【Suggestion】MCH "Pure DPS"

[Hanayumi]

Mch, prolly best single target than any other jobs (personally think), really just needs potency increases to it. However its, AoE is total garbo, needs changes a plenty to it, for now id just be happy if they increased its damage overall proper...

[LibitIncarne]

bring back hot shot's old effect, change nothing else, and MCH is top tier again

[ForsakenRoe]

Change Flamethrower to be a true OGCD again, which deals 150p on use, and then however much per second afterwards as you channel it.

Add a line to Flamethrower's effect which says 'initial potency is tripled (450p) when used on a target suffering from Bioblaster'.

Now in the 1min burst window, we swap a non-Reassembled Drill (600p) to a Bio+FT combo (300+450p), for a gain of 150p per minute.

This also makes both Bioblaster and Flamethrower see use outside of EX roulette, and feeds into the MCH identity by having two more 'tools' in the single-target rotation

I dunno if 300p more per 2min is enough to solve the MCH issue, but it can't make the situation any worse

[Andevom]

At least MCH is still top tier in PotD.

[Akamadoshi]

At least MCH is still top tier in PotD.

As a MCH main on all deep dungeons + solo , yesyesyesyes!!!
Out of Deep dungeon? Nonono. People talk about the heatshot "ping issue" as I play with 250 ping sometimes, I never had the issue.
True issue is: Queen never starts fighting because the sevrer lagging, nobody has spoken about it, but maybe because I put the timing wrong. I don't know, she seems very.... ready to retire.
(If you think this is my own mistake, please tell me!!! anyone who reads this. I wondered about this also!)

[Shurrikhan]

I just wish they'd either commit to selfish DPS levels of damage, or give it some support back. Right now it has neither, outside of role skills (and Tactician, which might as well be a role skill, since it's identical to Shield Samba and Troubador anyway).

That's a matter of not waiting it to be punished for packing any limits to relative mobility (neither limited range nor any car times), not a matter of it being judged as annoying less than "selfish". At time of writing, its damage is leagues above the rest of its role. It has more rDPS than BRD, DNC, or SMN even without having any raid buffs, and when then adding in its actual exploitation value from others' buffs (-> cDPS), MCH is mid-tier despite being a physical ranged.

Given that the interdependence of a buffer is slightly higher than a non-buffer, as one provides a lower base contribution than the other, we would normally expect the more finicky to provide faintly more cDPS. Instead, effectively, we get three flavors of unique actual utility across Bard's Minne, Dancer's Waltz, and MCH's Dismantle, but MCH leads in cDPS and even rDPS in addition to the obvious aDPS.

____________

Moreover, how would stripping identical effects of their unique names and animations benefit parity in any way? It's purely aesthetic, so the parity would be identical, yet you'd have dropped aesthetic differences nonetheless helpful to job flavor just for kicks. Why?

[Shurrikhan]

Plus doesn’t making [MCH] a pure selfish dps make it literally unbalanceable?

Not really, or else it'd be impossible to balance MNK/DRG against SAM, within the melee role.

Any buff to MCH is going to be a buff to BRD too

That's not how buffs work, though.

Yes, MCH and BRD would have to be able to compete with each other, but you're conflating intra-role and inter-role balance here.

Intra- and inter-role balance are two different beasts (or, at least, two very different steps). Moreover, we already have a fully selfish MCH and that doesn't make the problem of cDPS parity across its role any more confusing than between SAM and MNK do for theirs, so it's not as if the one necessarily bottlenecks the other to some unique degree among Physical Ranged.

Likewise if Machinist’s personal dps is higher than the rDPS Bard/Dancer output, it just invalidates their existence.

Judging by the typical standard (95th percentile Savage logs), MCH's rDPS is already (barely) higher than that of BRD or DNC, to be fair. Though yes, that would be a (slight) problem (dwarfed by the relative underperformance of the role as a whole) if it didn't at least flip in favor of BRD/DNC nearer to perfect play. [Honestly, aside from PIC, intrarole balance is really solid.]

Ideally, assuming equally valuable utility, jobs should have, across sufficient sample sizes, roughly equal cDPS within their roles on average across a given tier and none too sharply different cDPS across individual fights given near- (but not necessarily wholly) perfect play.

I mean, I highly doubt people would give their melee/BLM spot to a MCH just so they could also take a Bard or Dancer (which is impossible anyway because I think it’d still break lb generation?)

For that, one may as well simply collapse all Ranged into a single role, LB-wise. I'm not sure why we have 3 melee sub-roles and 2 ranged sub-roles but force said 3 melee roles to compete for 2 slots while forcing 1 each of the ranged sub-roles to be taken.

Granted, since physical ranged would then have to compete with magical ranged, we'd have to buff the physical ranged to be more tightly competitive (instead of relying on an arbitrary shoehorn).

