Machinist Melding, Stat Priority, and Consumables — Endwalker 6.55

This page covers a generalized priority system for substats pertaining to Machinist. All substats in FFXIV increase at intervals where certain amounts provide no gain at all. Critical Hit scales quadratically, while Determination and Direct Hit scale linearly, but work together dynamically to provide gains to each other. Skill Speed is our lowest-scaling stat and should be avoided outside of gear-specific optimization.

Machinist best in slot is located on our Machinist Best-in-Slot page. Some of the decisions in these lists will differ from the generalized information on this page simply due to stat tier optimization.

The stat priority on Machinist is as follows:

1. Weapon Damage;
2. Dexterity;
3. Critical Hit;
4. Determination;
5. Direct Hit;
6. Skill Speed.

Weapon Damage and Dexterity will always have more of an effect on your damage than minor substat changes, and should be prioritized ahead of them. Critical Hit is the priority for substats themselves, with Determination and Direct Hit being very close together. Skill speed is not completely dead for us, but outside of fight-specific optimization should be avoided if possible.

When melding on Machinist, the stat priority should be followed as listed above. When deciding on whether or not to meld Determination or Direct Hit, a good general rule of thumb is to try to get them as close as equal as you can, with a bias towards Determination.

As far as skill speed is concerned, Machinist functions at intervals of 0.06 where the rotation will fall into place and you will not be clipped by Wildfire's static placement. If you are looking to make your rotation a bit more smooth and 2.5 GCD is impossible, melding down to 2.44 might be worth it. There are also certain encounters where downtime happens at specific points in therotation and will net Machinist an extra Drill, Air Anchor, or Clean Shot. In these cases, fight-specific best-in-slot can be possible and might take advantage of Skill Speed melds.

Potions in this game are fairly straightforward. The potion you will want will always be the highest tier potion for the main stat that is on your gear. This means that for Machinist we will be taking Dexterity potions to increase our damage. The only other potions that have an effect on our stats are Vitality potions, which offer a short increase of health points. They are very rarely used, if ever.

Food for us is always included in our best-in-slot gear set, so if you are looking for information on what to stockpile on, you will want to look over on our Machinist Best-in-Slot page. Food affects stat tiers on substats and is always taken into account when figuring out what gear gives us the biggest gains.