[Viper] Vipersight Gauge Feedback

[dvoraen]

Hello! I am trying to do this as constructively as possible, so let's start with what my issues are:

Issues

• The Vipersight gauge is counterintuitive. It tells you which part of your combo you are on, but it does not inform you of whether the final action is positional, and if so, which position is optimal.
• The Vipersight gauge description does not convey actual information. It states it informs you of your progression in the combo, but merely looking at the hotbar conveys much more information.
• The use of colors in the Vipersight gauge is rather superfluous; the colors do not convey any information other than what step of the combo you are in.

Suggestions for Improvement

• Colors should be used for indicating a flank or rear positional, not which step of the combo you are in. This is much more intuitive and explains that each color means different things.
• The colors used should take colorblindness into account, if necessary. I am not colorblind myself, so perhaps someone who is can opine on whether they have any issues here? In accordance with this, I suggest adding text to the Vipersight gauge to indicate the action in question, or even "flavor text" like "Strike/Fang" or "Hunter/Swiftskin" as the second stage actions of the combo are called, and "Flank/Hind" for the third.
• The Vipersight job gauge description should explain what the left/right/both glow means, to teach players what the gauge is trying to tell them.
• The sides lit up on the Vipersight gauge should clearly indicate whether you should be pushing your Steel Fangs or Dread Fangs (or ae equivalent) hotbar button. Right now it's just "left/right" which correlates to those actions and what they change to.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

What job gauge in this entire game tells you what positional you are on? That's what your hotbar icons are for. The green ones flank and the red ones are rear.

Also the gauge does a good job telling you what part of the combo you are in once you understand it. With just a glance it tells you if you are on the first, second, or finisher step in the combo with is useful for knowing when to weave the oGCD proc and when to do the positional. The dotted lines don't tell you this. There is also not a color blindness problem here since if you can't see the colors you can still see that both segments of the blade are glowing.

"The use of colors in the Vipersight gauge is rather superfluous; the colors do not convey any information other than what step of the combo you are in."

"It doesn't convey any information besides this one very important piece of information" ?????


"The sides lit up on the Vipersight gauge should clearly indicate whether you should be pushing your Steel Fangs or Dread Fangs (or ae equivalent) hotbar button. Right now it's just "left/right" which correlates to those actions and what they change to."


The left/right isn't enough? Your hotbar proc lines already indicate which GCD to press next. It's kind of wild to me that Viper of all jobs, one that is getting meme'd on for being super easy to follow the glowing lines, has people saying it doesn't hand hold you enough

[Brandr]

To know what is the positional of the next finisher you can look at your buffs.

Btw, the icon will also show which button to press: if the little guy in the icon is facing left, then it's left sword, aka Steel Fangs side. If the little guy is facing right, then it's a Dread Fangs follow up.
And since it's only the third weaponskill that requires a positional, you have two entire GCDs to adjust

[Mikey_R]

Viper sight is quite literally the only gauge in the game that tells you everything you need to know about where you are in a combo and what to do next. I've said it in the past, you could quite literally play Viper with it's 2 gauges, Dreadwinder and Serpent's Ire. That is quite literally all you need. Buff/Debuff wise, the only things you need to see are the attack buff, the speed buff and Noxious Gnash.

If you want to learn how the Viper Sight gauge conveys info, I have made a post in the past here.

[dvoraen]

What job gauge in this entire game tells you what positional you are on? That's what your hotbar icons are for. The green ones flank and the red ones are rear.

Your argument has a glaring hole: The job gauge will tell you what part of the combo you're on, but your hotbar will tell you what you need to know? (Which also includes where you are in the combo, because you should know what your actions do and what your combos are.) So what's the point of the Vipersight job gauge if I can just look at my hotbar buttons for all of the information? Other than telling you about Rattling Coil stacks, I mean.

The left/right isn't enough? Your hotbar proc lines already indicate which GCD to press next. It's kind of wild to me that Viper of all jobs, one that is getting meme'd on for being super easy to follow the glowing lines, has people saying it doesn't hand hold you enough

This makes the assumption that everyone will have Steel Fangs to the left of their Dread Fangs button to correlate with the job gauge. This is not necessarily true for everyone (and for the record, mine are left/right for Steel/Dread and their ae equivalents). I did test relative positions on the hotbar. The left side always lit up for the Steel Fangs button, even if it's "right" of the Dread Fangs button. I don't think I need to belabor any points about how unintuitive that particular case is, if not cognitively dissonant for some. To say "oh you should be putting that button here and that there so it doesn't confuse you" is presumptive on anyone's part.

The point is that the hotbar does all the work of the job gauge and more, meaning that the Vipersight job gauge information is superfluous compared to the hotbar. So either Vipersight should get tossed (but keep the Rattling Coil indicator) and everyone just relies on the proc lines, or it needs significant improvement.

EDIT: To clarify one point: I'm not against it telling me where I am in the combo and what button to push. What I care about is the fact that the buttons change to multiple different actions, and that it doesn't tell me which combo I'm in (terminating in Flank-/Hind- actions). Now is there a bit of hand-holding there? Yes, we're in agreement on that point that positionals shouldn't be spelled out by the job gauge. I am conceding that point. But the problem is that the job gauge doesn't communicate anything other than the step you're on, rather than where you're going to end up. If the point of the job gauge is to keep you from needing to look at your hotbar, it doesn't hit all the marks on this point, because you have to look to see if you have a Flank-/Hind- action as your combo. Or memorize the "red left = flank", "red right = hind" information, which I'll note is not conveyed anywhere other than the internet (i.e., the job gauge description really needs to hit on this point of explaining how the gauge communicates to you other than 'it changes based on your buttons').

