You really did a great job explaining the pain points of the class. Hopefully we'll see some changes like these in the near future. Also, change Machinist LB3 to just getting into the G Weapon, it would be so cool.
I mean as a MCH main I am gonna go ahead and say it. Yes changes need to be made to the job either give it a huge gap of potency per skill and keep it the "pure" Physical Ranged DPS or rework some of the skills to make it feel like the other jobs. Honestly, I don't want it to play anything like bard or dancer (barf). Hypercharge should just be stacks honestly, I personally do not have issues with it but I know tones of people do because of their piss poor IPS. Honestly I love MCH the way it is granted a few small things. Also...... Don't you dare ask for them to change my LB3.... I love my giant Turret beam cannon.
Building off of your suggestions: Have queen summon in on top of the target air drop style and deal AOE. And can you imagine the rook trait being added when it’s replaced by the queen, but now rook shoots with you during hyper charge, but then in 7.0 let’s say, heat blast upgrades into said minigun which does two projectiles, meaning now you have 3 going off per second - the burst would feel outstanding.
I love the idea of having the Queen just smash something on the way in rather than the slow summon animation they have now. Would like them to do something similar with Dark knight too and just have your shadow burst out of a targeted enemy. Like you just took a portion of their darkness and made it your own.
crossbow not giving ogcds was always weird to me. flamethrower always felt odd being a channeled ability instead of part of the aoe rotation in some way much like bard's aoe sidewinder became this expac.
Suggestion: When you summon Queen, Gauss Round and Ricochet change, so that when you use it, the robot does the attack. And depending on how many Gauss Round and Ricochet you used during the Queen window, it enhances the final blow to a limited ammount (lets say 5), making the robot a mini Wild Fire window. Wild Fire - GCD, Queen - oGCD. (also thats a stretch, but make the robot gives everyone a buff of critical hit based on how many charges you got out of it, 0.5% per charge to a maximum of 2.5%)
The most frustrating part about the heat mode is that they already implemented a new and better version of that kind of fast-paced brief Going Crazy phase, Reaper's Enshroud is basically a better heat mode, and I think they should probably use that as a basis for an update. Two high-speed GCDs leading into an OGCD-- maybe not identical, but it's a good foundation.
It would be cool getting something similar to a snipper rifle that works kind of like ten chi jin on NIN where you "cannot move" but have big hits on 2 mins
@@JP11999 Yeah, but flamethrower isn't really used anywhere outside lazy AoE. It's like saying Monk is not mobile because it has Anatman. TCJ roots the NIN for 7 GCDs every 2 minutes in both ST and AoE, far cry from how FT is right now.
As someone who is currently taking MCH through Endsinger and Storm's Crown EX, I like some of these ideas. I agree with your idea on Wildfire, I don't see the big boom from it, especially in most fights with a lot of attacks going out, lol.
22:45 Perhaps instead of “Analysis”, the enemy damage taken gadget could be called “Debilitator”. That’s the name of one of Edgar’s tools in FF6. It applies a random elemental weakness to the target. With us getting Drill, Chain Saw, and the like, I think Debilitator fits the concept well.
@@ich3730 to be fair, for a while it was “did Mustadio do the thing?” He (beinf the first character in the franchise to be called a Machinist and equip guns as his main weapon type) is kinda why Machinist is a gun job in the first place, and why we got variants on his Aim attacks, with stuff like Head Graze, Foot Graze, and Leg Graze. I’m cool with them continuing to mesh the two sides of the job idea, with guns but also gadgets. Anyway, this is largely a name suggestion. If we’re gonna have a damage up debuff on Machinist, it just seems like a fitting name. Less forced than Chain Saw, anyway (as funny as that one is)
@@ich3730 For one it's not, Edgar never had a giant robot and didn't even use guns. Secondly there aren't many Machinists to draw inspiration from in FF's history. Edgar himself had like 8 tools and that's it.
Going off the idea of making the hypercharge window 1 second gcds and replacing part of the 123 combo with heat blast I feel like doing the same animation 5 times in a row would feel wierd without the weaving to break it up, so a potential way to fix this could be to replace all the 123 combo gcds with functionally identical heat blasts that have different animations letting people be creative in how they choose to shoot real fast
Not sure how it would fit but I feel like an enshroud style phase where you have a mecha suit fly in almost like iron man and then you do some sort of burst combo thing would be cool 😅
I always liked the idea of a flammable Bioblaster, like if you combo Bio->Flamethrower it replaces the poison with a hefty burn. You'd still want to channel it in AoE, but in single target you'd just need a tick of flames to get the whole spicy DoT once a minute.
Great ideas! I'd love to see them take a note from the PvP design and have Reassemble on a short CD, but augmenting other abilities in different ways (though, not the _same_ ways that they do in pvp).
I like the quick fire of machinist too. Your idea for the 5 quick shot reminds me of FFX-2 Yuna’s Trigger Happy skill. Would be cool if it was implemented in here too.
haven't seen the whole video yet but one idea i think it could be fun would be to have the tools being debuff/DoT attacks, like bioblaster being an enhanced DoT poison AoE, the flamethrower being a DoT fire AoE, the chainsaw being a DoT bleeding AoE, the drill being single target armor debuff, Flash being a paralyze/stun AoE. stuff like that
I agree that MCH needs another look, but I don't agree with a lot of these recommendations. However, its great to see more creators talking about it. The issue I think is that SE team is looking at the raw individual damage a job brings for balance purposes and not the raid utility that the rest of the group gets from those jobs. It explains why we see MCH so far ahead of DNC/BRD on aDPS and at the bottom on rDPS. I also think because of that MCH can't get any utility buffs without heavily nerfing it's raw dps... And the community will friggin implode on itself if there is any potency loss on a job people think is already performing the worst.
@@Elidan1012 The difference is that BLM needs to cast all of their spells and a SAM needs to be in melee. MCH has 100% uptime on a boss and everything is instant. They can't make it do those levels of damage; it would break the job in half and be a required job in all comps. It also was an issue for both SAM and BLM in the past, but that eventually got addressed. MCH is still paying the phys range tax and gets nothing in return for it. Again, look at aDPS for MCH; its not in a bad spot. IMO, it probably is at a decent spot for what it does. The issue is that the lack of personal damage from DNC/BRD is MORE THAN made up in their raid utility.
@@gtetrakai "a SAM needs to be in melee" - if raid boss hitboxes were not roughly the size of a county fair then that would be a relevant point of order, but as it is, melee has never had an easier time of 100% uptime. It's time to throw this trope in the trash where it belongs, or (they shouldn't, but for the sake of argument) revert hitbox changes and actually make this a relevant "need" again.
@@gtetrakai Ofc it should have a range phys tax. I never said otherwise. aDPS is irrelevant and should never be ballanced around. What matters for ballance is a jobs performance in high end 8 man content. Everything else in the game is too easy for percentile differences to matter in any way.
i like all of these so much. i dont think this is better than what you came up with, but i always wanted flamethrower to be like a turret/ or a flamethrower on a rotating stand that you summon to a location. probably just appears next to you where you stand, but it doesnt move similar to how the move is now, and acting like other dots to where once you do it you can go into other things, but still keeping the idea of wait until the tank has finished pulling. idk if thats better, but something i always thought sounded cool to me
I'd love to make wildfire a mix of Trick Attack and Earthly Star. Place it on the ground for a big oil-spill looking effect that lasts 10 seconds. During that window, everyone does slightly more damage to targets in the area (1-2%). After 10 seconds it becomes "combustible," at which point the machinist has 10 additional seconds to explode it for big nuke damage. If you want it to be even more complex you could retain the weaponskill bonus effect, but have it tied only to the machinist and the final nuke. (Lore-wise, I'd like it to be tied only to any attacks that increase or expend heat, but I think that might not work with timings).
i had a similar idea for the hypercharge window but there were some differences, no doubt it'll be 'sounds too much like reaper' but tough, basically: 123 combo reverted to basic slug/split/cleanshots, potency adjustments as needed hypercharge allows you to use heatblast heatblast gives 3 stacks of a buff called "Heatin' Up" (yes with the apostrophe) Heatin' Up turns your 123 into heated versions, this makes the flippy crazy animations of the heated versions feel more 'special' because you dont use them constantly heated cleanshot now gives a new buff called idk 'Augur Primed' Augur Primed allows you to use a new finishing skill at 70, the Augur (bazooka) from diadem for a big finishing hit, similar to communio from reaper, big damage line AOE there's probably a similar way to allow AOE to charge the Augur to how RDM can melee AOE to get to it's finishers too so you can use the Augur on AOE pulls too
Reapers enshroud is a really good example of how to make a good feeling rapid attack window. Having to spam the same button over and over just doesn't feel good.
Im going to go over some of your ideas and then use that to bring my ideas in, for organizational purposes. Wildfire: Love the idea, got a small simplr solution to the overcap. Name the 5 attacks "Quick Draw" and it gives a timed buff called "Wild Draw" that allows an additional charge of Geass Round/Ricochet to be stored (maybe 15 sec duration, or 20 second duration?). If not an extra charge, then 3 stacks of the buff to increase the potency of the skills, granted when all charges of Quick Draw are consumed. Wildfire needs a few things to feel better. One, the sound effects and visuals need some work. The popping off sound needs to be a strong "boom" that should be heard over other MCH skills. Visually, theres a few tricks. One, make it give the current explosion, then a very fast, brief "secondary" explosion thats slightly bigger, so its no longer "i blinked, what did i miss" deal. When it goes off, have it appear over the other numbers for at least the MCH, to make it feel that much bigger of a hit. And for MCH only, it can have a small screenshake effect when it does go off, maybe even a slight-but-noticable screen blur from the explosion location. As for Functionally, theres three ideas and they can be implemented seperately or together. Make it Crit each time, crit chance boosts its damage. Due to its cooldown, missing a crit would be devastating. This helps with that. The other is to give it a boost to Heat and Battery when it does pop off. This makes it lend itself to the follow up burst by creating a short cycle. Overheat combo the Wildfire, Wikdfire goes off, use Overheat again, perhaps have mech ready. Last one, as Happy already stated, make it aoe. Give it use out of ST scenarios, it feels odd to hold onto this CD in dungeon pulls because its just not good in them. Bioblaster and flamethrower can be made front koaded with benefits imo. Bioblaster can "shred" enemy defenses and let the McH next 3 hits do more damage (and you can do same with Drill, if desired, but thats if the game changes to where thats a good idea). For Flamethrower, my big idea is let us move during it, but trade it off with "if you use any other skill, this one ends". This allows repositioning at the least during a big pull. As for Queen, i have another idea that coukd work. This requires a new ability: Twin Rooks. Summons 2 mechs who target different foes if possible. Their focus is on aoe skills and together, their attacjs are weaker until 3 plus targets. They also have thwir overcharged skill to do a fuck-off boom and taje tge foe out with them. This gives us an AoE use to the battery, but i admit this is more of a full blown 7.0 idea. In short, the Theme of McH isnt bad at all. But the mechabics need to be modernized and pain points focused. Because we have a class thats on the edge of perfection feel wise, with some poijts so badly misallisgned that it hurts the whole experience. Im hoping for Mch's future.
