Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

change it back

I'm going to repeat what I'm saying in other threads on this issue:
Viper is literally much worse now and here's why.

The short but easily reapply-able 20s debuff (With a 40s max) gave vipers something to optimize, as the other two buffs require almost no thought other than when coming out of your 2/6/8/10 min window.
Before going into your reawakening its its fun to plan how you're going to ensure you go in with atleast 22+seconds of this debuff. Also if you set it up correctly its very easy to just apply a single gcd of gnash inbetween the two reawakens should you have miscalculated the timer! Beyond this I have to wonder if anyone who is saying these changes are good ever played reaper, as reaper's triple enshroud was almost always not worth the effort and very clunky.

Dealing with EX1 Vali and optimizing when the boss disengages you for the application of gnash on the needles (first hit of 3 hit combo on needle one, then use dreadwinder on needle two) then spacing out snaps to allow the timing of the first returning gcd on vali to be gnash was a ton of fun to optimize, and even when it was difficult to do, it was not a big deal as you still had 16-8 seconds till reawaken! Enough time to apply the debuff twice!

Viper was always an easy job. Noxious gash was just the one thing other than uptime and positional you could optimize.
Gnash feels truly like a better version of reapers death's design. It almost makes me wish they would make it a alternate combo for RPR rather than being a single button.

For all intents and purposes, Viper plays very similarly. But the few plates that you had to spin have fallen and all you have now is uptime, and positionals.
If you're saying its better I doubt you've ever tried to optimize it in any content whatsoever, let alone EX+ content.

TL;DR it's the worse and honestly more boring, you did not seriously play viper if you think the noxious gash change is good.

I hate the changes. While it doesn't kill the class for me, it does remove a lot of what I liked about it. I have nothing I can fine tune in the class anymore. The skill expression factor has gone down without having to optimize debuff timing with dreadwinder or add spawns.

Them: Viper is an easy job to play, and maintaining Noxious gash is equally easy.
Me: Okay, why change it all then if you find it so easy to play?
Them: >:c

So after actually using updated Viper during raid reclears today, I can now say that it feels a little weird not having Noxious. It's not awful, but it is awkward. I'm okay with how it is now, but I actually would prefer having Noxious back. I won't be upset of they don't bring it back, but I will always kinda miss that minigame...
Edit: AoE does feel better, though. Not having to worry about making sure each enemy is marked while also not accidentally overstacking the debuff is nice. Man. Now I'm torn.

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Originally Posted by Memyx

So after actually using updated Viper during raid reclears today, I can now say that it feels a little weird not having Noxious. It's not awful, but it is awkward. I'm okay with how it is now, but I actually would prefer having Noxious back. I won't be upset of they don't bring it back, but I will always kinda miss that minigame...
Edit: AoE does feel better, though. Not having to worry about making sure each enemy is marked while also not accidentally overstacking the debuff is nice. Man. Now I'm torn.

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I'm glad to hear you've come around. Thank you for trying it in content and sharing your thoughts! It definitely just makes things feel a little "emptier" in an actual fight, no? 1 -> 1 -> X -> 2 -> 2 -> X combo design is just a lot more boring, and Viper doesn't have a lot more going on than that. And no more choosing when to use Dreadwinder to avoid overcapping, no more setting up for burst phases. . . There's just so much less to do now. The job feels like nothing.

Also, on a different subject, I've seen lots of players in the JP forums complaining that, now that all three combo stages come with their corresponding FlAsHiNg ShInY sWoRd, that it's a lot more confusing to tell which combo part you're on, and I agree. Without memorizing colors or skill icons, you're even more (as one brilliant JP player put it) "a slave to the flashing hotbars." (Not to mention I find the BRIGHT YELLOW SWORD for the enhanced combo starter kind of ugly and out of place. . .)

I've been really heartened by seeing so many different communities -- these forums (in multiple languages), subreddits, Twitter, and in game -- coming together to protest the Viper changes. Please keep it up, my friends -- they listened about positionals, and they listened about Ice Paradox. Maybe they will listen about this if we just fight hard enough.

