Can we get a buff for Viper? (Ultimate content)

I have been progging through FRU and genuinely it's kind of frustrating because people keep excluding Viper solely for damage output. I can usually hold my own and make checks but seriously people are actively excluding me from content that I would have to reprog on another class, and I am at the point where sunken cost fallacy has taken effect.

But it is genuinely upsetting to see a class that I enjoyed since it dropped being actively discouraged from being played in high end content. Can we at least get like a potency buff or something to some abilities? Idk if this is scrub talk or not really but I genuinely feel mostly left out when trying to play more of FRU

Jobs should be allowed to struggle in some places and be great in others. you can't really buff viper in fru without fundamentally changing how it works or making it way too strong in savage and other areas (see pictomancer for an example)
Viper is fine, it can clear and it's got niches in other places. If anyone needs a buff, it's machinist

Something I would like for VPR to help it with downtime is like a 0 damage GCD that lowers the cool down of your Vicewinder charges. Like it could be like you character is sharpening their blades or something.

Like a GCD skill (with a long recast and only usable in battle) that shares the cooldown/charges with Vicewinder and fills both Serpent Offerings and Rattling Coil, and perhaps also refreshing your buffs? I'd like that

No, Viper is absolutely not fine, even in savage if you look deep in the statistics you realise that even the viper is actually one of the two worst melee in max potential damage(with the reaper), and for FRU it's not ok to be 8 PERCENTS lower than every other dps jobs in the game on phase 1 except machinist, it's normal to be low but not that low.

And unlike people say, it is extremely easy to fix this problem for both viper and machinist without breaking them in savage : simply greatly increase the damage of the time cooldown based skills, because those skills are used way more often in ultimate in comparaison to savage.

For viper it's just the vicewinder combo : boost vicewinder 500 -> 600, and the two other attacks 620 -> 700, and on the other hand, reduce by 20 every filler attack.
Same for machinist : slightly reduce fillers(i don't know how much, not my job), but increase the drill, air anchor and chainsaw from 600 to 650(at first i wrote 700, but for the machinist i feel drill is too important to be buffed this much).
Instant fix, and that absolutely doesn't break the jobs in savage.

And that would also have the other good effect(clearly mandatory in my opinion) to increase their opener's power(and even all the burst phases for the machinist), which would increase synergy between those jobs and raidbuffs, which is their obvious weakness in comparaison to other jobs like picto, samourai and ninja. It's absolutely not normal to have a job like machinist and viper, that are "selfish", to be so low on burst that they are not even considered good partner for a dancer. When a viper arrives in your team, you have only one thought : "oh sad, even if this person is really good, they are not gonna give me any buff, and at the same time, they are not even gonna benefit from my buff as much as a ninja, why would anyone want a viper in their team ?".

I have to agree it's not okay that Viper is as weak as it is in the first two phases of FRU, which I say as someone who has locked it out of my PFs because my options were either to do that or to require a PCT to compensate for them when running with friends who play the other casters. Part of the issue is also the structure of this ultimate though, three of the four major downtime mechanics are contained in those first two phases, so rather than the dps checks evening out based on which jobs are good under different circumstances you instead have this situation where it takes 8 minutes of encounter before Viper starts to make up for its shortcomings in prior phases. And since they're obviously not going to redesign FRU post-release to solve this issue, Viper should receive some kind of buff to make it not so bad in the early phases. That said, they're also not going to make any job adjustments until 7.2 at this point, which will make all of the DPS checks easier regardless, so idk what we can do from here.

I don't know how this would affect full uptime, but another change I think would be good is increasing the amount of gauge Coil, and Den GCDs grant from 5 to 10 per GCD.

