Machinist DPS Rotation, Openers, and Abilities — Dawntrail 7.1

This page covers the endgame rotation for Machinist. The base of the rotation consists of powerful tool weaponskills with long recast timers and combo actions that build resources. The resources can then be spent on burst phases utilizing Wildfire, Hypercharge, and Automaton Queen.

The most important weaponskills Machinist has are Drill, Air Anchor, and Chain Saw. They should be used as first priority and as often as possible. Reassemble should be used on one of these weaponskills for the greatest gains. The two charges on Reassemble and Drill also make the abilities quite flexible, and one of the charges can often be used during raid buffs windows.

The space between the long tool recasts should be filled with combo actions Heated Split Shot, Heated Slug Shot, and Heated Clean Shot. The combo timer is 30 seconds and breaks only if the timer is exceeded or if Scattergun is used.

The alignment of the three tools depends largely on the situation and encounter. Good general purpose alignments are as follows:

1. Air Anchor
2. Drill
3. Barrel Stabilizer
4. Chain Saw
5. Excavator
6. Full Metal Field

This gets all of the tools on cooldown as fast as possible and allows very flexible windows for Hypercharge, as all the tools will be cast back-to-back each time.

Machinist burst consists of Hypercharge windows, which can be further enhanced by using Wildfire every two minutes, in addition to Automaton Queen. Barrel Stabilizer grants us access to Full Metal Field and allows us to use a Hypercharge free of charge every two minutes, allowing Machinist to use Wildfire in the opener and double Hypercharge every two minutes.

Hypercharge costs 50 heat and takes 7.5 seconds to execute. It enables the use of Blazing Shot, which can be used five times during the window. Each cast of Blazing Shot also restores Double Check and Checkmate recast timers by 15 seconds. The following prerequisites should be met before you decide to Hypercharge:

1. Drill, Air Anchor, and Chain Saw all have longer than eight seconds left on their cooldown.
2. Your combo will not be broken. As of 6.0, the combo lasts 30 seconds, so this only becomes an issue if you attempt three Hypercharge windows in succession without combo actions between them.
3. You have less than two Double Check or Checkmate charges stored. If either stack is at two when you start Hypercharge, you will have a forced overcap.
4. Using Hypercharge still allows you to use Wildfire on cooldown. You want a minimum of 50 Heat or the free usage from Barrel Stabilizer going into a Wildfire window.

Every two minutes, one Hypercharge can be paired with Wildfire, which increases in potency for every weaponskill the Machinist executes on the afflicted target up to a maximum of six hits. Wildfire can be used either one GCD before or after the Hypercharge to get six weaponskills under the duration, but double weaving it with the Hypercharge offers the most lenient timing margin. Example setups below:

• Wildfire > GCD > Hypercharge > Blazing Shot x5
• Hypercharge > Wildfire > Blazing Shot x5 > GCD
• Hypercharge > Blazing Shot > Wildfire > Blazing Shot x4 > GCD > GCD
• Hypercharge > AoE GCD > Wildfire > Heat Blast x5 > GCD

Since Hypercharge stacks only get consumed when you use single target GCDs, you can use AoE GCDs such as Full Metal Field, Chain Saw, and Excavator after a late weaved Hypercharge and still have enough time for 5 Blazing Shots.

Wildfire functions the same as other DoTs in the game, meaning it will snapshot raid buffs upon being placed on an enemy, not when the explosion happens.

Automaton Queen can be used with the battery gauge whenever it is above 50. As of patch 6.2, for each 10 battery, Queen gains extra potency on all of her attacks, including Arm Punch, Roller Dash, Pile Bunker and Crowned Collider. This means that the most effective way to turn battery into potency is to avoid overcapping the battery gauge and summon Automaton Queen right before raid buff windows. As the weaponskill rotation generates roughly 200-210 battery for every two-minute cycle, the most effective practice is to summon queen between burst windows at 50 and 60 gauge while keeping a queen of 100 battery for each 2 minute burst window. Listed below is a table of all Battery levels and how they effect Battery usage.

No, Automaton Queen automatically casts Pile Bunker followed by Crowned Collider at the end of her sequence. The only time you will press Queen Overdrive is when the enemy is about to die or downtime is about to happen.

No, only GCDs used by your character do.

Given everything that we've gone over previously, this is what your opener would look like in a raid scenario.

Our highest DPS actions are our tools actions and the Blazing Shot burst, with Blazing Shot being slightly ahead of the tool actions. This is why it's key to put our tool's on cooldown as quickly as possible and to delay our Blazing Shots to fit inside the raid buffs from our fellow party members.

