What is wrong about making machinist good?

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Neither of these are inherently bad. You just need Auto-crossbow to deal enough damage in itself to compete with {HB focus damage + the CDR on DC/CM given both their focus and splash damage}, ideally outpacing HB/BS despite its DC/CM-CDR after 4 targets or so (not counting said DC/CM perhaps being bankable for raidbuffs or the like), while AoE would just have to be sufficient regardless of Battery, which in turns allow you to focus down a key mob if you like or to all the easier save it for bosses. I'd be fine with Queen gaining some splash on its finisher (and would love a bit of that on Wildfire's explosion), but I honestly don't want to see another AoE mirror like Bioblaster opposite Drill.

Meanwhile, MCH's throughput problems are less about a lack of raid buffs than just that Physical Ranged as a whole tend to be undertuned despite that their innate positioning advantages are mostly irrelevant now that casters and melee can each have full uptime. Otherwise, there'd be little to no issue with their damage scaling entirely with themselves while BRD's scaling is spread around the full party and DNC's a mix of the party (including themselves) and some Best-in-SlotSelfish DPS.

Frankly, though, if that parity takes Physical Ranged gaining some actions that reduce their relative mobility a bit without them losing any damage compared to now when avoiding said new actions, or by whatever other means adding on cognitive load (if mostly enjoyably) to "deserve" that extra DPS, I'd be fine with that.

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Accordant Suggestions:

• Just for the fun of tangibly seeing/setting up bigger bombs, have Wildfire splash deal 40% splash damage, and have Detonator detonate Wildfire's applied stacks without necessarily losing the ability to apply more, which would then go off automatically at the effect's end if not likewise actively Detonated. Remove any animation lock (truly-global ICD period, in this case of ~0.5 seconds + roundtrip ping) from Detonator and allow it to be used even during another animation, clipping or even skipping its own animation if necessary (adding about 288 AoE potency per minute)
  
  
• Have Pile Bunker and Crowned Collider deal 40% splash damage (adding about 530 AoE potency per minute).
  
  
• Return Double-Check to single-target only, like its ancestor in Gauss Round (costing up about 800 AoE potency per minute).
  
  
• (Altogether, this would be the faintest of buffs.)
  
  
• Increase Auto-crossbow's damage each time the damage of HB, GS, Rico, or their upgrades are increased, including their AoE damage, tuned against their contribution at 4 targets, to keep parity at each level between Auto-crossbow and its single-target mirror (including bonus effects) at 4 targets. (At present, no change to Auto-crossbow's AoE damage would be necessary due to Double-Check returning to single-target.)
  
  
• Increase Scatter Gun potency back to 150 or even 160 (or 200, with 30% falloff after the first for 140 AoE potency), now that the Battery from the ST combo has a bit of AoE value (~20 AoE potency/gcd).
  
  
• Hypercharge should at least itself be replaceable with Heat Blast (Blazing Shot) via the optional Action Change settings.

[Valence]

I disagree having one of the two charges be single target while the other is AoE with the same potency. In terms of design, this makes zero sense. Either differentiate them enough that they have different enough purposes if one has to be AoE and the other not AoE, or keep them identical for the sake of APM spamm.
In the case of the former, what I would have envisioned for both charges would have been something similar to Fan Dance, where heat blast regens gauss round as normal, and using gauss round has a chance to proc ricochet, for example.