VPR needs a way to not fall apart in downtime which is difficult because it relies so heavily on constantly keeping its buffs up (SAM is technically similar but SAM bursts a lot harder and can get its buffs up way faster)

I agree a downtime button that either refreshes their buffs without a target, can be channeled for ratting coil or channeled for both

It’s ironic they released two jobs this expansion, one that adores downtime and one that recoils when someone one block away even thinks about downtime

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

VPR needs a way to not fall apart in downtime which is difficult because it relies so heavily on constantly keeping its buffs up (SAM is technically similar but SAM bursts a lot harder and can get its buffs up way faster)

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This is not the problem, the problem is that samourai's meikyo and sen'ei are time based, and are way stronger than vicewinder, in full uptime viper can compare with samourai on odds minutes because he's supposed to get 50 gauge and a reawaken when a samourai gets a meikyo + sen'ei, but in ultimate with all the downtime, samourai get his meikyo + sen'ei anyway, while the viper doesn't get his gauge and reawaken, the only way to balance that without creating a new skill or new mechanic is to increase the power of the only viper's time based skill, vicewinder(the only other time based skill of the viper is serpent's ire, and to buff it you would have to buff reawaken potency, which in my opinion would be a good choice, but this would not be as impactful as a vicewinder buff in ultimate).
Keeping the buffs up is clearly not a big deal for a viper, specially when we see that the viper's problem is in P1 and P2 in FRU, where there is absolutely no problem to keep the buffs up. Just use vicewinder after every downtime(except after light rampant).

I should clarify it's really easy to get buffs from a simple reaving fangs > Swiftskin's sting > vicewinder > hunter's coil combo every time in downtime, the issue is that I will literally struggle without a pictomancer in my party in terms of damage, a ninja or samurai or even an astro would have to also be in the party to compensate for my damage, and I am playing "optimally" as described on the balance, trying to keep uptime for everything and I still still still struggle in DPS within P1 and P2, I wouldn't even know how much damage I can do on P3 enrage for FRU because quite literally, I am being locked out because people simply do not trust that class to get to that point. So the fact that I have to play something like Picto or Samurai just to continue prog really irks me. We need like a potency buff and same with machinist, it's genuinely kind of upsetting that we're in dawntrail and we're still getting issues where classes are being locked out of high end prog due to simply "not possessing enough damage" within like 2 phases.

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Originally Posted by TomoKush

I am playing "optimally" as described on the balance, trying to keep uptime for everything and I still still still struggle in DPS within P1 and P2

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Don't worry, there is no way to do good as a viper in P1 and P2, i've killed FRU 4 times as a viper, i played well everytime, and everytime my team had to carry P1 and P2, viper and machinist are so bad that it looks nearly impossible to take them in the team if there is no broken pictomancer to compensate. And you can still consider yourself happy cause machinist is even worse, at least the viper is good in P3 - 4 - 5. I really don't know if there has been a single time in the game when such a lack of balance has occured : picto in ultimate is the most broken thing i've ever seen(at least in P1 and P2), while viper and specially machinist are so trash that they can't even play without a picto in the team.

Oh and in addition, that's not the subject, but since we are talking about the viper, i'd like to add that currently, the viper also has the biggest problem in term of gameplay : since they removed Noxious Gnash, the viper's whole combo system is totally broken, the viper only uses 4 of his 8 possible combos in a full uptime scenario, while SE has made an entire UI for it. I think Noxious Gnash in its previous state was absolutely awful, i don't know if removing it entirely was the best choice but i understand that they did it because it was terrible to use in any situation that was not a single target full uptime. But now that they removed it, we lost half of our rotation.

So they should absolutely make something, like easy solution : reaving fang should give a TWO CHARGES buff(or resource without time limit) that buffs steel fangs two times. By doing just that, they would alternate in a reaving - steel - steel loop, the viper would get back his 8 combos, and those would work in a 12 combos cycle that would loop every around 2 minutes. Everything i said should have already been done in patch 7.1, we're now at 7.15 and nothing has been done while other jobs like ninja, samourai and dragoon got buffed while they were already stronger than viper, i hope something is done really soon because it's starting to get frustrating.

With PCT being forced in every FRU PF, there is no reason to exclude VPR or MCH, especially for prog. These two jobs are very strong in P3, where you usually have deaths or damage downs. Adds will be harder, but if everyone pushes their buttons, it's not an issue, as intermission should not have any deaths.

