Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[ovIm]

Square Enix really have no faith in their product, thats for sure. They could have just made Noxious a self buff if upholding it on multiple enemies was truly that difficult. This change however removes a bit of gameplay of the class that played part in making it more engaging, the decision making of when to use Steel and when to use Dread fangs.

Typical knee jerk change. Remove friction and uniqueness, push class into the mold of all other classes. Every class needs to play the same, all day, every day.

[Magusware]

For real, the fun has been removed. This is the worst thing that could have happened to Viper. When they said they were going to address how busy it was, I was immediately worried as the busy-ness of the job is what made it fun!

Having 3 status effects on 40 seconds you have to maintain for optimal performance was what made this job really interesting.

The 2 venoms you could argue were always relatively free to keep up, now even more so - they might as well be traits.
The more interesting one to work with was Nox, the debuff on the target. The removal of Nox has removed agency from the players in combat on whether they refresh Nox now, or even how they refresh Nox. Here's an example... Nox is 23 seconds, what do you do? You could Dreadwinder immediately, or use Dread Fangs, but you lose 3 seconds, not very optimal, but it's a "safe" thought. Easy to do if you don't care about that optimisation. But what I would do is start Steel Fangs and a follow up, then go into Dreadwinder.
It's not a lot of thought or effort, but thinking like that in the middle of combat has been removed. Doing that on the fly while dealing with mechanics was a lot of fun, it was very engaging.

This has been removed and I hate it.
A lot.

Please undo these Viper changes.

[Seiss80]

I am happy they didn't remove the positionals. The gnash debuff, I don't have feelings either way. I was able tp keep it up and do my rotation without much thought. Now with it gone, I do notice that I am not watching timers like I was before.

Regarding the AoE streamlining between single target and multitarget, I do like that. It feels more fluid. I wish they had that in the original spec.

Overall, I am going to still keep playing it. I like the job, and hope they don't change it even more. I used to play AST when it first came out, but after they did the major rework right away, it didn't feel right after that, and ever since, it bugs the crap out of me. I am happy that to a degree, nothing to major has changed. I can still play Viper and have fun. Even took it into Savage today, and it wasn't to bad.

[LeSkeLeT]

hello!
since yesterday debuff Noxious Gnash has desappeared, is it a bug or it's their will?

[M1SF0RTUNE]

Haven't been in the forum ring for a hot minute but I wanted to make my voice heard here:

In my opinion, I don't like these changes and I want them reverted.

As for my opinion to why, simply put: The job's already relatively brain-dead once you get the initial hang of it and go through the class quest, but these changes make this job much more brain-dead boring, autopiloted, spammy without any nuance, and even really patronizing in a way by trying to baby-proof the job for people that don't want to be pushed outside their comfort zone or challenged to engage with the game more. It also feels enabling to unskilled players who don't read their abilities to understand how their class works, which I think is overall dumbing down the game and the jobs in the long run.

---

Viper is a combination of existing job functions (Gunbreaker's Continuation, Dancer's Follow-the-Lit-Buttons, Monk's free-flow combo and Samurai's double buff management) and so it already doesn't feel wholly original. It borrowed Reaper's debuff-marking mechanic to increase damage and incidentally added a bit more to the Viper theme since the designers didn't wanna go with any DoT's while also baking it into combo attacks or multi-utility buttons. But where Monk, Dragoon, and Samurai offer you the freedom of choosing which combo tracks to travel depending on your need and expected you to pay attention to succeed, Viper's became absurdly linear thanks to the transforming glowing buttons feature that already held your hand through most of the job. Even before the change it was relatively idiot-proof unless you were just plain bad at the game; every attack does damage but the glowy buttons show you how to get the top damage. The only main options for decision making or expression came in when to use Dreadwinder/Pit of Dread, Uncoiled Fury, or when to apply the point of contention, Noxious Gnash.

I know it's not popular re-upping a timer every 20 seconds, but where some saw maintenance, I saw a mini-game with mini-strategies involved. Noxious Gnash came with such a tight time window that also got re-applied by a common and better buff button (Dreadwinder/Pit of Dread) I'd use regularly anyway, it taught me to be efficient when to use it; do I wanna double up the time to get a big burst now or continue to alternate between the high and low damage starters? Or what if I open with Dread Fang, then use Dread Winder to really boost up the timer for an early burst? Do I hold onto Dreadwinder or spend it now before entering Reawaken? Or use it between 2 Reawakens?

