Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

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Originally Posted by Morr_Ar

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.

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TBF though, VPR is probably the one job you shouldn’t read the tooltips in depth, they are so bad to read. Or at least ignore it at first. I only started to get the job after giving up on reading and smacking a dummy.

This is just me basically reiterating my thoughts from another thread, but I'm also putting it here because this thread appears to be the one gaining the most traction. We all know SE only likes to read the big threads, so just in case:

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Originally Posted by Embio

I think part of the reason the new change feels so awful is because it effectively removed half of your combo chains. 2-1-1, 2-1-2, 1-2-1, and 1-2-2 do not exist in Viper's current design. They spent all this time designing this free form combo system for Viper, only to turn around and make the rotation completely static. Wasn't that supposed to be the point of the job? What was the goal of this change?

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I don't think it's too big of an ask for the "free form combo job" they designed to actually have free form combos, lol.

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To add on a little bit though, I feel like the design team has an issue where they'll see players make a mistake in their rotation or not understand something immediately, and the devs see that as a flaw with the game. Whenever there's a curve in job difficulty or a skill to be mastered, they're incredibly prone to removing it out of a fear of scaring players away. However, the average player should be able to understand where they've made a mistake and where they need to improve. It's not a flaw in the game for a player to make mistakes and have to learn. That's the whole point of having any design in the first place. All of this says to me that the developers have a lack of confidence and faith in their own job design, and it's why we've seen so much decision-making and design removed, not added, to jobs over the years.

Now, there is something to be said about how the game conveys these mechanics to players through tooltips, and whether that's sufficient enough, but that's its own issue. Bad conveyance =/= bad mechanics; the job itself made sense once you actually played it. Maybe the game would stand to benefit from some MOBA-style video showcases for the jobs that teach players how to do their rotation. It doesn't stand to benefit from shooting its own design in the foot.

Like Sid Meier once said, "a game is a series of interesting decisions," but the only interesting decision the devs have left me with is whether I continue to sub to this game or not.

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Originally Posted by Embio

This is just me basically reiterating my thoughts from another thread, but I'm also putting it here because this thread appears to be the one gaining the most traction. We all know SE only likes to read the big threads, so just in case:



To add on a little bit though, I feel like the design team has an issue where they'll see players make a mistake in their rotation or not understand something immediately, and the devs see that as a flaw with the game. Whenever there's a curve in job difficulty or a skill to be mastered, they're incredibly prone to removing it out of a fear of scaring players away. However, the average player should be able to understand where they've made a mistake and where they need to improve. It's not a flaw in the game for a player to make mistakes and have to learn. That's the whole point of having any design in the first place. All of this says to me that the developers have a lack of confidence and faith in their own job design, and it's why we've seen so much decision-making and design removed, not added, to jobs over the years.

Now, there is something to be said about how the game conveys these mechanics to players through tooltips, and whether that's sufficient enough, but that's its own issue. Bad conveyance =/= bad mechanics; the job itself made sense once you actually played it. Maybe the game would stand to benefit from some MOBA-style video showcases for the jobs that teach players how to do their rotation. It doesn't stand to benefit from shooting its own design in the foot.

Like Sid Meier once said, "a game is a series of interesting decisions," but the only interesting decision the devs have left me with is whether I continue to sub to this game or not.

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Meier was absolutely spot on when he said that. I’ve seen plenty of people argue that because the job is broadly the same at a basic rotational level against a training dummy, the change is meaningless.

But that is a reductive analysis of game design by reducing a game to purely its inputs and not the decisions of the player actually engaging with the system.

I find the changes to be kinda bad, I got really used to Noxious Gash. I Personally feel like the job is in dire need of any kind of damage mit ability. I get it's a glass cannon, but after running EX1 about 45 times, there's is so many times I've had preventable deaths because the healers or tank didn't account for me being so low health. VPR needs to be brought up in health a tad or given another life steal ability or just give them that defensive they get in PvP.

Noxious Gnash should be added back onto the job. If there is a reason why the development team doesn't want to have that mechanic, then they should have given the job something else which has the same or more depth. It would also need to be a mechanic which holds all of the components of the job together like Noxious Gnash did.

