Non-main's perspective on Machinist

[Chasingstars]

TL;DR: It feels disjointed and clumsy as a job with some abilities that feel like they lack connectivity with the rest of the kit and that it doesn't entirely want to work with itself when it comes to its heat and battery gauge for building and by extension its own heat and battery gauge for payoffs.

My own personal experience is mostly with Dragoon, Summoner, Red Mage, Reaper, and Samurai.

After I got it to max on another character, from mostly just daily pvp roulettes, I decided to start playing around with it in 7.3 as a change of pace, mostly with roulettes of trials, araids, and nraids, dungeons, and the new alliance raid tier. I already recognized fairly early it feels like a prototype ranged version of reaper mostly from how the job accumulates heat and battery, but unlike reaper, it doesn't exactly work towards the same end goal for its gauges.

That is to say that while reaper's soul gauge is meant to build naturally into the accumulation of soul that can later be turned into shroud, machinist's heat doesn't build naturally into battery outside of heated split-shot as a combo bonus, doesn't help its the the third step of the basic combo.

That machinist's battery I understand is only useful for rook and later automaton queen. Even with practice it feels like I am missing what the point of rook/queen actually is aside from shadowbringers equivalent of a temporary ifrit-egi but if you use its pet command to perform an attack it is dismissed, so that button can only really be used before it expires or before the boss is scheduled to become untargetable.

Air anchor, chain saw, excavator, drill, bio-blaster. Such a strange bunch of abilities. Anchor, Saw, and Excavator provide battery, but drill/blaster don't. Which makes drill/blaster feel tacked on. Especially given that at max level, since drill shares the same 620 potency as anchor and saw/excavator, that it makes me wonder why you would bother using reassemble on drill unless the other two are on cooldown. And that drill/blaster don't build up to heat either.

Flamethrower from what I understand, in a prior iteration, was meant to generate heat, but now it doesn't. Which just makes it feel tacked on like drill/blaster.

For a physical ranged that is meant to be the most selfish of the bunch, it really seems to lack built-in traits or abilities that actually reduce weaponskill cast/recast time and to increase its own damage. Closest I can find that is meant to boost damage its own damage is hypercharge by increasing potency by 20, but that feels mostly intended for blazing shot and one of its other weaponskills.

Wildfire I don't even get why it has a fixed 1-charge 120 second timer given that you can build up heat plenty times faster than it will come off cooldown as its the only real intended recipient of blazing shots plus either basic combo action, a full metal field, a reassembled drill, anchor, saw, or excavator. Any of which aside from blazing shot with reassembled.

If I could make changes I would:

1. Wildfire can only be activated while you have the overheated buff and its cooldown is otherwise instant.
2. Drill generates 10 battery.
3. Bio-Blaster generates 20 battery upon activation.
4. Each of Queen Automaton's arm punch, roller dash, pile bunker, and crowned collider each generate 10 heat.
5. Flamethrower generates 10 heat each second up to 100 heat in total.
6. Auto-Crossbow gains "Additional effect: Reduces the recast time of both Double Check and Check Mate by 15 seconds." so its more properly the ranged version of Blazing Shot.
7. A self-buff that increases damage dealt, either as an additional effect to an existing ability or a brand new ability. And that just like its melee job counterparts, the buff needs to be easy to refresh. Such as a 10% buff that lasts for 45 seconds. Mostly so it can differentiate itself better the more supporty physical ranged jobs like Bard and Dancer.

Those changes of which that I propose I just personally feel would make the job feel that much more complete. Whether I am right or wrong about such things compared to people with more in-depth knowledge about the job, I don't know.

[Valence]

I agree, as soon as I saw the media tour MCH rework for Shadowbringers, it felt like that nothing in the kit actually interacted with each other much, it's just a bunch of high damage tools to use on cooldown, and the gauges don't interact with each other either. What generates heat and battery is totally arbitrary with little meaning behind.

Flamethrower literally conflicts with the rest of the kit and they had to finally, finally buff it enough to offset the fact that it's not generating anything for your resources.

The hypercharge 20 potency increase of blazing shot is a leftover from what overheat used to do before ShB (+20% damage output), just a lot more shallow because of its inconsequential power and it's meaningless past the first few level as soon as you unlock heat blast that you just want to spamm (so they could have just baked the potency into heat blast instead of this), where it could have had meaning on the filler combo like it does in the first few levels.

Wildfire used to be a million times more interesting when you could actually choose what to put inside and how, especially since the job had ammo rng to not make the sequence a fixed optimal thing to always aim for, which was a unique signature of the ranged physical role that only BRD and DNC somewhat still have... somewhat. Right now, WF isn't tied to overheat, but it's like it could either way because it wants you to use it while spamming blazing shot anyway. The only thing it still allows is desyncing from hypercharge it back or forward by one GCD though, which can allow some flexibility and some burst techs (like, WF -> GCD -> Hypercharge into blazing spamm or Hypercharge -> Blazing -> WF -> Blazing spamm -> 2x GCD). I wouldn't want to lose this because that's essentially one thing they kept from the predecessor of hypercharge, which was Rapid Fire (next 3 GCDs are fast recast). The main difference is how many shots are fast recast and that you can't choose which weaponskills get into it.

