Please don't change Viper

[RoseyBits]

i just want to say i don't really have many negative thoughts abt dawntrail at all from a story or gameplay perspective, but removing some of the positionals from viper would really damper my desire to lvl the job after i'm done with pictomancer levelling, and i don't really get why they're removing them. i know it's probably not worth much to complain on the forums but i genuinely really hope the dev team at CBU3 heavily reconsiders this choice, or at least waits until the first savage tier is released to let people make up their minds. in my eye, there's no harm in at least delaying this change to 7.1 to see if the positional complaints die down

[ValStormbreaker]

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There are colourblind options in the settings if you struggle with that. As for the job gauge indicating the directional requirement, I'll tell you why I'm against that idea:

There's already too much hand-holding on the job, since you can follow the dotted marquee on the next skills to use without actually having to learn about what you're doing and why. It doesn't have the executive decision-making that Monk used to have. While this early on, it might seem like it makes picking up the job and playing it easier to get into, the truth is, it avoids learning and enables you to go on auto-pilot when you play, increasing the likelihood of boredom or burn-out. The way around this is to make the rotation more cerebrally engaging, so you're making conscious decisions about what you're doing and why.

I have to make two posts about this due to the character limit, so look out for my follow-up on this one.

With MNK, you had to know that your moves are basically in the order of Flank>Flank>Rear for your ABC combo, and Rear>Rear>Flank for your 123 combo, and it would loop. For every rear combo ender you did that was your Damage over Time skill, you'd use two of the flank combo enders since it's stronger and you don't want to reapply your weaker DoT ability prematurely. So the order would be Flank, Flank, Rear > Rear, Rear, Flank > Flank, Flank, Flank > Rear, Rear, Rear, and would continue like that. It's a looping pattern, and you could just hum a tune to yourself or something to know what comes next. You'd be manually choosing which combo ender to use, based on whether or not you have to reapply your DoT before it runs out, or if you can just go with the more powerful option.

MNK used to be a lot better organized IMHO than what Viper is now with those two buttons on Viper as a result. You had two combos: your "ABC" combo was your "status effect" combo, which applied your debuff, your self buff and your DoT, and then your "123" combo was your pure damage combo. This would have been presented better to players for hotbarring skills more sensibly if Twin Snakes was a kick move instead of a mantis pinch, so players could understand you have 3 punches and 3 kicks like an arcade stick.

[ValStormbreaker]

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Part 2 of my reply on this:

If VPR was changed so that your Dread Fangs combo applied all of your status effects and buffs, and your Steel Fangs combo was just the more powerful combo, then we could remove the guessing game of which button you're going to push when it's time for your combo ender, since you'd be CHOOSING which one to use based on which buffs you need to reapply. The problem is that both of your combo enders are always going to be at the same positional, and the game just wants you to use the one you didn't use last time, to buff the other one for next time, which is... questionable design. To get around this, the game literally tells you which one it wants you to do already, and it will usually be the alternate positional from the one it was last time. But it's not the same as "I'm going to push this combo ender because I want to reapply my DoT, and then use this other combo ender because I don't need to reapply my DoT". So there's not really any choice involved.

I'm okay with it so long as MNK is revamped to be like current VPR but with even more oGCD double-weaving and is the higher APM job, so VPR can be like the ramp up into MNK for the players who want even more and go even faster. But adding more hand-holding mechanics for combo enders is not something I'm okay with, as it's already something infesting other DPS jobs and is hurting them. We need more conscious decision-making to avert boredom, not less.

[Nyctina]

Please dont change Viper, its super fun the way it is and absolutley not to busy!

[Asari5]

so... how many did complain about vip and how many voices do we need to stop that change?

[ValStormbreaker]

I agree with everyone here that Viper doesn't need any change.
I know some people have complained but I think it's safe to say a lot of us are really liking the new job as it is!

Please don't change viper! I want it to stay like this as it is a lot of fun! Keep it!

Who are these "some people"? The problem is, in spite of there being allegations of people complaining... we haven't actually seen anyone do so. If it happened on the JP forums, we've not yet seen any links to verify these claims.