The new effects "Honed Steel" and "Honed Reavers" have no depth to them and have no interactivity with the rest of the job's components, so they are not a suitable replacement for Noxious Gnash.

Also, the 'finisher' venom effects (e.g. "Hindstung Venom") being extended to 60 seconds leaves less room to make mistakes. If you can't fail, then you can't succeed, so I'd like to see this reverted back to 40 seconds.

I'm very disappointed to see a new job both simplified and fundamentally changed in so short a time. I really hope Viper is actually improved—in meaningful ways—in the near future.

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

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Originally Posted by TheAmazing3

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

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Agreed. I haven't checked out the German and French forums, but the Viper thread on JP seems split. There's more positive sentiment towards the changes than there is here (citing accessibility and ease of optimization), but from what I can tell the larger chunk still dislikes the change and how it affects the job's identity. There's been more than few people saying that the name should be changed from Viper to Snake, since the poison was removed lol.

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Originally Posted by TheAmazing3

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

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Good call, really. I wish they would make a Blogpost like the one from a week after early access to inform us if they have heard us or not...

As for other languages, the german DPS forum is rather quiet, but the few posts I have seen there are very much against the changes.

I liked Noxious Gash. I suppose if I had to pick between that and positionals being removed, I would have preferred Nox because I like reasons to move around the arena as part of my kit, but at the same time Nox actually interacted with everything else in the kit and its decision making.

My real preference would have been that they didn't remove either and tried to make the job more approachable some other way. The tooltips are garbage, for example, and the gauge does a very poor job of communicating your next attacks beyond the current one (and even the current one is a bit inscrutable, that gauge is nuts).

I saw some people making the argument about 'not giving jobs debuffs that nobody else cares about', like Death's Design (RPR), Noxious Gash (old, early DT VPR if anyone remembers that job), or literally any DoTs. I think this is a good point from the perspective of the debuff limit, but I think it's dumb as hell that they just let 50 copies of that debuff be on the target. Sucks for Hunts, Alliance Raids, Forays and even FATEs. The solution is not to remove these actions, it's to do what the game did until ShB (or how e.g. Mug/Dokumori still works): let one copy of this buff persist and any other job doing it simply reapplies it.

Would VPR or RPR really be OP if you had one refreshing the debuff and 3 others benefiting from it? No. That's just gameplay being affected by your group in an MMO. It'd be a good thing, and would make having multiple of the same job less of a drag for all players when it happens in DF.

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Originally Posted by TheAmazing3

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

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Japanese forums are kind of half-and-half. There's lots of "I wish you removed positionals instead," and lots of "I think you should've just made it 30-60s instead of 20-40s," which I still disagree with, but at the very least there are hardly any posts that are super in support of Noxious Gash's removal.

Most notably, the JP forums seem to hate the addition of the Honed Steel/Honed Reavers buff from stage 1 of the combo, and the fact that they make your hotbar glow. They find it's distracting and makes it hard for people to tell where they're at in their combo. Pretty interesting to see that they both have subjective, personal-fondness based, and objective, design-based opinions for the job.

Other than that, there's a lot of the same stuff we're saying. The poison being gone from the snake job is cring, the filler feels empty now, etc, etc.

My experience with Viper so far has been in the extremes and Savage fights. While playing it before 7.05, it was a simple job. Having cleared the Savage tier with Viper, I'd say it's a little simpler in the sense that you don't have to worry about a DoT, but it plays pretty much the same as it did. I will say that it has been very enjoyable to progress and clear with in Savage, specifically M3 and M4. Having cleared both of those fights, I don't believe I can say that I could push the other melee classes to the extreme and not lose out on even a single GCD. Perhaps this tier is just built for Viper, but I can't deny that it is fun to play regardless of how simple it may be. Initially I was going to play Samurai for this tier, but that didn't pan out with the changes to Tsubame-geashi all but ruining 2.15 GCD samurai for me.

Edit: Ultimately, I'm indifferent. I think it is silly that Viper got changed in the way it did so quickly. It takes time to adjust, learn, and optimize a class.

