Please don't change Viper

[DTreaty]

Please don't change Viper. It feels so good to play right now.

[CaptJOLLY]

I haven't hit level cap on Viper yet but I've really been enjoying it so far! I absolutely cannot stand them making a change so suddenly in the direction of simplifying the job.
They're taking the wrong lessons from SMN- Have some faith in the team that designed Viper. It's pretty damn fun and a lot of people agree!

Where is this intense outcry for making Viper easier? There is so much *easy* content in this game. Gutting the goodfeels of the busyfeet does nothing but hurtwound your playerbase!

THINK OF THE MOBBIES.

[ZhanMough]

Replying to show numbers. Viper feels insanely good to play at the minute, please don't change it.

[Khatmar]

Please, dont change Viper, dont make it easier or less busy. I am really enjoying the job now.

[Chasingstars]

I been chatting with others that I personally know, and from what I understand there is three aspects that feel harder than they might for others:

1) Quickness of rotation
2) Positionals
3) The "flip-flop" of abilities (like twinblood and twinbite swapping in priority with either use of the Coils).

I had already showed that its fairly simple to maintain positionals without overdoing the movement, by being at the SE or SW of an enemy if its not a full circle.
Quickness I had nothing except for just having minimal speed melds for a slightly lower gcd, as that is part of the job's rotation.
Same with the "flip-flop" being part of the job, although it seems s to be confusing to work with at least from what I was personally told.

I personally don't have these problems and think that the job is fine just the way it is right now. As I personally been playing it, just for fun, at higher apm with my skill speed currently at 2703. Which would also mean I am being subjected to the job's rotation, positionals, and "flip-flop" more than others in a given encounter.

I personally believe that the so called "issues" people have been experiencing with the job is the fact it breaks conventions and is not as homogenized as the others. Where it requires a somewhat familiar yet also different skill set.

[Furrysparks]

A few people supposedly say viper is too busy and they rush to change it after a few days. But when large amounts of the community complain for years about lack of job depth the best we get is "we'll look at it in 2 years". Make it make sense.

[ValStormbreaker]

Sorry if this isn't the place for it, but I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on MNK. I wasn't aware they listened to any specific players in the leadup to them killing my favorite job (MNK).

Testing to see if I can post again what with the daily lockout on posts. I'd be happy to go into more detail about that, but yes, this is a big problem, and one of those two content creators is currently mouthing off about Viper in a way that is advocating for the dumbing down of the job. Certain people ought to be de-platformed at this point due to the harm they're causing to everyone else's fun.

[ValStormbreaker]

Even as someone who has yet to touch Viper I find it strange to make such big changes to how it plays to early on.

I mean, I don’t remember seeing scores of threads talking about how it needed less positionals, nor the APM. So like, where did the complaints even come from lol? Even my Obviously-Super-Accurate-and-Reliable Google Translate on JP forum threads didn’t find any many major complaints about it.

Meanwhile certain other jobs do have many, many threads about them that are going mostly unaddressed (*cough* healers *cough*) lol

While I pointed the finger at Yoshi-"I'm a white-belt at MNK"-P, my husband says Mr. Happy is partly to blame for this. Apparently he made videos complaining that the job felt like it was "always on" and needed more down-time which he alleged might feel off-putting to some. It's not like MNK mains haven't totally been complaining for three expansions now about things that slow the job down and give us big windows where we have nothing to do because we don't have skills to push... :/

Happy is one of the content creators who gets to have face time with Yoshi-P at fan fests and has been directly asked what he would like to see, which he has admitted to on record, and some of these things have indeed been implemented into the game. He has directly advocated for changes that have aversely affected MNK, has been a proponent of removing skill speed as a stat from the game, and made suspiciously magnanimous statements regarding certain MNK skills in SHB that pretty much killed the fun speed builds and made them impossible to use.

This guy doesn't like going fast, and advocates for dumbing things down and removing any "race against the timer" kind of mechanics jobs had, but acts magnanimous about it. Then he tries to play politician to appease both the raiding crowd and the access SE gives him by making nice to the 220ms RPer in Limsa who is easily overwhelmed by having to learn how things work, by talking out of both sides of his mouth. He has held the simultaneous positions that VPR should be given more downtime, AND that not all jobs should cater to everyone, in order to keep his subscriber count up. It's pretty slimy and jobs have suffered by the dev team treating him like a representative for our community (which he isn't).

