SE's treatment of MCH is a joke

[Alchemii]

Since MCH is a pure damage dealer with less supportive effect, how about some debuff like with ninja or viper ? Or having more mitigation based support, idk

Mch use to have those abilities. Rather than buffing the party, originally Mch would instead Debuff the boss. It didn't last as long, was mainly meant for ever other Wildfire Burst window, if I remember correctly. This is how it got away with being the more DPS Focused Physical Ranged at the time, cause it wasn't doing it as frequently.

[Hanzz96]

Mch use to have those abilities. Rather than buffing the party, originally Mch would instead Debuff the boss. It didn't last as long, was mainly meant for ever other Wildfire Burst window, if I remember correctly. This is how it got away with being the more DPS Focused Physical Ranged at the time, cause it wasn't doing it as frequently.

Then came the shadow bringers rework and its been downhill since

[Tint]

The real joke is they buffed MCH by 200 potency once every 2 minutes.

And at the same time they buffed WHM DoT by 55 potency. Which runs for 30 seconds. That's 220 potency over 2 minutes.


I know I know the numbers are not that easily compareable - but it's hilarious anyway >.>

[Hanzz96]

The real joke is they buffed MCH by 200 potency once every 2 minutes.

And at the same time they buffed WHM DoT by 55 potency. Which runs for 30 seconds. That's 220 potency over 2 minutes.


I know I know the numbers are not that easily compareable - but it's hilarious anyway >.>

Yeah MCH is a second class citizen in Eorzea

[Vyrerus]

MCH displacing caster in the party meta back in Heavensward until 4.1 must have really rustled Yoshi-P's jimmies.

Ever since they took away OG Hypercharge (20 second damage taken up on the boss), it's been a very cool job but also very middling to just bad, raid comp wise.

Kinda miss OG Wildfire as well. The reason it works like it does now is because it used to be a damage compiling skill. It'd deal 25% of the damage you dealt while it was active when its timer exploded. This allowed MCH to do some really nutty damage with it that was higher than any single skill's damage for a long time, particularly under raid buff aligned burst window.

Can't remember when, but they nerfed it down to what it is now where it gains set potency by number of weaponskills successfully landed during its duration. So it has a maximum allowable potency, and that potency never improves too much over the course of a tier. 1440 potency max but can't crit or D-hit. Essentially making it worse than D-Crit Chainsaw/Drill/Air Anchor because of how D-Crits scale with having more of the substat in a multiplicative fashion.

Imagine they set it back to being 1/4th of the damage you deal during its duration. You could land Drill x2, Chainsaw, Excavator, and Full Metal Field all in the window in addition to several weaves of Checkmate/Double Check and your auto attacks. Of course, that has its drawbacks. But if they really wanted to kick it up a notch, insisting that it doesn't D-crit, they could make it deal 100% of damage dealt during its window, always giving it a a huge number, probably to the point of being situationally OP.

But really all they need to do is just give MCH massive potency increases. Set the big tools to 700 potency+. Full Metal Field should be set to 1440 potency to match Wildfire. The standard combo needs an upkick to be higher potency than tanks. the oGCDs Check and Double Check should be non-diminishing AOE. Auto Crossbow should gain a trait that makes their CDs lower by 15, just like Blazing Shot.

[HyperiusUltima]

*snip*

The only reason they aren't buffing MCH is because they're still kneejerking over Ranged Meta back in Heavensward, when MCH powercreeped Casters out of a job due to DRG's Piercing Debuff. That's gone now, and it's extremely jarring they hadn't just baked the 200 potency into all their damage by now - in 6 years since they got rid of Type Debuffs.

MCH does not deserve to be like this, especially since it is now the de facto WORST DPS in the game. While you have other jobs that may not have that same damage as MCH towards the tip of their logs, you can't discount the raid buffs that all other jobs bring that aren't selfish on their own.

If anything, they need to just get rid of the role designation for Ranged and just compare Ranged as a whole. This means look at Casters and Ranged together. Of course, people are going to say "don't lump them together! Physical Ranged can move whenever without worrying about cast times!" Well, when PCT stops having every god damn utility under the sun plus a Raid Buff? That's when hell will freeze over because XIV Job Design Team loves to power creep things.

This is why we're seeing 2x Caster be a thing as of late: PCT is actually Ranged DPS with a new coat of paint as a Caster DPS. Even if 15% Damage Reduction is pretty good? PCT outperforms the 1% buff VASTLY in every metric on its own - if anything Savage is probably the only thing keeping it in check because of how they've tuned their outgoing damage. Regardless, people will still go for standard until we get into patch lull when people will be overgeared from Savage raids.

