Machinist feels pretty good now.

[Soge01]

So.... Can we get Flamethrower fixed and Bishop Turret back, please?

I often find myself wondering why I even have Flamethrower on my hotbar when Shotgun, Chainsaw and Bioblaster are all superior to it in every way.

And with Queen Automata being only a single target attacker, it would be nice to have Bishop Turret back, so Machinist has a an alternative turret that specializes in attacking groups of enemies

[Eorzean_username]

Machinist changes were a band-aid on a severed limb.

Yes, you can get 5 shots of Heat Blast off now, even if you live in Antarctica.

However, if you need the 5-stack system to fit 5 Heat Blasts in, then you will almost-certainly still clip your GCD if you try to weave during those 1.5s GCDs.

Therefore, this design still places high-ping MCH in a situation where the clipping caused to avoid overcapping Gauss/Rico charges will drift and derange your rotation over time, as well as necessarily push potency outside of the buff windows by which Jobs live-or-die now.

Are the 6.30 changes an improvement? Yes, in the same way that being fed a diet of 100% raisins is technically an improvement over being fed a diet of 100% chunks of concrete.

Is MCH now in an actually healthy state? No, I do not think MCH is there yet. But I am sympathetic that right now, MCH players must feel euphoric to have received any sort of positive attention at all from their neglectful and unstable parent. And, admittedly, for players who already had adequate latency to play MCH, the 6.30 changes are just a straight-up and fairly chunky performance buff — which is certainly nothing to scoff at.

However, I feel pretty strongly that the overall "band-aid" here has fundamentally failed to both understand, and to actually address, the most fundamental issues affecting MCH design, and so I think "Daily reminder that Flamethrower is bad" and "Surprise, I miss Turrets" — while both perfectly-cromulent personal opinions — seems lower on the priority list than, "Maybe this game should not force people to weave during 1.5s GCDs, all factors considered"... and so on.

[Soge01]

Could the GCD clipping be fixed if Wildfire wasn't on a timer, but instead automatically goes off after a certain amount of attacks used by Machinist?

Admittedly, I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the intricate technical issues each job has.

[Seraphor]

I often find myself wondering why I even have Flamethrower on my hotbar when Shotgun, Chainsaw and Bioblaster are all superior to it in every way.

Chainsaw and Bioblaster, yes.
But Flamethrower has more potency than Scattershot.
The question is, does the heat gauge generation from Scattershot make up for it?

I think they should stick heat gauge generation on Flamethrower, and then make it share a cooldown with Air Anchor, so it basically becomes the AoE equivalent of it.

[Seraphor]

Machinist changes were a band-aid on a severed limb.

Yes, you can get 5 shots of Heat Blast off now, even if you live in Antarctica.

However, if you need the 5-stack system to fit 5 Heat Blasts in, then you will almost-certainly still clip your GCD if you try to weave during those 1.5s GCDs.

Therefore, this design still places high-ping MCH in a situation where the clipping caused to avoid overcapping Gauss/Rico charges will drift and derange your rotation over time, as well as necessarily push potency outside of the buff windows by which Jobs live-or-die now.

Are the 6.30 changes an improvement? Yes, in the same way that being fed a diet of 100% raisins is technically an improvement over being fed a diet of 100% chunks of concrete.

Is MCH now in an actually healthy state? No, I do not think MCH is there yet. But I am sympathetic that right now, MCH players must feel euphoric to have received any sort of positive attention at all from their neglectful and unstable parent. And, admittedly, for players who already had adequate latency to play MCH, the 6.30 changes are just a straight-up and fairly chunky performance buff — which is certainly nothing to scoff at.

However, I feel pretty strongly that the overall "band-aid" here has fundamentally failed to both understand, and to actually address, the most fundamental issues affecting MCH design, and so I think "Daily reminder that Flamethrower is bad" and "Surprise, I miss Turrets" — while both perfectly-cromulent personal opinions — seems lower on the priority list than, "Maybe this game should not force people to weave during 1.5s GCDs, all factors considered"... and so on.

So it's fine as long as you don't live in Antarctica?
Weaving in 1.5s windows has never been a problem for me, and my ping isn't amazing.

[Shurrikhan]

So it's fine as long as you don't live in Antarctica?
Weaving in 1.5s windows has never been a problem for me, and my ping isn't amazing.

We're trying to fit two .5s animation periods, each with an additional uptime cost of roundtrip ping, right? So, we'd just need to be under 250 ms roundtrip ping, or what the game would call 125 ms, I'd imagine.