I do agree that downtime sucks for VPR. The unfortunate "solution" to this will be removing VPR's personal buffs, mirroring what happened to MNK. VPR lost so much already, why not just lose more?

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Originally Posted by brinn12

The unfortunate "solution" to this will be removing VPR's personal buffs, mirroring what happened to MNK. VPR lost so much already, why not just lose more?

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As i said earlier, viper's personal buffs are absolutely not a problem, just like samourai's personal buffs are not a problem at all.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

With PCT being forced in every FRU PF, there is no reason to exclude VPR or MCH, especially for prog. These two jobs are very strong in P3

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There is not a single phase on this fight where the viper is stronger that the dragoon for example, while the dragoon is fine in P1 and 2. And the viper is not even that strong even in P3 and 4.
Machinist is worse, P3 is the only phase where it is not the weakest dps by a huge margin.
I guess people want to minimize the risk of failing any phase, and seeing how abyssal their dps are on some phases, it's hard to blame them for locking those jobs. Developer's fault.

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Originally Posted by Karuya

As i said earlier, viper's personal buffs are absolutely not a problem, just like samourai's personal buffs are not a problem at all.



There is not a single phase on this fight where the viper is stronger that the dragoon for example, while the dragoon is fine in P1 and 2. And the viper is not even that strong even in P3 and 4.
Machinist is worse, P3 is the only phase where it is not the weakest dps by a huge margin.
I guess people want to minimize the risk of failing any phase, and seeing how abyssal their dps are on some phases, it's hard to blame them for locking those jobs. Developer's fault.

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With a PCT, no one cares about P1 and P2 damage. And a (good) VPR is indeed strong in P3, same to MCH. The only "hard" checks are intermission, P3 and P5. Everything else is super easy. I'm only counting P3 and P5 because it's common to have deaths there, but the DPS check is by no means hard. Back in TOP, you would see clean enrages with Relics and dungeon gear. People wouldn't ban any jobs, so why would they ban 5 now?

Excluding SMN/RDM to a caster that's outperforming every other melee by a large % is reasonable. Machinist gets an extra Barrel Stabilizer in P4 by using it before rewind, and it can reach 31k rDPS consistently, some go up to 34k. It's not like you need it anyway, as the P4 DPS check is the easiest and you don't see the enrages being cast in good PFs.

If you're getting bad MCHs or VPRs, you should avoid the players, not the jobs. If you're seeing enrages after swapping a DRG to a VPR, check who you're playing with. 1300 median difference means less than 5%. We'll always have stronger jobs, and if you can't deal with that, you should not be raiding. If you're banning due to a 4% difference when you already have a PCT, it's time to hit that striking dummy a bit more.

I'm not banning anyone and i'm not saying people should ban anyone, and i guarantee i'm hitting my striking dummy more than you, but it doesn't mean that the situation is fine and nothing should be done. I've done TOP on patch and i clearly remember there was absolutely not this kind of imbalance, the only dps problem in TOP was in P2, if you didn't have white mage or sage or dragoon or reaper in P2 then you would have way more trouble beating P2 easily, but that was not on the same level than FRU and that was on a weird 2 targets situation, on FRU we are talking about full single target imbalance on 2 consecutive phases. What if picto was not broken ? Then you are saying that it would be understandable to ban viper and machinist because it would be too hard to beat P1 and 2.

Anyway, it's not because the fight is feasible with any team that we should not at least hope to see every job perform decently when there are absolutely obvious ways to fix those problems and it should have been done before the ultimate even came out.

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Originally Posted by Karuya

I'm not banning anyone and i'm not saying people should ban anyone, and i guarantee i'm hitting my striking dummy more than you, but it doesn't mean that the situation is fine and nothing should be done. I've done TOP on patch and i clearly remember there was absolutely not this kind of imbalance, the only dps problem in TOP was in P2, if you didn't have white mage or sage or dragoon or reaper in P2 then you would have way more trouble beating P2 easily, but that was not on the same level than FRU and that was on a weird 2 targets situation, on FRU we are talking about full single target imbalance on 2 consecutive phases. What if picto was not broken ? Then you are saying that it would be understandable to ban viper and machinist because it would be too hard to beat P1 and 2.