A full burst inside of raid buffs post-opener would look like this:

The nice thing about Dawntrail Machinist is the we can have a static burst window. The image above displays how our burst can look at every single 2 minute burst in full uptime encounters. The things that can change between burst windows are the combo GCDs as we will not always enter the burst with the same GCDs. It is also worth noting that you will have to save one charge of Drill to have only high damage actions inside of raid buffs. This does mean that there is a long time between your combo GCD that is placed between Air Anchor and Chain Saw. If your combo falls off before you can use the next combo action after the full burst then consider swapping the drill inbetween the combo GCD between Air Anchor and Chain Saw with the Drill between the two Hypercharge windows.

For further optimization, if we use a tincture on our first 2 minute burst, we can utilize the advanced Machinist technique of 10xHB. This allows us to put more potency into the tincture. The reason why this is only possible on the first 2 minute burst is because we enter the burst by using a Heated Clean Shot meaning we do not have to worry about upkeeping the combo GCD timer. The window would end up looking like this:

This window works due to the fact that Hypercharge does not consume stacks when you use AoE GCDs such as Full Metal Field. This does make the Hypercharge window fairly tight and thus this optimization can only be executed by those with low latency.

While learning a fight and drifting your short cooldown actions or, in the worst-case scenario, you have just died, you will be dealing with something called drift. Specifically with Drill, Air Anchor, and Chain Saw, small amounts of drift on this skill can result in major discrepencies in your rotation. A single GCD of drift on any of these changes where we can Hypercharge and also hinders our ability to burst in two-minute windows. If drift does happen due to tunneling on a fight your best course of action will be to delay the entire rotation by a singular GCD, which means inserting a filler combo action into your two-minute rotation. This will push your Wildfire back as well, but will still land it within raid buffs and ensure you are able to burst properly and maintain your Heat mapping.

In the case where you have accidentally overcapped on Heat, it is important to note how much you have overcapped by. Whatever you overcap on is the amount you will not have going into your next burst window. If this happens, it may be wise to store a Hypercharge window you would normally use earlier to ensure you are able to burst inside of raid buffs. This will be determined by how much the overcap was and what amount of Heat you would normally have going into the next burst window.

Machinist handles downtime incredibly well. We have no buff to upkeep and all of our cooldown actions are higher piority over our main combo actions, so any downtime allows the timers on our big abilities to continue ticking. The main thing to worry about when coming back from downtime phases is ensuring you have no or minimal overcap on resources and getting your big damage actions on cooldown with their proper alignment.

This is going to be the most common issue players have to deal with, Machinist or not, and is sometimes unavoidable. Machinist will lose all gauge resource when they die. Depending on where you are at in your rotation, this can either be thousands of potency lost or just a few hundred. The most important thing to do when you are raised is to get Drill, Air Anchor, and Chain Saw back on cooldown. If you want to add the filler correctly between them you can do so, but it does not matter as much as your entire Heat mapping will be off from normal. You may have to delay Wildfire a bit to build back Heat, and you should be prioritizing your multi-tool skills over Wildfire in the case their cooldown timers collide. Barrel Stabilizer may need to be placed after your Wildfire usage. If this happens, you will need to store enough Heat for successive Wildfire usage later in the fight as you will not be able to press it before your next Wildfire.

The multi-target rotation works very much the same way as the single target one, but some abilities can be switched to a multi-target variant.

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Excavator > Air Anchor
• Use Bioblaster is equal in potency to Drill, use whichever fits the situation
• Hypercharge: Blazing Shot
• Filler: Combo

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Excavator > Air Anchor
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Use Flamethrower when all tools GCDs are on cooldown
• Hypercharge: Blazing Shot
• Filler: Scattergun

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Excavator > Air Anchor
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Use Flamethrower when all tools GCDs are on cooldown
• Hypercharge: Auto Crossbow
• Filler: Scattergun

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Excavator > Scattergun > Auto Crossbow
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Use Flamethrower when all tools GCDs are on cooldown
• Hypercharge: Auto Crossbow
• Filler: Scattergun
• Delay Air Anchor as it is no longer worth using

Flamethrower potency looks low. However, this is because it does damage each second. On three targets flamethrower is a minor potency gain. this gain then becomes more pronounced as the amount of enemies increases.

Machinist is quite often forced into a 1.5s GCD speed while under Hypercharge. This leaves a lot less room to weave than a standard GCD speed of 2.5s. If you clip while weaving Double Check and Checkmate between each Blazing Shot, you will still get off all five Blazing Shot, but you will drift every other aspect of your rotation and it will make things really hard to line up and cost you GCDs during the encounter. The job will still be playable, but high-end content may be a problem. If you are having issues with this, you can opt to remove a couple weaves from between Heat Blasts or use a gaming VPN to reduce your ping.