Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[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.