Anyway, it's not because the fight is feasible with any team that we should not at least hope to see every job perform decently when there are absolutely obvious ways to fix those problems and it should have been done before the ultimate even came out.

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You're blaming the developers for VPR being excluded from PFs. This job was more than fine in Savage. FRU is its first on patch Ultimate. Ultimates have different durations and uptime for every phase. A 4% difference in an Ultimate is not unhealthy for the game, as this could mean jobs are not homogenized.

I am not disagreeing that VPR and MCH need changes to perform better in Ultimates. I main MCH and the job has been underperforming for 3 expansions. But it was viable in EW, still is now. Excluding VPR/MCH in parties without PCT is not justified, the issue is just worse when you already have a PCT. What you should do is avoid joining these PFs, if people really are coping for the perfect composition in a fight without relevant DPS checks, rather than looking for good players.

Also you're telling me some people swapped to MCH in TOP because of P2? P4 was a major problem, and many groups struggled with P6 damage. P1 was much harder... For any effect, in PF, TOP would see more clean enrages, and it's not even close. So you tell the people who ban VPR to hit the striking dummy, rather than blame the developers. MCH and RPR were good picks in TOP, and not very good in DSR. These variations are healthy for the game.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

You're blaming the developers for VPR being excluded from PFs. This job was more than fine in Savage. FRU is its first on patch Ultimate.

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Actually Viper was not really fine even in savage if you look carefuly at the statistics and consider every aspect of those fights : if you look at maximum(95%) potential damage in cdps on patch 7.05 on arcadion, you'll see only reaper was behind viper by 1%, but the viper was lower than samourai by a whooping 5%, monk was equal to samourai, and ninja and dragoon were the best(with picto of course). After that, ninja, dragoon and samourai were all buffed in 7.10, while viper and reaper didn't get anything.

And that was on arcadion, a raid tier that was clearly designed to give an advantage to the viper because there was a lot of movement where the viper could benefit from his uncoiled fury. It was alarming to see that viper was not the best by a big margin seeing how those fights worked and how uncoiled fury looked totally broken. Statistics on 7.10 patch are not relevant because nobody's doing this content seriously nowadays, so the viper has an advantage because easy to play and uncoiled fury.

So it was obvious from the start that viper would be bad in FRU, just like it was obvious that picto would break the fight if nothing was done, and it delivered. Viper is effectively the worst melee if we consider the entire fight even though he's supposed to have a big advantage in P4 thanks to his 40% cleave on burst. Even that is not enough to catch up to samourai who is the second worst melee on this fight. Which also clearly shows that the selfish jobs are always the weakest ones : Viper, samourai, machinist and even black mage if we compare it to picto or even red mage.

I think it clearly underlines a problem with the dps profile difference between selfish and buffers, in my opinion every selfish job should have a higher burst than buffers because it seems like it's the only way to mostly balance every type of dps, give them advantages in some situations or others, and to give them a decent synergy with their team. Currently, selfish just don't have any advantages. Problems always come from the idea that some dps should do "long term" dps, it was the monk 10 years ago and it disappeared, was samourai on Stormblood and it disappeared to get an insane burst, now they give it to the viper and it will disappear.

During endwalker, samourai didn't really have this problem because devs had already realized that samourai could never compete with other melee if they don't give a clear edge : an insane burst. Now that's exactly the same for viper, it will never have a good damage potential if you don't increase his synergy with his team's buffs. Same for machinist, same for black mage.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

Also you're telling me some people swapped to MCH in TOP because of P2?

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P2 was a problem because if you didn't have jobs with a good 2 targets cleave like white mage, then you would have trouble killing it without spending recourses that you should keep for P3, so you would be late for P3, so you would be late for P4. P4 was hard but was not the same problem because that was a single target, and it was the end of the big dps race, P5 dps check was easy, you had to spend eveything either at the end of P3, either during P4, depends on your team, for example i as a samourai would hold my burst for P4 while my team would burst in the end of P3. I didn't say anything about machinist in P2, i don't remember.