Well, never thought I'd end up posting anything, but here we are. I don't like the changes. Tend to bounce between half a dozen jobs, or more, per expansion, as none have felt fun enough to keep playing for extended periods of time. Then in comes Viper and changes that, until it too is changed. This sucks.

I know maintaining the debuff might not feel like much to some, but it honestly was the one thing you'd actually have to pay some attention to. It sure makes it far less annoying during big trash pulls to try to apply it to everything, but for single target, the job has lost a part of what made it engaging to me.

hello!
since yesterday debuff Noxious Gnash has desappeared, is it a bug or it's their will?

I finally set up my forum account so that I could contribute to speaking out against this change.

I enjoyed VPR when it came out. It was a simple but fun job. I liked the marginal but engaging decision making of whether I should refresh my noxious gnash in preparation for future burst or do more damage with my other combo starter. The class had very little to think about but it was just enough to keep the brain turned on.

After the changes, VPR no longer has anything to think about. It's like a blank slate for a melee that hasn't had anything added to it. Like being synced down to level 30 and only using a 1-2-3 combo on other melees. I was scared when I read the job changes, then I went and tried it once the servers were up. It's not the same, it's boring. The fun is gone.

The worst thing is I don't understand why. Players who do not care about playing properly would have just not kept their debuff going anyway. How does this improve anything for them? What is now the point of the second combo anyway? Alternating your 1 combo and your 2 combo is not fun, or engaging, just look at monk, which, in my humble opinion, was completely ruined once the free-flowing design of the combo system was removed back in... Shadowbringers, I think? But I digress, the end result of this change is that I will no longer play VPR and at least one thing that I thought they did a great job with in Dawntrail is now gone.

Dev team, please revert this change. Viper, as it was at launch, was great design for a simple but engaging job that a more casual player could enjoy because of how active and flashy it was. The change has done nothing for the casual player, it has exclusively ruined it for the rest of the players. It has gone against the design of having two combo buttons to flow between, there is no difference between the combos now, the second one may as well not exist. It was not necessary to make this change four weeks after the job launched.

I figured I'd try and make my voice heard here rather than into the abyss that is reddit and twitter. While I'm not a dedicated melee player I found Viper really fun to play and while I still do, taking away it's debuff is the wrong move, I'll be honest I think I would have much preferred taking away positionals than fundementally changing the way the job plays. I think reverting the removal and just upping how long the debuff lasts would be a better solution than just taking it away wholesale.

I'm disappointed with the changes, it feels like we're being hand held through the rotation. If a player can't manage reapplying Noxious Gash then let them fail, it's okay to have consequences for your lack of attention or focus.

I don't like this approach of having the game coddle the player on which button they should press next in terms of which buffs to apply, it feels insulting.

Haven't been in the forum ring for a hot minute but I wanted to make my voice heard here:

In my opinion, I don't like these changes and I want them reverted.

As for my opinion to why, simply put: The job's already relatively brain-dead once you get the initial hang of it and go through the class quest, but these changes make this job much more brain-dead boring, autopiloted, spammy without any nuance, and even really patronizing in a way by trying to baby-proof the job for people that don't want to be pushed outside their comfort zone or challenged to engage with the game more. It also feels enabling to unskilled players who don't read their abilities to understand how their class works, which I think is overall dumbing down the game and the jobs in the long run.

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Viper is a combination of existing job functions (Gunbreaker's Continuation, Dancer's Follow-the-Lit-Buttons, Monk's free-flow combo and Samurai's double buff management) and so it already doesn't feel wholly original. It borrowed Reaper's debuff-marking mechanic to increase damage and incidentally added a bit more to the Viper theme since the designers didn't wanna go with any DoT's while also baking it into combo attacks or multi-utility buttons. But where Monk, Dragoon, and Samurai offer you the freedom of choosing which combo tracks to travel depending on your need and expected you to pay attention to succeed, Viper's became absurdly linear thanks to the transforming glowing buttons feature that already held your hand through most of the job. Even before the change it was relatively idiot-proof unless you were just plain bad at the game; every attack does damage but the glowy buttons show you how to get the top damage. The only main options for decision making or expression came in when to use Dreadwinder/Pit of Dread, Uncoiled Fury, or when to apply the point of contention, Noxious Gnash.

