Viper Changes: Do the devs even play this game?

[Anonmoose]

I don't post a lot, I tend to keep my head down and just let things play out but I feel the need to provide my feedback on this, and I want to do it in its own thread so the devs know there's a lot of frustration here.

Apparently a small minority of players struggled with the job on Day 1 and complained, the devs saw the complaints and wouldn't budge on their 100% commitment to change the job based off immediate feedback. It makes sense if people were complaining early, a lot of the job's actual problems relates to lower level VPR design (the kit unlocks FAR too late, if this were an older job, there would be some blend of lv 50-60, 70 and 80 versions of reawakening and vicewinder). Meanwhile 100 VPR felt awesome to play in 7.00-7.01. A lot of people tried to communicate desires not to change VPR between 7.01 and 7.05 - the community saved VPR positionals according to the adjustments job guide patch notes, which is great, but now we're stuck with a course corrected change to VPR which is trying to fix a problem that never existed in the first place.

Noxious gnash was the only part of the job that required any forethought in order to land two ouroboros inside buff windows - it was the fun to optimize with it. It was something to be conscious of in the minute prior to each burst window. Now, you only need to press the glowing buttons to do a perfect rotation - it plays itself now. All that does is make it less fun as it wasn't difficult to begin with. We only had 2 things to juggle, our positioning, and that debuff.

Why were the devs even considering removing its positionals when the job had barely gotten into our hands, initially? Give people time to get used to new things and stop being so trigger-happy on sweeping changes that no one wants. Hundreds of thousands of us did not complain because we were happy with it - we were busy enjoying it! No one rushes to write a good review for a decent Big Mac, so only the most upset vocal minority would post here instead of enjoying the game during the first hours of its major expansion launch. Unless thousands upon thousands of players give feedback (coughkaitencough), please stop and collect better feedback before drastic changes to classes - or better yet, put out official polls that will give you a bigger sample size than just the small minority who even know these forums exist.

The speed at which the devs caved on the design of Viper and decided it needed change is really disheartening as a veteran player. It's like they don't play the game, if they don't understand why bad changes like this would make the class boring.

[Kalocin]

They don't read English forums and they removed one of their healers from the balance team for being too good. They force everyone into 2 min burst windows because there's too many jobs and balancing them would require hiring more people. That's the blunt truth. There's no skill expression.

[Rhael]

Why neuter the only thing about this class that took ANY skill?

I'm sorry, but managing a single debuff has never taken any skill. It was, however, critically important for the texture and feel of the job. Now it's gone, and - when combined with extending every other timer viper had to manage to 60s - the job feels flat and empty. The removal of the debuff may be the most prominent example to point to, but it is not the only problem with the changes. Extending the rest of the timers to 60s is just as bad for the feel of the job.