Please don't change Viper

[contresixtes]

Adding on my voice to this! I love VPR. I've joked for years that I'd swap from RDM, a caster class with a lot of double weaving and not a high dps ceiling reward for it, to a melee that asks the same of me. I finally have my RDM with positionals-- I love the double weaving, I love the myriad of positionals. I've had a blast learning it and getting better at it over the course of MSQ.

While the class DOES have a high skill ceiling, it is easy enough for casual play for those who don't want to optimize the job. You hit the button that lights up. If two light up, you get to pick which one. It's that simple! And you can still do great DPS this way!

Square, please, PLEASE let VPR remain as it is for at least a raid tier. The job has been out for only a week, that's not enough time to decide if it is too difficult to optimize or not yet!

[Furrytractor]

I don't post on the forum often, but it's news like this that make me think that I NEED to let my voice be heard. I don't main Viper at least yet, but from what I played, I am having a lot of fun. It has been not even a week since it came out, so hearing these changes feels like a kneejerk reaction that should not be done. PLEASE do not change viper, let it sit for a while, there's no real "Problem" with viper. It's just a matter of lack of practice and skill that people have and are complaining to make it easier.

You said you wanted to make jobs more interesting. Then actually act on that word. Don't just say we're going to improve the jobs and invoke skill expression, then immediately take said skill expression out because people are complaining it's "Too busy". Not every job is for some people, and nor SHOULD it be. People liking one job and disliking another SHOULD be the norm. As long as there are not objective problems like how Monk's potencies are just imbalanced and thus the optimal rotation is extremely strange, don't change it because a few people said "I don't like how busy it is".

[ValStormbreaker]

Not to change the subject of the thread, but I still haven't forgiven them for what they did to DRK in ShB. I'm aware this isn't anything new.

The changes to MNK directly impact the tanks and healers because of how much MNK needs to assist both of them. But I empathize with you on this for a very direct reason: I mained DRK when I started the game before switching to MNK, and was one of the first DRKs in SB to figure out you could maintain enmity by turning Grit off and just DPSing before it became popular to do so.

Oh boy, was I tortured for it. If an add so much as glanced in a caster's general direction, or a healer got so much as a love tap from a stray add I wasn't able to pull in time, the parties would throw massive fits and sometimes wait until just before the final boss of a dungeon to kick me, so my time would be wasted... even though I was still successful in being able to tank and maintain aggro while outside of tank stance.

Dark Arts was basically our primary oGCD weave, since the kit was very simple. The entire rotation was an ABC combo (MNK was ABC>123 with an XYZ combo for AoEing) that was already boring, and another ABC combo strictly for enmity. Yet they changed DA because players whined it was "spammy,". Well, spammy is what you get when we have FEWER moves instead of MORE to weave with!

Now the only tank I touch is Gunbreaker. WAR is so simple to the point where I'm just intellectually offended by the thought of touching it, as I know I'd be bored out of my damn mind playing it.

What happened to DRK is connected to the MNK/Viper/melee DPS situation, so tank mains should absolutely care about what happens with the melee DPSes, especially the actions-per-minute-heavy ones. And SMN mains were hit by this last expansion, too. MNK and SMN should be the two high-APM jobs that you work your way up the melee and caster ladders to, respectively. If Viper is like SB MNK in a tighter package, then DT MNK should be like Viper with more double-weaving.

On a side note, I'd like to point out how FFXII Zodiark is a snake with big wings and for years we were told that Hydaelyn literally kicked him into 14 pieces, and then EW comes along and gives us a very lore-violating Chaos 2.0 and pale sword lady with fish ears and messed up the sundering, but won't shut up about snakes with continued allusions to FFXII's version of Zodiark. I'd like to think everything we've been doing from SB's Parlay scene onward while the lore has been jumping the shark repeatedly is just us in a "Dream Zanarkand"-style tempered state while the real Zodiark is out there, and the subjugation of MNK is supposed to be some kind of a story thing that's being done on purpose until we break out of this bad dream that is the current state of the game and we get back to the reality where Yoshi-P actually listened to us all along... copium, I know, but it's all I have right now since the lore has been butchered so badly.

[Pavise]

Viper doesn't really need any major changes if at all, it's got a pretty good set-up atm.

I can see one problem potentially that they've received regarding the Awakened combo. Even though the easy fix is to set-up either your ST fangs/coils or your AoE Maws/Dens in a succession of keybinds close together in a set way (My set-up is AoE keys on mouse, with OCD follow ups on keyboard), which enables a really simple, two handed use of the awakening combo most people probably wouldn't have the foresight to set-up their keybinds correctly.

So I can see them just merging all the Generation steps into one keybind like legacy just sits on tail, to which then it'll just play exactly like Gunbreaker's continuation where you're just spamming 2 buttons in succession, rather than 1 button inbetween 4 different buttons so that it ends up playing like it does in pvp.

As for their positional comment I can see them potentially removing them off the Fang combos, as opposed to the coils just for the fact that it would only really force it during your short cooldown even though this is already easily covered by weaving in a true north after every coil start.

[Harusca]

I just want to chime in and add another voice to say: I'm loving Viper more than any melee dps in years and it's *because* of how many different actions I need to press, the high APM, and how I have to juggle my different resources/combos. I don't want to see the job's ceil skilling brought down for the sake of raising the skill floor when the job is still brand new.

[GenghisChimp]

Viper is perfect right now. This is the most fun I've had on a melee dps job since I started playing the role in Shadowbringers. Please don't ruin this job to appeal to people the job isn't for. It has carved its niche in terms of job identity, leave it be.

[RurouniLu]

I really hope they don't change Viper. The business of the job that they're talking about changing is what I enjoy about it. After changing mains from samurai to viper, it's a breath of fresh air to have my rotation be a bit more free-flow and busy, rather than the slow paced strictness of sam.

[EntailedFortune]

Throwing my hat into the ring too. Especially now that MNK got thrown over the chopping block, it feels like VPR is all that's really left for melee players that enjoy a fast-paced job. I don't even know what the job's vision will really be if they gut its speed too, because at that point it's just reflavored RPR.

[ValStormbreaker]

snip

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.

[ThorneDynasty]

I think what gets me the most is that you can have people complaining about a genuine issue, like the rampant homogenization for 5 years straight, before we get a slight acknowledgement that there's indeed a problem, that will be fixed year 8, maybe.

But then a certain subset complains for 2 days that job X is too hard, waah, like +2 days of casual content is an unreasonable learning curve for an entirely new job, and suddenly the devs are all: "Oh my god, we had no idea, King! We'll fix this immediately, next patch, pronto, right away, King!"