grants Blast Cannon ready for 30 seconds.

Blast Cannon
Deals 1200 Potency damage, dealing 65% less damage to enemies near. base 3.0s cast time with base 5.0s recast time. (Can't be reassembled) Basically the Aetheromatic auger from the Diadem.


Now some people are thinking "Melee abilities? Cast times? Positionals? How are these fun? Why saddle MCH with mechanics like these?" Well I can attest as a BLM/RDM that the fun's not from melee or cast times, its with getting away with melee and cast times. Also, MCH lacks unique personal utility, I thought about adding a rocket superspeed mode to it, which happens to completely round out the kit. Imagine this scenario:

You use Debilitator, but the weakpoint is on the opposite side of any enemy. At this point, you charge in with Chainsaw, Rocket charge, run through the enemy to snipe their weakpoint, Chainsaw second hit, spin to the next weakpoint and snipe it, Chainsaw third hit, run back to your original position within 5 seconds flat because Lost Swift level speed is stupidly fast. And if you get hit by mechanics? That's on you you were too greedy like SAM or BLM and got hit when you could have placed this combo anywhere within your minute long cycle and not lost usage of it. It also keeps this rework from becoming SMN 2.0 levels of bland, giving you something a little dynamic to work with.

Finally, there's Flamethrower. In my opening post, I stated that an attack like this would be good if MCH ever needed to realign cooldowns. Well with a 110ish cooldown cycle on the highest apm job, Flamethrower with single-target potency with aoe falloff damage is now worthy of a level 70 capstone ability. You can use it for its entire duration to realign with Raid buffs and give your fingers a break. With its 60 second cooldown, you can even break this into two sets of 5 second Flamethrower windows. In fact, you have a lot of options around where to place it because of the 55ish second freeform cycles. You could even stack skillspeed and go for 90 second cycles, forgoing Flamethrower and relying on good resource management to get a double Power tool window instead.

[Thi]

Trigger Happy I/II/III/IV
-Reduces weaponskill cast and recast times by 5/10/15/20% (Hypercharge is now a 25% recast reduction to keep cast times at 1.5s)

This, bring on higher APM.

[Kaedys]

Trigger Happy I/II/III/IV
-Reduces weaponskill cast and recast times by 5/10/15/20% (Hypercharge is now a 25% recast reduction to keep cast times at 1.5s)

I'm all for increasing APM. However one issue with making Hypercharge skills work with recast reduction, and tbh with introducing baseline recast reduction in general, is that it makes the job even _more_ susceptible to the impact of latency.

Basically, animation locks are a thing. The animation lock for the majority of instant skills is 600ms, but that timer doesn't start counting until your client receives the packet back from the server. The client does a provisional animation lock before that, which is not subtracted from the server-communicated animation lock. So your animation lock for instant skills is going to be 600ms plus twice your latency (you have to wait for the packet from your client telling the server you cast, and then the packet from the server telling your client that it succeeded and to start the animation lock "clock"). 1.5s already only leaves about ~300ms buffer across both skills, or ~150ms per skill, which means more than ~75ms latency and you're clipping even on single weaves. If you start lowering that with skill speed, it becomes a much larger problem. That's why literally every 1.5s GCD in the game (to my knowledge) cannot be mutated by skill speed, because the timing around weaving on them is already super tight.

That's even more true for double-weaving on a hasted GCD. 20% passive recast reduction means a 2.0s GCD. If you try to double-weave that, that's ~200ms buffer across all 3 skills. That starts clipping at only 34ms. That's why SAM is only at 13% (~63ms), NIN at 15% (~55ms), and why MNK tries to avoid double-weaving. By comparison, an unmodified 2.5s GCD can be double-weaved without clipping as high as ~116ms, and in theory can be triple-weaved at < ~12ms. MCH is already a bit notoriously susceptible to latency clipping. I don't think they should be pushing too much more passive recast until they properly fix how animation locking works (ie. either have the client be the one that determines the animation locking, with the server simply verifying that there's close to the expected spacing between abilities, or have the client subtract the already-elapsed lock time from the server-returned lock time).

[Atmaweapon510]

I'm all for increasing APM. However one issue with making Hypercharge skills work with recast reduction, and tbh with introducing baseline recast reduction in general, is that it makes the job even _more_ susceptible to the impact of latency...

My actual rework suggestion post was pretty lengthy, but I took all of that into account by designing it so you're never forced to double weave or even single weave under a 1.5 second cooldown window. Heat Blast and Auto-crossbow are just straight heat spenders that are used outside the 1.5 gcd Hypercharge window so you're never forced into the current loop of 1.5s Heatblast-> ogcd. Meanwhile the Battery = Cooldowns rework solves the rest of the ogcd woes because you don't have to hit them off of cooldown, you have free reign to rearrange them wherever it's optimal within a 30/60s cycle. Finally, Hypercharge isn't actually used under burst windows in this rework since Heat Blast is replaced by Wildfire, you ideally use it before the window so you can land the Wildfire finisher inside of it. The actual burst windows would be your burst tool attacks at 2.0 seconds each, giving you the ability to use 7 ogcds within 15 seconds of raid buffs at high ping.

[Jirah]

Heat needs to be reworked it’s not fun it’s not exciting and ping reliance is a b****. I think that essentially is my biggest issue with the job, its that its only phase is so boring. What’s sad is Reapers’s Enshroud could’ve been a great Hypercharge substitute but now that it exists it’s kinda hard or pointless to try to mold a unique mechanic out of it without reworking it. Throwing Battery in there too because the turret system is utter rubbish and Queen can be outdid by freaking Lead Shot on a gauge CD, and is likely to never change due to Devs hatred toward pet jobs and the spaghetti Code forcing their hand at easier solutions.

For the intangible I firmly believe MCH DPS is way to low, coming from me who doesn’t care about numbers that’s saying something. BRD and DNC has zero business out DPS-ing it and MCH at the very least should rival NIN with its lack of meaningful support and shorter kit than most melee. But that can easily be fixed in a patch unlike it’s more tangible issues.

Don’t mind keeping Drill I Drill II or Drill III, but everything else is up to redefinition. I doubt they can make MCH kit more shallow so I’m all for a rework