Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[ovIm]

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

Good call, really. I wish they would make a Blogpost like the one from a week after early access to inform us if they have heard us or not...

As for other languages, the german DPS forum is rather quiet, but the few posts I have seen there are very much against the changes.

[W00by]

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

Japanese forums are kind of half-and-half. There's lots of "I wish you removed positionals instead," and lots of "I think you should've just made it 30-60s instead of 20-40s," which I still disagree with, but at the very least there are hardly any posts that are super in support of Noxious Gash's removal.

Most notably, the JP forums seem to hate the addition of the Honed Steel/Honed Reavers buff from stage 1 of the combo, and the fact that they make your hotbar glow. They find it's distracting and makes it hard for people to tell where they're at in their combo. Pretty interesting to see that they both have subjective, personal-fondness based, and objective, design-based opinions for the job.

Other than that, there's a lot of the same stuff we're saying. The poison being gone from the snake job is cring, the filler feels empty now, etc, etc.

[Embio]

Noticed this thread fell off the first page and wanted to hop in here and hopefully remind some people that while there's barely any chance that they will backpedal on the awful decision of removing Noxious Gnash and half the basic combo, if we don't keep hammering the point that this is a detrimental move that does not solve the inherent issue they claim people had with the job and they need to never make these kinds of changes again out of the blue with zero warning, the chance becomes zero.

From a different angle, does anyone follow the other language forums, is the sentiment similar over there?

Agreed. I haven't checked out the German and French forums, but the Viper thread on JP seems split. There's more positive sentiment towards the changes than there is here (citing accessibility and ease of optimization), but from what I can tell the larger chunk still dislikes the change and how it affects the job's identity. There's been more than few people saying that the name should be changed from Viper to Snake, since the poison was removed lol.

[Post]

I liked Noxious Gash. I suppose if I had to pick between that and positionals being removed, I would have preferred Nox because I like reasons to move around the arena as part of my kit, but at the same time Nox actually interacted with everything else in the kit and its decision making.

My real preference would have been that they didn't remove either and tried to make the job more approachable some other way. The tooltips are garbage, for example, and the gauge does a very poor job of communicating your next attacks beyond the current one (and even the current one is a bit inscrutable, that gauge is nuts).

I saw some people making the argument about 'not giving jobs debuffs that nobody else cares about', like Death's Design (RPR), Noxious Gash (old, early DT VPR if anyone remembers that job), or literally any DoTs. I think this is a good point from the perspective of the debuff limit, but I think it's dumb as hell that they just let 50 copies of that debuff be on the target. Sucks for Hunts, Alliance Raids, Forays and even FATEs. The solution is not to remove these actions, it's to do what the game did until ShB (or how e.g. Mug/Dokumori still works): let one copy of this buff persist and any other job doing it simply reapplies it.

Would VPR or RPR really be OP if you had one refreshing the debuff and 3 others benefiting from it? No. That's just gameplay being affected by your group in an MMO. It'd be a good thing, and would make having multiple of the same job less of a drag for all players when it happens in DF.

[lugiaXD]

There's a lot to this forum thread that i'd like to read through but at the time I just want to put my thoughts down and it may be the same as others on the thread i'm not sure yet.

my personal history is i've been playing since ARR as a bard main, I've been playing on Gilgamesh the whole time and made an alt when the oceanic servers opened but still mainly play on NA cause that's where most of my friends are.

Honestly these changes were upsetting to read and having played it for a while upsetting to play through. The ONLY change I wanted to see with the job was the removal of positional requirements on Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil. I felt like it did not feel good trying to double weave and repositioning to around the boss for what amounted to a 50 potency increase in damage each way. I actually like Noxious Gnash, I wish it did something other than a damage increase (a DoT would have been nice or something interesting like as long as the debuff was applied it increased the potency of every oGCD attack or something along those lines but I digress) but otherwise I felt that the debuff could have been ok if its timer went up to 60 seconds (still only applying 20 though) but that was really it. I though out the gate the class felt a little rough around the edges but I truly loved playing it and the flow of it when positionals were turned off for fights.

the decision to remove Noxious Gnash and replace it with this very lukewarm forced alternation legitimately might be the worst decision i've ever seen SE make since they put cast bars on Bard in Heavensward. Like I've never felt like I'd seen a job gutted so badly since that expansion and that's knowing how much the dev team seems to like bullying Dark Knight.

If I could ask for one thing, please design team walk back these changes to Viper. the choices aren't fun the decision to remove the debuff ruins the core rotation of the class and truly ruins the theming of it in my honest opinion. Please remove the positionals from Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil and bring back Noxious Gnash or give us a debuff of some kind that does something interesting that requires the player to put more thought into their rotation and the decisions that they make. I know you all can do it because Bard came back with great design changes before. The class originally was imo overburdened with too many things to deal with, 4 positionals, about 20 oGCDs, a Debuff, a gauge to manage and that was before you factor in raid mechanics. Just take out those 2 positionals and increase Noxious Gnash's maximum debuff timer to 60 seconds and revert all the other changes back to pre-patch 7.05. Imho I think this will leave the class in a really good place that still allows some skill expression while making it a little bit easier to get into.

[jonimated]

The ONLY change I wanted to see with the job was the removal of positional requirements on Hunter's Coil and Swiftskin's Coil. I felt like it did not feel good trying to double weave and repositioning to around the boss for what amounted to a 50 potency increase in damage each way. I actually like Noxious Gnash, I wish it did something other than a damage increase (a DoT would have been nice or something interesting like as long as the debuff was applied it increased the potency of every oGCD attack or something along those lines but I digress) but otherwise I felt that the debuff could have been ok if its timer went up to 60 seconds (still only applying 20 though) but that was really it. I though out the gate the class felt a little rough around the edges but I truly loved playing it and the flow of it when positionals were turned off for fights.