The self buff that MCH used to rely on in HW was an infamous combination of many (Raging Strikes, Eagle Eye, etc), which was overbloated. I do feel the best iteration for its self buff was Overheat in SB with the +20% when you would overheat the gauge, even though the way to overheat it was too clunky and finicky/latency dependent. I'd rather have them go back to something unique like this instead of a fire and forget button that half the DPS roster already have.

[Chasingstars]

I agree, as soon as I saw the media tour MCH rework for Shadowbringers, it felt like that nothing in the kit actually interacted with each other much, it's just a bunch of high damage tools to use on cooldown, and the gauges don't interact with each other either. What generates heat and battery is totally arbitrary with little meaning behind.

Flamethrower literally conflicts with the rest of the kit and they had to finally, finally buff it enough to offset the fact that it's not generating anything for your resources.

The hypercharge 20 potency increase of blazing shot is a leftover from what overheat used to do before ShB (+20% damage output), just a lot more shallow because of its inconsequential power and it's meaningless past the first few level as soon as you unlock heat blast that you just want to spamm (so they could have just baked the potency into heat blast instead of this), where it could have had meaning on the filler combo like it does in the first few levels.

Wildfire used to be a million times more interesting when you could actually choose what to put inside and how, especially since the job had ammo rng to not make the sequence a fixed optimal thing to always aim for, which was a unique signature of the ranged physical role that only BRD and DNC somewhat still have... somewhat. Right now, WF isn't tied to overheat, but it's like it could either way because it wants you to use it while spamming blazing shot anyway. The only thing it still allows is desyncing from hypercharge it back or forward by one GCD though, which can allow some flexibility and some burst techs (like, WF -> GCD -> Hypercharge into blazing spamm or Hypercharge -> Blazing -> WF -> Blazing spamm -> 2x GCD). I wouldn't want to lose this because that's essentially one thing they kept from the predecessor of hypercharge, which was Rapid Fire (next 3 GCDs are fast recast). The main difference is how many shots are fast recast and that you can't choose which weaponskills get into it.

The self buff that MCH used to rely on in HW was an infamous combination of many (Raging Strikes, Eagle Eye, etc), which was overbloated. I do feel the best iteration for its self buff was Overheat in SB with the +20% when you would overheat the gauge, even though the way to overheat it was too clunky and finicky/latency dependent. I'd rather have them go back to something unique like this instead of a fire and forget button that half the DPS roster already have.

Mhm that I do all understand. And that is why, after going back into the history for Machinist through the wiki, it does feel like they have a rough draft of what they want machinist to be, but they haven't fully fleshed out the concept. Especially with the whole battery and heat generation aspects. It reminds me of Bard. Specifically that of Shadowbringers Bard as it was a bit of an odd duck, as until later updates, it also had this same issue of lack of connectivity between abilities, most notably its dots stormbite and caustic bite. Where the dots for example, upon usage, wouldn't grant Heavy Shot / Refulgent Arrow as they do now.

[Valence]

The dots on BRD had another, more meaningful interaction as they directly interacted with Repertoire procs until this was axed in EW in favor of what we have now. Up to HW, dots critting would reset Bloodletter and Rain of Death, and in SB with the new songs, they'd generate repertoire procs. It had a true, unpredictable rng aspect that could get quite hectic to play around. In SHB they attached those repertoire procs to a fixed dot chance every dot tick instead of crits because they apparently hate not having control over itemization getting "overboard" near the end of an expansion (late SB BRD grew very strong in power due to crit scaling, as strong as a rphys can be ofc).

Then in EW they just detached dots from repertoire completely, now you just have to play a song and repertoire comes every 3s with a 80% chance. Riveting.

[Chasingstars]

The dots on BRD had another, more meaningful interaction as they directly interacted with Repertoire procs until this was axed in EW in favor of what we have now. Up to HW, dots critting would reset Bloodletter and Rain of Death, and in SB with the new songs, they'd generate repertoire procs. It had a true, unpredictable rng aspect that could get quite hectic to play around. In SHB they attached those repertoire procs to a fixed dot chance every dot tick instead of crits because they apparently hate not having control over itemization getting "overboard" near the end of an expansion (late SB BRD grew very strong in power due to crit scaling, as strong as a rphys can be ofc).

Then in EW they just detached dots from repertoire completely, now you just have to play a song and repertoire comes every 3s with a 80% chance. Riveting.

That is true and I apologize for mixing up shadowbringers bard and endwalkers bard. As endwalker was what I was thinking of. But it still feels similar in how its dots at the time felt like they had no purpose beyond damage.

[HyperiusUltima]

Technically MCH USED to have a upkeep on its Damage Buff. However, they removed it after Shadowbringers with all the reworks. MCH never got that back, and has been in the dumpster since because it can't hold a candle to the Raid Buffs and Damage that the other two Ranged Jobs are bringing. What's more, we still have the ever-present problem of Ranged just being the "1% Stat" Role because the role's damage as a whole is too low to the point you could take another Caster and still be fine if your healers can keep up with incoming damage.

Back to MCH, I really think it does need Wildfire to go back to squeezing in as many damaging abilities as possible, but still remain to those 6 GCDs. This makes it so that MCH has to make decisions properly about how to use Anchor/Saw/Excavator/FMF when the time comes around for 2m since the fact that over 5 GCDs, Wildfire doesn't provide as much potency as these abilities makes it a problem in general since it is literally limited to 260 Potency per GCD used on the target before blowing up.

If they uncap the damage profile on Wildfire, MCH will be doing much higher numbers as is proper for a Selfish Job.