2 min raid buff idea, "Signal Flare" grats a 5% crit and direct hit rate to party members in range for 20 seconds. It fits the job and enhances reassemble while giving that 5% damage increase to crit/DH abilities for the whole party.
I get that they want to stay with the Edgar fantasy with MCH but they're completely missing an opportunity of using another amazing sharpshooter toolkit from the series. Irvine! His special ammos are so cool and have SUCH a nice impact.
Great video Haps! As an MCH main, I would love to see just about everything in this video added. I think job identity you sketch out here (quick attacking + gadgets) is great, and seems super fun.
They could also give them a giant defibrillator to use as a rez with a long cool down since they already use that as an excuse on why rdm and smn have low dps. You could have them reassemble it for an instant cast.
A short range res would definitely be different enough to feel unique and help emphasize physical range’s strength of being mobile. I like that conceptually.
Like the idea of flamethrower having stacks. What I think I do instead is have it so that when you cast flamethrower it gives you however many stacks, and as you are channeling it, it is consuming the stacks to deal damage. If you cancel flamethrower for whatever reason, you still have 5/10 seconds on the stacks and you can recast it, to have it start burning those stacks down as well. Nothing feels worse than when you get a huge pack to flamethrower and then 4 AOEs land at your feet as soon as you press the button
I love a lot of your ideas. I have a few of my own that I think work well as addendums. -Flamethrower: I think its a good idea to have flamethrower share a CD with air anchor and grant the battery, but I think it'd actually be cooler to it a targeted ranged circular aoe: Flame Shot. No channel, ever. It would be a little firey projectile that explodes on impact with the target. Think like the incinerator from Fallout. -Hypercharge and wildfire: I like your ideas for hypercharge and wildfire. On top of those, I actually think these could be consolidated and analysis could be removed. Hear me out. 60 second CD wildfire, 6 stacks of of quick draw on you and 6 stacks of wildfire on the target. Make the final explosion more bombastic, both for that feeling you mentioned, as well as to clearly indicate that it is aoe. I guess that would also get rid of heat, but I'm ok with that. And yeah! Add in the rook! Go all out! Honestly, I would prefer to keep gauss shot weaving during hypercharge if something like this ever happened, but if it makes the job unplayable for some I guess I don't need it.
I really liked all your proposed changes and new additions im not sure how i feel about the heatblast change but thats mainly me needing to play with the change im sure i would like it but beyond that i agree with every single change cant think of anything else to give personally great job as always
My two changes I'd like: Flamethrower turns into Machinist Doton. No Debuff, but like a 150 Potency DOT you can just plonk down that makes a flamethrower turret in the middle of the Trash group the tank just pulled. And Much like you suggested, Remove the Cast Time Reduction for Ricochet from Heat Blast And Give it To Auto Crossbow, Now, Hypercharge works a lot smoother where you're either mashing Heat Blast - Gauss or Auto Crossbow - Ricochet depending on if you're doing single Target or AOE. I also agree with changing Hypercharge from a Timer to a Stack of 5.
One of the big things i miss about mch was when it had utility. When rook/bishop turrets gave their own regenerations think it was tp/mp. Bring those placeable turrets back and maybe yes bishop could give pulsing shields but then have rook put a vuln stack on the boss or something to that effect. I thought that was great when mch was able to do those buffs. Maybe while we're at it we can give it the gauss barrel again for the ranged caster for the lols.
I'm still of the opinion that the best low-impact change they could do to fix the job would be to make Wildfire a party-wide buff. I think that would improve their numbers while also making it really fun to synergize with groups. adding that on top of the other changes to Wildfire you mentioned would be awesome as well.
In my opinion the best way they could fix MCH is to give it utility in the form of debuffs to put on enemy instead of buffs on party. I.e. something like SCHs Chain Strategem or the Tanks Reprisal. Still functionally the same but its an offensive flavor, preserving the jobs identity as an offensive phys ranged instead of a support phys ranged. Ive been an advocator of introducing Blitzball Player as the 4th physical ranged job amd makimg it the debuff job to match Wakka from ffx but itd be a good fix for mch too. EDIT: After finishing your video. I LOVE your suggestions!
Going into EW my most realistic hope for MCH was an upgraded version of hypercharge on a 2min cooldown to give our burst a bigger oomph and a better distinction from the rest of the rotation. Visually I was imagining it like us firing all our tools from our swiss army gun and just flinging it around us into different firing positions, maybe adding a final hit like a launcher or the sniper rifle from PVP as a finisher.
I love it. There are some parts I would maybe tweak but you already compromised in trying to fit in line with previous job design choices so I know not all of it is exactly how you might want it either. Great vid
How about this: Instead of CDs for the OGCDs you get charges, stacks so to speak. One charge can be used on either Ricochet or gauss round, and both charges for both skills track individually, with one charge restoring every 30 seconds. When you then enter your hypercharge window, instead of having to weave each heated blast consumes a charge and increases its damage by the potency of a gauss round or ricochet with an added AOE effect on top. This would eliminate weaving during hypercharge entirely while not missing out on damage or potency
For the longest time I've just wanted Flamethrower to not be a channeled skill (having to sit still, I'd like to move around with it); but having the damage frontloaded like Thundercloud would be great too. Still a quick DPS gain in AoE. One thing I thought of for the support route was a rez via Defibrillator. Instant cast weaponskill with a two or three minute cooldown; but works like Monk's Six-Sided Star. Extends your next weaponskill recast to 8 seconds (the same cast time for the other rez spells; but in this case can be reduced a bit with skill speed instead of spell speed).
Two words: Yes, please! I really learned machinist towards the end of Stormblood I miss that kit. Bring back rook, bishop, vuln up, and damage down, using current job design strategy. The pvp rework is proof of concept.
One cool change of the Rook would be to change it's effect at higher levels to just put up a large shield and then you ricochet your shots off that shield which empowers both your single target and your multitarget shots to do more damage. And make it a very cool visual effect as well, where you can see the shield reacting to the shots and watch the trajectory change.
What? This suggestion is just weird. It doesn't really add anything to gameplay element. Most of what you suggested was visual. You could accomplish the same thing is a much more rudimentary way without all of the smoke and mirrors of bouncing shots off of a rook turret.
With the "rook" trait at the end, I think that rather than having this sort of janky fix of reduced cooldown+potency for 1 of your gauss things and then also adding the turret to shoot behind you, instead make it so you load all charges of gauss+ricochet into it and the turret will fire it with increased potency, then stick around to "recycle" the rounds each time you heatblast/autocross(turning the bullets from that into gauss /ricochet rounds) , but keep the gcd at 1.5 and lock the player out of pressing gauss/rico. This effectively makes it so that every time you press overheat, you will have 0 charges of gauss while spamming heatblast and once heatblast is over and you go back to your longer gcd, *then* you can dump them all in your burst window. Alternatively, you can change Reassamble to be a buff that changes how your actions work and Overheat into the current auto-Dcrit effect of Reassemble, but with the "drawback" that you then have to cool off your gun, aka do 5 gcds of Heatblast or Heat Wave (autocrossbow rename).
G-Warrior for new LB3. The satellite is nice, but why not a G-Warrior airstrike? Or the Air Force from the Kefka fight? And as a machinist main, I really appreciate you for making this video. It changed my mind on a few things. I still think the class just needs a potency buff. However, I reallly like the idea of making Hypercharge into a tick-based skill instead of a timed one. They recently did it with Delirium for DRK so there IS precedent. And then I heard your ideas for utility - instead of a shield turret, why not a healing turret, to match curing waltz. Also, since you mentioned Mustadio, I like the idea of "Analysis" with a cool lazer scope animation that gives a 10%+ crit damage buff to the party.
Good stuff. Only thing I think I wouldn't totally be on board with is the 1 second GCD for HB/AC and not being able to weave gauss/ricochet inbetween. That said, 100% agree with having those windows of bam-bam-bam rapid fire gun attacks feel very satisfying. Dismantle should definitely be a thing as listed here. Idea I had in mind would be to have Flamethrower detonate the dot from Bio Blaster and cause all of that damage upfront; an idea born from too much time playing Driller in Deeprock Galactic, I'll say. Don't think it'd work out smoothly since (assuming Flamethrower shared CD with Air Anchor), it wouldn't always be up for every BB. Also, that sniper rifle LB from pvp and/or Mustadio could also be an "aoe Air Anchor" option rather than Flamethrower. Call it Rail Round or whatever and have it pierce targets for aoe akin to Chainsaw.
I started playing last year when endwalker came out and my main is Machinist, i'm very casual tho so I don't know enough but I think you have some great ideas. i've actually been watching all your dongeons guide as I was doing the MSQ I made it to shadowbringer and unlocked the dwarfs so for now i'm concentrating on getting the tank. thanks for the guides, quick and to the point, good visuals to understand the mechanics. I would like to point out that in order to have more fun you can jump 360 while casting heated split shot and it makes you do a 720 :D hahahha cheers
My main issue with the turret and queen is that the time starts counting down during the spawn in animation even though they reduced the time. If they kept the reduced time but stopped it from counting down during the spawn I’d love it so much more. I used to main it until then.
I’ve always said that MCH needs utility. BLM and SAM are still somewhat reliant on other players because their movement is limited. MCH can easily adjust to wherever it needs to be without any uptime loss. MCH is the only job completely not reliant on other players right now. As such if you look at FFLOGs it performs very well in Barbariccia which is a fight that is difficult to optimize because of how movement intensive it is.
I think it'd be neat if instead of buffing the party like the rest of the ranged phys classes, MCH's schtick was that he would debuff your enemies by using skills that break down a targets armor or defenses. Change Wildfire to an ability that, instead of just exploding for big damage, the enemy gains a stack of a "Burning Armor" debuff for the duration of Wildfire every time they're hit with a weaponskill. Once the timer expires on Wildfire it explodes, doing a set amount of damage, and blowing off a chunk of enemy armor increasing the amount of damage done to the target by 1% per stack of "Burning Armor" for a set amount of time.
Good suggestions all around. I do think though that the hypercharge idea with overcapped oGCDs is a bit too convoluted. A cleaner solution would be to just have a spender GCD. Say you can cash in 2 stacks for a bigger attack in hypercharge.
I would say yes to all your suggestions but I would lower the level for scattergun AND ad a 120 second snipe shot attack for single target ( like we have in pvp) and flamethrower be a super powerful 120 second blast of fire with 10 s of DOT . The sniper round and flame burst would give 50 heat and battery, those 2 new skills I mentioned could be unlocked at lvl 82 instead of scattergun
One thing that I think needs to be changed because of the changes to Queen's damage is giving Barrel Stabilizer the ability to add 50 Battery along with Heat. Making BioBlast a MCH version of Trick Attack to make it actually useful rather than a button that is largely useless would be nice.
