Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[koko-on-da-forumz]

I doubt this was genuinely due to player feedback so much as player performance not matching up with what they predicted. It's not surprising, because historically players have tended to struggle with debuff upkeep.

Also, like, being bad at something is the fun part of anything. People who were dropping NG regularly were also probably having the most fun. Once you've mastered a skill, you just plateau until you quit.

[LynxDubh]

Expecting players to rise to any challenge in this game is elitist and sweaty, don’t you know. As is expecting them to read their tooltips and understand what their abilities actually do and consider the order in which they should be applied.

TBF though, VPR is probably the one job you shouldn’t read the tooltips in depth, they are so bad to read. Or at least ignore it at first. I only started to get the job after giving up on reading and smacking a dummy.

[Embio]

This is just me basically reiterating my thoughts from another thread, but I'm also putting it here because this thread appears to be the one gaining the most traction. We all know SE only likes to read the big threads, so just in case:

I think part of the reason the new change feels so awful is because it effectively removed half of your combo chains. 2-1-1, 2-1-2, 1-2-1, and 1-2-2 do not exist in Viper's current design. They spent all this time designing this free form combo system for Viper, only to turn around and make the rotation completely static. Wasn't that supposed to be the point of the job? What was the goal of this change?

...

I don't think it's too big of an ask for the "free form combo job" they designed to actually have free form combos, lol.

To add on a little bit though, I feel like the design team has an issue where they'll see players make a mistake in their rotation or not understand something immediately, and the devs see that as a flaw with the game. Whenever there's a curve in job difficulty or a skill to be mastered, they're incredibly prone to removing it out of a fear of scaring players away. However, the average player should be able to understand where they've made a mistake and where they need to improve. It's not a flaw in the game for a player to make mistakes and have to learn. That's the whole point of having any design in the first place. All of this says to me that the developers have a lack of confidence and faith in their own job design, and it's why we've seen so much decision-making and design removed, not added, to jobs over the years.

Now, there is something to be said about how the game conveys these mechanics to players through tooltips, and whether that's sufficient enough, but that's its own issue. Bad conveyance =/= bad mechanics; the job itself made sense once you actually played it. Maybe the game would stand to benefit from some MOBA-style video showcases for the jobs that teach players how to do their rotation. It doesn't stand to benefit from shooting its own design in the foot.

Like Sid Meier once said, "a game is a series of interesting decisions," but the only interesting decision the devs have left me with is whether I continue to sub to this game or not.

[Morr_Ar]

This is just me basically reiterating my thoughts from another thread, but I'm also putting it here because this thread appears to be the one gaining the most traction. We all know SE only likes to read the big threads, so just in case:



To add on a little bit though, I feel like the design team has an issue where they'll see players make a mistake in their rotation or not understand something immediately, and the devs see that as a flaw with the game. Whenever there's a curve in job difficulty or a skill to be mastered, they're incredibly prone to removing it out of a fear of scaring players away. However, the average player should be able to understand where they've made a mistake and where they need to improve. It's not a flaw in the game for a player to make mistakes and have to learn. That's the whole point of having any design in the first place. All of this says to me that the developers have a lack of confidence and faith in their own job design, and it's why we've seen so much decision-making and design removed, not added, to jobs over the years.

Now, there is something to be said about how the game conveys these mechanics to players through tooltips, and whether that's sufficient enough, but that's its own issue. Bad conveyance =/= bad mechanics; the job itself made sense once you actually played it. Maybe the game would stand to benefit from some MOBA-style video showcases for the jobs that teach players how to do their rotation. It doesn't stand to benefit from shooting its own design in the foot.

Like Sid Meier once said, "a game is a series of interesting decisions," but the only interesting decision the devs have left me with is whether I continue to sub to this game or not.

Meier was absolutely spot on when he said that. I’ve seen plenty of people argue that because the job is broadly the same at a basic rotational level against a training dummy, the change is meaningless.

But that is a reductive analysis of game design by reducing a game to purely its inputs and not the decisions of the player actually engaging with the system.

[KuraLathliss]

I find the changes to be kinda bad, I got really used to Noxious Gash. I Personally feel like the job is in dire need of any kind of damage mit ability. I get it's a glass cannon, but after running EX1 about 45 times, there's is so many times I've had preventable deaths because the healers or tank didn't account for me being so low health. VPR needs to be brought up in health a tad or given another life steal ability or just give them that defensive they get in PvP.

[caaam]

Noxious Gnash should be added back onto the job. If there is a reason why the development team doesn't want to have that mechanic, then they should have given the job something else which has the same or more depth. It would also need to be a mechanic which holds all of the components of the job together like Noxious Gnash did.

The new effects "Honed Steel" and "Honed Reavers" have no depth to them and have no interactivity with the rest of the job's components, so they are not a suitable replacement for Noxious Gnash.

Also, the 'finisher' venom effects (e.g. "Hindstung Venom") being extended to 60 seconds leaves less room to make mistakes. If you can't fail, then you can't succeed, so I'd like to see this reverted back to 40 seconds.

I'm very disappointed to see a new job both simplified and fundamentally changed in so short a time. I really hope Viper is actually improved—in meaningful ways—in the near future.

[TheAmazing3]

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?

[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.

[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.

[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.