Quote Originally Posted by Carighan View Post
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.
"Exact same thing gameplay-wise" is wrong. The first action of your basic combo alternates every single time now, like MNK's dragon kick and leaping opo. Before, if you were alternating between Noxious gnash and steel fangs everytime, you were doing the rotation wrong.