Here are my ideas for MCH Idea #1: Make Flamethrower generate 20 Heat on cast, or Generate 10 heat per tick. 1a: its potency increased based on the amount of heat you have on cast. If applying idea #1, each tick will be stronger & stronger, providing further incentive to keep channeling. 1b: Another option is for Flamethrower to be a Heat Spender, with potency increasing the higher the gauge is. Cost: 5 Heat Gauge per second (or tick?) Idea #2: Reassemble resembling it's pvp counterpart, Analysis. Grants an additional effect depending on the next Weaponskill used (1 of 4) Drill effect: +200 potency Bioblaster effect: Applies a damage down on afflicted enemies for the duration Air Anchor effect: +20 additional battery Chain Saw effect: Reduces cooldown of next Chain Saw by 20 seconds Idea #3: Automaton automatically fires an attack based on Hypercharge weapon skill used, if applicable: Rapid-fire during Heat Blast, RPGs during Auto Crossbow for aoe. Keeps robot ranged. 3a: Issue commands to the Automaton akin to SCH fairy/Seraph. Additional hotkeys required. Can replace Queen Overdrive for one of them. 3b: Final Attack (Pile Bunker/Crowned Collider) are aoe and are auto DH crits. Included both because of different Ultimate/content levels. I must say, I love your Dismantle & Analysis ideas. I personally agree and think MCH/all P-range should have some sort of utility.
Two suggestions to fix machinist without a rework. Not sure if these has been mentioned before (I'd assume some form of the 2nd has been at least) 1) Allow all party members' damaging weapon skills (GCDs and oGCDs) to count for calculating final wildfire explosion damage, stacking up to a max of 10 (maybe 12?) damaging weapon skills for all party members. 2) When wildfire detonates, it applies a short DoT (same length of time as Circle of Scorn. 15s) with a potency equal to 50% of the cumulative potency from wildfire GCD stacks to the primary target and 25% to all enemies in a 5 yalm radius of the primary target.
Alternative to the suggestions in the video: split MCH into two separate jobs. Have one of them inherit the class name and make it into the ranged physical equivalent of SMN where it is constantly producing tools/turrets/robits to do its attacks with. As it stands, for myself at least, half of the jobs "schizophrenia" is that the tool gameplay and the gun gameplay just don't mesh very well. The other new job could become something like Magitek Gunner which focuses on using something like a transforming gun that can perform different types of attacks and leans more into the hypercharge type of gameplay. Alternatively again have it play like PLD where you have a smoothly alternating gun phase and tool phase instead of basically having the gun for 123 and barely anything else.
Great ideas! Having to weave during Hypercharge is what is stopping me from playing the job further. It feels like a penalty for obtaining 50 heat rather than a cool/fun reward to look forward to.
As a MCH Dps main i like these suggestions. While i personally don't mind the job how it is, i do wish there was just abit more to the job, whether it'd be, more buttons, damage or utility. I do miss the turret though from HW, wouldn't mind having that back
As a new player, machinist has been my favorite class so far to play. Granted, ive only leveld to 60 with most jobs, but it's just felt the best at those levels.
I envisioned a King automaton that pairs with Queen on summon that applied something like a personal Trick Attack for your damage window. Then have a Crowned/Checkmate skill that combines the King and Queen into a Brute Justice like massive cd that gives you the nice visual feedback for the damage to replace Wildfire. I like the idea of getting into the robot, but I'm not sure how they would implement it in actual combat. Might be easier to just leave the robots as is. I'd also remove Flamethrower for a Generator channeled ability. You pull out a crank generator and during the channel, you create a lightning field around you (skill going from cone to self aoe). The field can deal damage, but the main use is each second you channel, you get heat and battery gauge.
I definitely want Hypercharge to give charges, instead of just having a short duration. I also wanna see MCH get some kinda of debuff for their offensive raid utility, like mug, since DNC and BRD are both about buffing. You suggest Analysis. But why not just call it Libra? I would say make it so the boss is more "vulnerable" because of the MCH. So the party crits it more and/or harder. I like the idea of the Bishop autoturret doing a stacking aoe shield as a defensive tool. I was thinking that would be the besr defensive tool for them, unique from what DNC and BRD offer. Plus the idea of an engineer using a gadget to put a defensive barrier absolutely fits the aesthetic! D&D Artificer can do that with their mechanical servant, granting temporary HP every turn. D&D Artificer is a good basis for inspiration here in general for MCH aesthetics and ideas.
I’ve personally made some small ideas on what I’d love to see be added for MCH, mostly adding Battery into the AoE such as making Air anchor/Hot shot into Aoe skills, having all of the Rook and Queen skills have Aoe fall off, stuff like that, same with wildfire because it’s also just dead in dungeons But the big idea I had is a hybrid of the HW Gauss round system, Ammo and the pvp Blast Charge. Until say SB leveling it would just boost damage of your gcds, but at level 62/70 you’d gain a new skill that changes the 1-2-3/spread shot into 4 new skills that work like the pvp Blast charge and have those skills deal more damage. Feel like it would be interesting to have. As for how the Wild/Quick draw, if you’re gonna change all the st skills then I feel like there should be a whole combo system otherwise it should just stay as a different button.
I dont really play MCH all that much but one thing i hate with flamethrower is that its not entirely clear whether you're actually causing any damage (especially in big party content). Its very unsatisfying in that way. What I would do is have the skill give the enemy the "Burns" debuff and that way you'd actually get a much clearer feeling that you've hit the boss and caused damage.
Tbh the aoe rotation is fine by me, some idea are good too but my main issue with mch currently is actually the animation delay queen does when you summon her the duration gets lost due animation i calculated if u summon her on 50 gauge, her animation to finally atk is around 6-7 sec, while duration is 12.... so basically shes wasting 6 secs just for the summoning of her lol thats like 1,5sec 4x.... those are like 4 heatblast the queen does nothing lol just oh i come down get assembles and charge, in my opinion the animation should be "i come down and immediately charge" without getting up first lol or automatically laser-spawn on the enemy.... im not going deep into other issues
For hypercharge, I'd rather see a change to it similar to how enshroud works for Reaper, a charged based system with significantly more time to use all charges while still maintaining the 1.5sec gcd and single weaving. Similar to how Reaper is able to apply Shadow of Death or Whirl of Death during Enshroud, allow Mch to be able to use their other tool skills during hypercharge to avoid drifting. Then for Barrel Stabilizer, have it trigger "Wildfire Ready" and make Wildfire act as a guaranteed crit/dh finisher to your next Hypercharge window with AOE falloff damage in a 5y radius around the target so it's equally usable with Heat Blast or Auto Crossbow.
If we're going to add more utility to MCH, I like the idea of a damage down. But even before you mentioned the bishop turret, I was thinking that an aoe shield for allies would be perfect for the class thematically speaking. I didn't start till SHB so I didn't know it was previously a thing the class had.
Change Tactician to Aether Barrier and create overshields and change Analyze to Rally that gives a 5% damage buff for 15s. 3 charges of Aether rounds can be standard after executing Wild Draw but for every Crit that you land during Wild Draw it adds an additional Aether round to be used for a max total of 8 rounds each with a potency of 150. Lastly, get rid of Summon Automaton Queen in place of Summon G-Suit. Animation can have an armored suit warp directly to your character and changes your 1-2-3 combo to ‘Superheated’ versions. Drill, Air Anchor, and Chainsaw would change to Javelin, Pile Bunker, and Skysteel Collider and Scattergun, Bioblaster, and Flamethrower change to MIRV Cannon, X-Serum, and Melting Point. Battery Gauge would be changed to Bolt Gauge. Executing Drill, Air Anchor, and Chainsaw would grant one Bolt respectively for a total of 6 needed to summon the G-Suit and this aligns with the 2m burst window meta SE has pretty much implemented to this point.
I hadn't played machinist in a while and, when I got back to it, I could've sworn that there was some synergy between Bioblaster and Flamethrower. Obviously, there wasn't, but it got me thinking. As much as I know how everyone loves "Big Robot," I actually liked to picture Machinist as...well, a *Machinist*. Someone who actively uses gadgets and tools during a fight. Plus, I want reload back. Specifically, the quick reload animation. Here's how I'd rework it: In the lv15-30 space, you'd get reload, which replaces Hypercharge, the gauge reverting back to the bullets. This is an oGCD that grants you 1 special bullet, up to 3 max (fully fills in 3 outside of combat, like Monk's Chakra). What this bullet does is grants your next 1-2-3 combo or AoE weaponskill hit a secondary ability. -1: Deals an additional Gauss Round Shot -2: Grants additional Battery -3: Guaranteed Critical/Direct hit -AoE1: (Firstly, I want to change the animation. The hero throws some coins and shoots a single bullet, creating a ricochet) Enhanced effect leaves a Doton-equivalent puddle of midair ricocheting bullets. -AoE2: Shoots the ground for an additional blast at 50% dmg, but full dmg point blank (or full to the current target with dmg fall off for others) Lv30-50 would introduce the drone. Personally, I liked the old, "set it and forget it" single/aoe drones of eld. I also know the devs don't like pet classes, so I'd try and turn it into a modern summoner-esque device. Activating Battery let's you summon it and it will follow you around this time. Instead of battery acting as a wonky timer, I would have the drone fire in tandem with your attacks, decreasing the charge with each shot by 10 or 20. Single target attacks will have it perform heat blast and AoE will fire Auto Crossbow, both drone specific skills you acquire from lv30-50 that are unusable by you. Without these skills, it'll just fire basic pellet shots. When the drone depletes, it fires Drill as it's last 0% meter shot. I'd probably stick a timer on the thing anyway, to avoid camping with it. At lv50, it learns Flamethrower, a skill that sprays fire forward, creating an active hitbox in front of you, and rapidly depletes the meter. It will last until the meter is empty, perform its final attack, then exit the field. Battery can be gained while the drone is out, but Flamethrower makes it more difficult to maintain. Flamethrower also has a long cooldown, a minute maybe? Lv50-60 gives Bioblaster, which gets turned into a toxic grenade with a Cure III effect range that deals no damage. Instead, targets hit will get a short poison DoT. If those targets are then hit by Flamethrower, they will explode, take damage and then gain a burning DoT. This erases the poison one, so you'd have to wait until just the last second to get the most damage out of it, which also grants you time to do other things. -OR- Flamethrower simply deals more damage to the poisoned foes, giving you reason to spend 100% Battery. The channel time would link up with the Bio Bomb DoT timer, essentially allowing you to do other things while these two effects are active. This level range also grants the upgraded 1-2-3 combo skills. Lv60-70 has Barrel Stabilizer, now for Battery meter gain, Reassemble, and Wildfire at lv70. Wildfire is now a buff that temporarily, like Dancer, changes your 1-2-3 combo into new moves. It also activates a reworked heat meter gauge, displaying an empty bar and a short draining timer (like 5 seconds). While active, one of your combo skills will randomly highlight. Successfully hitting it will cause another one to randomly activate and reset the timer, repeating the effect. These shots deal lesser damage, but have very low GCD. Think of this as a cross between Dancer's steps and Gunbreaker's Continuation. The goal here is to land X number of shots to fill the bar, before the timer ends. If you hit the wrong button, take to long between shots, or use a different weaponskill, Wildfire automatically ends. Succeed in filling the bar however, and you will perform a finishing attack. If your drone is out, it will perform on in tandem with you. You do a more stylish Hot Shot, it does Air Anchor. Lv70-80 is primarily the drone upgrade as before. Only difference is, as stated earlier, it attacks with you. Rushing out at targets and then back to you, probably with an effect similar to Monk's Thunderclap. I would however, change its design. Sorry, but I think it just looks incredibly bland as as. Maybe make it look more magitek inspired, Garlond Works,, Omega-ish, or just more FF7 steampunk. This level range sees each of it's skills replaced with a newer version. Before hand it will just perform its old attacks. So Drill becomes Pile Bunker, Auto Crossbow can have it firing missiles or something, and Flamethrower becomes a laser. I figure, at this point, you've got so much stuff going on, that the lv80-90 set would just be trait buffs and Shotgun, like normal. I think this gives Machinist a bit more of an identity, instead of just "gun guy in the back." This set sees you constantly doing things at all level ranges and shelling out damage. I legit chose the job as my main through ARR, via purchase, but I won't lie, it gradually began to just feel brain dead to play after a while.
