Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[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?