Machinist needs some reworking

[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.

[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

[Jirah]

There are a couple of reasons to why. One of the biggest complaints people had then was that they felt that the job didn't look anything like a Final Fantasy MCH in terms of how the job is represented in other games. People claimed it was more gunner than MCH. Funny as there is a vocal crowd who wants to go back to that. Second was that of every job in the game at the time, it had the highest skill floor, and lowest skill ceiling. That coupled with how heat worked then, you were either playing the job exactly right, or were playing it wrong and it showed in how big your wildfire was, which at the time was big enough to sometimes yank enmity off the tank. Sure it felt good when everything came together, but it didn't often do that for a lot of players due to how much had to be crammed into that Wildfire window. All of it entirely dependent on ping as well. Strange how that problem still persists, but everything around it has been both nerfed to the ground, and simplified. Speaking of simplified, It ran up against Bard at the time. Many people consider Stormblood Bard to be the best that job has ever been. It was strong, it had useful utility, it was much easier to pick up and play right while still having room to play the job well. On a side note there was so much hate for Gauss Barrel then visually. Maybe if it was a sometimes thing you had on in a fight, but you always had it on, and it made most guns look stupid.

I will agree that it is very strange how Flamethrower, an attack that has been pretty universally hated since it was added has remain untouched. Especially since it lost the only use it had in Stormblood.

As a SB fanboy I HATED Gauss Barrel! Nothing about the skill made a lick of sense and could’ve been a trait, instead making all your guns looks ridiculous. Good riddance.

As a old world MCH main my biggest issues with SB was having no way to activate overheat manually without the long way or using flamethrower (funnily enough PVP MCH back then had a skill called Stun Gun which did the very thing I wanted from SB, got you overheat) and the only skills that broke up the 1-2-3 Load up rotation were basically Round every 15 seconds and Hot shot (which was like inverse death design on reaper) every 60 sec and a Cooldown (Heat blast) whenever you creeped too far into the red zone now and again. also some minor bloat issues, like the Gauss barrel thing, Rapid fire not being tied to heat, Blank and Heartstrike being a thing and Ricochet being very boring on a 60s CD. SHB essentially ruined everything and EW added nothing

[LauraAdalena]

-It has a slew of mechanics that make it scale poorly with secondary stats. Hypercharge windows devalue skillspeed, Wildfire and Reassemble devalue crit and direct hit.

Actually not so on Crit. I can’t speak for DH but Crit affects the multiplier given to a Crit, which is why jobs like Warrior and Machinist actually value them more. Skill speed however yeah.

-Automaton Queen can't be controlled outside of its initial summon. It can end up attacking something you don't want to focus.

This will probably stay that way because they don’t like pet jobs.

-Flamethrower is useless. It's kind of sad because I believe an attack like this could serve a purpose in a-

I have to stop you there. First off, it’s not entirely useless. Yes the uses are AOE and a niche use for when bosses are away and come back, but not entirely so. However, they did make flamethrower useful once. And enough people complained that they reworked the job entirely. So I don’t think this will ever change, no matter how much I want it to because I enjoy flamethrower’s animation a lot. In fact I fear for them removing it entirely.

The devs already admitted that Machinist is "complete" as it is and can't really add much, so it's sort of at a dead end point. That's why the Automaton Queen ended up with MCH's highest potency attack that lacks any input. The only recourse is a rework.

I disagree. People always call for reworks now when they don’t enjoy a job, but that will more than likely uproot people who enjoy the job which has already happened with machinist in the past. However I also disagree with their statement.

Machinist lacks key AOE skills that other jobs have. One that provides a gauge dump on AOE, one that builds gauge on AOE, and a skill that reliably fills that gauge at the beginning for an opener. Now if that seems confusing because their heat gauge has all of that then you aren’t looking in the right place. The Queen Automaton not having any of those feels severely underwhelming because of this issue. In dungeons why would you dump a single-target with an explosion that doesn’t really add much on AOE when you can save it for the next boss when people will have buffs to make the boss go infinitely Faster? That trash taking the explosion doesn’t benefit as much as the boss by far. And being the only job lacking that gauge builder in the opener I feel is part of why its damage and how satisfying it is to play are so low.

[Atmaweapon510]

Automaton Queen not being usable in AoE has nothing to do with how underwhelming it feels. AQ is a glorified DoT and MCH does build 50 gauge to use it in within the opener with the inclusion of Chain Saw. It has no impact, no punch that comes with pressing it as opposed to say, Apex Arrow. The delay between summoning the AQ or Wildfire and the effect actually dealing its main burst of damage is too unnoticeable with how busy MCH is, and the fact that they're oGCDs means there's little weight and consequence as to when or how they're used.

It's not even that I hate delayed damage effects, I feel like they would work extremely well on a job like say, Time Mage. Imagine casting Comet which deals huge damage after 30 seconds, but a bulk of your kit is about speeding up how fast Comet lands so your actual gameplay involves smashing as many comets into your enemy as you possibly can. AQ is just an afterthought compared to something like that.

If AQ and auto-turret worked more like Bahamut or Phoenix where they attack your target, and its finishing move involved actually ordering them to ram into an enemy and self-destruct, that would feel a whole lot better than the current version. If you want an example, there's a game called Dungeon Fighter Online with a Mechanic class, and the way they use their Detonate ability to order their robots to self destruct has so much flair in the animation that I want for Machinist to have.

[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).

[elioaiko]

I want them to instead of summoning Queen and forgetting her, to let us pilot it. People like mecha and it would be machinist themed.

Similar to RPR's Enshroud or even old SMN Dreadwyrm stance. MCH calls down the mech, and hops into it (kinda like Dva from OW). This changes their GCD skills into different ranged abilities, missiles, lasers with a final attack being a nuke.