Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[OliverQ]

After the viper changes I've been playing two other DPS: Reaper and Samurai.

With Reaper I'm edgy John fucking Madden, I can go crazy once my bar is full it's really fun and the aesthetic is great. Only downside is Death's Design which I feel could have been placed in a combo like Viper's good old Noxious Gnash (I still miss you please come back) but that's not too bad.

With Samurai (I haven't played it since SB so everything is "new" to me and I can't speak for Kaiten), I'm weeb John fucking Madden, I can go crazy once my bar is full it's really fun and the aesthetic is great. And so far I see no downsides with the job I am having a wonderful time.

Viper before? I was John Fucking Madden.

Viper now? I'm just John. I have lost my Madden.

My only issue with new Samurai is Higanbana drift and how you have to force early Meikyos to speed up the loop to keep bana aligned. I'm not very good at that part. The new Meikyo Midare animation is banger though.

[Ziggurat8]

I'm wondering why we have to homogenize the jobs at all. Why not make Mnk the brutal positional master job and Smn need to keep track of 10 bleed timers or some such. There needs to be at least one job in each category that is challenging to play with a smattering of easier jobs (perhaps an entry level job as well?). Numbers could be adjusted to reward high level players who can keep up with the rotations and those who can't take a DPS hit. Why is this not a thing? Vpr could easily have been a mid/high level job.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Unfortunately I didn’t get around to leveling VPR until now, so I’m not sure what it was like originally.

The only comment I have to make - and take it with a grain of salt because I’m a caster main and I’m never going to be a great melee - is about the Generation combo buttons. I’ve just gotten to the level where these unlock, and the button arrangement baffles me. I play on controller and always try to set hot bars up so similar skills are in similar places… which has worked fine for the first 10 levels. But now that Generation is available, First and Second proc off of buttons on my right trigger, while Third and Fourth proc on 2 buttons each, 3 of which are on my left trigger. Maybe I just need a better hot bar layout, but this seems weirdly disorganized to me.

[LisseyCrowe]

Unfortunately I didn’t get around to leveling VPR until now, so I’m not sure what it was like originally.

The only comment I have to make - and take it with a grain of salt because I’m a caster main and I’m never going to be a great melee - is about the Generation combo buttons. I’ve just gotten to the level where these unlock, and the button arrangement baffles me. I play on controller and always try to set hot bars up so similar skills are in similar places… which has worked fine for the first 10 levels. But now that Generation is available, First and Second proc off of buttons on my right trigger, while Third and Fourth proc on 2 buttons each, 3 of which are on my left trigger. Maybe I just need a better hot bar layout, but this seems weirdly disorganized to me.

The changes haven't affected this to my knowledge so don't worry for that, at least.

Generation skills really really want you to have them laid out in a way where you brain can easily do 1-2-3-4. Easiest way to showcase this is with a keyboard where you ... pretty much have them on those keys. On a controller that would maybe shift to a setup where it starts from X and goes clockwise, but really anything that your brain can quickly identify as a simple sequence. I would either shift your hotbars to match or perhaps identify the abilities that become 1234 and have one of your hotbars to have that loadout for when you Reawaken.

As for how it was, the TL: DR is that vicewinder/vicepit skills as well as your second combo would apply a 20 second debuff (stacking up to 40s) that increased your damage dealt. Instead of alternating between combos you would only start with the second one if you needed to refresh said debuff. This forced you to pay more attention to the Vice skills cooldown/Uncoiled Fury stacks as well as manage them at a more even pace.

[Khryseis_Astra]

The changes haven't affected this to my knowledge so don't worry for that, at least.

Generation skills really really want you to have them laid out in a way where you brain can easily do 1-2-3-4. Easiest way to showcase this is with a keyboard where you ... pretty much have them on those keys. On a controller that would maybe shift to a setup where it starts from X and goes clockwise, but really anything that your brain can quickly identify as a simple sequence. I would either shift your hotbars to match or perhaps identify the abilities that become 1234 and have one of your hotbars to have that loadout for when you Reawaken.

Thanks! I have some extra space on one of my double tap bars so I think I’m just going to put an extra set of those 4 buttons there, so I can have them all next to each other for Reawaken. Double tap is easier than the switching sides I’ve been doing up until now, even if it kinda wastes free slots for any future skills. lol

I will say that as much as playing melee makes me uncomfortable, VPR has been really fun so far!

