Viper Suggestion - Give Reaving Fangs the Armor Crush treatment

[Cynric]

I would be ok with this. It's at least better than just alternating the combo with no thought and makes winder feel a bit better.

My only concern is that we'd have stacks of rattling coil and this new type of stack and I feel like that seems like it would be a little weird in practice. They haven't shown that they can make a great Job UI with viper so I'm not sure this wouldn't wind up being even more confusing in the long run.

If the implementation was good though its not a bad idea.

[Embio]

I do think you've articulated something important here. Something many seem to miss or forget...

What's strikes me as odd about this is the fact that it's really hard to not notice the difference. It's easy to not realize the cascading effect only looking at the change on paper, but I barely had to play around on the dummy for about a minute to notice the substantial change to the combos. It's not like I live and breathe Viper either; I only used it to go through MSQ and prog some EX. On top of that, the job has only been out for a month anyways. Yet the change was massive enough for me to feel immediately, and diagnose in less time than it takes to microwave rice.

This leads me to two hypotheses on how these changes even made it into the game:

1. The devs haven't playtested the changes, are oblivious to the effects it's had on the core of the job, and are only familiar with it on paper, or

2. They have playtested the changes, but weren't even marginally familiar enough with the job beforehand to notice that the combo system had changed at all.

There is also option three, which is that they are aware of the effect it has and are just that willing to compromise on their design, but I'd really rather not consider that possibility.

[jonimated]

Another potential solution would be for Reaving Fangs to simply add a flat 20 second buff to Steel Fangs, that can be refreshed up to 40 seconds. And have Vicewinder apply the same 20 second buff/refresh. This makes pressing Reaving Fangs and Vicewinder functionally identical to their previous iterations but significantly reduces the punishment for allowing it to fall off early.

As a buff that only affects a single button, and not all damage, you could safely ignore it falling off during double Awaken windows. Would also remove the consequence of it falling off during disengage moments when you're spamming Uncoiled Fury.

I don't know I'm just brainstorming here. Maybe I'm just desperate for literally anything than what we have now.

[ShaolinMike]

I can't think of a time when SE just gave something back that was completely removed simply because the community wanted it. Has that ever happened?

Energy Drain was removed from SCH for a hot minute in Shadowbringers. SCH mains were burning their books in the streets in protest (metaphorically speaking). SW promptly brought it back.

[jonimated]

Energy Drain was removed from SCH for a hot minute in Shadowbringers.

Oh yeah, I did totally forget about that. Perhaps there's a teeny chance after all.

[Erwann]

Energy Drain was removed from SCH for a hot minute in Shadowbringers. SCH mains were burning their books in the streets in protest (metaphorically speaking). SW promptly brought it back.

This is the hopium i needed

[Cynric]

This is the hopium i needed

Hagakure was also removed and promptly brought back after the community outcry.

[W00by]

What's strikes me as odd about this is the fact that it's really hard to not notice the difference. It's easy to not realize the cascading effect only looking at the change on paper, but I barely had to play around on the dummy for about a minute to notice the substantial change to the combos. It's not like I live and breathe Viper either; I only used it to go through MSQ and prog some EX. On top of that, the job has only been out for a month anyways. Yet the change was massive enough for me to feel immediately, and diagnose in less time than it takes to microwave rice.

This leads me to two hypotheses on how these changes even made it into the game:

1. The devs haven't playtested the changes, are oblivious to the effects it's had on the core of the job, and are only familiar with it on paper, or

2. They have playtested the changes, but weren't even marginally familiar enough with the job beforehand to notice that the combo system had changed at all.

There is also option three, which is that they are aware of the effect it has and are just that willing to compromise on their design, but I'd really rather not consider that possibility.

In my opinion, I think the biggest problem is that they aren't confident in Viper. I mean, just look at Picto -- it's more complicated than Viper with a large playerbase, but no gameplay changes have been implemented there even though there's plenty of challenging stuff in its rotation, too. I think this is because they have faith in the design of Pictomancer, but with Viper, they just have no clue. If they were confident in how they originally designed Viper, they wouldn't have let 6 days of incomplete feedback determine how they are going to design the class.

In hindsight, it's kind of obvious. Looking at the Job Action Live Letter, the way they talk about Viper and Pictomancer are night and day differences. For Pictomancer, they go into detail, Yoshi P does a sample Opener, they hover over skill icons and names, explain the different parts of the kit. . .

For Viper, Yoshi P mashes out some buttons and explains that "I know it looks complicated but I promise it makes sense once you play it" and seems to deliberately avoid going into excessive detail because they feared it'd confuse people. They have thought, since designing Viper, that it was going to be too hard for the playerbase, so naturally, their immediate response to ANY criticism -- even ONE comment -- was to go "Oh god, we were right to worry, they hate it, rework it right away." This is the only theory that makes sense to me; they designed Viper afraid and not confident, and expected to have to change it to begin with.

That's why I believe it's important, as we protest the 7.05 changes, to also emphasize how much we liked 7.0 Viper. They had no reason to be worried! It was an awesome class! You could even argue it was TOO successful based on playrate numbers. I hope we can bring it back.

[jonimated]

In my opinion, I think the biggest problem is that they aren't confident in Viper.

This does put into words the feeling I get from the devs about Viper since it started being shown off. Almost seems like they don't believe in the class they designed and are scrambling to change it when there's even the smallest amount of feedback. Which I think has lead to an overcorrection. It was barely a week out of the gate before there was a post about incoming changes.

It's an incredible artist with low self esteem. They make a gorgeous work of art, get mostly amazing feedback, but one person is like "It could use a bit more blue". Suddenly they are apologizing and re-colouring the entire work blue.

[Lamarcy2699]

What's strikes me as odd about this is the fact that it's really hard to not notice the difference. It's easy to not realize the cascading effect only looking at the change on paper, but I barely had to play around on the dummy for about a minute to notice the substantial change to the combos. It's not like I live and breathe Viper either; I only used it to go through MSQ and prog some EX. On top of that, the job has only been out for a month anyways. Yet the change was massive enough for me to feel immediately, and diagnose in less time than it takes to microwave rice.

This leads me to two hypotheses on how these changes even made it into the game:

1. The devs haven't playtested the changes, are oblivious to the effects it's had on the core of the job, and are only familiar with it on paper, or

2. They have playtested the changes, but weren't even marginally familiar enough with the job beforehand to notice that the combo system had changed at all.

There is also option three, which is that they are aware of the effect it has and are just that willing to compromise on their design, but I'd really rather not consider that possibility.

Funnily enough almost all changes they make seem to be only done on paper, never playtested. MNK in particular "tried to keep its old playstyle" but differed so much at DT launch that it was a completely different job, requiring an entire update to fix it. PLD 6.3 was a straight downgrade is damage from PLD 6.28, despite it being called a "buff" several times. BLM is never at an appropriate damage level each expansion release, and PCT was/is so overtuned it's hilarious. Everything they do just points to having 0 idea about how it is in practice. The developers really do not seem to understand their own game, let alone its playerbase.

I said this in a previous thread, but there's just little to no communication between the team behind job decisions and the playerbase of the game. They also only ever push things to live test and pray it works. They give 0 warning in patch notes before, which kinda defeats the point of having patch notes in the first place. Sure learning about all the new stuff is cool, but job changes matter just as much if not more than new stuff being added. In case of VPR they handled the changes EXTREMELY poorly as they changed it right before savage release, which made any and all learning up to savage completely pointless, even moreso now the job plays itself.