This is why I'm pretty certain it's just Naoki "I'm a white-belt at Monk" Yoshida, who needs stuff he wants to play dumbed down for him and buffed to high holy hell since he has shown on numerous live letters he doesn't understand how to do a rotation.

I already find it insulting that every DPS job now has the combo action dotted-line marquee holding everyone's hand through the combo sequence based on what the game knows what buffs the game knows you're running low on and what you need to reapply; this gets in the way of you paying attention and knowing this is something you need to do, and going on auto-pilot and following the dotted-line marquee makes people AVOID learning the "why" instead of helping them get into it. And yet, Yoshi-P himself is the same guy who refused to give us "Hall of the Intermediate," which could have had drills on keeping your timers up, doing your positionals right, etc. He refused to give us that to help teach players, but we get THIS!?

That is arguably what bugs me the most out of it. I think people need to stop defending the same guy who tried to gaslight us into thinking Eureka Pagos wasn't poorly designed, the players were the ones who were doing it wrong. Real Principle Skinner vibes, if you know the "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong," meme. People treat him like he's the second coming of Christ, but he's been out of touch for what players have wanted for years, and the dev team caters to his inability to play the game he's the director and producer of even decently.

Tbh he's been long overdue from an exit from FFXIV, people overly praise him for "fixing" the game with ARR by copying WoW, but that story is often told with the rosiest of rose-coloured glasses and people don't remember that 2.0 at its release was still pretty bad, and Guild Wars 2 dominated FFXIV in Japan for good reason until the Japanese servers were pulled in 2015. People think level 50 content is what ARR was like when it was fresh. Oh, my sweet summer children...

Sakaguchi seems to care a bit too much for FFXIV, I say let him take over.

[ScarletE]

to contribute to this, please don't change viper!!

[Jae-Hyuk]

so... how many did complain about vip and how many voices do we need to stop that change?

We'll sadly never know ... But we gotta keep the thread active, as much as posible so we may have a " chance " it reaches the right persons.

Once again, Keep Viper the way it is !

[ValStormbreaker]

so... how many did complain about vip and how many voices do we need to stop that change?

At the least, we need to do what the healers did to get the attention their "strike" got. I'll ask my husband to make a video later today and see if we can do something about that if we can signal-boost it.

But this isn't just a "Viper" problem. It's a game-wide issue with all the jobs. The current treatment of melee DPSes has trickled down from the mistreatment of Monk that started in 5.0 and got progressively worse due to a combination of passive players demanding changes to a job they hadn't completed leveling on the altar of "trying it out," and a pair of American content creators who have had face-time with Yoshi-P himself, were directly asked about their wish-lists for the job, proceeded to suggest things they thought would be cool ideas but didn't actually fix any of the problems, and had their wish-lists granted. They have also positively promoted the gutting of the job back in 5.4 (when I quit), though this was before the patch dropped and they wound up not returning to it anyway even after the changes, while the rest of us suffered.

Arguably, MNK and what it needs is the cornerstone of pretty much everything else that is going wrong with the game's design philosophy right now.

[Bladesternly]

This is my first post on the forum, and I had to get everything set up to also add my two cents:

Viper is fantastic the way it is. The whole point of the job is the unrelenting offense at the cost of utility. There are no raid buffs, no defensives, and your only cooldown is just doing your fast ability (Reawaken) for free. Removing positionals and potential "busy-ness" of the job would be such a waste and get rid of the main appeal to the job.

If anything the only changes I'd like to see is implementing the Crystalline Conflict defensive Snake Scales for PVE in some fashion, just to give it a little extra survivability for harder content. Every other melee dps has something to give smart players a reward for lessening the burdens on healers or some tool to help stay alive. DRG has Life Surge, MNK has Riddle of Earth/Earth's Reply, SAM has Tengetsu, RPR has Arcane Crest, NIN has Shade Shift. If they don't get that though, it's still fine and all around the most fun I've had on a melee job in a long while.