And if that then meant you had jobs easier to get near-full (and sufficient for all contents even with minimally viable gear) value out of than others, you would want to slightly raise the skill expression available to the easiest somewhat as not to discourage use of harder jobs among skilled but imperfect players. But I'd argue Bard, Dancer, and Machinist would more than likely each be more enjoyable for having done so.

(For MCH, my preference would be to actually make the different weapons, you know, feel at least remotely different. Give me the shotgun, the sniper from PvP, etc., as real and meaningful options with branching ideal timings. Imo, MCH should be about having the right tool for nearly any situation -- noticeably so as long as you know how to prepare just right in advance to maximally leverage it.)

[Connor]

Moreover, how would stripping identical effects of their unique names and animations benefit parity in any way? It's purely aesthetic, so the parity would be identical, yet you'd have dropped aesthetic differences nonetheless helpful to job flavor just for kicks. Why?

Role skills don’t need to have the same animation by necessity; we saw that during Stormblood with Refresh/Tactician having different character animations. It was the same particle effects sure, but I don’t see why that has to be by necessity either, if the animations can be unique.

Plus, there is the sad truth that we live in a game with (apparently) limited design space. Putting literally identical skills (i.e 10%DMG reduction on phys ranged) in the role skills section just frees up an additional ‘ability’ slot for them to actually do something unique with the jobs instead of just ‘exact same ability different particles’.

Isn’t that like saying Scholar and Sage are two completely separate and unique jobs because all their nearly 1:1 ability counterparts are visually different and draw from (very slightly) different systems? Even though they’re effectively the same thing at their core?

I mean, why wouldn’t you want skill duplicates moved into the role skill section? When the alternative is forcing every job within that role to learn effectively the exact same skill; the only tangible difference between them is learn level (for idk ultimates or MINE or something). I’d rather have the extra space for more unique and interesting abilities and effects personally. Wasn’t that one of the reasons they added role skills in the first place? Along with deleting cross-classing and needing a replacement lol

[Shurrikhan]

Role skills don’t need to have the same animation by necessity; we saw that during Stormblood with Refresh/Tactician having different character animations. It was the same particle effects sure, but I don’t see why that has to be by necessity either, if the animations can be unique.

Plus, there is the sad truth that we live in a game with (apparently) limited design space. Putting literally identical skills (i.e 10%DMG reduction on phys ranged) in the role skills section just frees up an additional ‘ability’ slot for them to actually do something unique with the jobs instead of just ‘exact same ability different particles’.

A few things:

1. Having the unique animations per skill requires unique skill IDs per skill. So, it would save zero space to remove the name and icon. In fact, you'd now have to add three around this new "Role Action".
   
   
2. The game still stores the animations, icons, etc., of removed (and even never-used) abilities (as we know from mods being able to swap animations to those of said removed or even never-added skills [Power Slash, Brimstone, etc], so removing the unique names and icons would also save no space. It would be solely a net increase in space used.
   
   
3. These amounts do not remotely matter anyways. The "space" they consume is primarily client-side and, altogether, is a fraction of a fraction of a percent, while spell/action IDs already allow for many orders of magnitude more actions than we have.

Isn’t that like saying Scholar and Sage are two completely separate and unique jobs because all their nearly 1:1 ability counterparts are visually different and draw from (very slightly) different systems? Even though they’re effectively the same thing at their core?

???

No, it's saying that having the same effect but different names and icons is marginally but noticeably better than having the same effect, name, and icon -- That two-to-three points of job flavor is better than (n)one.

How did you arrive at this reduction?

I mean, why wouldn’t you want skill duplicates moved into the role skill section?

Because it's no easier to equip the skill from the Role Action menu than from the Job Action Menu despite, again, the latter permitting unique names, icons, and animations.

I’d rather have the extra space for more unique and interesting abilities and effects personally.

Purposely removing job flavor from among what we've had has never caused us to get more job flavor in other ways -- especially not in unique or interesting ones.

Wasn’t that one of the reasons they added role skills in the first place? Along with deleting cross-classing and needing a replacement lol

The latter was the only actual reason. (Removing cross-class was done to remove the "irritations" of being incentivized to multi-class and being punished (or, punishing one's group) if refusing to do so, but that's a separate matter.)

Role Actions "saved"... nothing -- neither server space nor hotbar space. But by originally giving 10 Role Actions and allowing players access only to 5, they were able to maintain a brief pretense of customization, allowing them a new "feature" as a selling point despite its utter lack of any real benefit.

Ultimately, Role Actions' largest effects were just to (A) slightly nerf Monk skill expression (primarily via competitive GCD thresholds and rotational/positional flexibility) through the removal of XC-Fracture (though that's arguably just the removal of Cross-Class / "Additional Skills") and (B) nerf Dark Knight dungeon kit through the gutting of Low Blow. The addition of Rescue, Arm's Length, etc., could as easily have been done through cross-class as before or by separate job actions, be that with identical effects or otherwise.