Machinest Further Nerfed PvE?

[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.

[Zelda206]

So basically, let's take the tooltip for Chainsaw : "Delivers an attack to all enemies in a straight line before you with a potency of 600 for the first enemy, and 35% less for all remaining enemies."

Before 7.25 it was 50%, which means that when you used Chainsaw on a group of mobs, the first enemy took 600 potency worth of damage, and all others took 300 potency (50% less, so 600 / 2 = 300, 600 - 300 = 300)
Now that it is 35%, the first enemy still takes 600 potency worth of damage, but now all remaining enemies take 390 potency (35% of 600 is 210, so 600 - 210 = 390)

So it's basically a 90 potency gain on all enemies in the AoE, but no change to single target damage. Hope this was clear enough !

That is very informative and I understand what you are saying. If the percentage of the damage reduction is reduced, then the flat damage occurring increases. It's only if the flat damage is reduced is where it's a reduction overall and the "nerf" I misread it for.