I know it's not popular re-upping a timer every 20 seconds, but where some saw maintenance, I saw a mini-game with mini-strategies involved. Noxious Gnash came with such a tight time window that also got re-applied by a common and better buff button (Dreadwinder/Pit of Dread) I'd use regularly anyway, it taught me to be efficient when to use it; do I wanna double up the time to get a big burst now or continue to alternate between the high and low damage starters? Or what if I open with Dread Fang, then use Dread Winder to really boost up the timer for an early burst? Do I hold onto Dreadwinder or spend it now before entering Reawaken? Or use it between 2 Reawakens?

That's where I felt some of the complexity lied with the job and the onus was on the player when to apply the debuff or plan ahead during a combo whether to start with it or not. It was a bit of micro decision making in a job that already throws away a lot of decision-making for the sake of glowing button accessibility (since it walked you through which personal buffs to reapply anyway, something that not even Samurai holds your hand through). If anything, Noxious Gnash was the one stopgap keeping the class from becoming as autopiloted as it turned into this patch. It wasn't perfect, no, I think a DoT would've been better over a damage increase, but it was still something.

So my stance? Let players who don't enjoy or learn how to figure out that nuance play the many more accessible other jobs on offer like Reaper, Summoner, Warrior or Bard, let Vipers have a little depth to chew on and turn into a fun puzzle as opposed to devoting my attention to Follow-The-Glowing-Button. You can't just sell us a "free-flow combo system you can weave in and out of" when the design of the job and the flashing buttons tell us otherwise.

...But that's my two cents.

After trying it out in an old raid unsynced, these changes feel awful. With the rotation being so static, you really don’t have to think about your starters or your positionals. All you need to do now is 1-1-rear x then 2-2-flank x repeat ad nauseam. I thought I might have a chance to keep Viper as a side class since it shares accessories with phys ranged. But now I’m dropping it unless the Noxious Gash changes are reverted. It triggers painful boredom for me now.

Long time player, first time poster; I've been here since stormblood and this is the first time I've felt something so strongly as to want to make my voice heard here so I'd like to add it to the viper changes pile. I think they're bad and set a worrying precedent.

I got into dawntrail a bit less than a month late, finally picked it up maybe a week or two ago, and I've been slowly leveling viper alongside my two main pickups because it seemed like a fun DPS. I think the pressure the noxious gnash timer added was small but vital to job feel, and the ranged-lite feel of the job now is still fun but antithetical to the idea of melee as far as i'm concerned. More importantly though, I think making a sweeping job change to a new job the same day as your savage drop is weird and kind of upsetting. I simply haven't had time to level the job to max and get my hands on the full rotation, I got viper to 90 30 minutes before the maintenance lockout and thus when I logged on to see what all the fuss was about I'd quickly realized I don't even know how much of the rotation at 90 is new and how much is just new to me. I haven't had time to play with Viper. A month to get the job to max might seem like a long time, but I have a life outside of xiv. Many people do. I haven't had time to level this job, both because I came in late and I've been juggling story progression with roulette leveling and FATE grinding. I'm sure I'm not the only person, and it frustrates me to no end to feel punished for not spending enough time on a job I didn't even know was going to see these sorts of changes this quickly, because it's never happened before. The fact it's happened once means now I'm going to end up worrying about it happening again.

It isn't even like I think you can't do rework level updates in a patch, this one alone I think the willingness to listen to fans about black mage and meet them halfway is commendable; the samurai changes seem interesting too. In a similar vein, I don't feel frustrated to play summoner right now and feel as though I missed out on Old SMN because I didn't play it back in stormblood or shadowbringers. Things change over time. However, I think this is too much too soon for a month old job. Even if the changes to Viper were unanimously adored, I'd still think it was too soon. I hope that the dev team listens here in the way they did about black mage.

for me, they made the job even more boring than it was at its starting levels (80s), so i'm not sure i'll even bother to finish leveling it.