I'm still really shocked that the only mechanics update Mch got at all was chainsaw. None of it's other abilities didn't really add anything else to Mch which is really a shame. I'm really hopeful that they'll give it some unique stuff in the next expansion I suppose.
As a physical range dps player, I constantly compare the 3 jobs. You definitely have highlighted the issues among them. I feel that whether the job is easy to play or not is really subjective and developer shouldn't make it a reason for it to have lower dps. Taking the idea of new job like reaper that has ability to transform. I do hope that if they ever rework machinst, they allow us to transform, like how ironman work (our char put on queens armor and weapon) and get some melee burst window and by just changing our abc combo as well as animations of ogcd. This makes us plan our tools in difficult fight and hopefully a more satisfying gameplay and damage output.
They already have the perfect MCH AoE tool in the game: The rocket launcher from the Diadem! Make it available for MCH as an alternative AoE Battery Spender and blast away and leave the Robot as it is for SIngle Target, that would be my solution. In terms of support, I think a Defibrillator-Ability would work well. something like Blue Mage got - A Ressurection with 6 min CD, but I would make it an instant cast OGCD. That's surely enough support for prog groups to consider bringing a MCH.
I feel like they could make Reassemble function similar to pvp analysis where it buff/changes how your gadgets affect your target. Agree on pvp bishop as well, that'd be neat. Just make bioblaster/flamethrower a poison grenade or something and both can be dots
I been wanting Auto-Crossbow to reduce the time on Ricochet, just like Heat Blast reduces Gauss Rounds for a long while. I also been wanting something to charge the battery gauge faster as well. I was thinking that starting around level 80+ after you get your Automation Queen, maybe have Drill add battery gauge as well, just like Air Anchor and Chainsaw does.
I think this really hits on problem points. For me the biggest is thst the are stuff doesn't feed into you burst, like every other dps/tank job does. Honestly I think g the clasz/job team need ti be more engineering oriented ted and not just developers. They need to think about what they are doing to jobs, and how that direction makes sense. We see these kind of problems at the beginning of every expansion. Existing jobs get some changes, new jobs are op, and things get broken. Looking at you inner release changes that shouldn't effect infuriate abilities. Machinist is in a bad place inside its role and need addressed. I like things you listed out as it looks at a problem amd not just the dps numbers
With most jobs they seem to have a “6 button” system - 6 corr GCDs that are manor kit elements. Sam you have your base 6 gcds, drg’s main combo part, tanks with their 123 and core class special moves and dash, NIN with 123 and mudra, rpr with 123, ogcd, and two alternating attacks, etc. MCH was in line with 123, 2 main ogcds, and heat blast. If the idea is to condense buttons, couldnt heat blast and the activation of it share the same button?
At the end of this you were talking about all of the rapid fire sounding awesome (it does), so my idea was something like trigger happy from ffx-2. We already have button mashing mechanics with a gage to fill up so it could be easy to implement. Or take some ideas from rikku's machina maw dress sphere
Make bio blaster and flame throwers Dots add physical damage resist down or magic damage resist down depending on which one you use first. So if Bio Blaster into flame thrower it adds heat corrosion 3% phys-dmg resist down for the duration of the DoT. And Flame thrower into Bio Blaster would be Tempered Virus which does the Magic resist down version for the duration of the DoT
More a flavor note than anything here... though one might slightly change how a skill works. Since the tools currently are mostly based off Edgar from FFVI, I would have the damage up tied to a debilitator tool. Second one for their defensive cooldown (though this one might not work with the current way they're designing jobs) make it tied to Edgar's flash tool, and maybe have it apply an accuracy down to the enemy? Though I can see this being overpowered if certain mechanics get dodged entirely. And at the risk of it sounding too much like summoner, perhaps reassemble sits on a 60 second cooldown and is what gives you a usage of each of your tools. So you can reassemble into debilitator into drill into chainsaw while your filler rotation is the gunslinging
It feels like it can't decide what it really wants to be aesthetically or from a design standpoint. Personally, I'd love something that felt more like a sniper with the occasional cast time. The only gadgets I really like are Drill/Flamethrower, and that's mostly because they're *just* over the top enough.
I want them to incorporate the sniper from PvP. My half baked idea is after using a certain amount of gauge you get one cartridge of ammo (like from back in HW and SB but just one),or instead by adding “Reload” and have it change into a skill called “Testament”. Like, you use Reload it then goes on CD for a short time before you can use Testament. Also have it be channeled like Midare and Communio so that you can have a short but nice animation of loading, racking, and firing the rifle. Its main purpose is as an equivalent to blast arrow/step finisher(though very arguably thats what the reassembled tools are). Also I want the animation for Scattergun to maybe be tweaked a little so it doesn’t look like you constantly putting away and pulling out the gun
Playing into the whole guns and gadgets thing, I'd like it to be a permanent pet class. .Sort of like hunter in WoW where you could have a different pet out for different situations. Would give them more offensive and support options without being a proper support class as you couldn't switch it mid encounter. Shield drone for defence, a bit or something similar for offence etc.
With Bio and Flame: maybe have a secondary effect where reassamble is what front loads the AoE damage to create an AoE burst window with a similar feel to the Single target burst window. Otherwise Flame and Bio can leave some, heavens forbid, DoTs (What kills Flamethrowers use is 100% that you have to stand still to use it. Those type of abilities with small ranges requiring to be next to enemies tend to not be used to their full extent * cough * Dancer Improvisation *cough * )
i always wanted the sniper shot incorporated somehow most likely like a execute phase only ability, when the target health is below 30% consuming heat as a trade off for big damage. but i do think some personal defensive gadgets like a personal shield or rocket boots would also go a long way to improve things.
My issue with the Hypercharge changes you implementing is that chaining all those abilities quickly is what makes MCH fun, at least for me. I think that stacking changes to both Wildfire and Hypercharge would be enough to fix the low ping requirement. I like how you need to weave so much in the burst window. The ping issue doesn't come from the abilities themselves but how it's all based on timers instead of stacks. If this messes with their 2 minute cycle there's other places you can shave time to fit it
Good changes but the proposed changes for hypercharge kill any double hyper charge windows without ridiculous overcap, so if you want super rapid fire makes more sense to have it consume a gauss round charge for extra potency and give the refund so you aren’t screwed if you properly save heat for 2 minutes
I will say I think that for Flamethrower, it would be better as a Dot that has a similar animation to Bio Blaster but burns enemies instead, still have give 20 battery and keep your Reassemble idea but rather than granting stacks for staying still, it would be much easier to make it a DoT instead at least imo
I agree, I miss the bishop turret, feels like it needs to come back and also get an upgrade like Mecha queen, so like Mecha king or something wish they'd bring back ammunition but I'd sacrifice that for utility like a group wide buff or like stated a trick attack like debuff for a shot
My Idea was in the next expansion, give us the ability to replace our summons (rook/queen), and give us a megitech suit instead that augments our abilities, give us some extra oomph in our bursts. I imagine something that when my bar is charged, I got a certain amount of seconds on a megitec suit we have, totally replaces our abilities with enhanced versions with higher potency. hence why i think it give us a bit of extra oomph during burst phases. Flamethrower needs to not auto cancel on movement, just give us a reduce movement debuff during flamethrower, give flamethrower a stackable DoT each tick (or increase the damage outright) that deals good damage. I love machinist during shadowbringers, it was my main job to go, and I loved it... but when endwalker came around the cornor, summoner was my go to class. I dislike how the state of machinist is, considering how I enjoyed it the whole last expansion, and I wish to see it be better. My near the end of this video, it kinda like we all kinda wanted the machinist to be either, a great engineer, a quickdrawing shooter, and a G-Warrior pilot.
The one thing I've wanted Machinist to have ever since Auto Crossbow skill came out is for it to actually refresh Ricochet and Gauss Round, because I NEVER wanted to use Auto Crossbow otherwise even when there were a big stack of enemies and it felt so stupid and frustrating. I felt like I could have done a lot more damage. Speaking of which, please make Auto Crossbow do at least a bit more damage. It feels like I could do the same amount of damage with the basic AOE skills. That's my #1 complaint about the job. Good suggestions overall.
![[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Mages Make!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/T6U_0aiGmlk/mqdefault.jpg)
"I like big robot. Gib bigger robot" Mr Happy 2022
I want to feel like summoner and have a gundam following me around
@@volts6042 why not sitting in a Gundam
@@lordzaradon6956 shit I’d take a magitech armor as a big burst window attack
You really did a great job explaining the pain points of the class. Hopefully we'll see some changes like these in the near future. Also, change Machinist LB3 to just getting into the G Weapon, it would be so cool.
I mean as a MCH main I am gonna go ahead and say it. Yes changes need to be made to the job either give it a huge gap of potency per skill and keep it the "pure" Physical Ranged DPS or rework some of the skills to make it feel like the other jobs. Honestly, I don't want it to play anything like bard or dancer (barf). Hypercharge should just be stacks honestly, I personally do not have issues with it but I know tones of people do because of their piss poor IPS. Honestly I love MCH the way it is granted a few small things. Also...... Don't you dare ask for them to change my LB3.... I love my giant Turret beam cannon.
Building off of your suggestions:
Have queen summon in on top of the target air drop style and deal AOE.
And can you imagine the rook trait being added when it’s replaced by the queen, but now rook shoots with you during hyper charge, but then in 7.0 let’s say, heat blast upgrades into said minigun which does two projectiles, meaning now you have 3 going off per second - the burst would feel outstanding.
I love the idea of having the Queen just smash something on the way in rather than the slow summon animation they have now. Would like them to do something similar with Dark knight too and just have your shadow burst out of a targeted enemy. Like you just took a portion of their darkness and made it your own.
Thank you for helping to bring more attention to our plight. I appreciate the input and agree with most of what you say.
