Please don't change Viper

[KyokaXIV]

Also jumping in, Viper is not even a week of playtime for the community and we shouldn't be jumping to massive changes. Small tweaks like increased range on some skills are pretty whatever, but I personally don't want to see reduction of positionals or a reduction in skills.

Please reconsider!

[AzureKupo]

Viper is the best class on release so far for me and I think the devs are too hasty to make changes. The positional and busyness is what sets Viper apart from the increasingly simplification and homogenization among other classes. Devs please don't change Viper so hastily.

[ValStormbreaker]

Adding my voice into here...

The culprit is likely none other than Yoshi-P himself. We memed back in Stormblood that the reason why BLM was so powerful was that he mained it, but showed during live letters he couldn't do a rotation to save his life, so we joked that the devs buffed it to high holy hell for his sake, but the jobs he didn't main were de-prioritized. This was only partly in jest at the time.

Starting in SHB, the team stopped putting out the job change patch notes ahead of time, to prevent the community from complaining about the changes before trying them. MNKs still complained and the fixes they asked for (especially with regard to Anatman) were not listened to for two expansions straight.

Then the live letter for 5.4 happened, and it was practically admitted. Blue Mage got the Suzaku kick MNK wanted, MNK got a third of its kit - which it still had - rendered completely useless, and Yoshi-P outright said on camera that he considered himself a "white belt" at the job.

Viper is 4.4 MNK in a tighter package, with some of the fixes us "black belts" wanted: the Demolish and Snap Punch combos consolidated to one button each to make more hotbar space without losing anything, changing the resource gauges from all-or-nothing meters with shallow payoffs to multi-move spectacle-fests during our bursts, an unshackling from Samurai gear stats that were unfavourable to MNK's balancing, a chakra gauge that isn't tied to RNG (which no melee DPS should have), a Greased Lightning gauge with an instant stack button (the requested Anatman fix asked for in 5.x) and that wouldn't shaft speed or power when tornado kick (Uncoiled Fury) was used, a Dolphin Flurry (Reawaken) combo, and more. It's still simplified, but it's something that MNK mains from back in Stormblood could stomach as a good foundation to build off of in future expansions, instead of what they did to it in EW.

And no matter how much people begged for the dev team to fix it... it not only didn't get fixed, IT GOT WORSE. EW never reversed course on what they did to MNK, it just doubled down on it.

If you saw the trend of what happened to MNK from SB onward... you know what's coming for Viper, and I'm pretty damn sure it's Yoshi-P himself who just can't play it well, given the history of what happened to us MNK mains.

I quit after 5.4's patch release. It was infuriating to the point of driving me away. I will do so again if they do not reverse this decision, since the game will be ruined for me, and I'm going to encourage both the review bombing of Dawntrail (which already has a terrible story) and striking of DPS mains since pretty much all DPS jobs are suffering from the precedent that was set with MNK changes from 5.x onward. Again, I can't say it enough; people need to apologize to Stormblood MNK mains since now everyone else is experiencing what we went through for the past two expansions and now you all know how it feels.

[Zairava]

snip

Not to change the subject of the thread, but I still haven't forgiven them for what they did to DRK in ShB. I'm aware this isn't anything new.

[Urthemiel]

Adding my voice to the chorus: Viper is perfect as is, please don't change anything, especially not this early into its lifespan.

[Ayako-chan]

yes please :c have so much fun with this class
please dont change viper that early T_T

[Chexy]

Viper does not need any rotational adjustments, the way it plays right now is perfectly fine. I seriously hope this isn't the road they're talking about when they screamed "8.0 job identity" in the live letter. Seriously, stop pruning jobs into a state where you want everyone to play it. Not a good look.

[justausername]

another adding to this.
The only acceptable change would be removing positionals from the dual blade combo, or making them color coded like the twin blade combo.
It's not too busy, the fast pace is what makes it fun. Any changes will make it just another brain dead job.
Seriously. We don't want this.

[ValStormbreaker]

Viper has room for improvement...

Removing positionals doesn't fix anything about the job, it just makes VPR simpler, and VPR is already pretty simple once you get it down.

The reason they extended it is the same reason back in Stormblood that Riddle of Fire slowed down your GCD speed: it was to give players with higher pings an opportunity to double-weave.

For the rest of us who aren't playing on dial-up or crappy wi-fi, it just slows the job down when it's not needed. A GCD speed in the vicinity of 2 seconds is already excruciatingly long, which is why we lamented the loss of double-weaving. This problem could be solved if SE invested in rollback netcode, but Japanese companies are very slow to adopt tech solutions coming out of the West for cultural reasons, and often not without pushback due to cultural pride for not coming up with it themselves. This is why even after Guilty Gear Strive made headlines with their implementation of rollback netcode, companies like Capcom were incredibly resistant in implementing it.

As for Twinfang and Twinblood, they shouldn't be changed. They're basically "baby's first double-weaving oGCD tutorial," and if you remember what Monk used to be like back in Stormblood, we had multiple pairings of oGCDs that were used all the time. This is already a simplified version of that, but they made it accessible by putting them on two buttons. With some good hotbarring, the gameplay on a controller is very rhythmic and flows nicely, since during your Dreadwinder combo, the double weave flows one way and then the other. It's very "wax on, wax off," which is why us old-school MNK mains love it, even though it's technically fewer buttons than the multiple pairings we used to have. It's an example of hotbar consolidation done right, though I'd argue we could still use some additional oGCDs. Serpent's Tail being a single oGCD that we can only use after completing one of the 3-move combos starting with Steel Fangs or Dread Fangs is already EXTREMELY simple, and I would prefer having MORE uses of Serpent's Tail for single-weaving after each and every press of either of those two buttons. A single oGCD weave after 3 GCDs is boring; if we're going to single-weave, then it should be after every GCD until our double-weaving combo is ready. This is what MNK should be right now, IMHO.

Uncoiled Fury is just Tornado Kick put on the GCD, and then given its own double-weaving. Again, very reminiscent to how MNK used to play, back when it was more fun. I'd leave anything concerning the weaving alone. The only thing that bugs me about Uncoiled Fury is that it doesn't give any meter for activating Reawaken, so it's just damage for damage's sake. I'd prefer if it gave us meter so we could use our Reawaken combo more often.

[cptroot]

I've already posted in another thread with a mode detailed list of suggestions. Adding my voice to this thread saying I love feeling like a living blender. I don't see how there could be changes made to Viper without some impacts to the feeling of the job. Surely changes could wait until after the upcoming Savage tier has actually showed off the job in high-level content?