It's just so much less fun than it used to be - there's no tension on the job anymore at all which is what made it fun. It felt like it was MEANT to be a job with simple execution but fun little things to manage among the chaos of all its buttons. Now it is literally "press glowing button" with NOTHING else to think about, why even add a job if it's going to be changed into something so boring and uninspired?

I definitely think the debuff could feel too constrictive before but it'd have been such a better change to just extend the cap or something instead of cutting it outright

There's a lot to this forum thread that i'd like to read through but at the time I just want to put my thoughts down and it may be the same as others on the thread i'm not sure yet.

my personal history is i've been playing since ARR as a bard main, I've been playing on Gilgamesh the whole time and made an alt when the oceanic servers opened but still mainly play on NA cause that's where most of my friends are.

Honestly these changes were upsetting to read and having played it for a while upsetting to play through. The ONLY change I wanted to see with the job was the removal of positional requirements on Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil. I felt like it did not feel good trying to double weave and repositioning to around the boss for what amounted to a 50 potency increase in damage each way. I actually like Noxious Gnash, I wish it did something other than a damage increase (a DoT would have been nice or something interesting like as long as the debuff was applied it increased the potency of every oGCD attack or something along those lines but I digress) but otherwise I felt that the debuff could have been ok if its timer went up to 60 seconds (still only applying 20 though) but that was really it. I though out the gate the class felt a little rough around the edges but I truly loved playing it and the flow of it when positionals were turned off for fights.

the decision to remove Noxious Gnash and replace it with this very lukewarm forced alternation legitimately might be the worst decision i've ever seen SE make since they put cast bars on Bard in Heavensward. Like I've never felt like I'd seen a job gutted so badly since that expansion and that's knowing how much the dev team seems to like bullying Dark Knight.

If I could ask for one thing, please design team walk back these changes to Viper. the choices aren't fun the decision to remove the debuff ruins the core rotation of the class and truly ruins the theming of it in my honest opinion. Please remove the positionals from Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil and bring back Noxious Gnash or give us a debuff of some kind that does something interesting that requires the player to put more thought into their rotation and the decisions that they make. I know you all can do it because Bard came back with great design changes before. The class originally was imo overburdened with too many things to deal with, 4 positionals, about 20 oGCDs, a Debuff, a gauge to manage and that was before you factor in raid mechanics. Just take out those 2 positionals and increase Noxious Gnash's maximum debuff timer to 60 seconds and revert all the other changes back to pre-patch 7.05. Imho I think this will leave the class in a really good place that still allows some skill expression while making it a little bit easier to get into.

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Originally Posted by lugiaXD

The ONLY change I wanted to see with the job was the removal of positional requirements on Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil. I felt like it did not feel good trying to double weave and repositioning to around the boss for what amounted to a 50 potency increase in damage each way. I actually like Noxious Gnash, I wish it did something other than a damage increase (a DoT would have been nice or something interesting like as long as the debuff was applied it increased the potency of every oGCD attack or something along those lines but I digress) but otherwise I felt that the debuff could have been ok if its timer went up to 60 seconds (still only applying 20 though) but that was really it. I though out the gate the class felt a little rough around the edges but I truly loved playing it and the flow of it when positionals were turned off for fights.

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One of the changes I proposed was to make Noxious Gnash a target debuff that only increased the potency of Steel Fangs. Leave everything else the same, the 20 second application time, the stacking to 40 seconds, and applying with Reaving Fangs/Vicewinder. This would ensure the basic combo remains exactly the same as before they removed Noxious Gnash, but remove the danger of having it fall off during double Reawaken Windows. Turning Noxious Gnash into a simple DoT with the same application mechanics would have a similar effect as well, and I thnk that would be fine too. Honestly my preference would be that they just brought it back as it was to begin with, but if that's not going to happen then I think this is a good middle ground.

Regarding the positionals I could get down with removing them for the Vicewinder combo, while keeping them in the final step of the basic combo. I never really had a problem with them, but I also find that I'm using True North almost exclusively for the Vicewinder combo so removing them would basically have no effect for me. And I would have preferred that over removing Noxious Gnash.

