Machinist DPS Rotation, Openers, and Abilities — Endwalker 6.55

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 also make the ability 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:

Solo:

1. Air Anchor
2. Drill
3. Chain Saw

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. Use this setup for any solo or dungeon situation where it is unlikely that you will be able to capitalize on raid buff optimization.

Raid:

1. Air Anchor
2. Drill
3. Heated Split Shot
4. Heated Slug Shot
5. Heated Clean Shot
6. Chain Saw

The reason for delaying Chainsaw by a full combo in raid situations is that it sets up the rotation for a powerful double Hypercharge burst sequence every two minutes.

Machinist burst consists of Hypercharge windows, which can be further enhanced by using Wildfire every two minutes, in addition to Automaton Queen. Barrel Stabilizer generates 50 heat 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 Heat Blast, which can be used five times during the window. Each cast of Heat Blast also restores Gauss Round and Ricochet 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 Gauss Round or Ricochet 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 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 > Heat Blast x5
• Hypercharge > Wildfire > Heat Blast x5 > GCD
• Hypercharge > Heat Blast > Wildfire > Heat Blast x4 > GCD > GCD

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 190-200 battery for every two-minute cycle, the most effective practice is to summon queen every 60 seconds with the gauge at 90-100. Listed below is a table of all Battery levels and how they effect Battery usage.

Battery Amount	Potency Per Battery	Pile Bunker Potency	Crowned Collider Potency	Total Normalized Pet Potency
50	26.6	340	390	1184
60	26.6	408	468	1422
70	26.6	476	546	1658
80	26.6	544	624	1894
90	26.6	612	702	2131
100	26.6	680	780	2368

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 previosuly, this is what your opener would look like in a raid scenario.

Since we've created the pocket of three Heated Combo actions, we can later on replace them in the rotation with a full Hypercharge window. With the Raid Opener rotation, you will want to summon Automaton Queen at 70 Battery around the one-minute mark. You will overcap 5 Heat by doing this; That's okay!

We're forced to delay Barrel Stabilizer slightly at two minutes, placing it between the first and second Heat Blast. Our weave windows become a bit hectic here. There's only one weave slot prior to Chain Saw, and since that is our target for Reassemble, it results in another slight delay to Wildfire as well. Automaton Queen should be summoned upon reaching 100 Battery, which should happen after the Air Anchor cast at the start of the burst window. The only available weave slot will be after the Drill, but before using Hypercharge.

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

In situations where you won't lose out on any multi-tool cast from downtime, you may opt to delay your Air Anchor and Reassemble for a bit of extra potency inside of raid buffs, as seen below.

Since we no longer have the three GCD pocket between Drill and Chain Saw, it requires a bit of flexing around to ensure our burst windows stay intact. Compared to the Raid Opener, the Delayed Tools rotation doesn't have forced back-to-back Hypercharge so players may find it easier to pull this off. As opposed to summoning Automaton Queen at 70, we instead summon her at 50 Battery earlier in the rotation. This rotation also uses an extra Hypercharge prior to the two-minute burst window, so you won't overcap by 5 Heat until a bit later in the burst window. This is how the burst will play out:

Keep in mind, the second Hypercharge is optional, but it is a larger gain under certain raid buffs such as Searing Light to get it off like the picture above.

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. Drifting Chain Saw will result in forced delay on Wildfire. 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. If you come back with enough Heat you can repurpose the three Heated actions in the opener with a Hypercharge window to avoid Heat overcap.

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 > Air Anchor
• Use Bioblaster is equal in potency to Drill, use whichever fits the situation
• Hypercharge: Heat Blast
• Filler: Combo

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Air Anchor
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Hypercharge: Auto Crossbow
• Filler: Flamethrower > Scattergun

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Scattergun > Auto Crossbow
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Hypercharge: Auto Crossbow
• Filler: Flamethrower > Scattergun

• Reassemble: Chain Saw > Scattergun > Auto Crossbow
• Use Bioblaster instead of Drill
• Hypercharge: Auto Crossbow
• Filler: Flamethrower > Scattergun
• Delay Air Anchor as it is no longer worth using

Flamethrower is a gain when used against three or more enemies and when you are unable to get another Hypercharge window. Generally, using this action with low Heat resource or towards the end of a mob's health is optimal. There are situations where using Flamethrower on two targets is a gain, but it is fight- and kill-time-dependent.

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 Ricochet and Gauss Round between each Heat Blast, you will still get off all five Heat Blast, 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.