Long-time player and Ultimate raider here. I'm far from the best player in the game, but I'm still pretty darn good at it, and I have enough feedback here that I can't fit it all into one post.


I hate the changes. Hate is maybe a strong word, but I very strongly prefer the version of Viper I was playing on Monday to the version I have today. At first glance, I thought I wouldn't mind the change too much. A big part of the reason I like Viper is the high CPM and higher amount of positionals compared to other melee, which I'm happy did not change. I can still mash my buttons 'till my fingers fall off in a hectic double Reawaken window, I can still scoot my way around the boss or figure out where I can triple-weave True North to hit all those positionals just fine.

However, after playing with the job a bit, I think losing Noxious Gash upkeep just genuinely makes the job more boring. Maintaining Noxious Gash wasn't terribly hard, you had multiple buttons that were part of your regular rotation that applied it, but there was still some level of skill expression in effectively maintaining it, not having it fall off but also not overcapping it either. And it rewarded you for doing this, maximizing your Steel Fangs usage was naturally a DPS increase over pressing Dread Fangs unnecessarily, and also lining everything up for a double Reawaken window during raid buffs without anything falling off felt really good. But even if you weren't super skilled at the game, the DPS loss from pressing Dread Fangs at an unnecessary time was pretty minor so you weren't really punished that hard for doing so; 60 potency isn't the end of the world, it's a missed positional on any other melee job. It was a well-designed system to me, one that rewarded skilled players for playing the job well, but also one that wasn't terribly hard for less-skilled players to still do well enough with.

That is now gone, and there's nothing new to take its place. The job is less fun to play for me now, even before we get to my other issue with the changes, one that I will fully admit is a personal problem.

(cont.)


Viper can spend a very, very long time outside of its regular 1-2-3 combo. Multiple Reawaken windows in a row, Dreadwinder combo, and even pressing Uncoiled Fury a few times in a row, it's easy to spend 20+ seconds not pressing any button in your 1-2-3 combo when you throw a few of those together. If you're not careful you can even cross over the 30 second mark and have your combo drop, and learning to not get lost in the sauce is another part of learning how to get good at the job. But because you can spend so long outside of your 1-2-3 combo, it's entirely possible to lose track of where you are in that combo, and when it's time to return to it, not knowing where you are in the combo can make it easy to miss Death Rattle.

With old Viper, I used the nature of being able to press either button for the first hit as an anchor point for keeping track of where I was in the combo. Neither button lit up? Cool, I'm on the first skill of the combo. A button lit up? Either this button or the next will have the Death Rattle follow-up and I can prepare for that.

New Viper always has a button in your 1-2-3 combo lit up (unless you make a mistake and drop combo), which weirdly enough makes it much harder for me to keep track of where I am in that combo. There's no split-second glance I can make to tell me how soon Death Rattle is coming up, and missing that button is a 280 potency DPS loss, which is very bad. Since the changes yesterday, I have found myself missing Death Rattle significantly more often than I did pre-patch because of how much easier it is to just lose track of where I am after doing 20+ seconds of other buttons.


So yeah. I don't really know why this change happened. I'm not going to say the job is completely ruined, there are still parts about it that I like a lot, but I also don't know anyone that asked for this to happen outside of people that are genuinely bad at the game, and their opinions on job design should largely be ignored. Even ignoring my second issue and just focusing on the first, to take something away from what was honestly my new favorite job and not give it anything in return just feels bad. The job to me is more boring and less fun to play now. I hate the change, and across both the EN and JP communities, it is clear I am far from the only one. The change even makes me less confident that the devs will be able to create interesting jobs in the future, if they're so willing to make this one more boring in the name of making it easier to play.

So, please make Viper fun again. It's all I ask. I almost never come here, but that I felt passionate enough about this change to type so many characters that I couldn't fit it into one post should count for something, shouldn't it?

I wish Noxious Gnash wasn't removed and wish it came back.

Oh man, that single debuff was too much for me to keep track of. I'm glad they removed it so I can just mash my single target combo buttons brainlessly now and never have to worry about anything! I can't wait until they actually just remove every single damaging ability except a single one so I can just push that one button over and over and over and over again! It'll be so heckin easy and beginner friendly!!!!

