Alacrity Mechanist is Doomed Without 10 Player Application

[Noe.8032]

Posting this here since the developers haven't made a new feedback thread for the fourth beta, so this would just get buried in the old one.

 

Currently Mechanist can only apply Alacrity to five players, especially since the Alacrity application is tied to barrier application. As a result, Mechanist's Alacrity application is fundamentally inferior to Renegade and Mirage in any content featuring over five players. So... the entirety of metas, raids and strikes.

 

If players want to fit a support DPS Alacrity Mechanist in their group of ten; then they'll need to explicitly stick another source of five player Alacrity in as well. Since adding a Renegade or Mirage in would be redundant as they can already handle Alacrity by themselves. This means that DPS Alacrity Mechanist will only be viable if the group can explicitly find one of the few other five player Alacrity sources in the game. Meanwhile, a support healer Alacrity Mechanist will require another source of five Alacrity AND a DPS Quickness provider to compensate for the fact that a support healer Mechanist is not Firebrand; and thus will be providing Alacrity instead of Quickness. In raids, where healer Firebrand might not be taken, the fact that Mirage and Renegade already have Alacrity fully covered means that at best even if a healer Mechanist is be chosen the Alacrity they provide will be completely wasted.

 

Without the ability to provide Alacrity to ten players, Mechanist as a DPS Alacrity provider is straight up worse than Renegade or Mirage; and will require a pairing with niche additional builds just to compensate. Meanwhile as a healer, Alacrity Mechanist is still going to require that exact same additional pairing while also needing a DPS to provide Quickness as previously a healer Firebrand could of done such. In the current meta, convincing a group to let in an Alacrity healer when Renegade is already so widespread will be difficult and frustrating enough; let alone if Mechanist goes live with only half of Renegade's Alacrity generation. The only way this could be made up is if Mechanist ended up being so powerful that they were worth the inconvenience. Which, with Engineer having to sacrifice all their toolbelt skills for the Mech, including the self heal from their medical kit, and the Mech getting stat nerfs in beta four; Mechanist probably isn't going to be that overwhelming.

 

I for one would actually like to play as a class that won't get me harassed and kicked in half the structured group content available. It would be a really nice change of pace from trying to play as any of the multiple other healers that exist in this game which are spited by a significant amount of the player base all because they don't provide quickness or have spirits.

 

(I'd also like to add that it'd be really nice if the developers decreased the brightness on the rocket punch/prototype green explosion, at least when players have graphical effects lowered, as the current effect is very bright and may irritate photosensitive players.)

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Anet: "We felt that alacrity on the mirage and revenant were overtuned, and they were overshadowing the newer elite specializations.  Now that alacrity is more plentiful, we have decided to reduce the number of targets to 5."

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

In raids/strikes, yeah.  Mechanist should go up to 10-man barrier application for there.

 

For Fractals, though, it may be good enough to substitute for Alacrigade.

[RobinotX.1604]

I believe in the chat with CmC and Teapot they mentioned this as well. CmC said they are first looking at EoD launch and after that check other things for balance. So I think we can see some changes in 2022 on boons

[Infusion.7149]

The problem is also it is outputting confusion which has no damage mod or added condition duration in the mechanist traitline. There was too much of the confusion condition placed onto alac mechanist (Discharge Array applies confusion as well as mace attacks). Since 5 man would probably replace alac ren in fractals at best it should have had decent CC (not necessarily top tier), burn, and bleed. Barrier output is useful in fractals due to agony decreasing heals by 70% , confusion generally isn't as strong in fractals due to how exposed works.

At the least mechanist gained some burn on superconducting signet but by no means is a 4 kit mechanist (or even 3 kit mechanist) going to be attractive for playing on a daily basis. Ideally you would have it similar in consistency to radiation field (asura racial) which has poison output. Until Superconducting signet works compared to running 3 kits as utilities it will remain a concern (grenade, bomb , flamethrower) because you really need mace in some fashion to have enough barrier for alacrity uptime (without it you are looking at Barrier engine trait meaning no explosion traits affect your mech). For the elite skill you would run Overclock signet instead of mortar kit.


 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

10 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

The problem is also it is outputting confusion which has no damage mod or added condition duration in the mechanist traitline. There was too much of the confusion condition placed onto alac mechanist (Discharge Array applies confusion as well as mace attacks). Since 5 man would probably replace alac ren in fractals at best it should have had decent CC (not necessarily top tier), burn, and bleed. Barrier output is useful in fractals due to agony decreasing heals by 70% , confusion generally isn't as strong in fractals due to how exposed works.

At the least mechanist gained some burn on superconducting signet but by no means is a 4 kit mechanist (or even 3 kit mechanist) going to be attractive for playing on a daily basis. Ideally you would have it similar in consistency to radiation field (asura racial) which has poison output. Until Superconducting signet works compared to running 3 kits as utilities it will remain a concern (grenade, bomb , flamethrower) because you really need mace in some fashion to have enough barrier for alacrity uptime (without it you are looking at Barrier engine trait meaning no explosion traits affect your mech). For the elite skill you would run Overclock signet instead of mortar kit.


 

I legitimately do not know what build you're thinking of right now.  As far as I can tell, it is best to specialize: go alacrity, or go condi DPS.  Alacrity would require two traits (barrier engine, channeling circuits) in order to function, removing Jade Dynamo and Conductive Alloys.  This will gut its damage quite severely.  Also, with this recent update the mech and mace no longer sustain permanent alacrity by themselves, requiring at least some investment in concentration (around 30% boon duration is good, but you'll need more if you want to cap might).  

[Infusion.7149]

18 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I legitimately do not know what build you're thinking of right now.  As far as I can tell, it is best to specialize: go alacrity, or go condi DPS.  Alacrity would require two traits (barrier engine, channeling circuits) in order to function, removing Jade Dynamo and Conductive Alloys.  This will gut its damage quite severely.  Also, with this recent update the mech and mace no longer sustain permanent alacrity by themselves, requiring at least some investment in concentration (around 30% boon duration is good, but you'll need more if you want to cap might).  

30%  boon duration is a nonissue stat-wise since you can run seraph or plaguedoctor with sigils for burn/bleed duration , that's what cele renegade does with 79% boon duration. The mech itself does about 2-3K DPS now because it doesn't seem to crit with the condition traitline of mechanist (Conductive Alloys)  on Jade dynamo very often (listed chance is 33% to begin with).

Alacrity is 0.75s from the Channeling Circuits trait so if you have a mace and have quickness you would be putting out barrier on ~1.75s auto chain ; the issue is barrier engine which pulses every 3s relies on the mech to be alive. In total it's about barrier every 1.1s before quickness meaning about 46% boon duration (i.e. 0.75s of alacrity lengthened by 46% is ~ 1.1s).

The number one problem with using mace is confusion isn't strong at all in fractals for the most part and you would want 10 man alac in raids and strike missions.

Edit: apparently the entire golem does 7K with copied boons , I was testing condi mech (renegade rune) with no boons on the golem. See the log here if a full condi mech does 39K+with elementalist runes , 28K or so should be achievable with a mace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vnbk7HBaOs

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Infusion.7149