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Originally Posted by jonimated

One of the changes I proposed was to make Noxious Gnash a target debuff that only increased the potency of Steel Fangs. Leave everything else the same, the 20 second application time, the stacking to 40 seconds, and applying with Reaving Fangs/Vicewinder. This would ensure the basic combo remains exactly the same as before they removed Noxious Gnash, but remove the danger of having it fall off during double Reawaken Windows.

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Honestly I would be completely okay with it staying a 40 second cap if it worked something like that where the damage is given to the rest of the viper moveset and doesn't necessarily effect Reawaken. I will also say though that something I really enjoyed about Noxious Gnash as a debuff was that it was also baked into the rotation and toolkit of Viper so much better than it was on Reaper with death's design.

The fact that dreadfangs (now reaving fangs) was a combo starter and the fact that Dreadwinder (now Vicewinder) was a core part of the rotation and a net damage gain made the debuff actually feel good to maintain unlike with reaper where I found it more of a hindrance because I had to spend a GCD on a button that does nothing but apply the debuff. It's the kind of thing that after playing the class for a while I said to myself "Wow this part of the job is really well thought out and timed pretty well to make me think about keeping it up but also not getting to haphazard with Dreadfangs since Dreadwinder is going to come up soon and Steel Fangs does more damage as a combo starter". Sadly the team decided to throw out that piece of great design for something much more simple and overall not as fun.

Even after giving it a try in savage, it just feels so empty now. I unironically would have preferred positionals being removed than having a timer gutted, but the monkeys paw curls...

Not every job needs to be loved by anyone, why doesnt SE understand that? And I wouldnt imagine casual players cared about noxious gash since the job is already so simple to play, just hit the shiny buttons and youll do good damage. Who was this change even for?

The only change I was hoping from them was using the twin swords on the vipersight gauge to show timers on the haste and damage buffs, instead of what step you were on the 1-2-3 combo. just feels so redundant.

Tried the job again after dropping it post-changes and I can't help but find it more confusing to play than before. Things that used to feel natural just ... don't anymore.

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

I feel like I hit this part midway through a boss or engagement where I don't know why I'm pressing specific buttons anymore. For some potency might be a good enough answer but I prefer jobs that give you more than that, which is why I really liked how Gnash tied the whole kit.

But even the timer changes to one minute feel weird to me. For testing purposes, I went out of my way to see if you could drop the one minute buffs if you went nuts with the other skills. The result it that it's possible but very, very hard. What hasn't been hard to drop however ... is the combo itself. More than anything, it now feels like I need to always finish a combo before starting any Awakening/Vicewinder/Uncoiled loops because unlike Gnash there is no possible way to track the combo timer.

The difference here vs before is that before Viper's resources had to be used evenly throughout a fight (or pooled for specific reasons), and so dropping the entire combo was rarely an issue. But with that need gone I find myself often needing to dump a bunch of those resources at the same time because I lost track of them all.

I know this is all skill issue, but let's not pretend managing Gnash wasn't either. I simply wanted to have my experience out there that went beyond my previous comments that all essentially boil down to "Previous Viper game design = Better". It's a shame I'll never really get that data, but I'd be curious to know if the people losing DPS to the debuff dropping aren't losing just as much DPS from wasting the combo timer/capped resources.

To reiterate again, I think literally no one saw the dot as a problem so this change is completely out of left field. I genuinely thought they were going to remove the positionals on the cd attacks, I literally didn't see the dot removal coming because it was so easy to reapply.
I haven't really played viper post change but honestly this change seems like it'll be more punishing for new players and will make the burst even more rigid and just as busy. Like genuinely who is this change for? The dot and buffs were something pretty much everyone instantly understood, the 2 button combo chains is what people found imposing initially.