In all seriousness, Squeenix is just appealing to the absolute bottom of the barrel player who can't keep track of one(1)((Singular)) debuff timer. I'm unsurprised.

I will say I do hate the new Christmas light show now though. I didn't notice it before, until was streaming some stuff on discord and a friend asked why I wasn't hitting the glowing button at times. I don't look at my bars so was confused and started to watch it as farmed fates for stones. For some reason at times, it recommends the wrong button press. Telling to to refresh the 32 seconds still damage buff over the 17 second left speed buff. What the heck ..

This was not a good chance and it shows, considering the amount of people (myself included) who created accounts on the forum to voice their dissatisfaction. Huge shot in the foot for SQEX - even the removal of Kaiten (which was wildly disparaged) actually made sense. This? This is babyproofing a job to the point that you cannot mess up, and people will still mess up because you can't baby proof for idiocy.

I played around initially and thought "Oh, this doesn't feel that different" but then I played a bit more and realized "Oh no, this feels completely automatic now". There's absolutely 0 thought process in going through your combos now. It already was "Follow the Dotted line" for the most part. The nuance you had was whether or not you needed to use Dread Fangs or not. Noxious Gnash was actually a better designed Damage up debuff than Reaper's Death's Design IMO. It flowed with your kit well and was just very well designed. Once you remember that Dreadwinder also applied the debuff, you realize how you only needed to press Dread Fangs not too often. Knowing how much you had to reapply Noxious Gnash was a key component of Skill expression on Viper. Now it's completely gone and Viper, in less than a month of its initial release, became a shell of its former self in favor of pleasing a small crowd of players who can't take the time to learn how to properly play a job. This is exactly how we got Job Homogenization and The job designers continue to go through this trend.

Viper gameplay now feels extremely automated. Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes is the exact same now as the new Reaving Fangs into Swiftskin's Sting. You just do 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 for your first 2 combo starters, exactly the same as Monk's 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 gameplay. What we asked for was not JUST to not remove the positionals, but to not change the job because of how immensely satisfying it was to play. Now it's nothing. You completely ruined a job not even 1 month of Dawntrail coming out. There ARE at least good job designs out there like the newly released Pictomancer and old jobs like Warrior. They need to answer to this kind of mistake, cause the job designers messed up big time.

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Originally Posted by Furrytractor

I played around initially and thought "Oh, this doesn't feel that different" but then I played a bit more and realized "Oh no, this feels completely automatic now". There's absolutely 0 thought process in going through your combos now. It already was "Follow the Dotted line" for the most part. The nuance you had was whether or not you needed to use Dread Fangs or not. Noxious Gnash was actually a better designed Damage up debuff than Reaper's Death's Design IMO. It flowed with your kit well and was just very well designed. Once you remember that Dreadwinder also applied the debuff, you realize how you only needed to press Dread Fangs not too often. Knowing how much you had to reapply Noxious Gnash was a key component of Skill expression on Viper. Now it's completely gone and Viper, in less than a month of its initial release, became a shell of its former self in favor of pleasing a small crowd of players who can't take the time to learn how to properly play a job. This is exactly how we got Job Homogenization and The job designers continue to go through this trend.

Viper gameplay now feels extremely automated. Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes is the exact same now as the new Reaving Fangs into Swiftskin's Sting. You just do 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 for your first 2 combo starters, exactly the same as Monk's 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 gameplay. What we asked for was not JUST to not remove the positionals, but to not change the job because of how immensely satisfying it was to play. Now it's nothing. You completely ruined a job not even 1 month of Dawntrail coming out. There ARE at least good job designs out there like the newly released Pictomancer and old jobs like Warrior. They need to answer to this kind of mistake, cause the job designers messed up big time.