- A MCH main
Oh my goooood! The DPS on Machinist is .5% less than the highest one! WE MUST FIX IT NOW! HOMOGENIZE EVERYTHING!
crossbow not giving ogcds was always weird to me. flamethrower always felt odd being a channeled ability instead of part of the aoe rotation in some way much like bard's aoe sidewinder became this expac.
also didn't make sense to me that flamethrower also doesn't generate heat...like wut?!
I appreciate you taking a 'shot' at addressing the issue....
Suggestion: When you summon Queen, Gauss Round and Ricochet change, so that when you use it, the robot does the attack. And depending on how many Gauss Round and Ricochet you used during the Queen window, it enhances the final blow to a limited ammount (lets say 5), making the robot a mini Wild Fire window. Wild Fire - GCD, Queen - oGCD. (also thats a stretch, but make the robot gives everyone a buff of critical hit based on how many charges you got out of it, 0.5% per charge to a maximum of 2.5%)
The most frustrating part about the heat mode is that they already implemented a new and better version of that kind of fast-paced brief Going Crazy phase, Reaper's Enshroud is basically a better heat mode, and I think they should probably use that as a basis for an update. Two high-speed GCDs leading into an OGCD-- maybe not identical, but it's a good foundation.
It would be cool getting something similar to a snipper rifle that works kind of like ten chi jin on NIN where you "cannot move" but have big hits on 2 mins
Gonna be honest, I dunno why anyone would want a skill that's like TCJ, but then again I despise TCJ so lol.
@@AzureRoxe we have flamethrower. It's nothing new tbh
@@JP11999 Yeah, but flamethrower isn't really used anywhere outside lazy AoE. It's like saying Monk is not mobile because it has Anatman. TCJ roots the NIN for 7 GCDs every 2 minutes in both ST and AoE, far cry from how FT is right now.
As someone who is currently taking MCH through Endsinger and Storm's Crown EX, I like some of these ideas. I agree with your idea on Wildfire, I don't see the big boom from it, especially in most fights with a lot of attacks going out, lol.
It needs to AT LEAST have that same impact as a Fire 4... AT LEAST.
Its a 2min ogcd tho, so should really have more oomph
22:45
Perhaps instead of “Analysis”, the enemy damage taken gadget could be called “Debilitator”. That’s the name of one of Edgar’s tools in FF6. It applies a random elemental weakness to the target. With us getting Drill, Chain Saw, and the like, I think Debilitator fits the concept well.
i kinda hate how every design choice for mch comes down to "did edgar do that thing?"
@@ich3730 to be fair, for a while it was “did Mustadio do the thing?” He (beinf the first character in the franchise to be called a Machinist and equip guns as his main weapon type) is kinda why Machinist is a gun job in the first place, and why we got variants on his Aim attacks, with stuff like Head Graze, Foot Graze, and Leg Graze.
I’m cool with them continuing to mesh the two sides of the job idea, with guns but also gadgets.
Anyway, this is largely a name suggestion. If we’re gonna have a damage up debuff on Machinist, it just seems like a fitting name. Less forced than Chain Saw, anyway (as funny as that one is)
@@ich3730 "did edgar do that thing" actually gave MCH an identity beyond "guy with gun" tho.
@@ich3730 For one it's not, Edgar never had a giant robot and didn't even use guns. Secondly there aren't many Machinists to draw inspiration from in FF's history. Edgar himself had like 8 tools and that's it.
@@apharys8921 it is telling, though, that SHB gave us Drill, Air Anchor, Auto Crossbow, and Bio Blaster all in one go.
Going off the idea of making the hypercharge window 1 second gcds and replacing part of the 123 combo with heat blast I feel like doing the same animation 5 times in a row would feel wierd without the weaving to break it up, so a potential way to fix this could be to replace all the 123 combo gcds with functionally identical heat blasts that have different animations letting people be creative in how they choose to shoot real fast
Not sure how it would fit but I feel like an enshroud style phase where you have a mecha suit fly in almost like iron man and then you do some sort of burst combo thing would be cool 😅
The devs have secretly been saving G-Warrior for machinist this whole time.
Overheat and Shroud are essentially the same mechanic with slightly different bells and whistles
I always liked the idea of a flammable Bioblaster, like if you combo Bio->Flamethrower it replaces the poison with a hefty burn. You'd still want to channel it in AoE, but in single target you'd just need a tick of flames to get the whole spicy DoT once a minute.
Great ideas! I'd love to see them take a note from the PvP design and have Reassemble on a short CD, but augmenting other abilities in different ways (though, not the _same_ ways that they do in pvp).
I like the quick fire of machinist too. Your idea for the 5 quick shot reminds me of FFX-2 Yuna’s Trigger Happy skill. Would be cool if it was implemented in here too.
haven't seen the whole video yet but one idea i think it could be fun would be to have the tools being debuff/DoT attacks, like bioblaster being an enhanced DoT poison AoE, the flamethrower being a DoT fire AoE, the chainsaw being a DoT bleeding AoE, the drill being single target armor debuff, Flash being a paralyze/stun AoE. stuff like that
I agree that MCH needs another look, but I don't agree with a lot of these recommendations.
However, its great to see more creators talking about it. The issue I think is that SE team is looking at the raw individual damage a job brings for balance purposes and not the raid utility that the rest of the group gets from those jobs. It explains why we see MCH so far ahead of DNC/BRD on aDPS and at the bottom on rDPS. I also think because of that MCH can't get any utility buffs without heavily nerfing it's raw dps...
And the community will friggin implode on itself if there is any potency loss on a job people think is already performing the worst.
Since that is not an issue for SAM or BLM, I doubt they don't know the numbers for raid damage.
@@Elidan1012 The difference is that BLM needs to cast all of their spells and a SAM needs to be in melee. MCH has 100% uptime on a boss and everything is instant. They can't make it do those levels of damage; it would break the job in half and be a required job in all comps. It also was an issue for both SAM and BLM in the past, but that eventually got addressed. MCH is still paying the phys range tax and gets nothing in return for it.
Again, look at aDPS for MCH; its not in a bad spot. IMO, it probably is at a decent spot for what it does. The issue is that the lack of personal damage from DNC/BRD is MORE THAN made up in their raid utility.
@@gtetrakai "a SAM needs to be in melee" - if raid boss hitboxes were not roughly the size of a county fair then that would be a relevant point of order, but as it is, melee has never had an easier time of 100% uptime. It's time to throw this trope in the trash where it belongs, or (they shouldn't, but for the sake of argument) revert hitbox changes and actually make this a relevant "need" again.
@@gtetrakai Ofc it should have a range phys tax. I never said otherwise.
aDPS is irrelevant and should never be ballanced around. What matters for ballance is a jobs performance in high end 8 man content. Everything else in the game is too easy for percentile differences to matter in any way.
@@Elidan1012 "aDPS is irrelevant" kek
i like all of these so much. i dont think this is better than what you came up with, but i always wanted flamethrower to be like a turret/ or a flamethrower on a rotating stand that you summon to a location. probably just appears next to you where you stand, but it doesnt move similar to how the move is now, and acting like other dots to where once you do it you can go into other things, but still keeping the idea of wait until the tank has finished pulling. idk if thats better, but something i always thought sounded cool to me
I'd love to make wildfire a mix of Trick Attack and Earthly Star. Place it on the ground for a big oil-spill looking effect that lasts 10 seconds. During that window, everyone does slightly more damage to targets in the area (1-2%). After 10 seconds it becomes "combustible," at which point the machinist has 10 additional seconds to explode it for big nuke damage. If you want it to be even more complex you could retain the weaponskill bonus effect, but have it tied only to the machinist and the final nuke. (Lore-wise, I'd like it to be tied only to any attacks that increase or expend heat, but I think that might not work with timings).
I'd give them a party true north. Give it something to work with other roles of course, but it would be an interesting buff other than more dps.
i had a similar idea for the hypercharge window but there were some differences, no doubt it'll be 'sounds too much like reaper' but tough, basically:
123 combo reverted to basic slug/split/cleanshots, potency adjustments as needed
hypercharge allows you to use heatblast
heatblast gives 3 stacks of a buff called "Heatin' Up" (yes with the apostrophe)
Heatin' Up turns your 123 into heated versions, this makes the flippy crazy animations of the heated versions feel more 'special' because you dont use them constantly
heated cleanshot now gives a new buff called idk 'Augur Primed'
Augur Primed allows you to use a new finishing skill at 70, the Augur (bazooka) from diadem for a big finishing hit, similar to communio from reaper, big damage line AOE
there's probably a similar way to allow AOE to charge the Augur to how RDM can melee AOE to get to it's finishers too so you can use the Augur on AOE pulls too
Reapers enshroud is a really good example of how to make a good feeling rapid attack window. Having to spam the same button over and over just doesn't feel good.
Im going to go over some of your ideas and then use that to bring my ideas in, for organizational purposes.
Wildfire: Love the idea, got a small simplr solution to the overcap. Name the 5 attacks "Quick Draw" and it gives a timed buff called "Wild Draw" that allows an additional charge of Geass Round/Ricochet to be stored (maybe 15 sec duration, or 20 second duration?). If not an extra charge, then 3 stacks of the buff to increase the potency of the skills, granted when all charges of Quick Draw are consumed.
Wildfire needs a few things to feel better. One, the sound effects and visuals need some work. The popping off sound needs to be a strong "boom" that should be heard over other MCH skills. Visually, theres a few tricks. One, make it give the current explosion, then a very fast, brief "secondary" explosion thats slightly bigger, so its no longer "i blinked, what did i miss" deal. When it goes off, have it appear over the other numbers for at least the MCH, to make it feel that much bigger of a hit. And for MCH only, it can have a small screenshake effect when it does go off, maybe even a slight-but-noticable screen blur from the explosion location. As for Functionally, theres three ideas and they can be implemented seperately or together. Make it Crit each time, crit chance boosts its damage. Due to its cooldown, missing a crit would be devastating. This helps with that. The other is to give it a boost to Heat and Battery when it does pop off. This makes it lend itself to the follow up burst by creating a short cycle. Overheat combo the Wildfire, Wikdfire goes off, use Overheat again, perhaps have mech ready. Last one, as Happy already stated, make it aoe. Give it use out of ST scenarios, it feels odd to hold onto this CD in dungeon pulls because its just not good in them.
Bioblaster and flamethrower can be made front koaded with benefits imo. Bioblaster can "shred" enemy defenses and let the McH next 3 hits do more damage (and you can do same with Drill, if desired, but thats if the game changes to where thats a good idea). For Flamethrower, my big idea is let us move during it, but trade it off with "if you use any other skill, this one ends". This allows repositioning at the least during a big pull.
As for Queen, i have another idea that coukd work. This requires a new ability: Twin Rooks. Summons 2 mechs who target different foes if possible. Their focus is on aoe skills and together, their attacjs are weaker until 3 plus targets. They also have thwir overcharged skill to do a fuck-off boom and taje tge foe out with them. This gives us an AoE use to the battery, but i admit this is more of a full blown 7.0 idea.