I don't have strong feelings on the viper changes in isolation but I do feel like in this circumstances the changes felt very kneejerk in a very bad way. There was no time given for people to settle into the job. The design from what I played of it in extremes felt cohesive and fine there was nothing broken about it that needed some immediate fix and change in my opinion. Having this kind of swift reaction when I feel there is no way the devs actually had enough time to gather a wide range of relevant data to inform a change makes me worried for the general direction of job design.
It additionally looks bad when you've lived through jobs with actual issues sometimes even deeprooted design issues getting their problems ignored for years on years. Like for example what is up with MCH gameplay under ping not getting the reevaluation even after an extensive bug report in the forums on the network issues shining a highlight around what is causing that stuff? From that perspective this change feels like a bad prioritization of actual issues as well and felt like a waste of resources.

Not to get too cheeky but maybe if some of that viper attention and energy was actually focused on relevant things maybe monk and blm wouldn't have released in the laughable state they did before the patches fixed them up more. Like some of the oversights that have passed through this time I feel have been really bad on a level where you wonder is the job design team just stretched that thin?

What is confusing is that they mentionned going to remove positionals, community was against it so they removed something else...?
But at the same time RPR keeps Death Design. (Don't remove it).
It felt like they wanted take away the appetizers, didn't after we asked for it but took the chair.

I think the best solutions would've been to remove positionals potency and add a 20s dot you refresh up to 40/60s everytime you succeed at a positional.
This way, they lessen the impact and "pressure" on positionals by allowing to miss a few of them without dropping the dot.

They could even adjust the potency so that if you fail to refresh the dot you're heavily punished rather than today's almost unnoticeable gain on positionals.
Anyway, that's just an idea that would answer SQEX's concerns while keeping Noxious gash.

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Originally Posted by LisseyCrowe

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

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This is interesting, and you're absolutely right. In attempting to make the job feel less busy SE actually ended up making it feel significantly more clunky and unnatural.

I do find myself staring at Vicewinder significantly more than before because my brain now sees it as just another DPS cooldown as opposed to a utility. So my DPS brain says "well if I'm not hitting it on cooldown every time it's a DPS loss." Whereas before the utility of the ability made it so I would not hit the button if Noxious Gnash had more than 20 seconds remaining. The cooldown was always up when I needed it and the stack never overcapped. It was fluid and natural.

Additionally, as you said, the permanently glowing combos and having to track the combo starters is at once both way less interesting and significantly more annoying. If the end goal was to make Viper feel less busy without removing the fun they couldn't have missed the mark further.

The changes don't feel thought out at all. It's as if when they said they were going to change/remove the positionals, and people said "no", they just decided to arbitrarily remove something else instead. It has "poor planning" and "reactionary" written all over it. And the fact it hasn't been address yet, even in a Lodestone post, is wild.

Also as someone above mentioned there are other jobs that required significantly more attention than Viper, yet this is what they chose to focus attention on. Viper would have been fine if left alone.

I just wanted to add that two content creators have now spoken out about their disappointment in the viper changes.
And while CC's opinions shouldn't matter more than any other players, I hope these videos grab the dev's attention because they sum up what many people have been saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLUs..._channel=Rinon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvk6...=BraxophoneXIV

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Originally Posted by Mondschnee

I just wanted to add that two content creators have now spoken out about their disappointment in the viper changes.
And while CC's opinions shouldn't matter more than any other players, I hope these videos grab the dev's attention because they sum up what many people have been saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLUs..._channel=Rinon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvk6...=BraxophoneXIV

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I agree with these videos, replying here to show my support for them to bring back Noxious Gnash. Also... maybe bring back the names "Dreadwinder" and "Pit of Dread" too while you're at it? Vicewinder and Vicepit sounds really lame in comparison.

Also gonna copy and paste my reply I made in another post about Viper's changes:
I was really enjoying this job, it was simple and easy but there was still a little bit you could do to optimize, and now that's gone. I find it ridiculous the job has barely been out and they already did a rework like this. It feels insulting having my favorite job in Endwalker, Monk, have every step of it's 1-2-3 combo turn into leaden fist and now when I moved on and was enjoying Viper, they do this.

