Viper feels weird

As the title says this job feels kind of strange. I'm currently 85 with it and just started it last night but looking ahead at my abilities I'm not sure how I feel about it. Yeah it's fast and has a lot of ogcds but I never have to worry about my speed or damage buffs and I it doesn't really feel impactful. There's no defensive ability and a lot of the skills sound wet noodley....I dunno how I feel about it but compared to reaper or samurai it almost feels kind of incomplete. Am I just needing to get to 100? Because right now it's just a fast melee and that's....kind of all it is.

Going by what happened with Gnashing Fang my theory's been that they had a more solid concept with the form changing weapon and all, but it got torn apart by the fight design team and they had to scramble to make it at least functional by release.

It feels about as incomplete as if that was the case to me, at least. The job also takes reaching lv100 to feel decent

Yeah I agree, I always felt that they must have planned for the switch between DW and 2H to be more meaningful, plus DW really must have once been meant to be fully randomized given the way it works UI-wise.

If we assume that the general job design overhaul is a real thing happening in 8.0 it could be that they have a Viper design planned for that expansion where the form switching is more impactful and the current design is just there to align with the two minute meta and whatnot. If they nuke all the raid buffs (which they absolutely should) that would free up job design to do all sorts of wacky stuff that they can't do currently.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

If we assume that the general job design overhaul is a real thing happening in 8.0

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I bet it will be, and it'll turn out to be a long list of +10 or -10 potency. #popcorn

You are 85 you literally missing everything, Viper is sadly a job which doesnt feel good at all below 100

What a useless thread this is.
Reaper feels incomplete, I'm level 75 btw.
Black Mage feels weird, I'm level 20 btw.
Have you played this game before? Every Job feels/is incomplete below max level.
Also what do you need a defensive ability for? Using bloodbath + reawaken makes the next 20 seconds "ignore mechanics o'clock" in all normal content.
If anything, Viper feels like a more complete Reaper with reawaken dealing damage while enshroud doesn't, Uncoiled Fury being almost always available while Harvest Moon is kinda shit.

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Originally Posted by RenkoBernkastel

What a useless thread this is.
Reaper feels incomplete, I'm level 75 btw.
Black Mage feels weird, I'm level 20 btw.
Have you played this game before? Every Job feels/is incomplete below max level.
Also what do you need a defensive ability for? Using bloodbath + reawaken makes the next 20 seconds "ignore mechanics o'clock" in all normal content.
If anything, Viper feels like a more complete Reaper with reawaken dealing damage while enshroud doesn't, Uncoiled Fury being almost always available while Harvest Moon is kinda shit.

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Most jobs feel bad below 50 and wonky below about 70-80

VPR is straight barely a job below 95

We shouldn’t be encouraging the level of “job feels partially functional” to go even higher

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

We shouldn’t be encouraging the level of “job feels partially functional” to go even higher

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I'm not, the devs are. If I had a say in it, we'd have our full kit in Sastasha but synced down, like GW2 does it.

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Originally Posted by RenkoBernkastel

I'm not, the devs are. If I had a say in it, we'd have our full kit in Sastasha but synced down, like GW2 does it.

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Then saying VPR is one of the classes that is uniquely terrible in the middle level ranges I think is a perfectly valid complaint, like how WHM is trash below 76 while the other healers are somewhat functional by about 45 or SMN is mostly in a completed state (for SMN) by like 40 but BLM changes every 5 levels below 80

Pointing out jobs that are strangely worse than their peers at syncing is a valid complaint

Meanwhile PCT gets its creature motif at lv30 and weapon motif at lv50, sub palette at lv60, scenic motif at lv70, and holy at lv80. It's largely feature complete at the level you unlock it and has something that significantly adds to its gameplay every capstone level before it

The removal of Noxious Gnash has hurt Viper Gameplay a lot really. The class will feel a bit less clunky once you get it to level 100, but it unfortunately, it was gutted because some play tester thought it was "too busy".

Reawakening getting unlocked so late is a particularly weird decision. Since the reawakening combo is made of 12 separate abilities (reawakening, the five generations, the five legacies, and ourobouros), why not gradually unlock those to extend the combo as you "level up" rather than unlocking it in just 3 steps over the last ten levels?

Even a limited reawakening combo at low levels would make the class a bit more interesting.

I guess they wanted to make the actual leveling process (aka going from 80 to 100) more interesting by giving you these significant milestones where.you unlock a bunch of things at once, but that's a bad idea given that you only level up once, whereas you get synced to low level all the time, so making the gameplay better when synced is more important.

i think it feels fine in casual content, if you are using the symbols correctly you should be do optimal damage consistently, with very little downtime compared to say ninja or samurai where you have to balance gauges and tokens, the job is actually pretty dynamite, but I do prefer big moment like the aforementioned ninja where your building toward your major unload window, something Viper doesn't seem to have to worry about as much.

With second wind and bloodbath as viper's main and only way of any "defense", it's basically geared around the idea of someone smashing skill speed materia in every gear slot if they can manage it.

IMHO, every job should feel like they have a general gist of what they're going for and becoming at level 50.

Feels terrible when level sync downed for lower level dungeons.
No defensive skill also feels weird.

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Originally Posted by Selvokaz

i think it feels fine in casual content, if you are using the symbols correctly you should be do optimal damage consistently, with very little downtime compared to say ninja or samurai where you have to balance gauges and tokens, the job is actually pretty dynamite, but I do prefer big moment like the aforementioned ninja where your building toward your major unload window, something Viper doesn't seem to have to worry about as much.

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I think this could easily be accomplished too and for the betterment of the game as a whole. We have so many levels where classes just get a trait that increases damage for skills. We could get new animations and names for all those skills instead to visually show our characters getting stronger. That alone would fill in some of the dead space left by moving the bulk of our kits to lower levels to make ARR fun again. WHM is the first class that comes to mind for skills that are core to its kit being learned after level 80. A lot of classes would benefit from a serious rethink. Deciding all classes should only be complete at max level in a game where all content is replayed regularly was a big misstep in my opinion. Viper just exemplifies this.

I dunno, I genuinely like the idea of a job that isn't as build around this "big moment" as all the other ones. I just wish the combo-combinations were randomized so that it feels less static than, wenn, all the other jobs. More variety!