The State of Machinist in DT - Let's talk about it (again).

[Carighan]

My secret is that half my suggestions for this game are just things we had in HW and StB.

As always, people keep hyping class-design of HW and SB, but merely because you need to look across the pond more. "Machinist already was a debuffer" is technically true. But their debuffing back then was so mechanically rubbish and design-wise unusable, it's no wonder it got removed. Instead, look at how other games do "debuffer" as a job (and more importantly, look at why Debuffer was one of the three MMORPG class roles that got dropped when the genre shifted from 6 roles to the 3 roles that now form "the trinity", that's important). Or why they don't. And what remained, which is DoT-centric jobs, they cause a ton of debuffs, but their point is that they're a DPS dealer that uses multiple stacked and/or constantly cared-for DoTs to deal their damage.

Which IMO is doable if you want a "debuffy" feel, but also would totally not fit Machinist as a concept. Even if one were to make the Flamethrower the primary identity.

(edit: Sorry, this is such a pet peeve of mine. As if the absolutely rubbish way jobs worked in HW and SB would be in any form usable in a game that doesn't want to feel like it's 2001. As if just having more skills on your hotbar somehow makes a game "better" to play, ignoring the very concept of complexity vs depth and/or how games with just 2-3 buttons still achieve deep gameplay systems from them. As if RPG-y identity cannot be separate from mechanical implementation, or in fact has to be for an MMORPG. HW and SB are, if anything, a huge part of why the game feels so wonky nowadays, because they tried to push it into a direction which even back then was long outdated and proven to not work. Other MMORPGs existed - and exist. We can look at what worked and didn't work. And nowadays players talk as if bringing that back would be a good thing. Sorry, but... what?!)