Quote Originally Posted by contresixtes View Post
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The job does not have a high skill ceiling. Nothing in this game does. If anything, it is a HEAVILY SIMPLIFIED version of the most fun version of Monk we ever had, which is what us MNK mains want to go back to. It had higher actions per minute than other jobs, but having a high APM and having a high skill ceiling are not the same thing. In fact, the current state of Viper's regular rotation is pretty much a version of MNK's old raid rotation. Your concept of "optimization" is a bit flawed here, since again, the game was never difficult, even at a high level. Viper is just presenting the same sorts of skills differently on your hotbar, but it's the same basic idea as the old 4.4 raid rotation, just presenting it in a way that's easier for you to understand without completely dumbing it down. Simplified on the hotbar, but not simplified in terms of functionality (at least not super heavily), by taking your two 3-move combos and consolidating them down to two buttons each instead of 6. The flow of which one you swap to is the same as what MNKs used.

Now you all know how we've felt for the past 3 expansions. People who did not spend enough time with the job to figure it out and learn it complained it was more complex than it really was, and now it has been butchered into being practically unplayable for the people who were most loyal to it, to cater to the few who complained that it should be made simpler in order to simply try it out (which is not a guarantee that they'd even stick with it, which usually doesn't happen anyway, and would inconvenience everyone else in the meantime).

Viper should be left alone, and MNK should be made more like Viper, with additional double-weaving to make it the higher APM job.

The dev team repeatedly confuses the "rhythm and flow" that MNK had with a "busy feel,". It's not about it being "busy"; that mindset led to them removing too many oGCDs and making the few they had left very spammy. Instead, it was about the job having a rhythm, flow and beat to it, like a 3-beat waltz, which flowed nicely on a controller, almost akin to fighting game inputs. The double-weaving of Viper is very "wax on, wax off," like 4.4 MNK.

Do not insult 4.4 MNK by comparing Viper to "baby's first caster". RDM has the lowest skill ceiling AND lowest skill floor of the casters, on top of being the slowest, heavily reliant on RNG procs and dual-casting, and has never been terribly oGCD-weave-heavy. Viper has none of these things and is the furthest thing to any caster in the game.