Viper Suggestion - Give Reaving Fangs the Armor Crush treatment

[Karuya]

Buff management was basically removed in the same step as the removal of Noxious Nash, since extending the timer for your haste/damage buff to 40 seconds and your combo potency buff to 60 seconds meant you would have to completely mess up everything for them to ever fall off.
Gauge management is also a joke unless you're going for triple Reawaken shenanigans, especially with Serpent's Ire giving you a free use of Reawaken instead of 50 gauge.

That's one of the big reasons why Viper feels so incredibly boring to actually play, it looks like it has all these things going on but most of them just resolve themselves automatically.

Actually everything that you said is wrong at some point in high level content.

There are multiple examples in the last fights where you will lose your buffs if you don't chose the good rotation in M4S or FRU.

Gauge management is also not trivial if you want to optimize it, again in M4S or FRU where you can use it at some point or others for many reasons.

Those are some reasons why the viper is actually not boring to play, even though i also absolutely think that the current state of his combo system is a shame, having only a 4 combos loop on the viper is clearly not what is meant to stay and I hope they patch this soon.

I feel like people who complain about the removal of noxious gnash never experienced it and don't know what they are talking about. This debuff was not a 1/10, it was heavensward headache level, i don't think removing it entirely was the best option but it clearly made things better than before. I played viper a lot during this month and i know that any situation that was not just plain single target full uptime was an absolute pain. AOE ? Terrible. Target swap ? Terrible. Lose uptime ? Terrible.

You people just don't wanna accept that this game's difficulty has shifted, it went from job complexity to fight momentum and rythm(which in turn make them harder). You want a job to feel complex even in easy fights, but back in the days, jobs were so complex that there was no way to make the fights faster/harder because jobs were already overwhelming. Right now, people that found the game too hard before might feel confortable to try some harder content thank to the job's simplification, that is huge.

I think in the current state of the game, except for his combo system(and his bad dps and unbalanced uncoiled fury), viper could be better but is really not bad. I think the game is in the best state it has ever been, the last fights are among the best this game and any game has ever made. People are free to keep complaining if that's not the state they want the game in, but it's annoying seeing people talking like their opinion is "objectively" better in a lordly manner because they think job complexity is more important, I don't feel this way and pretty sure a lot of people don't feel this way either.

[jonimated]

Gauge management is also not trivial if you want to optimize it, again in M4S or FRU where you can use it at some point or others for many reasons.

Gauge management in FFXIV has been reduced to "Should I use this now or save it?" That's the extent of the decision making, and even then it really only necessary at the highest level of content. If the complexity of a job only shines through in the bleeding-edge of content then I would call that poor job design. I'm not even sure why gauges still exist because functionally they all work like a stacking cooldown. This isn't unique to Viper though. It's a problem for every job with a gauge.

You people just don't wanna accept that this game's difficulty has shifted, it went from job complexity to fight momentum and rythm(which in turn make them harder). You want a job to feel complex even in easy fights, but back in the days, jobs were so complex that there was no way to make the fights faster/harder because jobs were already overwhelming. Right now, people that found the game too hard before might feel confortable to try some harder content thank to the job's simplification, that is huge.

Honestly this is a really poor excuse for boring job design, and if the devs were to give an excuse like this my response would be that they are no longer fit to develop the game and it needs to be passed off to a different team. In order to make fight design more fun you don't have to dumb down job design. That doesn't make any sense.

There are several examples in the MMO market of games which have both increased the class complexity and fight complexity over the years. In fact there is one on the market right now in which you can go back and actually see what the game was like when it first launched compared to today. WoW's combat design, for both it's classes and it's fight mechanics, is almost unrecognizable currently compared to the original version of the game in terms of complexity. It's current fast-paced combat, with it's quick GCD and reactionary gameplay, is such a far cry from the single-button slow-resource-building 2.5 GCD of old.

On the flip side I would argue that FFXIV's job design has actually been in regression. Any semblance of reactive gameplay has been stripped away. Resource management has been reduced to what is functionally just another stacking cooldown. Every single button press you make is pre-determined. As before this is not an issue exclusive to Viper, but Viper is just the most recent example in a long line of examples.

TL;DR Job complexity and fight complexity are not mutually exclusive. Both can be made interesting simultaneously without sacrificing one another and a skilled team would be able to do both.

[Carighan]

Gauge management in FFXIV has been reduced to "Should I use this now or save it?"

That's because except for Dancer in some situations, no job is anything but "static rotation". What a proper gauge management would entail is that your inability to ever optimize your gauge perfectly leads to minimizing losses, usually achieved through:

* Having multiple resources.
* (Ideally) trying to spend one accelerates generation of the other.
* Few/None of them produce truly reliably. High proc chances for example, but there's a chance you won't get an increase. Or maybe it always adds +X~Y charge, in a certain band.
* No way to spend multiple resources in quick succession.

This means avoiding overcapping is an impossible thing to truly perfect. Now as long as those spenders are GCD based, we're getting into non-static-rotation territory. Your gameplay cannot be static, as you cannot know before the fight how the procs, randomness and their timing in the fight enforce which resource to spend when versus which you allow to overcap when.