Anyway, i don't disagree with you on anything actually, and sorry i said banning a job in PF is kinda ok, i actually find it ridiculous, i was just speaking out of frustration for my job. But i'm still surprised that the devs didn't realize sooner how unbalanced this ultimate would be while statistics clearly showcased it.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

With PCT being forced in every FRU PF, there is no reason to exclude VPR or MCH, especially for prog. These two jobs are very strong in P3, where you usually have deaths or damage downs. Adds will be harder, but if everyone pushes their buttons, it's not an issue, as intermission should not have any deaths.

I do agree that downtime sucks for VPR. The unfortunate "solution" to this will be removing VPR's personal buffs, mirroring what happened to MNK. VPR lost so much already, why not just lose more?

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The solution to not locking out VPR and MCH being to lock out BLM, RDM and SMN is actually not a good solution, just in case anyone was wondering.

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Originally Posted by brinn12

Excluding SMN/RDM to a caster that's outperforming every other melee by a large % is reasonable. Machinist gets an extra Barrel Stabilizer in P4 by using it before rewind, and it can reach 31k rDPS consistently, some go up to 34k. It's not like you need it anyway, as the P4 DPS check is the easiest and you don't see the enrages being cast in good PFs.

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MCH getting to 34K rDPS? What kind of substance are you on? Not even the top 99% players can even reach 28K rdps in any fight (ultimate or savage) or in any phase for that matter. Have you even done any of the fights? Or are you speaking this just by looking at streamers?

honestly at this point, it would be something to preserve or refresh applied buffs and passively build reawaken gauge in increments for an extended period of downtime. similar meditate and anatman (before EW monk rework). but one of viper's issues in downtime phases is a common issue with RPR, MCH, and RDM gauge in similar scenarios. but then PCT is also just ridiculous in downtime given it can be used to generate 1 or multiple 1000+ potency nuke buttons which no other classes can really do. and DRG, NIN and MNK more or less operates from a timer which does better upon coming back from downtime.

Like i said earlier, preserving buffs is really not a problem for the viper, and actually i don't think that the gauge is a problem either, i've killed FRU multiple times and always felt that my buff management and resource was pretty smooth. No, I think that, like you said at the end, the problem is just that those jobs usually have time based skills that are too weak : viper's vicewinder is clearly too weak, machinist drill/air anchor/chainsaw are too weak but should not be buffed too much because drill is the biggest part of machinist dps, samourai looks fine but should actually be a bit higher too, and reaper same as samourai.

I also think that all those jobs should have a higher burst, except maybe samourai who should maybe buffed on his filler or odd minutes instead, but viper, machinist and reaper burst phases are clearly too weak looking at how overwhelmingly strong every raidbuffs are. Again the only melee job that has a weak raidbuff, reaper with a 3% raidbuff, is clearly the weakest with the two selfish jobs, samourai and viper. There is clearly a big problem in term of burst damages between selfish and buffers, and this will never be balanced if selfish don't get a burst that are at least as strong as jobs that have a raidbuff like ninja and picto.

And i'll add one more thing for the viper : actually, i'm pretty sure that the reason why he's weak is because of uncoiled fury. Why? Because since the beginning, SE has been balancing this job with the idea : "ok, viper should never lose uptime, so how should we balance it so it isn't too strong in comparison to other melees?". This is actually a big game design issue, from the beginning i think that the viper should have never been allowed to get 3 stacks of uncoiled fury at the same time, because it is just unfair for other melees, no melee should have a tool that allow them to get so much uptime in comparison to others, and since SE knows that it's unfair from the start, they have given the viper weak damage overall to compensate. We've already seen what happened at the end of patch 7.05 : viper was the weakest melee(with the reaper), and now we see what happens on FRU, viper is just the weakest overall, even when we consider P4 where he is actually supposed to be broken.

I think viper should be allowed to get only 2 uncoild fury at the same time, and i think maybe serpent's ire should not even give a stack, not sure, i always felt like this skill should not give one. But on the other hand, viper should get a big buffs on his reawaken and vicewinder combos.