Please don't change Viper

[ValStormbreaker]

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.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The dev team repeatedly confuses the "rhythm and flow" that jobs like Viper and Stormblood MNK had with a "busy feel,". It's not about it being "busy"; that mindset led to them removing too many oGCDs from MNK in 5.4 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 motion inputs. The double-weaving of Viper is very "wax on, wax off," like 4.4 MNK.

We need to be vocal against the use of the phrase "busy" with regard to there being a lot of buttons or actions per minute. High APM does not mean difficult or complex, and often that's not really the problem. The problem is that if you remove the rhythm and flow of the moves so instead of a waltz, you're spamming fewer moves, it becomes both clunky and often boring to play. Simplification is never the answer to this problem, though those who cry "accessibility" would disagree on the principle of just wanting to try out the job, and often while they get what they want, they are the ones who will ultimately abandon the job when they decide it's not for them anyway, while the rest of us who were fine with it will have our gameplay experience negatively impacted. And of course this either won't be addressed until toward the end of the expansion, where it will be made even worse.

Anyone who has been a MNK main since before SHB will tell you, this is just how it goes.

[ValStormbreaker]

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!"

On behalf of all Monk mains since Stormblood, I ask of thee:

"First time?"

[ValStormbreaker]

I've already posted in another thread with a mode detailed list of suggestions. Adding my voice to this thread saying I love feeling like a living blender. I don't see how there could be changes made to Viper without some impacts to the feeling of the job. Surely changes could wait until after the upcoming Savage tier has actually showed off the job in high-level content?

Or at least the normal mode versions of the raids, like back in 5.1 where some jobs got some good tweaks to recast times and effect durations to better handle the new trial mechanics and the pace the players had to keep up with. That, I'm fine with, but those were also changes that made certain skills more robust. This is the opposite: the job is being simplified, when it's already too simple to use.

[zaen903]

Very much agreed. It's not even BUSY, just because we have more than one button to press doesn't mean the job is difficult. LEAVE VIPER ALONE PLEASE SQUARE ENIX STOP DUMBING DOWN JOBS.

[Laun_dingo]

I'm begging Yoshi P and the devs to not change it, it doesn't feel busy at all in my opinion it's way less busy and kinda want to do more because it's fun. It's hard enough that I switched to Viper being a black mage main in despair. Just wanted to add on to the thread of voices.

[Aco505]

Agreed. Some QoL to the oGCDs such as giving them more range is nice. The job is already simple but fast paced and I'd rather it stayed that way! Don't change it!

[ValStormbreaker]

Japan.
Every stupid change generated by player "feedback" typically comes from Japan.

Nope, American content creators are also VERY responsible for stupid job changes, especially since two in particular who have interviewed Yoshi-P directly on numerous occasions were outright asked for their wishlists for MNK changes, said a whole bunch of stupid stuff that doesn't actually fix any of the problems that the job had, and got everything they wanted. Now the job is borderline unplayable for those of us who remember what it used to be like, and moved to Viper as the closest alternative.

As for Japanese players themselves, Japanese gamers tend to be very averse to complaining for cultural reasons, and are, on average, more content with what they get. Japanese social culture is often the opposite of what we see in anime; people are encouraged to be quiet and conform, not be loud and speak up.

The culprit is, in all likelihood, Yoshi-P himself. After what he admitted about his inexperience with MNK in the 5.4 live letter, a lot of the memes made half in jest about how the dev team prioritizes whatever he happens to be maining at the time to help him get through content without him having to do a rotation properly were absolutely validated. Naoki "I'm a white belt at Monk" Yoshida could not do a BLM rotation in SB to save his life, but it was his main, so it was made stupidly overpowered. Now you know why MNK changes always get ignored until the end of the expansion cycle - at which point it's far too late to matter since it's going to get reinvented next expansion anyway - and often what we get is something worse, with a cocktail of stupid ideas that come from American content creators who Yoshi-P treats as the voice of the English-speaking player base when they really ought to be de-platformed for the damage they've caused.

Viper, being a consolidated 4.4 MNK, is likely too much for Yoshi-P to understand. So unless we actually start seeing threads on the JP forums with players there - who often say the devs don't really listen to them, either - asking for Viper positional simplification (which, to my current knowledge, isn't a thing yet), the only person I could fathom who has an issue with it is the guy who admitted to being a "white belt" at MNK and refused to listen to any of us "black belts" about what we wanted, and didn't get until Viper rolled around.

Now, if anyone here actually can read and write in Japanese, and can inform the JP forums to take a look at what's happening here, that would indeed be something, but it would take something like a "Healer Strike" level of "DPS Strike" for them to notice, and as per the response to that from one JP player, I'm willing to bet they'll validate what I wrote above about them being very complaint-averse and putting up with it.

[Elaithe]

I don't know where the feedback is supposedly coming from but quite honestly I think we need more time before any of it can be taken seriously. I find Viper to be incredibly easy to understand and play and the speed makes it fun. Understanding which positional is coming up (which is easily identifiable via color) or when to save and use my ranged combo is very engaging and fun. The class is somewhat faster than other classes in FXIV that I have played, but not really much faster than others and it doesn't really feel busy, it just feels like it doesn't have any dead air (WHICH IS A GOOD THING).

Please reconsider any changes you are jumping in to and see how things work out over time before making major adjustments like simplifying a class that is already very simple.

[SeaJae]

Not a single person offered usable and meaningful feedback to this job and this dev team has lifted the curtain on how they listen to feedback by announcing these changes.

The majority of the playerbase does not have the job at level 100. The majority of the playerbase has not done a single piece of meaningful combat content with it.

The changes they are making have nothing to do with the job and everything to do with the nomad crybabies who don't want to learn and take a nibble on every job.

They don't care about the feedback from people who play the job. We've known this for a long time now, but this time they really aren't hiding it.

[bane1190]

I made a meme-style post on my own (why would I want the collector's edition statue of a dead job, lol), but I want to reply here as well to get more posts on a single thread:

This job is not "too busy". It has a lot of oGCDs, which is how the job was sold to us, and why I was so excited about it. I play GNB for the oGCDs, too.

The buttons feel good to hit, but offer no actual complexity, and to remove them would be a detriment to the job. As somebody else mentioned in another post, some people are capable of hitting more than 2 buttons in a 2 second interval.

Please don't kill VPR. It's barely gotten to live.