Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[LisseyCrowe]

Tried the job again after dropping it post-changes and I can't help but find it more confusing to play than before. Things that used to feel natural just ... don't anymore.

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

I feel like I hit this part midway through a boss or engagement where I don't know why I'm pressing specific buttons anymore. For some potency might be a good enough answer but I prefer jobs that give you more than that, which is why I really liked how Gnash tied the whole kit.

But even the timer changes to one minute feel weird to me. For testing purposes, I went out of my way to see if you could drop the one minute buffs if you went nuts with the other skills. The result it that it's possible but very, very hard. What hasn't been hard to drop however ... is the combo itself. More than anything, it now feels like I need to always finish a combo before starting any Awakening/Vicewinder/Uncoiled loops because unlike Gnash there is no possible way to track the combo timer.

The difference here vs before is that before Viper's resources had to be used evenly throughout a fight (or pooled for specific reasons), and so dropping the entire combo was rarely an issue. But with that need gone I find myself often needing to dump a bunch of those resources at the same time because I lost track of them all.

I know this is all skill issue, but let's not pretend managing Gnash wasn't either. I simply wanted to have my experience out there that went beyond my previous comments that all essentially boil down to "Previous Viper game design = Better". It's a shame I'll never really get that data, but I'd be curious to know if the people losing DPS to the debuff dropping aren't losing just as much DPS from wasting the combo timer/capped resources.

[jonimated]

• Vicewinder stacks have to be actively tracked now. Before I realistically only had to do so when refreshing Gnash.
• Permanently glowing combo. It feels like at every moment the main combo is demanding my attention. Even knowing the potency buffs are a full minute, the fact that it's glowing feels like it's constantly begging me to prioritize it.
• Tracking which combo starter I'm on is annoying and I can never stare away from my hotbar.

This is interesting, and you're absolutely right. In attempting to make the job feel less busy SE actually ended up making it feel significantly more clunky and unnatural.

I do find myself staring at Vicewinder significantly more than before because my brain now sees it as just another DPS cooldown as opposed to a utility. So my DPS brain says "well if I'm not hitting it on cooldown every time it's a DPS loss." Whereas before the utility of the ability made it so I would not hit the button if Noxious Gnash had more than 20 seconds remaining. The cooldown was always up when I needed it and the stack never overcapped. It was fluid and natural.

Additionally, as you said, the permanently glowing combos and having to track the combo starters is at once both way less interesting and significantly more annoying. If the end goal was to make Viper feel less busy without removing the fun they couldn't have missed the mark further.

The changes don't feel thought out at all. It's as if when they said they were going to change/remove the positionals, and people said "no", they just decided to arbitrarily remove something else instead. It has "poor planning" and "reactionary" written all over it. And the fact it hasn't been address yet, even in a Lodestone post, is wild.

Also as someone above mentioned there are other jobs that required significantly more attention than Viper, yet this is what they chose to focus attention on. Viper would have been fine if left alone.