There's a lot to this forum thread that i'd like to read through but at the time I just want to put my thoughts down and it may be the same as others on the thread i'm not sure yet.

my personal history is i've been playing since ARR as a bard main, I've been playing on Gilgamesh the whole time and made an alt when the oceanic servers opened but still mainly play on NA cause that's where most of my friends are.

Honestly these changes were upsetting to read and having played it for a while upsetting to play through. The ONLY change I wanted to see with the job was the removal of positional requirements on Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil. I felt like it did not feel good trying to double weave and repositioning to around the boss for what amounted to a 50 potency increase in damage each way. I actually like Noxious Gnash, I wish it did something other than a damage increase (a DoT would have been nice or something interesting like as long as the debuff was applied it increased the potency of every oGCD attack or something along those lines but I digress) but otherwise I felt that the debuff could have been ok if its timer went up to 60 seconds (still only applying 20 though) but that was really it. I though out the gate the class felt a little rough around the edges but I truly loved playing it and the flow of it when positionals were turned off for fights.

the decision to remove Noxious Gnash and replace it with this very lukewarm forced alternation legitimately might be the worst decision i've ever seen SE make since they put cast bars on Bard in Heavensward. Like I've never felt like I'd seen a job gutted so badly since that expansion and that's knowing how much the dev team seems to like bullying Dark Knight.

If I could ask for one thing, please design team walk back these changes to Viper. the choices aren't fun the decision to remove the debuff ruins the core rotation of the class and truly ruins the theming of it in my honest opinion. Please remove the positionals from Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil and bring back Noxious Gnash or give us a debuff of some kind that does something interesting that requires the player to put more thought into their rotation and the decisions that they make. I know you all can do it because Bard came back with great design changes before. The class originally was imo overburdened with too many things to deal with, 4 positionals, about 20 oGCDs, a Debuff, a gauge to manage and that was before you factor in raid mechanics. Just take out those 2 positionals and increase Noxious Gnash's maximum debuff timer to 60 seconds and revert all the other changes back to pre-patch 7.05. Imho I think this will leave the class in a really good place that still allows some skill expression while making it a little bit easier to get into.