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I mean-- if they really wanted to dumb it down further (which I wouldnt put it past the devs to do, cause they seem to love dumbing things down so even the child pressing the dead monkeys button would work) they could remove the second combo and reduce the button bloat. Put all 4 buffs up on all 3 skills as a wall-o-text and really seal vipers defanged venom. Goes from a viper to a garden snake after yesterday

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Originally Posted by Komarimono

I will say I do hate the new Christmas light show now though. I didn't notice it before, until was streaming some stuff on discord and a friend asked why I wasn't hitting the glowing button at times. I don't look at my bars so was confused and started to watch it as farmed fates for stones. For some reason at times, it recommends the wrong button press. Telling to to refresh the 32 seconds still damage buff over the 17 second left speed buff. What the heck ..

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I really do wish they'd have an option to turn off the dotted lines (and get rid of job gauges).

One, for clarity. Two, for pleasure.

Day 2 of Noxiousless VPR

I've been playing nothing but VPR to accomodate to the changes and at least give them a chance.
It feels really bad, just as most people though it would be.
The dance between 1 and 2 combos along with Dreadfang for the debuff maintenance is gone, making the rotation extremely streamlined and boring.

I know Noxious Gnash was difficult for some to manage (specifically around the double Reawaken window) but it feels like removing it has swung the basic combo too much in the other direction. Even if the debuff had to go removing it outright and replacing it with nothing makes the combo feel so weird and bad.

I echo some of the sentiments of people saying they would have preferred the positionals go over this. Honestly when I was saying I wanted the positionals to stay, if I had known the ultimatum would be removing the maintenence debuff, I would have opted to remove the positionals instead.

I created a different thread about this but I think the correct solution would have been to make Reaving Fangs grant a Ninja Armor Crush-like buff to Steel Fangs. Would have been a good way to replace Noxious Gnash maintenance with something that still required attention, and made the basic combo less static but was less annoying.

I don't know I'm just one player. What do I know.

I saw that thread actually, and I kinda like the principal of the idea but I wasn't quite sure it was the proper solution as exactly as presented.

See, after just running an Expert roulette just now and doing Strayborough Deadwalk's second boss it kinda dawned on me. I hate this because I'm staring at hotbars far more often now and there's no "break" in the combo; you have to keep it consistently held up by following the glowing buttons or you'll lose massive damage. The debuff used to act as a visual queue of whether I needed to start with 1 or 2 in the combo or use Dreadwinder but it was a visual queue I had control over. With that step I only needed to worry about following 2 buttons correctly if Dreadwinder wasn't available. On top of that it gave *me* the choice whether I wanted to extend my combo that started with Steel Fang so I could start with it more times in a row or I wanted to continue alternating. The onus was on me how I wanted to set that up in advance, but now I have control stripped away if I wanted to stay optimal or I have to delay re-entering the endless combo by using UF, Vicewinder or Reawaken (but the button spam combined with the time in between can make it even easier to mentally lose track since you're focused in hitting the oGCD's or GCD+oGCD's in between those moves).

It's a band-aid without enough thought how it would cascade into the rest of the job's flow.

I’ll preface my thoughts with the admission that I am not a Savage Raider or even someone who does Extremes. Normal Raids and Alliance Raids are about as far as I go with Battle Content, barring stuff like Bozja or Eureka. So I’m relatively casual overall.

I think the VPR changes are a good case study in how a seemingly small change can dramatically change the feel of how a job plays (or substitute any other class or character equivalent in other games).

As pointed out by others, Noxious Gnash’s implementation meant that an attentive player would realise that Dreadwinder could carry the bulk of the debuff’s uptime, with only the occasional Dread Fangs being required. Thus there was scope to optimise to use as few Dread Fangs as possible while still maintaining the debuff, based on keeping track of the debuff timer vs your next Dreadwinder combo. Nothing requiring chess level strategies, sure, but you were rewarded for your attentiveness and forward planning.

Additionally, your debuff timer affected other aspects of the Job, particularly double Reawaken on even minutes and also uncoiled fury to a lesser extent.

When I was playing VPR from DT’s launch until now, what I found engaging (again, as a casual player, I’m sure this is trivial for experienced raiders) was that I was always thinking about the debuff. If I had to disengage to avoid a mechanic and use Uncoiled Fury, I was considering my debuff timer while disengaged and unable to reapply it. When coming up to a double Reawaken window, I know I need at least a good 24/25 seconds to complete both Reawakens and have enough time to press either Dreadwinder or Dread Fangs to not lose the debuff.

