Why do the devs hate MCH so much?

[MikkoAkure]

I had been wanting to play the class since we were told in the 1.0 beta that Musketeer wasn't going to be in the beta, but it was totally going to be in the release version of the game. And then after that we were told that it was going to be out in a patch. And then it along with Arcanist were put on indefinite hold as the original game fell apart. This seems to have been foreshadowing for everything else to come with the class and its future incarnation.

ARR is released and Musketeer is nowhere to be seen while Arcanist gets a complete makeover with the weird rod things replaced by books and traps replaced by Carbuncle. Marauder moved from the pirate ship and was placed in the Coral Tower, Musketeer's 1.0 guild building, though the Musketeer symbol remained so there was hope. But finally in HW the class was released in Ishgard! with my favorite 1.0 NPC in the story! I immediately set the MSQ aside after unlocking MCH and excitedly leveled it up but ended up not being impressed.


I don't know where a lot of people find love for HW and SB MCH though. The standard rotation was super RNG and it didn't feel fun to have to press 1 over and over because the Twelve hate you. The NA servers at the time had my traffic go through Level 3 and I had slow connections immediately at 7pm every day which made the issues with wildfire even worse. BRD could do everything better and with less effort and there seemed to be no place for MCH.

SB came around and introduced the heating mechanic that didn't seem intuitive at all and the best rotation somehow involved using flamethrower for part of its cycle for heat? And there were also certain times when and when not to use the gauss barrel? I tried it for a little bit and ended up not liking it at all and went back to other classes.


ShB was a very big improvement and made Machinst more of an actual "machinst" instead of a "person with a gun and a robot sometimes". The issue is that with DNC released, I feel like the other existing physical ranged classes went through an identity crisis that I feel like SE hasn't properly addressed since. I wish that SE would revisit these 3 classes before PLD and DRG since it seems to be that they just simply exist and there's no reason to play them unless you really dig the aesthetic. Wildfire and the Queen have steep DPS loss if the boss jumps away while either are active. The class is very boring when not in Wildfire or Overheated mode. My beloved Bishop disco ball is gone, as is Grenado Shot. Flamethrower is still useless.


MCH should be at least as powerful as SMN, which it might be by now, but it also needs more from its abilities. The standard 1-2-3 does nothing except slowly boost your gauge and otherwise has no interaction with any other abilities the class has. Wildfire/Overheated mode unlocks a new rotation for less than 10 seconds. Then there's a couple of random powerful abilities thrown in there that help boost your gauges and a robot pet that does its own thing separate from the rest of your class that you can just throw out whenever your gauge is ready. There's just no unity in it and it feels like a room of people had a lot of ideas and they just threw them all together and made compromises. It also lacks party support like DNC and BRD have, but doesn't bring the DPS boosts you'd expect from losing those abilities.

At this point I think it needs another overhaul or at least some new gimmick to tie its abilities in more. I would not mind losing wildfire or hypercharge tbh. This may be heresy, but if they want it to be the "selfish" physical ranged DPS, they could reintroduce the gauss barrel and give it DPS like BLM at the cost of movement and cast timers. They've already made SMN basically the 4th ranged physical DPS by removing the vast majority of its casting timers so going in the opposite direction has precedence now. And hopefully they either remove flamethrower, change how it works, or make it worthwhile.