Quote Originally Posted by Furrytractor View Post
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.
I mean-- if they really wanted to dumb it down further (which I wouldnt put it past the devs to do, cause they seem to love dumbing things down so even the child pressing the dead monkeys button would work) they could remove the second combo and reduce the button bloat. Put all 4 buffs up on all 3 skills as a wall-o-text and really seal vipers defanged venom. Goes from a viper to a garden snake after yesterday