In short, the Theme of McH isnt bad at all. But the mechabics need to be modernized and pain points focused. Because we have a class thats on the edge of perfection feel wise, with some poijts so badly misallisgned that it hurts the whole experience. Im hoping for Mch's future.
I would cry tears of joy if Bishop Turret came back lmao Great video, I'd love to see them implement things similar to what you came up with here!
2 min raid buff idea, "Signal Flare" grats a 5% crit and direct hit rate to party members in range for 20 seconds. It fits the job and enhances reassemble while giving that 5% damage increase to crit/DH abilities for the whole party.
I like it, IF they end up going that route with making it not a pure selfish dps. Part of me still wants it to be the hard hitting phys range.
I get that they want to stay with the Edgar fantasy with MCH but they're completely missing an opportunity of using another amazing sharpshooter toolkit from the series. Irvine! His special ammos are so cool and have SUCH a nice impact.
Great video Haps! As an MCH main, I would love to see just about everything in this video added. I think job identity you sketch out here (quick attacking + gadgets) is great, and seems super fun.
They could also give them a giant defibrillator to use as a rez with a long cool down since they already use that as an excuse on why rdm and smn have low dps. You could have them reassemble it for an instant cast.
A short range res would definitely be different enough to feel unique and help emphasize physical range’s strength of being mobile. I like that conceptually.
please, no more rezzes. i beg you.
Like the idea of flamethrower having stacks. What I think I do instead is have it so that when you cast flamethrower it gives you however many stacks, and as you are channeling it, it is consuming the stacks to deal damage.
If you cancel flamethrower for whatever reason, you still have 5/10 seconds on the stacks and you can recast it, to have it start burning those stacks down as well.
Nothing feels worse than when you get a huge pack to flamethrower and then 4 AOEs land at your feet as soon as you press the button
These sound like really fun changes. Hope the right kind of person from SE watches your videos and takes note.
I love a lot of your ideas. I have a few of my own that I think work well as addendums.
-Flamethrower: I think its a good idea to have flamethrower share a CD with air anchor and grant the battery, but I think it'd actually be cooler to it a targeted ranged circular aoe: Flame Shot. No channel, ever. It would be a little firey projectile that explodes on impact with the target. Think like the incinerator from Fallout.
-Hypercharge and wildfire: I like your ideas for hypercharge and wildfire. On top of those, I actually think these could be consolidated and analysis could be removed. Hear me out. 60 second CD wildfire, 6 stacks of of quick draw on you and 6 stacks of wildfire on the target. Make the final explosion more bombastic, both for that feeling you mentioned, as well as to clearly indicate that it is aoe. I guess that would also get rid of heat, but I'm ok with that. And yeah! Add in the rook! Go all out!
Honestly, I would prefer to keep gauss shot weaving during hypercharge if something like this ever happened, but if it makes the job unplayable for some I guess I don't need it.
I really liked all your proposed changes and new additions im not sure how i feel about the heatblast change but thats mainly me needing to play with the change im sure i would like it but beyond that i agree with every single change cant think of anything else to give personally great job as always
Though I'm still to try machinist (only 4 left till I have everything at 90, personal achievement eventually
My two changes I'd like:
Flamethrower turns into Machinist Doton. No Debuff, but like a 150 Potency DOT you can just plonk down that makes a flamethrower turret in the middle of the Trash group the tank just pulled.
And Much like you suggested, Remove the Cast Time Reduction for Ricochet from Heat Blast And Give it To Auto Crossbow, Now, Hypercharge works a lot smoother where you're either mashing Heat Blast - Gauss or Auto Crossbow - Ricochet depending on if you're doing single Target or AOE. I also agree with changing Hypercharge from a Timer to a Stack of 5.
One of the big things i miss about mch was when it had utility. When rook/bishop turrets gave their own regenerations think it was tp/mp. Bring those placeable turrets back and maybe yes bishop could give pulsing shields but then have rook put a vuln stack on the boss or something to that effect. I thought that was great when mch was able to do those buffs. Maybe while we're at it we can give it the gauss barrel again for the ranged caster for the lols.
I'm still of the opinion that the best low-impact change they could do to fix the job would be to make Wildfire a party-wide buff. I think that would improve their numbers while also making it really fun to synergize with groups. adding that on top of the other changes to Wildfire you mentioned would be awesome as well.
In my opinion the best way they could fix MCH is to give it utility in the form of debuffs to put on enemy instead of buffs on party.
I.e. something like SCHs Chain Strategem or the Tanks Reprisal. Still functionally the same but its an offensive flavor, preserving the jobs identity as an offensive phys ranged instead of a support phys ranged.
Ive been an advocator of introducing Blitzball Player as the 4th physical ranged job amd makimg it the debuff job to match Wakka from ffx but itd be a good fix for mch too.
EDIT: After finishing your video. I LOVE your suggestions!
Going into EW my most realistic hope for MCH was an upgraded version of hypercharge on a 2min cooldown to give our burst a bigger oomph and a better distinction from the rest of the rotation. Visually I was imagining it like us firing all our tools from our swiss army gun and just flinging it around us into different firing positions, maybe adding a final hit like a launcher or the sniper rifle from PVP as a finisher.
I got my mch 90 and left it. Was just an odd job. I definetly agree with these ideas
I love it. There are some parts I would maybe tweak but you already compromised in trying to fit in line with previous job design choices so I know not all of it is exactly how you might want it either. Great vid
How about this:
Instead of CDs for the OGCDs you get charges, stacks so to speak.
One charge can be used on either Ricochet or gauss round, and both charges for both skills track individually, with one charge restoring every 30 seconds.
When you then enter your hypercharge window, instead of having to weave each heated blast consumes a charge and increases its damage by the potency of a gauss round or ricochet with an added AOE effect on top.
This would eliminate weaving during hypercharge entirely while not missing out on damage or potency
For the longest time I've just wanted Flamethrower to not be a channeled skill (having to sit still, I'd like to move around with it); but having the damage frontloaded like Thundercloud would be great too. Still a quick DPS gain in AoE.
One thing I thought of for the support route was a rez via Defibrillator. Instant cast weaponskill with a two or three minute cooldown; but works like Monk's Six-Sided Star. Extends your next weaponskill recast to 8 seconds (the same cast time for the other rez spells; but in this case can be reduced a bit with skill speed instead of spell speed).
I don't know how the devs can look at flamethrower for multiple expansions and be like yeah this is fine
Probably because they don't look at it at all.
Two words: Yes, please!
I really learned machinist towards the end of Stormblood I miss that kit. Bring back rook, bishop, vuln up, and damage down, using current job design strategy. The pvp rework is proof of concept.
One cool change of the Rook would be to change it's effect at higher levels to just put up a large shield and then you ricochet your shots off that shield which empowers both your single target and your multitarget shots to do more damage. And make it a very cool visual effect as well, where you can see the shield reacting to the shots and watch the trajectory change.
What? This suggestion is just weird. It doesn't really add anything to gameplay element. Most of what you suggested was visual. You could accomplish the same thing is a much more rudimentary way without all of the smoke and mirrors of bouncing shots off of a rook turret.
With the "rook" trait at the end, I think that rather than having this sort of janky fix of reduced cooldown+potency for 1 of your gauss things and then also adding the turret to shoot behind you, instead make it so you load all charges of gauss+ricochet into it and the turret will fire it with increased potency, then stick around to "recycle" the rounds each time you heatblast/autocross(turning the bullets from that into gauss /ricochet rounds) , but keep the gcd at 1.5 and lock the player out of pressing gauss/rico. This effectively makes it so that every time you press overheat, you will have 0 charges of gauss while spamming heatblast and once heatblast is over and you go back to your longer gcd, *then* you can dump them all in your burst window.
Alternatively, you can change Reassamble to be a buff that changes how your actions work and Overheat into the current auto-Dcrit effect of Reassemble, but with the "drawback" that you then have to cool off your gun, aka do 5 gcds of Heatblast or Heat Wave (autocrossbow rename).
G-Warrior for new LB3. The satellite is nice, but why not a G-Warrior airstrike? Or the Air Force from the Kefka fight? And as a machinist main, I really appreciate you for making this video. It changed my mind on a few things.
I still think the class just needs a potency buff. However, I reallly like the idea of making Hypercharge into a tick-based skill instead of a timed one. They recently did it with Delirium for DRK so there IS precedent. And then I heard your ideas for utility - instead of a shield turret, why not a healing turret, to match curing waltz. Also, since you mentioned Mustadio, I like the idea of "Analysis" with a cool lazer scope animation that gives a 10%+ crit damage buff to the party.
Good stuff. Only thing I think I wouldn't totally be on board with is the 1 second GCD for HB/AC and not being able to weave gauss/ricochet inbetween. That said, 100% agree with having those windows of bam-bam-bam rapid fire gun attacks feel very satisfying. Dismantle should definitely be a thing as listed here.
Idea I had in mind would be to have Flamethrower detonate the dot from Bio Blaster and cause all of that damage upfront; an idea born from too much time playing Driller in Deeprock Galactic, I'll say. Don't think it'd work out smoothly since (assuming Flamethrower shared CD with Air Anchor), it wouldn't always be up for every BB.
Also, that sniper rifle LB from pvp and/or Mustadio could also be an "aoe Air Anchor" option rather than Flamethrower. Call it Rail Round or whatever and have it pierce targets for aoe akin to Chainsaw.
I would love these ideas! esp. with the raid fire mch during hypercharge, would love the sniper shot during 2mins
I started playing last year when endwalker came out and my main is Machinist, i'm very casual tho so I don't know enough but I think you have some great ideas. i've actually been watching all your dongeons guide as I was doing the MSQ I made it to shadowbringer and unlocked the dwarfs so for now i'm concentrating on getting the tank. thanks for the guides, quick and to the point, good visuals to understand the mechanics. I would like to point out that in order to have more fun you can jump 360 while casting heated split shot and it makes you do a 720 :D hahahha cheers
My main issue with the turret and queen is that the time starts counting down during the spawn in animation even though they reduced the time. If they kept the reduced time but stopped it from counting down during the spawn I’d love it so much more. I used to main it until then.
I’ve always said that MCH needs utility. BLM and SAM are still somewhat reliant on other players because their movement is limited. MCH can easily adjust to wherever it needs to be without any uptime loss. MCH is the only job completely not reliant on other players right now. As such if you look at FFLOGs it performs very well in Barbariccia which is a fight that is difficult to optimize because of how movement intensive it is.
I think it'd be neat if instead of buffing the party like the rest of the ranged phys classes, MCH's schtick was that he would debuff your enemies by using skills that break down a targets armor or defenses. Change Wildfire to an ability that, instead of just exploding for big damage, the enemy gains a stack of a "Burning Armor" debuff for the duration of Wildfire every time they're hit with a weaponskill. Once the timer expires on Wildfire it explodes, doing a set amount of damage, and blowing off a chunk of enemy armor increasing the amount of damage done to the target by 1% per stack of "Burning Armor" for a set amount of time.
Good suggestions all around. I do think though that the hypercharge idea with overcapped oGCDs is a bit too convoluted.
