Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[Carighan]

This is like saying an automatic car and a manual car drives the same, depending on the level of depth it's true until it's false.

Not really, but there's an interesting point in there: It's more like comparing a clutch-car to a tiptronic car. After a small~moderate amount of time, neither requires active brain resources, however the tiptronic one did not from the start.

And that in fact is my point. People keep talking about this "decision that was lost". Which... it wasn't? Do you think I decide to save by Lance Charge in 2:1 ratio for the even and odd bursts? Do you think I decide to hold two cards for the burst and then roll over into the next draw?

I only needed to do that when initially picking the job up. Then, it was baked into the same braindead motion I do during gameplay, and it does not matter (or rather, not to a degree where it is noteworthy from a design POV) whether that gameplay is 1-2-3-1-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5-6 or 1-1-1-1-1-1. None of these sequences involve any active thinking. And importantly, no decisions. In fact, the lack of actual decisionmaking during gameplay on non-Dancer jobs is the very flaw of the entire FFXIV combat system. Jobs are all static rotations. Viper went from one static rotation to another static rotation. Hence, beyond the very first fresh steps with the job, the experience of playing it is the exact same, your hands go through learned motions with your brain disconnected from this part, fully focused on the boss mechanics and maybe on chatting with your friends.

Now it's mindless from the outset, feels more like a Dancer like rotation now with alternating waltzes, not the image I want when playing a snake inspired hunter.

It's funny that you bring up Dancer, the only non-static job in the game right now (including pre-change Viper). Sure, maybe proc-based gameplay feels mindless to you - after all it's just reactive, hit the button that glows.
But it should be understandable that a non-proc-based (like every single other job including the healers and tanks) static rotation gameplay is just as braindead to other players, because once your muscle memory takes over, you quite genuinely no longer need to think about it. It's all on full auto.
It could be reduced into a single long macro if that could viably be done with game mechanics; and hence we have the recent proliferation of autocombos in both PvP and PvE, further showcasing how on-rails the entire combat system of ~all jobs actually is.

Now don't get me wrong: I dislike the Viper changes. Maybe that wasn't clear. But I don't dislike it because it removed Noxious Gash, rather because it did not remove just about everything else, ripping out the current core structure and putting something with an actual identity centered around this left/right combo system into place - which sounds like a cool idea, but then you see the current implementation, sigh, yawn, and go back to not paying attention.

That they changed something was good. But they changed something that didn't need changing (or like I said, from my perspective it makes 0 difference so I also don't truly care that they changed it), while leaving the pile of stuff that desperately needs to be replaced to give Viper an identity of its own and make it "cool" to play alone. It really shows that they had no further idea behind the job than "Oh yeah it sticks two 1H swords together", and did not do any brainstorming how to translate that into a gameplay system that feels interesting.