Hello I am new and made a machanist. I only have a day in but shortly after looking into the class I seen some issues brought up where the class is gate kept out of higher level content.
Are machinists still gate kept and should I then switch to a artilerist? Or is this all issues that are no longer relevant?
Machinist is fine. Some people will gatekeep probably, but play what you think is fun. I have a shadowhunter which is also a transformation class and suffers from similar scaling issues. At the end of the day, machinist has decent utility and is a good class. The people who gatekeep are usually trying to minmax but you can find groups
Thank you. I am still new to the game and was worried I might have issues later on.
Nah, reaper has lowest DPS at the moment (generally speaking) and my groups still take them. From what I’ve seen, if a new raid has come out then you might see more people min maxing but as people become more overgeared for a lot of the raids it becomes more of a “I don’t care we just need bodies” situation. The biggest thing is the class synergy inst amazing so you’ll see classes with crit synergies and things like that get in a lot easier.
I play with a badass Machinist who laughs at some Brel HM mechs that we all run screaming from…Def viable
That’s a good point. Being push immune lets you ignore A LOT. I have 3 destroyers, shadowhunter and a gunlancer and I get to just relax and smack the boss. You trade a lot of your damage ceiling for damage uptime since you can comfortably ignore so many things. Utility can be OP
Thats good to know.
So a machinist is more reliable. That is helpful thank you.
considering there was a machinist in the first clear for brelshaza hellmode
Hey, I don’t what’s wrong with the people replying to you, but it is in fact true you will be gatekept much more often as a machinist than as an artillerist.
The vast majority of lobby leaders don’t even inspect machinists when they apply, they look at the class icon and the immediately look at the next person in the sign up list.
Why is there a stigma against machinist? The class’s damage is one of the lowest in the game. They also have one of the worst party synergies (synergy in this game can be thought of as party buffs that you offer). Raids require some amount of destruction and stagger damage types and machinist is at best just average at those too.
Overall, the main job of a dps is to damage, and machinist is bottom tier in most of the things that would contribute to that. Every dps will be judged hard, the competition is very fierce to get into raid groups, but machinist especially is playing an uphill battle.
If you’re looking for a somewhat fair chance to get into raid groups, you basically have to overgear your machinist.
That is not true. All the synergies in the game amount to a similar amount of damage boost for the party (the only exception is BA/FA synergies from DB/GL being stronger). You might get a better bonus from crit synergies if you run keen blunt or something, but at its core, they’re all about the same.
That is also not true. Machinist has a lot of destruction skills in their transformed state some of them on a relatively low cooldown. You also have to keep in mind, that when you’re out of your transformation, you normally need just two spells to get back to it. Well… 3 if you have lower spec or want to play it safer and that means that you can fill the other 5 skill slots with pretty much any utility your heart desires, be it destruction or stagger. Yes, you can’t compete with true stagger bots like GL or Destroyer, but your stagger will still be up there if you tune your build.
This part is sadly true. Until the artist release and the following lack of DPS players in Valtan/Vykas I spent more time looking for parties on my over geared machinist, than on my destroyer, who’s 25ilvls lower.
Now I’d say it got better for Valtan/Vykas/Clown/Brel normal 1-4, but I imagine it still might be rough for Brel normal 5-6 and Brel hard
How many lobbies have you seen looking for attack power synergy? Personally, as a day 1 player, I have seen 0. I can, however, can say I’ve seen hundreds of lobbies looking for crit synergy. You’re saying they’re equal in boost but they’re actually not. There’s a lot of classes that are crit starved and their damage is pooled into 1 large hit. Over the course of hundreds of hits, these 2 buffs might look similar but the reality is a lot of dps classes only whip out a couple of these huge hits if even that every minute. So when they fail to crit that big hit, it’s a tremendous damage loss. That is why a class like a deathblade doesn’t see much use out of attack power buffs. Every deathblade you know will prefer a crit synergy over an attack buff one.
And regarding destruction and stagger: most if not every class has destruction and stagger baked into their kits, this isn’t unique to machinist. Your class is about middle of the pack for these things. You won’t beat a gl or a destroyer but you also won’t be useless for stagger/destro checks. It doesn’t stand out, especially to make up for the lack of damage.
Sorry, I might’ve worded my idea poorly. What I was trying to say is that +6% atk statistically gives as much of a damage boost as +10% crit chance. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, some classes prefer crit over raw atk buff, due to a specific build as I mentioned or as in your example due to the fact that their damage is concentrated in one skill that must crit. But still, if you compare the two synergies in a long enough parse (let’s say 15m) I bet the damage difference would be negligible. Also, the crit is still a chance, unless you have it at 100% there’s every now and then when the skill would not crit even with the glorious crit synergy.
What that all means? In a practical raid scenario of your average pug party, you wouldn’t even notice the difference between two synergies, because there would be more factors affecting your damage - boss patterns and mechanics, uptime on support buffs, uptime of the aforementioned synergies, your rotation and so on. Does that make sense?
What you say is correct only on paper. If you just look at the skills you could see that all classes both have a stagger and destruction in their kit, so what is the difference then?
Let’s talk destruction first. My current scouter build gives me 6 destruction points (maybe more actually, need to double check) and my GT destroyer has 8. But there’s a catch. As a Destroyer I might not have time to fit in all these 8 destruction points in the mech window because the skills are not very fast, and to make it worse if I’d try to fit as many destruction points as possible I’d simply have to sacrifice quite a bit of damage because of how Destroyer’s identity works. If I’m to not leave any damage on the table, it’s safe to assume that I’d get 4-6 points in. As a scouter, I can dish out these 6 destruction points pretty much whenever without sacrificing anything. So same on paper, but not so much in the practical scenario.
A similar idea goes for stagger. Scouter does noticeably less stagger compare to true chads like Destroyer and GL, but because his stagger skills are available to you pretty much whenever and you can fine-tune your build for stagger easily enough it’s way comfier to use and puts you way above average.
tl;dr Scouter’s destruction is top tier and stagger is above average.
I heard machinist is getting a buff coming up so I put that as my alt. I main artilery now.
Figured artilery as a main and scouter for alt is a good start for me.
I like the scouter playstyle but unlocking the pressurized exlposive enhancement where you can charge it makes me not think about it much.
Sometimes I just use the full charge pressurized exposive on trash mobs.
Could also vary depending on what region you’re in. The gatekeeping has been pretty late past week 1 of a raid apart from title (you get a title once you clear a raid enough times so people will make title only lobbies). Could be that I’m just lucky and I have a fairly big account, but I really haven’t experienced much gatekeeping. I am pretty overgeared though to be fair
Yes, he got buffed recently, but only his AT engraving, the one that relies on non-transformed attacks.
Smilegate will say “you can play anything” but the playerbase will not let you do any content.
Ngl made me laugh.
As a shadowhunter main, which is seen in a similar light as scouter, I say don’t worry about it. It’s cheaper to make a good build for these classes, because you need less gems and tripods. And honestly, even though people talk a lot about it and make tier lists etc, the class balance in this game is amazing! In almost all cases the guy with the highest ilvl/best gear will MVP. It’s very rare that someone outdps you with worse gear or much lower ilvl… In my experience (playing since launch) people get gatekept because of ilvl, roster lvl, engravings, gems/cards and only then because of class and then mostly because of synergy. If the raidleader is a deathblow striker he will always prefer the surge blade/GL for synergy, just how it is.
Yes the general playerbase is so bad that Legacy scouter is viable.
Scouter both spec/build are also very high apm reliant. So if your fingers are slow and you’re not good at remembering combos don’t attempt it. It’s a really weak class in the wrong hands.