Viper Changes Thread - Share your thoughts

[Leonus]

The pretty surface level is to say "Do I delay or not delay."
In reality, there were a lot of nuances:

For example, you could use Dread Fangs (now Reaving Fangs) or Dreadwinder (now Vicewinder) to apply Noxious Gnash with different consequences depending if you had Reawaken soon or two Reawaken and if you go into Reawake you could continue your basic rotation if you out of it in time or not or you go Uncoiled Fury rotation, or you can go Dreadwinder rotation. Or maybe you want to cast Serpent's Ire and drop combo rotation. And there is only one correct choice to maximize DPS from all possible choices. Also, it played well with watching other buffs because they could run out too. If you do it incorrectly you just simply do more CDs than you need and you will lose DPS because combo fail. Also, combine this with boss mechanics and watching what the boss was doing and it was pretty deep and enjoyable.

That’s because it is what it was.

People are pretending as though it’s deep, it wasn’t. It never would have been. People are turning into something that it’s not. The fight itself dictated way more than the debuff ever would have. However, do I delay or not delay is what noxious nash can be boiled down to. Just about every time.

[Colt47]

That’s because it is what it was.

People are pretending as though it’s deep, it wasn’t. It never would have been. People are turning into something that it’s not. The fight itself dictated way more than the debuff ever would have. However, do I delay or not delay is what noxious nash can be boiled down to. Just about every time.

The gist of it is the game designers want all the decision making on the fight end and make the jobs have minimal decision making. This is to limit the benefit of clearing specific fights and then having that knowledge carry over to the next set of fights since they want to control how fast people clear content. In fact, most of what they are doing is for more control over the clear rates and how difficult content is that they are pushing. It's one of the pains of a live service game: The goal is to keep someone paying as many sub fees as possible or making as many lootbox / gacha spins as possible while still being enough of a game to be enjoyable by the player. But that is getting a bit off topic at this point.

[Higashikata]

A completely negative change. Previously you were required to think for 0.5 seconds, now there is zero thought required at all

[Username69]

Only made an account on here to say I hate the change.

The argument that it didn't take effort is just false out the gate, given the fact they removed it precisely because some people were claiming to have trouble maintaining the debuff. I myself managed to let the debuff drop off multiple times just because I got carried away with other abilities (Reawaken go brrrr). This is not a bad thing! The content was still cleared just fine, I simply made a mistake. I took a mental note of needing to make greater effort to maintain the debuff, and moved on.

It's a shame that a class that requires you to reach the level required to beat Shadowbringers (A few hundred hours into the game, three whole expansions worth of content!) had a bit of complexity taken away. It should be a given that classes unlocked at highers levels are generally going to expect just a bit more from the players. This is also an odd choice given the previous statements that they had gone too far with class simplification.

I hope they revert the changes.

[Mondschnee]

At this point, I'm just really mad. I was a Summoner main in Shadowbringers. They ruined it. Ok. I moved on to Black Mage. Then, they ruined Black Mage in the beginning of Dawntrail. Okay. I move on to yet another job, gear up Viper, I'm having massive fun, I want to main it. Now they change Viper after barely a month. The gameplay is missing something without the dot to keep track of. Honestly, I'm just disheartened, I don't even want to look into how to optimize the changes anymore. This is ridiculous.

Yeah, sorry, I'm frustrated.

[Kossuel]

I've made these points in different places but I'll put my thoughts on here too:

The change was unnecessary and overall served to make certain parts of the job feel worse. Dreadwinder, or whatever it's called now, now feels like it serves no interesting purpose because all it does is open a couple strong damage GCDs whereas before it was a fun tool to optimize Noxious Gnash uptime.

I'm noticing that in this thread there's a lot of arguing over whether or not NG uptime is considered a valid form of skill expression and my response to it is "If it wasn't difficult, why did Square feel the need to change it?" There's too much focus on the argument of whether or not it should've existed as a form of job maintenance that people are ignoring that, much like other things lost over the years, it's just another job mechanic that is removed and replaced with nothing. I've been playing XIV for the better part of 10 years, and this slow removal of mechanical maintenance and upkeep is what got us to the point that Square needs to make a statement about how jobs will totally have their identity back by 8.0.

The TL;DR is that while it wasnt the most engaging thing to utilize, it was a small bit of kit that ultimately made the job feel somewhat complete, and now that it's gone there's a lack of overall fun feel to the job as a whole. One of the things I miss most about XIV's job design is that feeling of constant fight maintenance. If people were genuinely that annoyed by it being on a 20/40 second timer, swapping it to a 30/60 timer would've fixed it for everyone without the need to remove a bit of what made the job enjoyable.

[Komarimono]

Other jobs also have status effects to watch, for example, NIN or BLM and others.
VPR still have 2 status effects to watch, even though it is much easier, but if you not watching them means you are just a beginner and this doesn't apply to you and you do not need it to play VPR on a casual level, so why are you even writing here? You would do fine with Noxious Gnash because it doesn't matter on your level.

Viper had one status effect to watch. The two buffs come automatically when played right, focusing on the GCD one on fight initiation.

Funny you're calling be the beginner here lol, been playing the game for some time now.

[Colt47]

A completely negative change. Previously you were required to think for 0.5 seconds, now there is zero thought required at all

It doesn't even solve the problem they were trying to address. The job is busy so they removed noxious gnash and add even more ability highlighting? The new design encourages tunneling during encounters since it makes Vicewinder look less important than death rattle, reaving fangs, and steel fangs. The new design also makes it much easier to forget using uncoiled fury, and I don't think I've had a point in time in the past month of play where I ever let my energy gauge go over 55 or 60 on the awakening meter, nor did I often forget to use serpents ire on cooldown. It might just be lack of experience on the new version of viper since I've only had time to do a striking dummy test and expert roulette, though.

[Socram]

I hate this change so much. The job became "follow the glowing button" so literally now that you can turn your brain off

[GenghisChimp]

I'm so confused, who are these changes for? Viper really has nothing going for it now asides from being high apm. People (mostly jokingly) before said that this job was just following the dotted line, but that is genuinely all you do now lmfao. I'm very disappointed with these changes.

Congrats SE, you've appealed to very few people who were bad at Viper, instead of the many Viper players who loved this job before.