Viper Suggestion - Give Reaving Fangs the Armor Crush treatment

[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.

[Embio]

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

Good observations, and I'm inclined to agree with you. How quickly the changes were announced says everything to me. They weren't just responding to a week of feedback; they already had these changes in the works from the very start, and were just waiting for the word. There's no way they could come to the conclusion that changes needed to be made and come up with a brand new design when, realistically, there's a group of people that didn't play early access and only had the job for TWO days. CBU3 already had their finger on the trigger, and someone in the playerbase happened to sneeze. They need to trust in their design more; I know they're capable of making unique feeling jobs. The PVP rework showed that last expansion.