I was expecting to hate the viper changes since I really liked managing Noxious Gnash, but honestly I think the job feels better to play and is just as fun without debuff management in most situations. My main gripe is that both the first and second hits of your filler combo just alternate between one and the other, which can feel a bit static. I think I'd like to see something like "Using Reaving Fangs gives two stacks of Honed Steel, consuming both stacks of Honed Steel gives one stack of Honed Reavers" just to spice up our filler rotation a bit (although I'm biased because I also really like monk and this would just make viper's filler more similar to monk's). I'd also like to see more ways to spend Rattling Coils added to give us more decisions to make about how to spend them, maybe something like a jumping attack with a long animation lock or a personal defensive that consumes a Rattling Coil but gives it back if you take damage, but that's probably something that would have to be added in a future expansion. Overall I still love viper, but I would like it even more if we had more meaningful decisions to make :)

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Originally Posted by sqoops

I was expecting to hate the viper changes since I really liked managing Noxious Gnash, but honestly I think the job feels better to play and is just as fun without debuff management in most situations. My main gripe is that both the first and second hits of your filler combo just alternate between one and the other, which can feel a bit static. I think I'd like to see something like "Using Reaving Fangs gives two stacks of Honed Steel, consuming both stacks of Honed Steel gives one stack of Honed Reavers" just to spice up our filler rotation a bit (although I'm biased because I also really like monk and this would just make viper's filler more similar to monk's). I'd also like to see more ways to spend Rattling Coils added to give us more decisions to make about how to spend them, maybe something like a jumping attack with a long animation lock or a personal defensive that consumes a Rattling Coil but gives it back if you take damage, but that's probably something that would have to be added in a future expansion. Overall I still love viper, but I would like it even more if we had more meaningful decisions to make :)

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agreed. current iteration of Viper is a massive improvement over the old viper.

I got used to it but throwing Dreadwinder without thinking just feels weird.
You can just throw it on cooldown as you as your don't overcap the red diamond.

By the way, anyone else felt like Viper suffers a lot from the "animation lock" when throwing 2 oGCDs back to back? I'm especially thinking about the 2nd oGCD after the Dreadwinder GCDs, I spam them but they don't queue and don't go off. I'm used to play GNB so double weaving should be that big to me but someone, Viper throws me off.

I think the main appeal of viper remains, its the weakness dot didn't make it 20x more advanced then it is now.
The appeal of viper is that its brainless constant button pressing job, short recast time remains so the main reason a lot of people play it is still there. Its not a very skillful job nor a hard to learn job its just a constant button pressing job where you press similar buttons over and over, you're not really managing anything besides the coils which don't build very fast so you don't have to think too hard about them, It makes it a very easy melee job to prog with and to improve at encounters with because of coil being a strong range option. It really is a nothing burger change, Viper never needed to be changed thats reflected in this change since the only thing it really did is make you rotate the first button in the chain.

I do think its shitty that CBU3 did this though, because the change was obviously preplanned during 7.0, there isn't any placeholder like images for the new buffs and the yellow sword glow was added fast. CBU3 took 10 years to add a buff timer in your party window they do not do UI stuff like this fast. They disguised these changes they wanted to make (because they have zero confidence in their job design anymore) through pretending that these were changes we asked for, NO ONE asked for changes for Viper the job literally just came out, we didn't even get to try it in savage. If the dot was problematic those complaints would of come up during Savage/Ultimate not Extremes, thats what annoys me more then the change.
The fact CBU3 is obviously embarassed about releasing a job they deemed unfinished they tried to gaslight us into thinking we asked for it.

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Originally Posted by W00by

I've also seen a few people mention that this makes Viper way less fun below level cap. Imagine picking this job up at level 80 today and having no mechanic except "Hit whatever button the Vipersight Gauge says to and lol don't overcap Dreadwinder I guess!" No more choosing when to use Dreadwinder -- sorry, VICEwinder -- for optimal Noxious Gash timing, no more nuanced and varied combo alternation, no more interesting multi-target or post-downtime optimization. The more I think about it, the more I think this change is utter garbage.

Revert it.

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Hello 'tis i, someone who started leveling it after 7.05. Why is babbys first melee job allowed to deal SAM/BLM levels of damage?

Also, Viper has to be the worst playing job below 90. Its a lv50 job at its starting level.

