Please don't change Viper

[Router]

I dont know who asked for these viper changes.

Japan.
Every stupid change generated by player "feedback" typically comes from Japan.

[ValStormbreaker]

Japan.
Every stupid change generated by player "feedback" typically comes from Japan.

Nope, American content creators are also VERY responsible for stupid job changes, especially since two in particular who have interviewed Yoshi-P directly on numerous occasions were outright asked for their wishlists for MNK changes, said a whole bunch of stupid stuff that doesn't actually fix any of the problems that the job had, and got everything they wanted. Now the job is borderline unplayable for those of us who remember what it used to be like, and moved to Viper as the closest alternative.

As for Japanese players themselves, Japanese gamers tend to be very averse to complaining for cultural reasons, and are, on average, more content with what they get. Japanese social culture is often the opposite of what we see in anime; people are encouraged to be quiet and conform, not be loud and speak up.

The culprit is, in all likelihood, Yoshi-P himself. After what he admitted about his inexperience with MNK in the 5.4 live letter, a lot of the memes made half in jest about how the dev team prioritizes whatever he happens to be maining at the time to help him get through content without him having to do a rotation properly were absolutely validated. Naoki "I'm a white belt at Monk" Yoshida could not do a BLM rotation in SB to save his life, but it was his main, so it was made stupidly overpowered. Now you know why MNK changes always get ignored until the end of the expansion cycle - at which point it's far too late to matter since it's going to get reinvented next expansion anyway - and often what we get is something worse, with a cocktail of stupid ideas that come from American content creators who Yoshi-P treats as the voice of the English-speaking player base when they really ought to be de-platformed for the damage they've caused.

Viper, being a consolidated 4.4 MNK, is likely too much for Yoshi-P to understand. So unless we actually start seeing threads on the JP forums with players there - who often say the devs don't really listen to them, either - asking for Viper positional simplification (which, to my current knowledge, isn't a thing yet), the only person I could fathom who has an issue with it is the guy who admitted to being a "white belt" at MNK and refused to listen to any of us "black belts" about what we wanted, and didn't get until Viper rolled around.

Now, if anyone here actually can read and write in Japanese, and can inform the JP forums to take a look at what's happening here, that would indeed be something, but it would take something like a "Healer Strike" level of "DPS Strike" for them to notice, and as per the response to that from one JP player, I'm willing to bet they'll validate what I wrote above about them being very complaint-averse and putting up with it.

[ValStormbreaker]

I'm also going to say this... and I know this may be controversial... but for all I keep carrying on about Viper being a consolidated 4.4 MNK...

... I think that Viper and Samurai should swap gear sets. Viper should be on Striking, and Samurai should be on Scouting. This is the one change I would make.

Striking gear was made for MNK before SAM was added to the game. One of the major things MNKs asked for was to have their gear unshackled from SAM, since the play styles are practically polar opposites from each other. What would happen is, if SAM was in good shape, MNK would usually suffer, and vice versa.

Players asked back in SB for SAM to get Brotherhood, since in 4.3 a feature that was added to the game (that you'd only know about from this live letter since the tool tips don't say anything about it) is that Brotherhood actually stacks. This had no real usage outside of comps with MNK duplicates which nobody wanted, but remained a feature throughout SHB even though the game doesn't tell you about it. Instead, they buffed the hell out of SAM to compensate for its lack of utility, and gear stats began prioritizing it over MNK throughout SHB, putting MNK in a weird spot. This furthered the idea that SAM and MNK should be on separate gear sets.

Due to having to accommodate the cosmetics of SAM, MNK gear started looking worse, outside of the Omega and Scaevan sets from SB. Scouting gear looks better on SAM, though a lot of it also looks pretty bad on NIN, especially for female toons due to the really big skirts some of them have. Outside of the AF gear, it's slim-pickings for Vipers.

Since Viper is similar to MNK in a lot of ways, and MNK used to be the "gotta go fast" job before it was the first melee to get dumbed down and kneecapped, I feel like they'd benefit from similar gear stats.