Quote Originally Posted by Zytoryu View Post
Just throwing my comment in the thread so SE might rethink changing it. I love Viper as it currently is.

Please don't change it square, I've waited years to have a proper Dexterity melee like Viper.
IMHO Viper and SAM should be swapped so Viper is on Striking and SAM is on Scouting.

This would solve a lot of balance problems and issues that result from MNK and SAM sharing a gear set, but having polar opposite styles of gameplay. Since SAM's introduction, whenever MNK has been in good shape, SAM has been in terrible shape, and vice versa. One of the requests since Stormblood was to unshackle them and give SAM its own gear set, or move it somewhere else. With VPR being very similar to Stormblood MNK, it would help out balancing a whole lot.

Both jobs would also benefit from better glamour options that are more fitting for them. Striking was originally exclusively for MNK until SB, when SAM was introduced, and since then, the gear attempting to cater to two drastically different power fantasies has been pretty bad, with the only exceptions really being Stormblood's Scaevan and Omega gear sets from when Alphascape launched (the striking gear for both of which would look OUTSTANDING on Viper). Everything else looks terrible. Scouting gear isn't very cosmetically fitting for NIN either, but would actually look a lot better on SAM for that ronin-esque power fantasy.

The attitude was "well Striking already has two jobs and Scouting only has one, so we have a vacancy" but they didn't consider a lot of the issues that might come with that. It's easier to fix MNK and balance it with Viper than it is to fix MNK and not have SAM be in good shape. It'd be easier to synergize SAM and NIN than SAM and MNK unless you reinvented SAM to play at the rhythm and pace of VPR or a 1.85 GCD speed MNK, which isn't happening. MNK, meanwhile, should not only be ideally MORE like VPR, it should technically be the more advanced version of it, with more oGCD double-weaving and a much faster GCD speed.