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Originally Posted by Mecia

Hello 'tis i, someone who started leveling it after 7.05. Why is babbys first melee job allowed to deal SAM/BLM levels of damage?

Also, Viper has to be the worst playing job below 90. Its a lv50 job at its starting level.

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At least before the awful changes, you could play around with your combos since which combo starter you used was a choice, but now... yeah. I have said this before but it feels like a low level job to me even at max level now.

I hadn't looked at stats for savage but wow, viper is at the top when it comes to median performance. That's... pretty disgusting.

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Originally Posted by Mecia

Hello 'tis i, someone who started leveling it after 7.05. Why is babbys first melee job allowed to deal SAM/BLM levels of damage?

Also, Viper has to be the worst playing job below 90. Its a lv50 job at its starting level.

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It's not only horrible to play pre-90, I also wonder how much of the early criticism of the job stems from people trying it out and getting a bad first impression. Speaking for myself, I initially thought the job was annoying and even disappointing to play since it felt like it was pure positional spam. Of course people would complain about positionals and busyness when your only gameplay is constantly shifting around for Combo enders and Dreadwinder positionals all while managing a debuff at the same time that, for many players, is probably still going to be all the way on top of the screen under the enemy's HP, and let's not forget reacting to mechanics.

Reawaken and the Uncoiled combo do wonders to the general pace of the job, giving you time to readjust and it's criminal that Viper starts without these. I'd be very curious about the Job's reception if it started with Reawaken and Dreadwinder was the late unlock.

I only really tried viper in one level 80 trial before 7.05, and I just finished leveling it to 100 yesterday. And I got a couple runs of the first EX trial in too just to see how it plays when in something high end, even if it's one that I've farmed a lot.
I really like Viper right now. It's still probably going to stay my Melee main, in no small part due to the aesthetic of the job gear, and how cool the weapons are. (I've been hoping for a dual wielding sword user for kind of a while now)
At this point though, I feel as though I've pretty much squeezed as much optimization as I can get out of it. With Reawaken lasting about 12 seconds each, all you need to do to maximize burst windows is to just have 50 gauge before the 2 minute mark, Unless you have a pot buff you want to fully max out too. And even then, all it takes is just having one Rattling coil saved before Serpent's Ire. (I'm no raid buff wizard though, so tell me if I'm off-base on this. I'm a Black Mage main, I don't pay attention to those.)
It does feel nice to have Vicewinder combos interspersed between the standard 1 and 2 combos. I feel like they could have done something more creative than just making it a 40 second cooldown though. It works though, and I'm not about to start complaining about that when there's something else to complain about in the room.

Noxious Gnash was something I never really got the hang of, but as I already stated, I only tried it in actual combat against a level 80 trial. It's all just an hour total on a striking dummy besides that. Even as someone who never learned to properly use it, and especially not in between Reawakens, I thought it would be really fun to optimize. Knowing now what I know, that Dreadwinder doesn't really need to be saved for bursts, I liked what kinds of decisions it would encourage.
Each of your three part main combo had a different use. The first part was different depending on how much Noxious Gnash you had left, and whether Dreadwinder was coming off cooldown soon. The second determined which buff you got re-applied, and foreshadowed what positional the next part would have, and the third part did the most damage while giving you a boost to a different finisher in sequence. Now there's no reason to not just pair 1 with 1 or 2 with 2 for the first two hits of every combo. It's to the point where I'll intentionally take the DPS loss when I hit the buttons wrong just to not have to do any 1-2-1 or 2-1-2. Not that I'm suggesting anything other than an all out reversal of these changes, but they could have at least made Vicewinder swap your Honed Steel for Reaving Steel so you'd have to occasionally alter the carefully laid out pattern.

The loss of Noxious Gnash also just makes Vicewinder feel weird. It just does damage, and re-applies the buffs that you most definitely still have up. There's no reason to not just chain two of them together every 80 seconds, and spend Ratts to not overcap.

I find it really funny how they went "we're going to be making positionals on Viper easier" and were met with overwhelming "What the heck. That's a terrible idea. Don't." and they went "oh, ok I guess." Then in the same breath just gave us a whole ass rework on a class that has existed for less than a month without any chance for us to even play it in a savage tier to give informed feedback on.
Let's all collectively pray for 7.08 so hard that we summon an Eikon to fix this situation.