Drak Gamestein is another guy who is more directly responsible for the state of EW and DT MNK, and is another person who has been in the same position as Happy, with similar access. People who don't know any better don't second-guess the things they say, because they're established. We need better content creators who aren't going to use their access so irresponsibly. My husband says he doesn't agree with everything Xenosis Vex has to say but appreciates that he seems more genuine and doesn't pull his punches when he has issues with something to appease people.

[ValStormbreaker]

This is my first post on the forum, and I had to get everything set up to also add my two cents:

Viper is fantastic the way it is. The whole point of the job is the unrelenting offense at the cost of utility. There are no raid buffs, no defensives, and your only cooldown is just doing your fast ability (Reawaken) for free. Removing positionals and potential "busy-ness" of the job would be such a waste and get rid of the main appeal to the job.

If anything the only changes I'd like to see is implementing the Crystalline Conflict defensive Snake Scales for PVE in some fashion, just to give it a little extra survivability for harder content. Every other melee dps has something to give smart players a reward for lessening the burdens on healers or some tool to help stay alive. DRG has Life Surge, MNK has Riddle of Earth/Earth's Reply, SAM has Tengetsu, RPR has Arcane Crest, NIN has Shade Shift. If they don't get that though, it's still fine and all around the most fun I've had on a melee job in a long while.

I wanted to reply to this yesterday but had the daily lockout on more posts. The game has always had unique PvP skills for the DPS jobs that would have been incredibly useful for immediately fixing job problems if ported over to PvE and just given potency adjustments, but the dev team never does this. SHB MNK could have really used the PvP skills Axe Kick and Somersault as oGCDs for reliable ways of managing the Chakra and Greased Lightning gauges, but that never happened. Instead the animations were aped for something hidden behind the beast chakra system in EW that was like a worse version of NIN's mudras and made no sense on MNK, and created even more problems.

This is another game-wide issue, and I agree that Snake Scales should be brought to PvE. Riddle of Earth in its current form is... not good. The previous RoE from SHB 5.1 was really good, and incredibly useful in context. I haven't bothered seeing how it works in PvP, but the current PvE skill brings with it a lot of problems and reveals issues with encounter design philosophy. That's a whole sermon, though, but the TL;DR is I do not think the cool and useful PvP skills should be exclusive to PvP when there has been a consistent track record of them always being super useful for solving job issues in PvE. They NEED to be ported over.

[ValStormbreaker]

I'm a physically disabled player. I have muscular dystrophy, so I can ONLY play using a controller. If Viper isn't too hard for someone like me to play, then where are the complaints coming from?

Positionals aren't hard to execute. If you're melee DPS you park yourself on the back corner of your target where flank and rear meet, and move one step over when appropriate. AND we have two charges of True North (which I use out of laziness rather than necessity).

I don't get this at all.

As I previously mentioned, I'm also a disabled player with nerve damage issues in my right hand, and I also can ONLY play with a controller. Even then, I gravitate toward the high-APM jobs and love fighting games. I wouldn't ever ask for any game to dumb things down on my account.

I'll tell you exactly where the "simplification" arguments come from, and it's two places primarily:

1) The W-Cross Hotbar is NOT the default as it should be, and the game never tells you it exists. It's hidden in the settings. So, rather than controller and players having immediate access to a full 32 skills without needing to hotbar swap, they feel overwhelmed by the restrictions of the default 16 icons for their controller layout, and don't know there's a superior alternative. This is also something that encourages automation, to work around the inconvenience of not having full access to skills easily playing on controller.

2) Passive, effort-averse players who use people like us as a shield for wanting the game to be more of a cakewalk for them. "What if a player is disabled?" They try to pander to us while treating us like we're inferior so the game needs to be "brought down to our level,". I'm disabled and I can outperform these jokers even on a bad day. They need to stop using us as an excuse, it's insulting.