While the potency gain has been shifted directly into VPR’s skills, and we do have a another self ‘buff’ to the alternate combo starter, the job now feels more strict and uninteresting to play, due to there being less decision to be made on the fly, especially in the new Normal Raids where bosses do move and might not be targetable or I’m forced to disengage. Previously I felt rewarded for knowing those were coming ahead of time and prematurely increasing the debuff timer. Now that nuance doesn’t really exist on the job.

Noxious Gnash forced you to look at every skill through the lens of its timer and rewarded players who could plan ahead and optimise that timer.

Overall, I think it’s a shame and a misguided change to a job that felt very well designed on release.

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Originally Posted by An_IRL_Rabbit

I hate the changes. Hate is maybe a strong word, but I very strongly prefer the version of Viper I was playing on Monday to the version I have today.

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Had some more thoughts since I wrote this.

To me, Noxious Gash represents a little thing I like to call good game design. Not only in the skill needed to accurately keep track of it and apply it without it falling off or overcapping, but in the small optimizations you could do around that. For example if I knew a boss was about to go untargetable for a mechanic, I could quickly reapply Noxious Gash before they left so that it would still be on them when they returned, giving me a small damage increase over a Viper that had the debuff fall off in the 20 seconds or so when the boss was untargetable. But at the same time, I do mean small damage increase. I was rewarded with this with a small bit of personal satisfaction at this thing I figured out, but the player that didn't do it wasn't really punished for it either, they just lost a minuscule amount of DPS compared to me.

Likewise, there have been times where either a mob didn't have much health and would die quickly (like, say, the pillars on the final boss of the DT MSQ finale dungeon) or a boss was about to die, where I intentionally either did not apply Gash in the first place or purposefully let it fall off because I knew it would take more GCDs for the loss of potency to catch up than it would for the thing to die. Again, teeny tiny damage optimization that lead to increased personal satisfaction but didn't punish the Viper that pressed Dread Fangs anyway.


I am doing my hardest to not be a toxic elitist here, but I genuinely did not think old Viper was at all hard to play at a baseline. If you wanted to play it really well it was fun and engaging, but if you just followed the pretty glowing lights you were already like 90% of the way there. As long as you have the dexterity to press all the buttons it wants you to press, the job was quite frankly easy already. It did kind of a bad job of teaching you how to play it (something that is still the case), but once you played with it for a little bit, it was an extremely straightforward job already. So my big question is, if the job was already pretty easy at a baseline and the stated intent of the changes was to make the job easier for players, then who is this change for? Why was something that I genuinely think was well-designed get cut with nothing to replace it?

So, then what do we do instead? If the dev team really wants to simplify Viper a bit, how do we do that instead of this? I have heard a lot of people float the idea of making the application of Noxious Gash 30 seconds and the cap 60 (instead of 20 and 40), but I don't quite agree. I think this also simplifies it enough to the point where it becomes too easy to maintain and then we find ourselves back here when they remove Noxious Gash in 8.0 because maintaining it was so free. But I think those people are on the right track.

At first, I floated a 25 second application with a 50 second cap, give the job a little more wiggle room. This would work, but I do think it would miss out on some of the high-end optimization still, so what I instead propose is:

Dread Fangs and Dreadwinder would still apply 20 seconds of Noxious Gash to the target as they did pre-patch, but instead of a 40-second cap, the cap would instead be 60 seconds. This would let high-skill players still get the same rush of figuring out how to optimize the job, while giving lower-skill players extra wiggle room by letting them apply it a third time, giving them a much larger window to work with if they make rotation mistakes.

I like the ideas, but honestly, I really think it should just be reverted wholesale.

Dropping Noxious Gash was losing 10% on, like, one or two GCDs until you go "oh crap!" and reapply it again. Losing Noxious Gash for even a Reawaken is still only slightly more catastrophic than one or two canceled casts on a caster.