That's where I felt some of the complexity lied with the job and the onus was on the player when to apply the debuff or plan ahead during a combo whether to start with it or not. It was a bit of micro decision making in a job that already throws away a lot of decision-making for the sake of glowing button accessibility (since it walked you through which personal buffs to reapply anyway, something that not even Samurai holds your hand through). If anything, Noxious Gnash was the one stopgap keeping the class from becoming as autopiloted as it turned into this patch. It wasn't perfect, no, I think a DoT would've been better over a damage increase, but it was still something.

So my stance? Let players who don't enjoy or learn how to figure out that nuance play the many more accessible other jobs on offer like Reaper, Summoner, Warrior or Bard, let Vipers have a little depth to chew on and turn into a fun puzzle as opposed to devoting my attention to Follow-The-Glowing-Button. You can't just sell us a "free-flow combo system you can weave in and out of" when the design of the job and the flashing buttons tell us otherwise.

...But that's my two cents.

[An_IRL_Rabbit]

Long-time player and Ultimate raider here. I'm far from the best player in the game, but I'm still pretty darn good at it, and I have enough feedback here that I can't fit it all into one post.


I hate the changes. Hate is maybe a strong word, but I very strongly prefer the version of Viper I was playing on Monday to the version I have today. At first glance, I thought I wouldn't mind the change too much. A big part of the reason I like Viper is the high CPM and higher amount of positionals compared to other melee, which I'm happy did not change. I can still mash my buttons 'till my fingers fall off in a hectic double Reawaken window, I can still scoot my way around the boss or figure out where I can triple-weave True North to hit all those positionals just fine.

However, after playing with the job a bit, I think losing Noxious Gash upkeep just genuinely makes the job more boring. Maintaining Noxious Gash wasn't terribly hard, you had multiple buttons that were part of your regular rotation that applied it, but there was still some level of skill expression in effectively maintaining it, not having it fall off but also not overcapping it either. And it rewarded you for doing this, maximizing your Steel Fangs usage was naturally a DPS increase over pressing Dread Fangs unnecessarily, and also lining everything up for a double Reawaken window during raid buffs without anything falling off felt really good. But even if you weren't super skilled at the game, the DPS loss from pressing Dread Fangs at an unnecessary time was pretty minor so you weren't really punished that hard for doing so; 60 potency isn't the end of the world, it's a missed positional on any other melee job. It was a well-designed system to me, one that rewarded skilled players for playing the job well, but also one that wasn't terribly hard for less-skilled players to still do well enough with.

That is now gone, and there's nothing new to take its place. The job is less fun to play for me now, even before we get to my other issue with the changes, one that I will fully admit is a personal problem.

[An_IRL_Rabbit]

(cont.)


Viper can spend a very, very long time outside of its regular 1-2-3 combo. Multiple Reawaken windows in a row, Dreadwinder combo, and even pressing Uncoiled Fury a few times in a row, it's easy to spend 20+ seconds not pressing any button in your 1-2-3 combo when you throw a few of those together. If you're not careful you can even cross over the 30 second mark and have your combo drop, and learning to not get lost in the sauce is another part of learning how to get good at the job. But because you can spend so long outside of your 1-2-3 combo, it's entirely possible to lose track of where you are in that combo, and when it's time to return to it, not knowing where you are in the combo can make it easy to miss Death Rattle.

With old Viper, I used the nature of being able to press either button for the first hit as an anchor point for keeping track of where I was in the combo. Neither button lit up? Cool, I'm on the first skill of the combo. A button lit up? Either this button or the next will have the Death Rattle follow-up and I can prepare for that.

New Viper always has a button in your 1-2-3 combo lit up (unless you make a mistake and drop combo), which weirdly enough makes it much harder for me to keep track of where I am in that combo. There's no split-second glance I can make to tell me how soon Death Rattle is coming up, and missing that button is a 280 potency DPS loss, which is very bad. Since the changes yesterday, I have found myself missing Death Rattle significantly more often than I did pre-patch because of how much easier it is to just lose track of where I am after doing 20+ seconds of other buttons.


So yeah. I don't really know why this change happened. I'm not going to say the job is completely ruined, there are still parts about it that I like a lot, but I also don't know anyone that asked for this to happen outside of people that are genuinely bad at the game, and their opinions on job design should largely be ignored. Even ignoring my second issue and just focusing on the first, to take something away from what was honestly my new favorite job and not give it anything in return just feels bad. The job to me is more boring and less fun to play now. I hate the change, and across both the EN and JP communities, it is clear I am far from the only one. The change even makes me less confident that the devs will be able to create interesting jobs in the future, if they're so willing to make this one more boring in the name of making it easier to play.

