What is wrong about making machinist good?

[Reginald_Cain]

This has been the most neglected job for 8 years. Autocrossbow still has no interaction with check or checkmate. There is still no aoe battery spender.

This selfish d p s has low damage because they're too stupid to remove the roll restrictions on the d p s slots, and they don't want it to replace the other phys ranged. They won't even compensate machinists with a raid buff or actual support skills beyond dismantle.

I like machinist being a selfish job but for the love of god, can we make its damage profile accurately?Reflect a selfish dps?

[Vatom]

SE has a thing for making guns bad mate idk if they have the ability

[NobleWinter]

I wanna be able to use battery gauge to revive fallen team mates. When are we gonna get a defibrillator as a support action? I wanna walk up to a downed Dragoon and pump their chest with volts on a four second cast for 20 battery gauge. I need that animation in the game. Add in a gap closer that uses a grappling hook to reach them from 20 yalms away for flavor too.

[mallleable]

It all comes down to how physical ranged as a role is designed with having no cast times, and all attacks being long ranged. The entire role is treated like actions like Piercing Talon, Throwing Dagger, Writhing Snap, Enpi, Ruin II, or any of the tank ranged attacks like Shield Lob. These are actions that jobs want to keep their uses to a minimum. They 'fixed' this problem in PVP by creating the walking cast mechanic for BRD, and MCH which would allow their damage output to be more comparable to magical ranged while keeping their gameplay distinct enough. I think they should bring in the walking cast mechanic from PVP into PVE for BRD, and MCH, and maybe even the potential 4th phys ranged in 8.0.

[Valence]

They didn't fix anything in pvp because they precisely removed the limitations on ranged jobs that forced them to get close to do max damage (and the only thing that still does is good players actually knowing when they need to come close to rotate with their melees on crystal). Right now jobs like BRD, MCH or especially PCT can blast you from 25y away without any worry in the world. It's never been about the walking cast, much like for casters it's never been about cast times in pvp either. They precisely made those irrelevant to the greater picture because they're only tied to the filler combos.
But I do agree with the reasoning, SE has always considered rphys to be the jobs on "training wheels" like baby's first raiding job because it doesn't have to worry about uptime mechanics. The only thing where rphys jobs except DNC struggle more than the rest of the jobs in XIV pve is mobility, where most jobs can dash around or teleport, they can't.

[Netaie]

I am always doubtful about the difficulty justification for machinist job. Its lack of mobility is a big issue IMHO when I am not familar with a fight.

For the context I am a casual content player. I am not into difficult content in this game. But difficulty is relative: something trivial for more advanced player could be challenging for me. That being said, for new content I always prioritize tanky melee DPS like ninja or reaper. And, as soon as I found the safe posts and know the fight perfectly, I go as a machinist. As someone who play shmup games too I use a common approach: identitify negative spaces to find the safe places during boss patterns. Ninja and reaper are much more forgiving for that because they have better tools to compensate/adjust (mitigation, dash, safe heal) in case of a bad decision. Again it's in a basic content context: no extreme, savage, ultimates (at least at their release), I can totally imagine that hardest difficulty has different priorities than pure mobility

[aiqa]

While I agree the whole ranged physical role dps should be upped, a lot. I don't understand this argument about specifically selffish dps. Being selfish or not is already included in rDPS. And MCH has very competitive rDPS compared to other jobs in the same role. If anything, I think it feels much more unfair for classes that do bring raid buffs and, only to see their rDPS contribution bottom of the barrel.

[Valence]

While I agree the whole ranged physical role dps should be upped, a lot. I don't understand this argument about specifically selffish dps. Being selfish or not is already included in rDPS. And MCH has very competitive rDPS compared to other jobs in the same role. If anything, I think it feels much more unfair for classes that do bring raid buffs and, only to see their rDPS contribution bottom of the barrel.

Well it comes from inner intricacies of the metrics used to compare jobs within their own subrole, within which they do compete against each other. BRD and DNC are heavily slanted toward raid damage buffs that amount for close to a quarter of their total rDPS/cDPS contribution. This means that they're going to be very dependent of their team to perform optimally, and that's also why even before the recent buffs MCH wasn't doing that bad in lower percentiles.

On the other hand at higher level MCH cannot follow because MCH doesn't have the pDPS output to keep up with melees or BLM/PCT, simply because having a lower pDPS output than those, it will mathematically not benefit as much as them from raid damage buffs and play as well within those than them. You also don't dance partner a MCH usually for the same reason.

This turns it at low level or percentiles as a valued job that can carry its own weight, especially light parties and even more in solo (notably with a huge upfront damage), but at a higher percentiles that's lacking because it's not working within the same parameters as BRD and DNC as a heavy raid buffer. Well, that is, before the recent buffs, which definitely put BRD and DNC behind even at high percentiles, because rphys as a subrole is meant to suck alongside SMN/RDM, that's about it.

[aiqa]

Well it comes from inner intricacies of the metrics

That would hold up if MCH was always lower at top or 95th percentile rDPS. But at least at the moment it is not. At half the current tier MCH top rDPS is shared best in the rphys role, and highest at 95th percentile in 3/4.

And even if we ignore current tier. It's not a clear argument for why MCH needs to perform better. The dependance on other players is an indirect job difficulty, which MCH doesn't have. And that added difficulty should be rewarded, not penalized.

[Valence]

As I said, it used to be until the last patch where they buffed it enough to completely overtake DNC and BRD on literally everything. If you go down percentiles, MCH gets ahead even more as a result.