Perhaps that should be a bit lower than 125ms, for safety, if there's any need to account for time between the query's actual start and that of the server query check.

But... honestly, seems like there are a fair few of us who'd still fall above that.

The game quite simply shouldn't charge us twice our ping's worth of potential uptime after each animation. Once I could understand, but there's no reason for the game to then reset the animation timer on server confirmation of the action.


EDIT (for clarity):

Heat Blast itself, as with any other action, has a minimum period in which no other actions can be cast for a fixed length of 0.5s seconds plus whatever your roundtrip ping is (because you start the 0.5s animation lock timer and then it is reset when the server sends back confirmation of that action). From there, Gauss/Ricochet takes up another fixed mutually exclusive period of 0.5s, plus whatever your roundtrip ping is. That is still a "single weave."

A 1.5s GCD does not give you 1.5s of "GCD gap". It gives you, at 0 ping, exactly 1.0 second of "GCD gap". To double-weave in 1.5s, one would have to have literally 0 ping. To single-weave in 1.5s, one would have to have <250 ms roundtrip ping (what most games would show as <125 ms).

But many XIV players have pings exceeding 125 ms and will therefore lose uptime. That is a problem that would be easily solved if the game just didn't reset that minimum animation period upon server confirmation, in which case every animation time would be just 0.5s instead of 0.5s+roundtrip_ping.

[Seraphor]

We're trying to fit two .5s animation periods, each with an additional uptime cost of roundtrip ping, right? So, we'd just need to be under 300 ms roundtrip ping, or what the game would call 150 ms, I'd imagine.

Perhaps that should be a bit lower than 150ms, for safety, if there's any need to account for time between the query's actual start and that of the server query check.

But... honestly, seems like there are a fair few of us who'd still fall above that.

The game quite simply shouldn't charge us twice our ping's worth of potential uptime after each animation. Once I could understand, but there's no reason for the game to then reset the animation timer on server confirmation of the action.

Two? No, you don't need to double-weave Ricochet and Gauss in each 1.5s window. If you've depleted at least 2 charges of each already, you can just alternate them.
Double-weave during your regular 2.5s skills sure, to get those charges out of the way before you go into Hypercharge.

[Shurrikhan]

Two? No, you don't need to double-weave Ricochet and Gauss in each 1.5s window. If you've depleted at least 2 charges of each already, you can just alternate them.
Double-weave during your regular 2.5s skills sure, to get those charges out of the way before you go into Hypercharge.

The GCD itself has an animation lock. If it were a double-weave, there'd be 3, which means you'd need literally 0 ping to do so within the 1.5s seconds.

Heat Blast GCD - Heat Blast ICD - GB/Rico ICD =
1.5 - (0.5s + RT_Ping) - (0.5s + RT_Ping) =
0.5s - 2xRT_Ping

You can support at most a roundtrip ping of 250 ms.

[Deceptus]

So.... Can we get Flamethrower fixed and Bishop Turret back, please?

I often find myself wondering why I even have Flamethrower on my hotbar when Shotgun, Chainsaw and Bioblaster are all superior to it in every way.

And with Queen Automata being only a single target attacker, it would be nice to have Bishop Turret back, so Machinist has a an alternative turret that specializes in attacking groups of enemies

Flamethrower could be changed to Electrical Charge and use as an AoE battery Dump for trash pulls. Because right now there's no use for battery gauge outside of Queen / Single Target.

[Zomkei]

We're trying to fit two .5s animation periods, each with an additional uptime cost of roundtrip ping, right? So, we'd just need to be under 300 ms roundtrip ping, or what the game would call 150 ms, I'd imagine.

Perhaps that should be a bit lower than 150ms, for safety, if there's any need to account for time between the query's actual start and that of the server query check.

But... honestly, seems like there are a fair few of us who'd still fall above that.

The game quite simply shouldn't charge us twice our ping's worth of potential uptime after each animation. Once I could understand, but there's no reason for the game to then reset the animation timer on server confirmation of the action.

The GCD itself has an animation lock. If it were a double-weave, there'd be 3, which means you'd need literally 0 ping to do so within the 1.5s seconds.

i'm very confused by these statements. you're saying you're double weaving ricochet and gauss between your heat blasts? because if so, that's why you're having issues. you're supposed to single weave / alternate as Seraphor said. and im not sure what you mean by there being an animation lock? heat blast, or wild fire, or anything like that doesnt have an animation lock. flame thrower (sort of) does, but i dont recall anything else having one