One of the changes I proposed was to make Noxious Gnash a target debuff that only increased the potency of Steel Fangs. Leave everything else the same, the 20 second application time, the stacking to 40 seconds, and applying with Reaving Fangs/Vicewinder. This would ensure the basic combo remains exactly the same as before they removed Noxious Gnash, but remove the danger of having it fall off during double Reawaken Windows. Turning Noxious Gnash into a simple DoT with the same application mechanics would have a similar effect as well, and I thnk that would be fine too. Honestly my preference would be that they just brought it back as it was to begin with, but if that's not going to happen then I think this is a good middle ground.

Regarding the positionals I could get down with removing them for the Vicewinder combo, while keeping them in the final step of the basic combo. I never really had a problem with them, but I also find that I'm using True North almost exclusively for the Vicewinder combo so removing them would basically have no effect for me. And I would have preferred that over removing Noxious Gnash.

[lugiaXD]

One of the changes I proposed was to make Noxious Gnash a target debuff that only increased the potency of Steel Fangs. Leave everything else the same, the 20 second application time, the stacking to 40 seconds, and applying with Reaving Fangs/Vicewinder. This would ensure the basic combo remains exactly the same as before they removed Noxious Gnash, but remove the danger of having it fall off during double Reawaken Windows.

Honestly I would be completely okay with it staying a 40 second cap if it worked something like that where the damage is given to the rest of the viper moveset and doesn't necessarily effect Reawaken. I will also say though that something I really enjoyed about Noxious Gnash as a debuff was that it was also baked into the rotation and toolkit of Viper so much better than it was on Reaper with death's design.

The fact that dreadfangs (now reaving fangs) was a combo starter and the fact that Dreadwinder (now Vicewinder) was a core part of the rotation and a net damage gain made the debuff actually feel good to maintain unlike with reaper where I found it more of a hindrance because I had to spend a GCD on a button that does nothing but apply the debuff. It's the kind of thing that after playing the class for a while I said to myself "Wow this part of the job is really well thought out and timed pretty well to make me think about keeping it up but also not getting to haphazard with Dreadfangs since Dreadwinder is going to come up soon and Steel Fangs does more damage as a combo starter". Sadly the team decided to throw out that piece of great design for something much more simple and overall not as fun.

[LisseyCrowe]

Tried the job again after dropping it post-changes and I can't help but find it more confusing to play than before. Things that used to feel natural just ... don't anymore.

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

I feel like I hit this part midway through a boss or engagement where I don't know why I'm pressing specific buttons anymore. For some potency might be a good enough answer but I prefer jobs that give you more than that, which is why I really liked how Gnash tied the whole kit.

But even the timer changes to one minute feel weird to me. For testing purposes, I went out of my way to see if you could drop the one minute buffs if you went nuts with the other skills. The result it that it's possible but very, very hard. What hasn't been hard to drop however ... is the combo itself. More than anything, it now feels like I need to always finish a combo before starting any Awakening/Vicewinder/Uncoiled loops because unlike Gnash there is no possible way to track the combo timer.

The difference here vs before is that before Viper's resources had to be used evenly throughout a fight (or pooled for specific reasons), and so dropping the entire combo was rarely an issue. But with that need gone I find myself often needing to dump a bunch of those resources at the same time because I lost track of them all.

I know this is all skill issue, but let's not pretend managing Gnash wasn't either. I simply wanted to have my experience out there that went beyond my previous comments that all essentially boil down to "Previous Viper game design = Better". It's a shame I'll never really get that data, but I'd be curious to know if the people losing DPS to the debuff dropping aren't losing just as much DPS from wasting the combo timer/capped resources.

[jonimated]

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

This is interesting, and you're absolutely right. In attempting to make the job feel less busy SE actually ended up making it feel significantly more clunky and unnatural.

I do find myself staring at Vicewinder significantly more than before because my brain now sees it as just another DPS cooldown as opposed to a utility. So my DPS brain says "well if I'm not hitting it on cooldown every time it's a DPS loss." Whereas before the utility of the ability made it so I would not hit the button if Noxious Gnash had more than 20 seconds remaining. The cooldown was always up when I needed it and the stack never overcapped. It was fluid and natural.

Additionally, as you said, the permanently glowing combos and having to track the combo starters is at once both way less interesting and significantly more annoying. If the end goal was to make Viper feel less busy without removing the fun they couldn't have missed the mark further.

The changes don't feel thought out at all. It's as if when they said they were going to change/remove the positionals, and people said "no", they just decided to arbitrarily remove something else instead. It has "poor planning" and "reactionary" written all over it. And the fact it hasn't been address yet, even in a Lodestone post, is wild.

Also as someone above mentioned there are other jobs that required significantly more attention than Viper, yet this is what they chose to focus attention on. Viper would have been fine if left alone.

[Ramiee]

To reiterate again, I think literally no one saw the dot as a problem so this change is completely out of left field. I genuinely thought they were going to remove the positionals on the cd attacks, I literally didn't see the dot removal coming because it was so easy to reapply.
I haven't really played viper post change but honestly this change seems like it'll be more punishing for new players and will make the burst even more rigid and just as busy. Like genuinely who is this change for? The dot and buffs were something pretty much everyone instantly understood, the 2 button combo chains is what people found imposing initially.