[Taliriah]

oops, wrong thread.

[Mikey_R]

What I care about is the fact that the buttons change to multiple different actions, and that it doesn't tell me which combo I'm in (terminating in Flank-/Hind- actions).

There are only 2 combo ender paths, one from Hunter' Sting (damage buff) and one from Swiftskin's Sting (Speed buff). Hunter's Sting always changes them into flank, Swiftskin's Sting always changes them into Rear.

The glow then just tells you how to get to each buffed ender. No glow is the combo starter. The red glow then tells you which fang to use from the second step, then the blue glow tells you which fang to use on the last step. You know whether it is rear or flank, because you know which second combo step you done.

The same logic also applies to the Dreadwinder combo, Attack buff is side, Speed buff is rear.

[W00by]

Viper exists in a somewhat nebulous position where it is already "carrying more weight for you" than other jobs. Comparing to another melee DPS, like Dragoon, Dragoon is also alternating weaponskill combos between the DoT combo finisher and the Heavens' Thrust combo finisher. But Dragoon's hotbars nor job gauge tell you which combo you should be doing next, nor which positional will be required at the end of that combo. While the hotbar lights up to tell you the next steps in your combos in general, there is still an expectation that you eventually improve enough to be able to choose the right combo at the right time.

This dynamic does not exist for Viper. For the most part, Viper is telling you explicitly what you need to do. There is no expectation that you learn what buttons lead to which combo ender, or learn which combo ender procs the Venom buff for which other combo enders. Even if you invest zero effort into learning viper at a higher level, you are able to achieve a higher baseline than most other melees simply by following the Vipersight gauge.

The only thing you have to learn on Viper is which positional each combo ender is. And, not only are these color coded, but they always alternate -- if you just did a green combo ender, you know the next one will be red, AKA, rear.

Because the Vipersight gauge already provides so much more information than other jobs, Viper's difficulty must be balanced carefully. If positionals are removed or the Vipersight gauge tells you explicitly how to perform them, Viper will be reduced to a job that strictly follows flashing lights and has no upper limit for optimization. If the Vipersight gauge provides too little information, casual players will be confused by the hotbar switching and will be unable to play the job at all. This is what makes viper such a controversial subject.

Personally, I think the Vipersight gauge and Viper's positionals are fine as they are right now -- casual players just following the Vipersight gauge while completely ignoring positionals entirely are only losing out on around three hundred potency per minute, which is about the same as missing one GCD, which happens far more often to players across all roles (such as casters that have to cancel casts or healers who must heal instead of casting a GCD) and is thus fine. I think most reactions describing Viper as too difficult come from players hesitant to dedicate that extra bit of effort to the job, but I encourage those players to understand it's fine not to play perfectly optimally. 99.9% of us aren't optimal anyway.

[dvoraen]

I was going to just come in to say that after some thinking, you guys convinced me on the job gauge. I do think they should improve it slightly, but not to the degree which I originally posted. I think what I want most is that the color indicators tell you which button you did press. So if you pressed Hunter's Sting, the left sword (and only the left sword) colors red after the buttons change to the Flank* actions, rather than color both sides the red color. EDIT - To be clear I'm not talking about the glow, I'm talking about the staining or whatever you want to call it that occurs after you push the button in response to the glowing.

I was going to leave it at just that, but then someone had to try and profile shame me, which I find very interesting. So Valkyria Stormbreaker, this is for you:

What would you like to know about my profile? Because you clearly did not know that most of my leveled jobs date from the end of Shadowbringers. I barely played during Endwalker. Taking that into account, you can see that not only do I have multiple non-healer jobs leveled (including a tank, every caster, every ranged, and a melee dps even), but I did so fairly early in the expansion. I'm taking a much more laidback approach to leveling for Dawntrail onward, simply so that I don't burn out again.

I enjoy playing this game. You clearly do too. But your dismissive and "jobist" attitude serves no purpose here. Our voices are equal standing. A consensus from others will form over whose opinion they think has more merit, but that doesn't mean the other party/-ies lose standing because of it. At the end of the day, we're all still human beings. It should be telling to everyone that multiple people have provided feedback stating that they don't like the Vipersight job gauge. Others disagree with that feedback, as clearly shown by this thread. I've changed my mind for the most part from what I've initially posted, because I think I'm seeing what everyone's saying in their replies. That does not mean that my initial impressions* of the job are invalid, which I do intend to level by the way**.

* And by initial impressions, I'll note that I made no suggestion of changes to how the job plays (losing its positionals, potency changes, etc.). My feedback was strictly one part of its job gauge, and only that. I made no presumption of viper balance other than how the job gauge presented its information.
** Spoiler alert: I will not be a level 100 viper anytime soon. Healers need caught up first, particularly Sage, because I am indeed a healer main. (Guilty as not-charged, because there's no shame in that.) Then probably casters, because I want to be Arbiter of Magic, then from there we'll see.

That's all.

[kashi11]

I just set this up on mine and it makes the gauge a lot more useful.