Quote Originally Posted by Taliriah View Post
The GCD for swiftskin's coil and hunter's coil is 2.51 seconds (with swiftscale up), ie 2510ms. If your ping is so bad that you can't send two ogcd uses during that time you have much bigger problems than playing Viper.

Or they are doing extremely silly things like waiting for the server to tell the client that the OGCDs are available rather than the client just assuming that they are (since there's no randomness or any particular rule to their activation). But if that's the case then they need to fix this, not change the class.
I did some speed tests to get some more specific data here:
Google speed test, server is 100 miles or so from where I live (central US): 310.5/20.6 Mbps speeds, 11ms latency.
speedtest.net test, server is in Sydney (close to OCE DC): 315.5/4.5 Mbps speeds, 184 ms latency. (I honestly expected worse latency, but 184ms isn't too bad considering the ocean between here and there)

Basically, I can comfortably do the double weaving on an NA world without issue. When I try to do the same on OCE, it fails miserably. The combination of ping and the animation locks creates the problem where double weaving simply doesn't work. Obviously, if I want to play at my best, I should play strictly on NA, but if I want to play with friends I've made, I play on OCE sometimes. For classes like RDM, I simply just don't try to double weave and can mostly play just fine even with the higher ping. With Viper, it'd be a disaster to try. Why should one class be singled out? That said, for the characters I actually plan to level viper on, they're all NA characters anyway.

My point is simply that with cross-region datacenter travel being a possibility between more regions later, an issue like this does need a solution. I play RDM differently between NA and OCE given the fact that double weaving doesn't work at that latency, but simply spreading out the OGCDs doesn't feel like it's really hurting my average DPS, it just makes things like the opener less bursty. Viper doesn't have an option to spread out those to OGCDs after the skills that activate that combo. You either go for them anyway and delay your next GCD by however much it delays you by, or you do something else weird, like making sure swiftscale drops off or simply skip the third hit in each of those combos. In other words, you either have the break the fast-pacing Viper was going for or you break the rotation.

My vote would be to use this opportunity to address the animation locks or whatever that cause issues with double weaving on any class with latencies in the 100-200ms range rather than to "dumb down" the rotation to remove the double weaving. Personally, I'm more in it so that RDM can feel the same no matter which server I play on, but Viper makes a better poster child for this since double weaving is (at least currently) a feature of its designed rotation. My fear is that SE will take the "easy" way out and change Viper's rotation. I can accept this possibility myself (the class becomes playable with such pings either way), though I recognize that many of the voices here obviously don't want this to happen.

100-200ms latencies shouldn't be outright disregarded as "you shouldn't play this game". For a decent chunk of NA (and even in other parts of the world), the reality is that pings in this range will be the best you can expect. The reason is simply that nice connections aren't available everywhere, and recently Starlink is shaping up to be the only real viable ISP for gamers in such areas. At present, the technology is extremely impressive at managing pings of ~125-150ms from what I remember measuring at my parents' place and Starlink is trying to get federal approval for even lower orbits to reach pings as low as ~100ms. It's easily the most expensive ISP serving most of those areas with your only other options being things like dialup (no joke) that can reach 50ms ping, but good luck with those 0.04 Mbps speeds, lol, traditional satellite and its 350-500ms pings (when this was my only other option, I literally signed up for dialup to play the MMO I was playing at the time using the Satellite for nothing more than downloading updates to overcome dialups bandwidth limitations), and cellular hotspots which also only manage 100ms or so latency and make absolutely terrible gaming routers (these hotspots also come so close to costing as much as Starlink that I don't see them lasting long as competition given how soundly Starlink beats them). Also bear in mind that the fastest of those alternatives vs. Starlink are having a great day if they can even reach 5% of Starlink's speeds.

Given the huge amount of coverage Starlink has (at least potentially) worldwide, I'd say SE's goal should be that all classes should be playable just fine on a Starlink connection to their local DC. There will still be some players/situations that won't be catered to at that level, but I'd expect that the few still not able to comfortably play at that point would just be too hard to make work to be worthwhile.