A cleaner solution would be to just have a spender GCD. Say you can cash in 2 stacks for a bigger attack in hypercharge.
I would say yes to all your suggestions but I would lower the level for scattergun AND ad a 120 second snipe shot attack for single target ( like we have in pvp) and flamethrower be a super powerful 120 second blast of fire with 10 s of DOT . The sniper round and flame burst would give 50 heat and battery, those 2 new skills I mentioned could be unlocked at lvl 82 instead of scattergun
Make it like a 30s burst that uses the Chess Promote system to go from Queen (0s)to Rook (30s) to Knight (60s) to Bishop(90s) to Queen (120s)
One thing that I think needs to be changed because of the changes to Queen's damage is giving Barrel Stabilizer the ability to add 50 Battery along with Heat.
Making BioBlast a MCH version of Trick Attack to make it actually useful rather than a button that is largely useless would be nice.
Here are my ideas for MCH
Idea #1: Make Flamethrower generate 20 Heat on cast, or Generate 10 heat per tick.
1a: its potency increased based on the amount of heat you have on cast. If applying idea #1, each tick will be stronger & stronger, providing further incentive to keep channeling.
1b: Another option is for Flamethrower to be a Heat Spender, with potency increasing the higher the gauge is. Cost: 5 Heat Gauge per second (or tick?)
Idea #2: Reassemble resembling it's pvp counterpart, Analysis. Grants an additional effect depending on the next Weaponskill used (1 of 4)
Drill effect: +200 potency
Bioblaster effect: Applies a damage down on afflicted enemies for the duration
Air Anchor effect: +20 additional battery
Chain Saw effect: Reduces cooldown of next Chain Saw by 20 seconds
Idea #3: Automaton automatically fires an attack based on Hypercharge weapon skill used, if applicable: Rapid-fire during Heat Blast, RPGs during Auto Crossbow for aoe. Keeps robot ranged.
3a: Issue commands to the Automaton akin to SCH fairy/Seraph. Additional hotkeys required. Can replace Queen Overdrive for one of them.
3b: Final Attack (Pile Bunker/Crowned Collider) are aoe and are auto DH crits. Included both because of different Ultimate/content levels.
I must say, I love your Dismantle & Analysis ideas. I personally agree and think MCH/all P-range should have some sort of utility.
Two suggestions to fix machinist without a rework. Not sure if these has been mentioned before (I'd assume some form of the 2nd has been at least)
1) Allow all party members' damaging weapon skills (GCDs and oGCDs) to count for calculating final wildfire explosion damage, stacking up to a max of 10 (maybe 12?) damaging weapon skills for all party members.
2) When wildfire detonates, it applies a short DoT (same length of time as Circle of Scorn. 15s) with a potency equal to 50% of the cumulative potency from wildfire GCD stacks to the primary target and 25% to all enemies in a 5 yalm radius of the primary target.
Alternative to the suggestions in the video: split MCH into two separate jobs. Have one of them inherit the class name and make it into the ranged physical equivalent of SMN where it is constantly producing tools/turrets/robits to do its attacks with. As it stands, for myself at least, half of the jobs "schizophrenia" is that the tool gameplay and the gun gameplay just don't mesh very well. The other new job could become something like Magitek Gunner which focuses on using something like a transforming gun that can perform different types of attacks and leans more into the hypercharge type of gameplay.
Alternatively again have it play like PLD where you have a smoothly alternating gun phase and tool phase instead of basically having the gun for 123 and barely anything else.
Oh I’d love that actually. I’d play the heck out of both of those classes if it was done
Great ideas! Having to weave during Hypercharge is what is stopping me from playing the job further. It feels like a penalty for obtaining 50 heat rather than a cool/fun reward to look forward to.
As a MCH Dps main i like these suggestions. While i personally don't mind the job how it is, i do wish there was just abit more to the job, whether it'd be, more buttons, damage or utility. I do miss the turret though from HW, wouldn't mind having that back
As a new player, machinist has been my favorite class so far to play. Granted, ive only leveld to 60 with most jobs, but it's just felt the best at those levels.
I envisioned a King automaton that pairs with Queen on summon that applied something like a personal Trick Attack for your damage window. Then have a Crowned/Checkmate skill that combines the King and Queen into a Brute Justice like massive cd that gives you the nice visual feedback for the damage to replace Wildfire. I like the idea of getting into the robot, but I'm not sure how they would implement it in actual combat. Might be easier to just leave the robots as is. I'd also remove Flamethrower for a Generator channeled ability. You pull out a crank generator and during the channel, you create a lightning field around you (skill going from cone to self aoe). The field can deal damage, but the main use is each second you channel, you get heat and battery gauge.
I definitely want Hypercharge to give charges, instead of just having a short duration.
I also wanna see MCH get some kinda of debuff for their offensive raid utility, like mug, since DNC and BRD are both about buffing.
You suggest Analysis. But why not just call it Libra?
I would say make it so the boss is more "vulnerable" because of the MCH. So the party crits it more and/or harder.
I like the idea of the Bishop autoturret doing a stacking aoe shield as a defensive tool. I was thinking that would be the besr defensive tool for them, unique from what DNC and BRD offer. Plus the idea of an engineer using a gadget to put a defensive barrier absolutely fits the aesthetic!
D&D Artificer can do that with their mechanical servant, granting temporary HP every turn.
D&D Artificer is a good basis for inspiration here in general for MCH aesthetics and ideas.
I’ve personally made some small ideas on what I’d love to see be added for MCH, mostly adding Battery into the AoE such as making Air anchor/Hot shot into Aoe skills, having all of the Rook and Queen skills have Aoe fall off, stuff like that, same with wildfire because it’s also just dead in dungeons
But the big idea I had is a hybrid of the HW Gauss round system, Ammo and the pvp Blast Charge. Until say SB leveling it would just boost damage of your gcds, but at level 62/70 you’d gain a new skill that changes the 1-2-3/spread shot into 4 new skills that work like the pvp Blast charge and have those skills deal more damage. Feel like it would be interesting to have.
As for how the Wild/Quick draw, if you’re gonna change all the st skills then I feel like there should be a whole combo system otherwise it should just stay as a different button.
I dont really play MCH all that much but one thing i hate with flamethrower is that its not entirely clear whether you're actually causing any damage (especially in big party content). Its very unsatisfying in that way. What I would do is have the skill give the enemy the "Burns" debuff and that way you'd actually get a much clearer feeling that you've hit the boss and caused damage.
Tbh the aoe rotation is fine by me,
some idea are good too but my main issue with mch currently is actually the animation delay queen does when you summon her the duration gets lost due animation i calculated
if u summon her on 50 gauge, her animation to finally atk is around 6-7 sec, while duration is 12.... so basically shes wasting 6 secs just for the summoning of her lol
thats like 1,5sec 4x.... those are like 4 heatblast the queen does nothing lol just oh i come down get assembles and charge, in my opinion the animation should be
"i come down and immediately charge" without getting up first lol or automatically laser-spawn on the enemy....
im not going deep into other issues
For hypercharge, I'd rather see a change to it similar to how enshroud works for Reaper, a charged based system with significantly more time to use all charges while still maintaining the 1.5sec gcd and single weaving. Similar to how Reaper is able to apply Shadow of Death or Whirl of Death during Enshroud, allow Mch to be able to use their other tool skills during hypercharge to avoid drifting.
Then for Barrel Stabilizer, have it trigger "Wildfire Ready" and make Wildfire act as a guaranteed crit/dh finisher to your next Hypercharge window with AOE falloff damage in a 5y radius around the target so it's equally usable with Heat Blast or Auto Crossbow.
If we're going to add more utility to MCH, I like the idea of a damage down. But even before you mentioned the bishop turret, I was thinking that an aoe shield for allies would be perfect for the class thematically speaking. I didn't start till SHB so I didn't know it was previously a thing the class had.
Change Tactician to Aether Barrier and create overshields and change Analyze to Rally that gives a 5% damage buff for 15s.
3 charges of Aether rounds can be standard after executing Wild Draw but for every Crit that you land during Wild Draw it adds an additional Aether round to be used for a max total of 8 rounds each with a potency of 150.
Lastly, get rid of Summon Automaton Queen in place of Summon G-Suit. Animation can have an armored suit warp directly to your character and changes your 1-2-3 combo to ‘Superheated’ versions. Drill, Air Anchor, and Chainsaw would change to Javelin, Pile Bunker, and Skysteel Collider and Scattergun, Bioblaster, and Flamethrower change to MIRV Cannon, X-Serum, and Melting Point. Battery Gauge would be changed to Bolt Gauge. Executing Drill, Air Anchor, and Chainsaw would grant one Bolt respectively for a total of 6 needed to summon the G-Suit and this aligns with the 2m burst window meta SE has pretty much implemented to this point.
I hadn't played machinist in a while and, when I got back to it, I could've sworn that there was some synergy between Bioblaster and Flamethrower. Obviously, there wasn't, but it got me thinking. As much as I know how everyone loves "Big Robot," I actually liked to picture Machinist as...well, a *Machinist*. Someone who actively uses gadgets and tools during a fight. Plus, I want reload back. Specifically, the quick reload animation. Here's how I'd rework it:
In the lv15-30 space, you'd get reload, which replaces Hypercharge, the gauge reverting back to the bullets. This is an oGCD that grants you 1 special bullet, up to 3 max (fully fills in 3 outside of combat, like Monk's Chakra). What this bullet does is grants your next 1-2-3 combo or AoE weaponskill hit a secondary ability.
-1: Deals an additional Gauss Round Shot
-2: Grants additional Battery
-3: Guaranteed Critical/Direct hit
-AoE1: (Firstly, I want to change the animation. The hero throws some coins and shoots a single bullet, creating a ricochet) Enhanced effect leaves a Doton-equivalent puddle of midair ricocheting bullets.
-AoE2: Shoots the ground for an additional blast at 50% dmg, but full dmg point blank (or full to the current target with dmg fall off for others)
Lv30-50 would introduce the drone. Personally, I liked the old, "set it and forget it" single/aoe drones of eld. I also know the devs don't like pet classes, so I'd try and turn it into a modern summoner-esque device. Activating Battery let's you summon it and it will follow you around this time. Instead of battery acting as a wonky timer, I would have the drone fire in tandem with your attacks, decreasing the charge with each shot by 10 or 20. Single target attacks will have it perform heat blast and AoE will fire Auto Crossbow, both drone specific skills you acquire from lv30-50 that are unusable by you. Without these skills, it'll just fire basic pellet shots. When the drone depletes, it fires Drill as it's last 0% meter shot. I'd probably stick a timer on the thing anyway, to avoid camping with it. At lv50, it learns Flamethrower, a skill that sprays fire forward, creating an active hitbox in front of you, and rapidly depletes the meter. It will last until the meter is empty, perform its final attack, then exit the field. Battery can be gained while the drone is out, but Flamethrower makes it more difficult to maintain. Flamethrower also has a long cooldown, a minute maybe?