So, please make Viper fun again. It's all I ask. I almost never come here, but that I felt passionate enough about this change to type so many characters that I couldn't fit it into one post should count for something, shouldn't it?

[An_IRL_Rabbit]

I hate the changes. Hate is maybe a strong word, but I very strongly prefer the version of Viper I was playing on Monday to the version I have today.

Had some more thoughts since I wrote this.

To me, Noxious Gash represents a little thing I like to call good game design. Not only in the skill needed to accurately keep track of it and apply it without it falling off or overcapping, but in the small optimizations you could do around that. For example if I knew a boss was about to go untargetable for a mechanic, I could quickly reapply Noxious Gash before they left so that it would still be on them when they returned, giving me a small damage increase over a Viper that had the debuff fall off in the 20 seconds or so when the boss was untargetable. But at the same time, I do mean small damage increase. I was rewarded with this with a small bit of personal satisfaction at this thing I figured out, but the player that didn't do it wasn't really punished for it either, they just lost a minuscule amount of DPS compared to me.

Likewise, there have been times where either a mob didn't have much health and would die quickly (like, say, the pillars on the final boss of the DT MSQ finale dungeon) or a boss was about to die, where I intentionally either did not apply Gash in the first place or purposefully let it fall off because I knew it would take more GCDs for the loss of potency to catch up than it would for the thing to die. Again, teeny tiny damage optimization that lead to increased personal satisfaction but didn't punish the Viper that pressed Dread Fangs anyway.


I am doing my hardest to not be a toxic elitist here, but I genuinely did not think old Viper was at all hard to play at a baseline. If you wanted to play it really well it was fun and engaging, but if you just followed the pretty glowing lights you were already like 90% of the way there. As long as you have the dexterity to press all the buttons it wants you to press, the job was quite frankly easy already. It did kind of a bad job of teaching you how to play it (something that is still the case), but once you played with it for a little bit, it was an extremely straightforward job already. So my big question is, if the job was already pretty easy at a baseline and the stated intent of the changes was to make the job easier for players, then who is this change for? Why was something that I genuinely think was well-designed get cut with nothing to replace it?

[An_IRL_Rabbit]

So, then what do we do instead? If the dev team really wants to simplify Viper a bit, how do we do that instead of this? I have heard a lot of people float the idea of making the application of Noxious Gash 30 seconds and the cap 60 (instead of 20 and 40), but I don't quite agree. I think this also simplifies it enough to the point where it becomes too easy to maintain and then we find ourselves back here when they remove Noxious Gash in 8.0 because maintaining it was so free. But I think those people are on the right track.

At first, I floated a 25 second application with a 50 second cap, give the job a little more wiggle room. This would work, but I do think it would miss out on some of the high-end optimization still, so what I instead propose is:

Dread Fangs and Dreadwinder would still apply 20 seconds of Noxious Gash to the target as they did pre-patch, but instead of a 40-second cap, the cap would instead be 60 seconds. This would let high-skill players still get the same rush of figuring out how to optimize the job, while giving lower-skill players extra wiggle room by letting them apply it a third time, giving them a much larger window to work with if they make rotation mistakes.

[Furrytractor]

I played around initially and thought "Oh, this doesn't feel that different" but then I played a bit more and realized "Oh no, this feels completely automatic now". There's absolutely 0 thought process in going through your combos now. It already was "Follow the Dotted line" for the most part. The nuance you had was whether or not you needed to use Dread Fangs or not. Noxious Gnash was actually a better designed Damage up debuff than Reaper's Death's Design IMO. It flowed with your kit well and was just very well designed. Once you remember that Dreadwinder also applied the debuff, you realize how you only needed to press Dread Fangs not too often. Knowing how much you had to reapply Noxious Gnash was a key component of Skill expression on Viper. Now it's completely gone and Viper, in less than a month of its initial release, became a shell of its former self in favor of pleasing a small crowd of players who can't take the time to learn how to properly play a job. This is exactly how we got Job Homogenization and The job designers continue to go through this trend.

Viper gameplay now feels extremely automated. Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes is the exact same now as the new Reaving Fangs into Swiftskin's Sting. You just do 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 for your first 2 combo starters, exactly the same as Monk's 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 gameplay. What we asked for was not JUST to not remove the positionals, but to not change the job because of how immensely satisfying it was to play. Now it's nothing. You completely ruined a job not even 1 month of Dawntrail coming out. There ARE at least good job designs out there like the newly released Pictomancer and old jobs like Warrior. They need to answer to this kind of mistake, cause the job designers messed up big time.