Who cares if they can mess up? That's fine. 20s applications, 40s caps was fine and players who didn't like it would've gotten the hang of it eventually or landed somewhere else.

As someone who moved from Warrior to Viper in the hopes of finally playing a class that asked players to pay attention, Square's decision to completely walk away from that here has basically destroyed my hope that they'll ever deliver a new class kit that's actually engaging (or one that asks that players manage literally anything) ever again.

If not for Dawntrail finally introducing a modicum of difficulty back into the game with these new trials/fights, I'd have quit this patch. The moment encounter design goes back to being class designs' level of braindead, I'll just drop the game until 8.0.

I honestly can not, for the life of me, understand how people can say "Viper still plays the same". At this point, I guess everyone who says that has been playing the job wrong, and should not have been catered to anyhow.

And to those that say it still "feels" the same to them - cool beans, but then it would not have changed for you if it remained the same as in 7.01, no?

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Originally Posted by W00by

I like the ideas, but honestly, I really think it should just be reverted wholesale.

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Ya honestly Viper 7.01 was perfect but at this point I‘ve lost complete trust in the job dev team. I don’t know if they would roll it back…

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Originally Posted by Mondschnee

Ya honestly Viper 7.01 was perfect but at this point I‘ve lost complete trust in the job dev team. I don’t know if they would roll it back…

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There's only one way to get them to roll it back. Keep talking about it on the forums, and anywhere else anyone will listen. There was a Kotaku article about it published yesterday, our voices are being heard.

We've already won one battle for Viper's complexity, even though it doesn't seem like it -- they fully intended to remove positionals until we complained about it. We can win this war. I know it seems difficult, as things don't get reverted too often. But just this patch, they made Tsubame-Gaeshi a more flexible and engaging skill on Samurai after turning it into a meaningless looping tool, and restored Ice Paradox to Black Mage even though they intentionally removed it. And in the past, they added back Energy Drain after it was taken out of Scholar's kit, too. It was added back on a similar timeframe, too -- removed in 5.0, re-introduced in 5.05. We could see it again soon.

Square Enix is not immune to reverting things. If you give up, then it won't get reverted, but this is the time we need to make it clear how we feel. The Viper playerbase is in a unique position to take a stand for complexity in this game. There are a lot more of us than there are any other job, so we have more voices. Please lend yours! You're all doing great!

Let's see 7.01 Viper again. I really think we can!

And to any developers reading, this is a great chance to prove that you're listening. People are losing faith: what better way to show them you're listening than by addressing their concerns? A lack of communication is what got us into this mess, so let's do better on both ends.

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Originally Posted by W00by

Who cares if they can mess up? That's fine. 20s applications, 40s caps was fine and players who didn't like it would've gotten the hang of it eventually or landed somewhere else.

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I wish more people would understand that getting a case of skill issue isn't bad. You just have to get better and it's not even necessary.
We need to be realistic with the performance we aim for.

Expecting players to rise to any challenge in this game is elitist and sweaty, don’t you know. As is expecting them to read their tooltips and understand what their abilities actually do and consider the order in which they should be applied.

YOU KNOW WHAT. IM GOING TO SAY IT. DPS STRIKE. ENJOY YOUR 80 MINUTE DUNGEONS AND WOE ENRAGE BE UPON YE. A MILLION TIMES OVER.

The changes were announced six days after EA launched (two days after the main release). I doubt this was genuinely due to player feedback so much as player performance not matching up with what they predicted. It's not surprising, because historically players have tended to struggle with debuff upkeep. That being said, they definitely should have taken some time to let people learn the job and develop habits around it before drawing conclusions.

The timing was really poor as well. Rotational changes shouldn't be released alongside new raid content.

They need to hold a Live Letter soon. There's a lot the dev team needs to answer to the playerbase.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I doubt this was genuinely due to player feedback so much as player performance not matching up with what they predicted. It's not surprising, because historically players have tended to struggle with debuff upkeep.

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Also, like, being bad at something is the fun part of anything. People who were dropping NG regularly were also probably having the most fun. Once you've mastered a skill, you just plateau until you quit.