Machinest Further Nerfed PvE?

[Absurdity]

Enjoy your AoE weaponskills being only worth over 8+ targets now.

Their almost militant refusal to buff Auto Crossbow is really the baffling part. They either don't understand how Machinist works (which is honestly likely) or they want you to throw that thing off your hotbars.

[Absurdity]

At least I can use Auto Crossbow as a Heat-dump in certain odd circumstances.

The problem with Auto Crossbow isn't as obvious at first.
It is supposed to be your AoE equivalent to Blazing Shot, but in reality it is only a damage gain over simply using your single-target heat spender on 5 targets IF you still have stacks of Double Check and Checkmate available.
If you do not have any stacks of Double Check or Checkmate available then it is only a damage gain over Blazing Shot on 8 or more targets (which basically means never in the current dungeon design of hitting a wall after two trash packs), since it doesn't reduce the cooldown on your oGCDs.

Flamethrower is funnily enough still more useful than Auto Crossbow, because it ticks every second instead of every server tick (roughly every 3 seconds).
It's a damage gain over Scattergun on 3+ targets or technically 2+ targets if you can't make use of the +10 heat that Scattergun gives you for some reason.
You can use it to delay having to dump heat into Hypercharge since it doesn't generate any.
And because it functions similar to a DoT you can snapshot party buffs for it's full duration.

Yes, Machinist AoE is unnecessarily complicated.