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Originally Posted by GartredZW

I find it really funny how they went "we're going to be making positionals on Viper easier" and were met with overwhelming "What the heck. That's a terrible idea. Don't." and they went "oh, ok I guess." Then in the same breath just gave us a whole ass rework on a class that has existed for less than a month without any chance for us to even play it in a savage tier to give informed feedback on.
Let's all collectively pray for 7.08 so hard that we summon an Eikon to fix this situation.

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Sadly I really do feel we're talking to deaf ears. We need a statement or something because the knee-jerk reaction level to job changes needs to stop. Changes should be explained beforehand so players of those jobs are able to give input into them. I'm tired of not having my voice heard and I'm even more disgusted that their take away from VPR mains saying "don't change the job" when positionals were going to be made easier was taken as "let's remove the one thing players had to manage/think about". I'm so sick of jobs becoming hollow versions of how they were previously.

I'm saddened by how, even with the apparent "difficulty spike" of dungeons and normal raids, jobs being as easy as they are is making the game awfully boring to play in 90% of the content available to me. I don't even have to think a lot of the time because I know I have said this once before but if I truly had 0 commitments to other players by being in a static I would have left this game for good. This level of change doesn't even deserve my attention, let alone my money.

Still okay/unbothered with the removal of NG.

It's trash

revert it

before the nerf it was the most busy/engaging melee to me, now it's less engaging and fun

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Originally Posted by TheAmazing3

it feels like a low level job to me even at max level now.

I hadn't looked at stats for savage but wow, viper is at the top when it comes to median performance. That's... pretty disgusting.

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meanwhile, he's parsing green on m4 normal

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Originally Posted by Mecia

Why is babbys first melee job allowed to deal SAM/BLM levels of damage?

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maybe cause no raid buff, no utility, no shield ?

but im not sure yet tbh

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Originally Posted by CaedemSanguis

maybe cause no raid buff, no utility, no shield ?

but im not sure yet tbh

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I know, it was rhetorical.

Ok folks, apparently we have our answer. I pulled this quote from a recent interview with Eurogamer.
The community said „we don’t want these changes“ and the developers apparently did it anyway because idk, duh.
I don’t know what to say.

According to Yoshi-P: „Don‘t worry about it.“

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“With regards to the changes for Viper, we had adjusted right until the last minute and we did have in mind the possibility that some players might provide feedback that it was too busy to play. We did release the job in that state, and then we found a lot of players say it was very busy to play to the extent that they were not able to see mechanics.

The battle team, right until the last minute, were considering whether to make any adjustments to the job. The battle director actually consulted with me because he was quite torn about whether they should go through with an adjustment or not. We announced that we were considering making adjustments to the job, but the response to that was a lot of feedback from players who had already reached the level cap and were already used to playing with the job, and they were happy with the way it played. However, we had already identified some actions which would inevitably be a cause of stress for players. Eventually, we just went through with adjusting what we had initially planned, and that was unrelated to the community feedback. However, I believe probably there was some misunderstanding on the community's part.

I do remember on social media, especially in North America and in Europe, some people were saying, 'Hey, Yoshida, you're listening too much to community feedback', but that was only a little bit so really you don't need to worry.“

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Originally Posted by Mondschnee

Ok folks, apparently we have our answer. I pulled this quote from a recent interview with Eurogamer.
The community said „we don’t want these changes“ and the developers apparently did it anyway because idk, duh.
I don’t know what to say.

According to Yoshi-P: „Don‘t worry about it.“

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Here is the interview in question, in case people want to read the full thing.

I am not just speechless, I am actually pretty mad. Same thing that happens to healers, or with DRK feedback - a wonderful "You think you do, but you don't" mentality on the developers part. The disconnect is real.

No, it feels closer to "We identified that Noxious gash would put too much stress so we planned on removing it but only in 7.01. We didn't removed the positionals as the community was against it."
It's best to take at face value their communications.

But I still hope they'll understand that some form of stress is good.