[blackmagics]

VPR feels great. Love the new changes. It really is just one of the classes where (to me) is a no fuss class that brings out great dps for little time investment in learning/mastering a job. And honestly, I feel like there should be jobs out there where it can be great for new players just starting out but want to feel competitive with other jobs in regards of DPS.

[Carighan]

Unfortunately I didn’t get around to leveling VPR until now, so I’m not sure what it was like originally.

I'll be honest, it was the exact same thing. The changes are drummed up so much, and yeah sure, "one less thing to track now". But frankly you pressed the exact same static sequence of buttons, there was nothing to react to or track or be dynamic. You just had a fixed muscle memory when to press what, exactly as now. It's like saying Reapers have to track their debuff, no they do not after more than an hour with the job, you press the button naturally as part of your internalized combat sequence, whether it applies a debuff to the enemy, a buff to yourself or opens a can of beer in the other room makes 0 difference to how you press it.

[CKNovel]

Not really the exact same thing.

Before the change you had to plan Dreadwinder (Vicewinder) to lose the least amount of Noxious gash timer.
Today you just don't care about Dreadwinder usage, you use it on cooldown or to refresh your buffs as fast as possible.

It was basically a puzzle of "How can I refresh the least amount of Noxious gash without dropping Noxious Gash?", which was fun to me.
I wish they would have eased the management of Noxious gash instead of removing them, positionnals can and must stay.

[Carighan]

Not really the exact same thing.

Before the change you had to plan Dreadwinder (Vicewinder) to lose the least amount of Noxious gash timer.
Today you just don't care about Dreadwinder usage, you use it on cooldown or to refresh your buffs as fast as possible.

It was basically a puzzle of "How can I refresh the least amount of Noxious gash without dropping Noxious Gash?", which was fun to me.
I wish they would have eased the management of Noxious gash instead of removing them, positionnals can and must stay.

Again, it's the exact same thing gameplay wise. You list the consideration that goes into building the static rotation, but once you did this, you internalize the button sequence and you're done. And that's the thing, nothing has changed. Before you had a braindead static approach to how you play, now you have a braindead static approach to how you play, the core flaw in a gameplay system (as a whole) where all but 1 jobs are based on static rotations while those rotations have no interactive or reactionary components to at least have branching paths or so, and all fights you engage with are built around these static rotations to engage with them.

It's extra wild for the particular job of Viper, which is so to diverging from this exactly-all-the-same-gameplay setup they've opted for their melee jobs where even your hotbars can be largely mirrored from one another with only superficial changes between jobs. And Viper was nearly there. If left-vs-right were actually random (and as a result managing Noxious Gash would not have had a static solution), the job would have something to set it apart from all the other melees. The dancer of melee jobs, so to speak. But that's not what they went for, instead it's autocombo-monk merged with autocombo-reaper and 0 imagination.

And as a result, frankly, the changes don't matter either way IMO. The job is so crucially flawed at a very deep level, these surface-level changes such as removing Noxious Gash just don't make a dent. But then, the issues pervasive to Viper gameplay are issues shared by at least all melee jobs, if not all (but 1) DPS jobs. And as a result the whole gameplay setup for combat in FFXIV and how its fights are designed.

[TheAmazing3]

Again, it's the exact same thing gameplay wise. You list the consideration that goes into building the static rotation, but once you did this, you internalize the button sequence and you're done. And that's the thing, nothing has changed. Before you had a braindead static approach to how you play, now you have a braindead static approach to how you play, the core flaw in a gameplay system (as a whole) where all but 1 jobs are based on static rotations while those rotations have no interactive or reactionary components to at least have branching paths or so, and all fights you engage with are built around these static rotations to engage with them.

I see a lot of this argument "braindead job is still braindead, nothing changed" but the fundamental flaw in this logic is that there was a point of failure that existed and punished sub-optimal play that no longer exists. It doesn't matter that the end result would be similar (I disagree that it is, but let's follow your argument here) in how you approach the rotation, you could drop drop your noxious gnash before and be punished for it with lower damage, now you cannot. The skill floor for executing the rotation has gone up an extra couple of notches from the handful of notches below the skill ceiling where it was.