[Zakuyia]

Man imagine if they wanted to make mch support instead of selfish it should have a revive in form of defibulator, or just make mch station that either gives defence or offense for few seconds, or just allow mch to work by lore and create stuff in battle to give better support or offense to your team.

[Connor]

I feel like trying to balance a selfish dps in a subrole specifically designed to ‘support the party’ (as per job guide) was always doomed to fail. Like I don’t understand why they thought this would ever be a good balancing decision lol.

Either the selfish one is so strong you can ignore the support ones, or the support ones are so valuable nobody cares about the selfish one. They’re never going to be properly interchangeable because they serve two completely different functions (one does personal dps two do raid dps), and they’re basically impossible to balance correctly. I mean, even with the actual damage output between jobs being so small it’s still not exactly ‘balanced’ lol. And that’s not even considering balancing with dps outside of the sub-role, with Machinists being classed as ‘selfish dps’ then balanced as if they’re a supporter.

In my opinion they need to do one of two things:

-Either give Machinist actual party support appropriate for the role that’s distinct from what Bard/Dancer offer (i.e enemy debuffs).
- Remove them from the ‘physical ranged’ dps role and balance them as a melee, idk maybe Scouting. If they’re worried it’s not ‘complex enough’ to be balanced thus, then they can easily just add either PvP short cast times, or a ‘sweet spot’ mechanic where damage output is relative to distance from the enemy to the point it requires rapid repositioning (essentially emulating melee ‘uptime’ which according to Yoshi-P is like so super hard they just NEED to be the best jobs in the game lol)

[HyperiusUltima]

I feel like trying to balance a selfish dps in a subrole specifically designed to ‘support the party’ (as per job guide) was always doomed to fail. Like I don’t understand why they thought this would ever be a good balancing decision lol.

Yes, but no. Go take a hard look at Melees - we have MNK, RPR, DRG and NIN who all provide raid buffs while VPR and SAM are your selfish DPS. You can't quantify a DPS by 'support the party' alone. MCH having Dismantle makes sense as a way of being able to fit - but what doesn't match up is the raw potencies they have when you try to have them fight with DNC/BRD. This is because of Songs and Standard Step being a constant raid buff. MCH doesn't have this, and due to the fact that their potencies aren't outright beating their raid contribution, but the inverse(Raid Buffs beating out personal contribution) MCH is in a state where the job is just bad.

[Valence]

I've always been a proponent of bringing back things that should never have been deleted:

- Ammo and procs: I do believe were part of the core rphys identity and introduced a lot of randomness and chaos into the rotation, enough for it to require more upkeep and constant agency than most deterministic rotations.
- Raid buffs (old turret hypercharge), which are also core to rphys identity and made MCH able to compete with BRD on what the role was supposed to do. Current MCH doesnt fit well within its own role, and even runs contradictory to what is actually written on the job guide's website role descrption...

Is that DPS difference the limit between a wipe and a clear? I mean, I've had no issues playing MCH even if DNC or BRD outclass me in damage. Guess it's min ilvl issue for 1st week?

The damage outclass isn't that huge so no. The cDPS gap isn't really big between all rphys, but obviously bringing a BRD will give you a slight edge over DNC, and a slightly bigger edge over MCH right now.

And you'd probably start gaining even more damage by replacing your rphys with a second high damage job and I do feel that the only saving grace against this is the currently weak state of BLM, else you could see double caster double melee comps probably overcoming the 1% party bonus, which is the true, more immediate problem in my eyes. Some ranged are just allowed to compete with melees, while the rest are taxed either for raising, or for "mobility".

Just because "every job can clear" doesn't mean it's the best choice, SE. Machinist can clear it, but it doesn't scale with jobs, it scales with gear, and poorly at that compared to bard and dancer, who scale with gear plus the gear the party gets.

A selfish job will scale with raid buffs from others. This is a party game, not an individual job game in a vacuum. The problem of MCH isn't that it doesn't scale with raid buffs, it's that it doesn't scale as much as other selfish jobs. When you buff massively the top jobs as a BRD or DNC, you're buffing jobs that deal 10% more damage than a MCH. When you're being buffed by support jobs as a MCH, you're being buffed on an output that is 10% lower.

MCH is deceptively comparable to other selfish DPS, but not quite. If one wants to shine as a selfish dps, they need to top the charts, which MCH does not do. This can be bandaid fixed like SE enjoys doing over patches because it keeps falling behind as things progress, but it's not very... elegant nor satisfying.

Edit: it's possible we were saying the same thing though, sometimes hard to make from an internet forum medium.