Can we get a buff for Viper? (Ultimate content)

[TomoKush]

I have been progging through FRU and genuinely it's kind of frustrating because people keep excluding Viper solely for damage output. I can usually hold my own and make checks but seriously people are actively excluding me from content that I would have to reprog on another class, and I am at the point where sunken cost fallacy has taken effect.

But it is genuinely upsetting to see a class that I enjoyed since it dropped being actively discouraged from being played in high end content. Can we at least get like a potency buff or something to some abilities? Idk if this is scrub talk or not really but I genuinely feel mostly left out when trying to play more of FRU

[Wayfinder3]

Jobs should be allowed to struggle in some places and be great in others. you can't really buff viper in fru without fundamentally changing how it works or making it way too strong in savage and other areas (see pictomancer for an example)
Viper is fine, it can clear and it's got niches in other places. If anyone needs a buff, it's machinist

[mallleable]

Something I would like for VPR to help it with downtime is like a 0 damage GCD that lowers the cool down of your Vicewinder charges. Like it could be like you character is sharpening their blades or something.

[Azurarok]

Like a GCD skill (with a long recast and only usable in battle) that shares the cooldown/charges with Vicewinder and fills both Serpent Offerings and Rattling Coil, and perhaps also refreshing your buffs? I'd like that

[Karuya]

No, Viper is absolutely not fine, even in savage if you look deep in the statistics you realise that even the viper is actually one of the two worst melee in max potential damage(with the reaper), and for FRU it's not ok to be 8 PERCENTS lower than every other dps jobs in the game on phase 1 except machinist, it's normal to be low but not that low.

And unlike people say, it is extremely easy to fix this problem for both viper and machinist without breaking them in savage : simply greatly increase the damage of the time cooldown based skills, because those skills are used way more often in ultimate in comparaison to savage.

For viper it's just the vicewinder combo : boost vicewinder 500 -> 600, and the two other attacks 620 -> 700, and on the other hand, reduce by 20 every filler attack.
Same for machinist : slightly reduce fillers(i don't know how much, not my job), but increase the drill, air anchor and chainsaw from 600 to 650(at first i wrote 700, but for the machinist i feel drill is too important to be buffed this much).
Instant fix, and that absolutely doesn't break the jobs in savage.

And that would also have the other good effect(clearly mandatory in my opinion) to increase their opener's power(and even all the burst phases for the machinist), which would increase synergy between those jobs and raidbuffs, which is their obvious weakness in comparaison to other jobs like picto, samourai and ninja. It's absolutely not normal to have a job like machinist and viper, that are "selfish", to be so low on burst that they are not even considered good partner for a dancer. When a viper arrives in your team, you have only one thought : "oh sad, even if this person is really good, they are not gonna give me any buff, and at the same time, they are not even gonna benefit from my buff as much as a ninja, why would anyone want a viper in their team ?".

[HeavenlyArmed]

I have to agree it's not okay that Viper is as weak as it is in the first two phases of FRU, which I say as someone who has locked it out of my PFs because my options were either to do that or to require a PCT to compensate for them when running with friends who play the other casters. Part of the issue is also the structure of this ultimate though, three of the four major downtime mechanics are contained in those first two phases, so rather than the dps checks evening out based on which jobs are good under different circumstances you instead have this situation where it takes 8 minutes of encounter before Viper starts to make up for its shortcomings in prior phases. And since they're obviously not going to redesign FRU post-release to solve this issue, Viper should receive some kind of buff to make it not so bad in the early phases. That said, they're also not going to make any job adjustments until 7.2 at this point, which will make all of the DPS checks easier regardless, so idk what we can do from here.

[mallleable]

I don't know how this would affect full uptime, but another change I think would be good is increasing the amount of gauge Coil, and Den GCDs grant from 5 to 10 per GCD.

[Supersnow845]

VPR needs a way to not fall apart in downtime which is difficult because it relies so heavily on constantly keeping its buffs up (SAM is technically similar but SAM bursts a lot harder and can get its buffs up way faster)

I agree a downtime button that either refreshes their buffs without a target, can be channeled for ratting coil or channeled for both

It’s ironic they released two jobs this expansion, one that adores downtime and one that recoils when someone one block away even thinks about downtime

[Karuya]

VPR needs a way to not fall apart in downtime which is difficult because it relies so heavily on constantly keeping its buffs up (SAM is technically similar but SAM bursts a lot harder and can get its buffs up way faster)

This is not the problem, the problem is that samourai's meikyo and sen'ei are time based, and are way stronger than vicewinder, in full uptime viper can compare with samourai on odds minutes because he's supposed to get 50 gauge and a reawaken when a samourai gets a meikyo + sen'ei, but in ultimate with all the downtime, samourai get his meikyo + sen'ei anyway, while the viper doesn't get his gauge and reawaken, the only way to balance that without creating a new skill or new mechanic is to increase the power of the only viper's time based skill, vicewinder(the only other time based skill of the viper is serpent's ire, and to buff it you would have to buff reawaken potency, which in my opinion would be a good choice, but this would not be as impactful as a vicewinder buff in ultimate).
Keeping the buffs up is clearly not a big deal for a viper, specially when we see that the viper's problem is in P1 and P2 in FRU, where there is absolutely no problem to keep the buffs up. Just use vicewinder after every downtime(except after light rampant).

[TomoKush]

I should clarify it's really easy to get buffs from a simple reaving fangs > Swiftskin's sting > vicewinder > hunter's coil combo every time in downtime, the issue is that I will literally struggle without a pictomancer in my party in terms of damage, a ninja or samurai or even an astro would have to also be in the party to compensate for my damage, and I am playing "optimally" as described on the balance, trying to keep uptime for everything and I still still still struggle in DPS within P1 and P2, I wouldn't even know how much damage I can do on P3 enrage for FRU because quite literally, I am being locked out because people simply do not trust that class to get to that point. So the fact that I have to play something like Picto or Samurai just to continue prog really irks me. We need like a potency buff and same with machinist, it's genuinely kind of upsetting that we're in dawntrail and we're still getting issues where classes are being locked out of high end prog due to simply "not possessing enough damage" within like 2 phases.