Lv50-60 gives Bioblaster, which gets turned into a toxic grenade with a Cure III effect range that deals no damage. Instead, targets hit will get a short poison DoT. If those targets are then hit by Flamethrower, they will explode, take damage and then gain a burning DoT. This erases the poison one, so you'd have to wait until just the last second to get the most damage out of it, which also grants you time to do other things. -OR- Flamethrower simply deals more damage to the poisoned foes, giving you reason to spend 100% Battery. The channel time would link up with the Bio Bomb DoT timer, essentially allowing you to do other things while these two effects are active. This level range also grants the upgraded 1-2-3 combo skills.
Lv60-70 has Barrel Stabilizer, now for Battery meter gain, Reassemble, and Wildfire at lv70. Wildfire is now a buff that temporarily, like Dancer, changes your 1-2-3 combo into new moves. It also activates a reworked heat meter gauge, displaying an empty bar and a short draining timer (like 5 seconds). While active, one of your combo skills will randomly highlight. Successfully hitting it will cause another one to randomly activate and reset the timer, repeating the effect. These shots deal lesser damage, but have very low GCD. Think of this as a cross between Dancer's steps and Gunbreaker's Continuation. The goal here is to land X number of shots to fill the bar, before the timer ends. If you hit the wrong button, take to long between shots, or use a different weaponskill, Wildfire automatically ends. Succeed in filling the bar however, and you will perform a finishing attack. If your drone is out, it will perform on in tandem with you. You do a more stylish Hot Shot, it does Air Anchor.
Lv70-80 is primarily the drone upgrade as before. Only difference is, as stated earlier, it attacks with you. Rushing out at targets and then back to you, probably with an effect similar to Monk's Thunderclap. I would however, change its design. Sorry, but I think it just looks incredibly bland as as. Maybe make it look more magitek inspired, Garlond Works,, Omega-ish, or just more FF7 steampunk. This level range sees each of it's skills replaced with a newer version. Before hand it will just perform its old attacks. So Drill becomes Pile Bunker, Auto Crossbow can have it firing missiles or something, and Flamethrower becomes a laser.
I figure, at this point, you've got so much stuff going on, that the lv80-90 set would just be trait buffs and Shotgun, like normal. I think this gives Machinist a bit more of an identity, instead of just "gun guy in the back." This set sees you constantly doing things at all level ranges and shelling out damage. I legit chose the job as my main through ARR, via purchase, but I won't lie, it gradually began to just feel brain dead to play after a while.
I'm still really shocked that the only mechanics update Mch got at all was chainsaw. None of it's other abilities didn't really add anything else to Mch which is really a shame. I'm really hopeful that they'll give it some unique stuff in the next expansion I suppose.
As a physical range dps player, I constantly compare the 3 jobs. You definitely have highlighted the issues among them. I feel that whether the job is easy to play or not is really subjective and developer shouldn't make it a reason for it to have lower dps.
Taking the idea of new job like reaper that has ability to transform. I do hope that if they ever rework machinst, they allow us to transform, like how ironman work (our char put on queens armor and weapon) and get some melee burst window and by just changing our abc combo as well as animations of ogcd. This makes us plan our tools in difficult fight and hopefully a more satisfying gameplay and damage output.
They already have the perfect MCH AoE tool in the game: The rocket launcher from the Diadem!
Make it available for MCH as an alternative AoE Battery Spender and blast away and leave the Robot as it is for SIngle Target, that would be my solution.
In terms of support, I think a Defibrillator-Ability would work well. something like Blue Mage got - A Ressurection with 6 min CD, but I would make it an instant cast OGCD. That's surely enough support for prog groups to consider bringing a MCH.
I feel like they could make Reassemble function similar to pvp analysis where it buff/changes how your gadgets affect your target. Agree on pvp bishop as well, that'd be neat. Just make bioblaster/flamethrower a poison grenade or something and both can be dots
i really like these ideas especially the trait there at the end to give more of the rapid fire feeling
Square, just friggin hire this man already Good Lord
I been wanting Auto-Crossbow to reduce the time on Ricochet, just like Heat Blast reduces Gauss Rounds for a long while.
I also been wanting something to charge the battery gauge faster as well. I was thinking that starting around level 80+ after you get your Automation Queen, maybe have Drill add battery gauge as well, just like Air Anchor and Chainsaw does.
I think this really hits on problem points. For me the biggest is thst the are stuff doesn't feed into you burst, like every other dps/tank job does. Honestly I think g the clasz/job team need ti be more engineering oriented ted and not just developers. They need to think about what they are doing to jobs, and how that direction makes sense. We see these kind of problems at the beginning of every expansion. Existing jobs get some changes, new jobs are op, and things get broken. Looking at you inner release changes that shouldn't effect infuriate abilities. Machinist is in a bad place inside its role and need addressed. I like things you listed out as it looks at a problem amd not just the dps numbers
With most jobs they seem to have a “6 button” system - 6 corr GCDs that are manor kit elements. Sam you have your base 6 gcds, drg’s main combo part, tanks with their 123 and core class special moves and dash, NIN with 123 and mudra, rpr with 123, ogcd, and two alternating attacks, etc. MCH was in line with 123, 2 main ogcds, and heat blast. If the idea is to condense buttons, couldnt heat blast and the activation of it share the same button?
At the end of this you were talking about all of the rapid fire sounding awesome (it does), so my idea was something like trigger happy from ffx-2. We already have button mashing mechanics with a gage to fill up so it could be easy to implement. Or take some ideas from rikku's machina maw dress sphere
Make bio blaster and flame throwers Dots add physical damage resist down or magic damage resist down depending on which one you use first. So if Bio Blaster into flame thrower it adds heat corrosion 3% phys-dmg resist down for the duration of the DoT. And Flame thrower into Bio Blaster would be Tempered Virus which does the Magic resist down version for the duration of the DoT
Thanks
More a flavor note than anything here... though one might slightly change how a skill works.
Since the tools currently are mostly based off Edgar from FFVI, I would have the damage up tied to a debilitator tool. Second one for their defensive cooldown (though this one might not work with the current way they're designing jobs) make it tied to Edgar's flash tool, and maybe have it apply an accuracy down to the enemy? Though I can see this being overpowered if certain mechanics get dodged entirely.
And at the risk of it sounding too much like summoner, perhaps reassemble sits on a 60 second cooldown and is what gives you a usage of each of your tools. So you can reassemble into debilitator into drill into chainsaw while your filler rotation is the gunslinging
It feels like it can't decide what it really wants to be aesthetically or from a design standpoint. Personally, I'd love something that felt more like a sniper with the occasional cast time. The only gadgets I really like are Drill/Flamethrower, and that's mostly because they're *just* over the top enough.
I want them to incorporate the sniper from PvP.
My half baked idea is after using a certain amount of gauge you get one cartridge of ammo (like from back in HW and SB but just one),or instead by adding “Reload” and have it change into a skill called “Testament”.
Like, you use Reload it then goes on CD for a short time before you can use Testament.
Also have it be channeled like Midare and Communio so that you can have a short but nice animation of loading, racking, and firing the rifle.
Its main purpose is as an equivalent to blast arrow/step finisher(though very arguably thats what the reassembled tools are).
Also I want the animation for Scattergun to maybe be tweaked a little so it doesn’t look like you constantly putting away and pulling out the gun
These changes are actually excellent, really good solutions in all senses. I hope yoshi-p or any of the devs actually see this...
Playing into the whole guns and gadgets thing, I'd like it to be a permanent pet class. .Sort of like hunter in WoW where you could have a different pet out for different situations. Would give them more offensive and support options without being a proper support class as you couldn't switch it mid encounter. Shield drone for defence, a bit or something similar for offence etc.
Give it a raid buff (old hypercharge), give it jet boots for mobility, give it a mech it can pilot.
With Bio and Flame: maybe have a secondary effect where reassamble is what front loads the AoE damage to create an AoE burst window with a similar feel to the Single target burst window. Otherwise Flame and Bio can leave some, heavens forbid, DoTs (What kills Flamethrowers use is 100% that you have to stand still to use it. Those type of abilities with small ranges requiring to be next to enemies tend to not be used to their full extent * cough * Dancer Improvisation *cough * )
i always wanted the sniper shot incorporated somehow most likely like a execute phase only ability, when the target health is below 30% consuming heat as a trade off for big damage. but i do think some personal defensive gadgets like a personal shield or rocket boots would also go a long way to improve things.
I think executes are extremely unlikely. We've had plenty up till StB, and they're all gone now.
@@RockR277 true it would be a nice option to have though kept specifically to the job
My issue with the Hypercharge changes you implementing is that chaining all those abilities quickly is what makes MCH fun, at least for me. I think that stacking changes to both Wildfire and Hypercharge would be enough to fix the low ping requirement. I like how you need to weave so much in the burst window. The ping issue doesn't come from the abilities themselves but how it's all based on timers instead of stacks. If this messes with their 2 minute cycle there's other places you can shave time to fit it
Good changes but the proposed changes for hypercharge kill any double hyper charge windows without ridiculous overcap, so if you want super rapid fire makes more sense to have it consume a gauss round charge for extra potency and give the refund so you aren’t screwed if you properly save heat for 2 minutes
I will say I think that for Flamethrower, it would be better as a Dot that has a similar animation to Bio Blaster but burns enemies instead, still have give 20 battery and keep your Reassemble idea but rather than granting stacks for staying still, it would be much easier to make it a DoT instead at least imo
I agree, I miss the bishop turret, feels like it needs to come back and also get an upgrade like Mecha queen, so like Mecha king or something wish they'd bring back ammunition but I'd sacrifice that for utility like a group wide buff or like stated a trick attack like debuff for a shot
My Idea was in the next expansion, give us the ability to replace our summons (rook/queen), and give us a megitech suit instead that augments our abilities, give us some extra oomph in our bursts.
I imagine something that when my bar is charged, I got a certain amount of seconds on a megitec suit we have, totally replaces our abilities with enhanced versions with higher potency. hence why i think it give us a bit of extra oomph during burst phases.
Flamethrower needs to not auto cancel on movement, just give us a reduce movement debuff during flamethrower, give flamethrower a stackable DoT each tick (or increase the damage outright) that deals good damage.
I love machinist during shadowbringers, it was my main job to go, and I loved it... but when endwalker came around the cornor, summoner was my go to class. I dislike how the state of machinist is, considering how I enjoyed it the whole last expansion, and I wish to see it be better.
My near the end of this video, it kinda like we all kinda wanted the machinist to be either, a great engineer, a quickdrawing shooter, and a G-Warrior pilot.
The one thing I've wanted Machinist to have ever since Auto Crossbow skill came out is for it to actually refresh Ricochet and Gauss Round, because I NEVER wanted to use Auto Crossbow otherwise even when there were a big stack of enemies and it felt so stupid and frustrating. I felt like I could have done a lot more damage. Speaking of which, please make Auto Crossbow do at least a bit more damage. It feels like I could do the same amount of damage with the basic AOE skills. That's my #1 complaint about the job. Good suggestions overall.
I think having Wildfire have a bigger BOOM sound and a more impactful animation would help to owith making it feel more exciting.