Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[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 ..

[AurorBorealis]

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.

[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.

[Elkanah]

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.

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

[koko-on-da-forumz]

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 ..

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.

[Erwann]

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.

[jonimated]

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.

[M1SF0RTUNE]

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.

[Morr_Ar]

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.

[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.

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?