And yeah, except Dancer around their burst, no job currently does this. They're all too dependable and too staticky in their main rotation and also how their spenders integrate (oGCD weaves instead of GCDs) to eshew their statick-y rotation.

Viper would be really fun as a highly randomized job:

* left/right truly random, no predictable sequences at all. Just react to the swords lighting up! In return, positionals either totally removed or the whole sequence is random side or read after an Awakening, until the next one (as in, Awakening flips the coin whether you're side or rear now).
* 2H mode is also random in which you use first for extra damage. Hence it's still either side->rear or rear->side, but you got to react on the spot when you start it.
* Gauge generation is unreliable, as say the right combo adds 2x as much as the left one, and with them being utterly random, there's no way to know how quickly you build gauge or not and hence whether you'll have to bleed some off in what moment. Bonus points if the right skills in turn only give 6-9s of the self-buffs, and the left give 2x as much or so. Meaning that either your buffs are tight or your gauge, or something in the middle. And you cannot plan or know which it'll be.

[ovIm]

Actually everything that you said is wrong at some point in high level content.

There are multiple examples in the last fights where you will lose your buffs if you don't chose the good rotation in M4S or FRU.

Gauge management is also not trivial if you want to optimize it, again in M4S or FRU where you can use it at some point or others for many reasons.

Those are some reasons why the viper is actually not boring to play, even though i also absolutely think that the current state of his combo system is a shame, having only a 4 combos loop on the viper is clearly not what is meant to stay and I hope they patch this soon.

Yes that is exactly the point: not boring to play in high level content. With the adjustments made in 7.05, Viper got much more boring in any other content when the fight is much less complex. Before the 7.05 adjustments, so many people had so much more fun with Viper to the point to when CS3 announced adjustments, this forum exploded with pleads to not change Viper. Then the adjustments dropped, and the same amount of people lamented the changes. To add insult to injury, Yoshi-P has confirmed that they ignored the positive feedback they received for the class. And all that happened within a month.

I feel like people who complain about the removal of noxious gnash never experienced it and don't know what they are talking about. This debuff was not a 1/10, it was heavensward headache level, i don't think removing it entirely was the best option but it clearly made things better than before. I played viper a lot during this month and i know that any situation that was not just plain single target full uptime was an absolute pain. AOE ? Terrible. Target swap ? Terrible. Lose uptime ? Terrible.

Agree to disagree - removing NG made the job an absolute autopilot snoozefest in almost every aspect, and I have played Viper since 7.0. There is nothing appealing about playing Viper anymore, its super boring at this point, which also leads to:

You people just don't wanna accept that this game's difficulty has shifted, it went from job complexity to fight momentum and rythm(which in turn make them harder). You want a job to feel complex even in easy fights, but back in the days, jobs were so complex that there was no way to make the fights faster/harder because jobs were already overwhelming. Right now, people that found the game too hard before might feel confortable to try some harder content thank to the job's simplification, that is huge.

Moving every bit of the interesting bits of the game from jobs to fights is a stupid idea. Jobs are the main way we interact with the game, and a fun job can make a boring fight somewhat enjoable. There are just as many people that consider the fights to be too complex for their comfort, and would rather have less difficult fights and more engaging jobs. You can't please everyone, obviously, but there are more than one truths. To add that Yoshi-P has also considered that job simplification has gone too far, I think that is evidence enough that this kind of mindset was unhealthy for the game.

I think the game is in the best state it has ever been

Even Yoshi-P disagrees with that statement.

[Metricasc]

I heavily disagree about how much stuff viper maintains.

I am playing VPR right now in FRU... class is boring and doesn't have much going on in the head department. and I only completely more or less realized when i just simply played another class momentarily (to PLD, my actual main funny enough). and most downtime stuff in FRU often lasts long enough that you will change how you apply your buffs or is long enough that you will have to vicewinder > Swiftskin > Hunters to get your damage and sks buffs back up.

In M4S it was more about keeping your rotation and buffs going though melee downtimes else not much else was going on in the head department.

i would greatly appreciate that viper actually has some stuff to properly maintain that keeps the class from feeling boring to most ppl.

[Carighan]

I am playing VPR right now in FRU... class is boring and doesn't have much going on in the head department.

Okay I want to add two things to that:

1. You're in FRU. You're per-definition the absolutely highest top end level of player if you're doing that, top bracket, no job would ever be made or balanced for you unless the devs want to absolutely ruin their gameplay experience for the other 99,98% of players.
2. More importantly, honestly every job is that, melee in particular? It's because all every job does is run a static or quasi-static rotation, with oGCDs you punch as they come off cooldown except in rare cases where you hold them until you see the flurry of raid buffs running down your screen. That's it. That's the extend of mental effort in every DPS job: "Can you press this exact sequence of buttons for 8 - 25 minutes without making a mistake in the process?" is the entire gameplay challenge. Viper had the chance to do something else, to randomize this. And instead they added a pattern to it anyways, which completely ruined what it could have been as now it is, once again, a static sequence. Laaaaaaaaaaame.