Viper is not hard, and does not need simplification.

[Myon88]

Well, with how much subjectivity is involved with perceived difficulty, I don't think the conversation will stay very productive if we go down this road. The game does have something that can help break things down empirically though, something that I invite everyone reading this to try.

The strayborough expert dungeon we have right now has two somewhat notable bosses. I think everyone should be able to perform flawless runs of both of them, tracking hazards solely by themselves, while keeping up an optimal rotation with 100% uptime throughout. I think you should be able to do this three, even five times in a row, no matter the quality of your party (the randomness is part of the fun).

If you've truly become adept at your job, and minimized the effort it takes to pilot, I think this is a reasonable ask. If you're unable to do so, I'd like to gently suggest that in that case, the notion that the job is designed intuitively enough does not hold. I mean, can anyone truly claim a job is operating fine if they are still making mistakes? However straightforward the job was claimed to be, it clearly wasn't sufficient to assist them through this.

[Rhael]

I mean, can anyone truly claim a job is operating fine if they are still making mistakes?

... yes???? This is a complete non-sequitur. A job operating fine does not equate to making mistakes impossible. To continue your car analogy from earlier, that's like forgetting your blinkers and trying to blame the car for not automatically using them for you. A lack of skill or experience from a pilot does not inherently imply a flaw in job design. To reiterate what I stated above, changing the job's design to account for a lack of fundamental understanding regarding how the game itself works is, at best, extremely misguided.

[Myon88]

A job operating fine does not equate to making mistakes impossible.

No, it makes complete sense to me. If someone says it's fine for a job to require glancing at their hotbar, and that causes them to be unable to keep up with mechanics that also require attention, then what gives? There's a clear contradiction happening.

So this is what I'm talking about when I say I have higher standards for competence. Other people may be content tunnel visioning on their hotbar and getting carried by someone else doing callouts, but I'm not. I suspect that many people feel this way intuitively, which is why when I heard the news about the feedback (presumably coming from the JP side), I was not surprised at all.

[Lyth]

This has been pointed out earlier, but VPR is currently the most played job in Extremes by a significant margin. This is on top of the fact that support jobs have fewer jobs for the same number of slots (2 jobs for 1 slot vs. 3 jobs for 1 slot), so you'd ordinarily expect them to have slightly higher counts within clear runs than the most popular DPS (as was the case back in Endwalker). There's always a bigger learning curve associated with a newly released job, in part because you don't have previous experience to draw on, and in part because the optimization tech is going to change quite rapidly alongside job changes. If you're not already extremely comfortable on this job you should strongly be looking at other options. Advocating for simplifications will get players nowhere, because they're still likely to be gated out in favor of people who have put in the effort already.

The Coil/Den combo isn't a true doubleweave sequence due to the longer GCD length. It actually feels more like the Mudra inputs on NIN. Rinon reported that the media tour attendees were recommended a 'piano' setup where you can glissando the keys. I personally have the four buttons in sequence as my 1-4 keys, with the base combo as Q and E. This setup also works well for Reawaken. The positionals on the sequence are quite straightforward and you have a lot of time to get to them.

The only thought process that I could see behind them removing the positionals on these is if they were previously on the fence about merging down Coil and Den into a single combo that has a proximity effect (similar to how Reawaken is used in AoE). I think this proximity effect damage is what the 'range' is designed to address as well - outside of Reawaken, the base AoE range is 3 yalms instead of the standard 5 yalms. Even if that's their end goal, I'd rather them preserve the positionals on it and just change the proximity effect.

The base combos are just practice. The buff icon tells you what your next combo should be. The first button is entirely dependent on your NG timer. The second and third buttons just depend on your active buff icon, with the four permutations of 'left' and 'right' corresponding with the four possible buff icons. You also rotate through them in a set sequence, which makes it even more straightforward. I'd argue that you shouldn't be reliant on the vipersight gauge or 'dotted lines', because if you're serious about playing this job in progression you should be able to play without looking at your hotbars. These really just exist for the entry level player who wants to click their actions to play through the MSQ story mode.

[george357]

no not a hard job to learn it has both good solo and aoe damage so no need to dumb it down