Please don't change Viper

[TheMaxwewll]

I agree. It's honestly really simple, the only reason people may find it overwhelming is most likely the difficulty or starting the job due to the action changes in the hotbar. Please don't change Viper, it's only been a week.

[Blindheart]

All I want with viper is to be able to separately assign all the skills from level 1 to 60 to the hot bar to be able to learn what each skill does and how it flows into the next. The new ability to choose whether or not to upgrade a skill on your hot bar or not is made for just this sort of thing. It takes nothing away from the class to allow for this.

[RinCv]

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.

They can go play RPR, who can hold positionals and has a way slower rotation... or a healer because pressing glare over and over again might be the skill level they are at. Just because you don't want to be arsed to learn a new job or can't play it optimally doesn't mean you need to ruin it for everyone. Might as well make savage and ultimate more accessible/brain dead too. I'm legit going to quit the game if Savage/FRU is bad because the only saving grace of dawntrail is the fight design so far.

[ValStormbreaker]

I'm also going to say this... and I know this may be controversial... but for all I keep carrying on about Viper being a consolidated 4.4 MNK...

... I think that Viper and Samurai should swap gear sets. Viper should be on Striking, and Samurai should be on Scouting. This is the one change I would make.

Striking gear was made for MNK before SAM was added to the game. One of the major things MNKs asked for was to have their gear unshackled from SAM, since the play styles are practically polar opposites from each other. What would happen is, if SAM was in good shape, MNK would usually suffer, and vice versa.

Players asked back in SB for SAM to get Brotherhood, since in 4.3 a feature that was added to the game (that you'd only know about from this live letter since the tool tips don't say anything about it) is that Brotherhood actually stacks. This had no real usage outside of comps with MNK duplicates which nobody wanted, but remained a feature throughout SHB even though the game doesn't tell you about it. Instead, they buffed the hell out of SAM to compensate for its lack of utility, and gear stats began prioritizing it over MNK throughout SHB, putting MNK in a weird spot. This furthered the idea that SAM and MNK should be on separate gear sets.

Due to having to accommodate the cosmetics of SAM, MNK gear started looking worse, outside of the Omega and Scaevan sets from SB. Scouting gear looks better on SAM, though a lot of it also looks pretty bad on NIN, especially for female toons due to the really big skirts some of them have. Outside of the AF gear, it's slim-pickings for Vipers.

Since Viper is similar to MNK in a lot of ways, and MNK used to be the "gotta go fast" job before it was the first melee to get dumbed down and kneecapped, I feel like they'd benefit from similar gear stats.

[ValStormbreaker]

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.

Yeah, MNK mains had this since forever. People would complain that "leveling the job isn't fun,". Duh. Short of completely revamping how the entire combat system functions and redoing all of the job quests to properly tutorialize everything (which isn't happening; at that point you might as well make a new MMO), everyone just kind of deals with it. We understand that we need to power-level the job to 100 first, and THEN, when we have everything unlocked, THAT is when we optimize our hotbars and figure out how everything works. Nobody thinks that's good game design, but for a game that is over 10 years old, we understand that's not changing, and asking for anything else is incredibly entitled and asking for the Taj Mahal.

Yet, these are the people who get listened to. Look no further than the butchering of MNK from SHB onward from what it used to be in SB for the consequences. VPR is a consolidated 4.4 MNK, and I cannot say this enough. It is likely getting the same kinds of people complaining who demanded MNK be simplified into the ground to cater to giving them an entry into the job and make leveling more fun for them, but then after they got exactly what they wanted, didn't bother sticking with it anyway because it wasn't for them... though the rest of us had to live with the consequences. What happened to MNK should be a direct warning to everyone who likes Viper, and now that more people are experiencing Viper who maybe either couldn't get into MNK back in 4.4 (or didn't have the opportunity if they started later), it's all the more reason for players to back the old-school Monk mains (just not the content creators like MrHappy or Drak Gamestein, both of whom are partially responsible for suggesting the current sorry state of the job directly to Yoshi-P when he asked them for what they'd like to see) on what the state of combat should be like for melee DPSes.

At this point, we need a meme of MNK just saying "First time?" since I feel like saying that in response to the majority of the posts here.

[kashi11]

Please do not change this job!

Positionals are fun and offer a slightly larger skill ceiling to a job that is pretty simple.

Also I love the high speed and actions per minute required!

My only recommendation would be to update the job gauge to indicate which positional is coming next, either change the glowing effect to indicate the directional requirement, or add a T shaped elements that glows on the horizontal element for flant and the vertical element for rear.

Also red green isn't the best for colorblind individuals, maybe make the skill icons be a different color to indicate whether that is rear or flank?

[ValStormbreaker]

They can go play RPR, who can hold positionals and has a way slower rotation... or a healer because pressing glare over and over again might be the skill level they are at. Just because you don't want to be arsed to learn a new job or can't play it optimally doesn't mean you need to ruin it for everyone. Might as well make savage and ultimate more accessible/brain dead too. I'm legit going to quit the game if Savage/FRU is bad because the only saving grace of dawntrail is the fight design so far.

I legit quit in 5.4 and only came back for Viper being like 4.4 MNK, so I did absolutely put my money where my mouth is and dropped the game for over four years. At this point I think we need a Melee DPS strike to get some real attention here. Now that the story is disappointing people, and the expansion has a mixed reception on Steam, the people who defended all the egregious lore violations that happened from SHB through EW no longer have a "feelings" shield for DT to hide behind. I say we review bomb the hell out of the expansion directly into the negative until this gets changed and do something to get some real attention on the issue. Might as well get on that now and get at least the kind of attention the Healer Strike did, and get content creators talking about it, rather than waiting for Savage, since the x.05 patches are coming soon with more simplification and we might as well get out in front of that if we're going to have any kind of impact.

I have zero problem quitting again and going back go Guild Wars 2 until and unless this problem is appropriately resolved. They have a better decoration system coming in their upcoming August expansion anyway, which I'm looking forward to. My husband works in game dev so I can ask him how he'd fix issues with this game, and if he could make a video on that.

[Cynric]

Adding to this, Viper is the first time I've actually had fun on jobs in like 9 years ish. Just let people learn the job, the game literally just came out and you're already making something easier?

I was actually enjoying something for once and when I woke up and saw this post about job changes it immediately ruined my day.

[Genoflax]

Please don't change viper. The positionals and how many buttons you have to press make this job so much fun for me.

[RavenSho]

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!