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.