(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?