Poor Viper

[Chasingstars]

I don't have any words other than: Viper 80% less AOE damage beyond the first

[Reginald_Cain]

20% of vipers massive potency skills at the speed of which vipers attack is still pretty good my dude.

[Carighan]

The more important thing to take away is that it's a 43% reduction in incidental AoE damage on the burst combo. Which is both fine (Viper AoE damage during burst was high, and without sacrificing any on-target damage at all unlike other DPS) and kinda meh (it was a unique thing that Viper was so damn good at AoE, should have nerfed its single-target damage instead to specialize it).

[Chasingstars]

The more important thing to take away is that it's a 43% reduction in incidental AoE damage on the burst combo. Which is both fine (Viper AoE damage during burst was high, and without sacrificing any on-target damage at all unlike other DPS) and kinda meh (it was a unique thing that Viper was so damn good at AoE, should have nerfed its single-target damage instead to specialize it).

I am going to miss that as it always felt fun to use serpent's ire and reawaken in an optimized way to clear trashpacks and still have enough time for it to come back off cooldown just in time for the next boss. Now lets far less efficient.

[Carstien]

It's fine, really. VPR got just too much incidental damage from too many skills that just didn't need it and the result was a job that was great at single target damage and does more aoe splash damage than any other job for no good reason. In most AOE situations in things like dungeons this did not matter, but in the M6S adds phase, you weren't using normal AOE buttons, you prioritized targets and the splash damage put in an enormous amount of work. When VPR was hitting points of being 6-10k higher than the next highest job, you know it's a problem.

So now it's been dropped to...a job that does great single target damage and still does more aoe splash than most other jobs, just not as much as it did. Even at just 20%, having it on every hit of the awakening state is huge, having it at ranged with coil is also huge.

The reason nerfing single target instead would have been a terrible idea is because A: Most high end fights will be single target for the majority, VPR still needs to pull it's weight there as a job with no utility, just damage and B: Lowering the single target would incidentally nerf the AOE anyway unless it was just the filler you nerfed and in that case it would suffer more in older content (ultimates specifically) because the filler is more relevant there at lower levels when your awaken either sucks or just does not exist.

VPR doing fine, anyway.

[Karuya]

Viper is not fine at all. Only reason why people feel like viper is fine is because its uncoiled fury is the most stupid skill in the entire game and allows on its own the viper to have a decent dps in savage because it's way too easy to have nearly full uptime. But if you look at FRU where uncoiled fury is mostly useless, you will see that viper is currently the worst job in the game if you do a role/role comparison between all dps jobs in the game.

It was already the worst melee when FRU came out, but at least at that time viper was pretty good on P4 so it was not so bad, but now viper is the worst in the game in FRU P4 because of the two consecutive nerfs that it got on its aoe. This nerf was deserved, but going from 35% to 20% in a single patch is in my opinion completely ridiculous, like cutting 43% of aoe part in a single patch? Are you crazy? They should have gone to like 25%. Anyway, that's not even the reason why the viper is so bad in FRU so i actually don't care about the nerf, viper was obviously a problem in aoe, we saw it on M6S. But clearly viper should have been given a lot of dps balancing and gameplay improvements to compensate, but no it still got absolutely nothing and is still the worst designed job in the game one year after FRU came out.

I don't actually care about FRU, but have people thought about the next ultimate ? Like, to my knowledge the next ultimate is supposed to come out in like 5 months, so the previous patch was to my knowledge the last patch that we'll get before the ultimate comes out, so we are actually 100% sure that the viper will be the worst job in the game on the next ultimate by a very big margin(unless this ultimate is extremely different from the others and mostly full uptime, but no reason for it to be the case), am I the only one to see it? Unless devs actually do a patch when the ultimate comes out, but again that would be stupid, why patch it at the very last moment while you could have done it right now to see if the changes are fine before the ultimate comes out ? I'm pretty sure absolutely nothing will be done when the ultimate comes out. I mean, viper should have already been rebalanced when FRU came out because it was obvious that it would be trash, so i really was expecting big changes for the viper when FRU came out, but it got absolutely nothing, and still got absolutely nothing one year later, while other jobs keep getting improved everywhere.

[Karuya]

Uncoiled fury should be nerfed in some way because it completely destroys the global balance between melees in savage(like, you could allow viper to have only 2 stacks of uncoiled fury instead of 3, that would still be a 6 seconds ranged windows, still more than other melees), viper is always gonna be used in early savage prog because too easy full uptime if uncoiled fury is not nerfed. But on the other hand its dps should be balanced so it gets as good as the other jobs even with uncoiled fury nerfed, like simply heavily buff its vicewinder combo, small buff to reawaken, and nerf its filler combo to compensate, like that's easy obvious maths balance, ask any "viper theorycrafter" and you'll see what they say.

And viper should also be reworked to make its combo system actually fun like it was when it came out, i'm not talking about bringing noxious gnash back but just doing something else to make the combo system unique, and that looks extremely easy to do. Other people on this forum has already talked about this, for example you can just make it so that reaving fangs does less damage but buffs the two next uses of steel fangs, this would make a 12 combos loop for the viper, that would still be pretty easy to play but would be less boring overtime and would be kind of unique. You could also add a new downtime skill like a trap or something but that would require more work i guess so that seems unlikely.

[Karuya]

All this shit about viper just clearly proves to me that devs have absolutely no clue about how to make their game balanced and fun, and that they are completely hopeless. And players too honestly, like people playing other jobs being "jealous" about viper being too strong in savage but don't realize that it's actually just bad design/balance, but on the other hand the job is complete trash when its only useful skill becomes useless, and people keep saying "viper is fine", like "you can clear anything with anything" but forgetting that i'm gonna make my team lose hours of their prog time on the next ultimate not because i don't play well, but just because my job is absolute trash and people keep saying it's fine, but on the other hand those same people kept vomiting on the picto when it was broken when FRU came out. Like, viper came out the very same day pictomancer came out, the worst designed job in the game came out the very same day the most broken job in the game came out, what the actual kupo. One whole year with the viper in that state and no ones seems to realize how stupid this is.

And don't start saying like "oh you know the game has never been balanced for the ultimate", yes it has, like i just said picto was fully broken on FRU, but then got nerfed after some months so now it's not breaking the fight as hard anymore.

It's the first time in my life that i decided to change my main job because this is absolutely insufferable, i'm planning on doing the next ultimate but planning on doing it as a viper would currently mean shitting on my whole team. I was really excited about viper when it came out and I completely switched to it during a year, but since, everything that happened was just absolutely disgusting. Thank you square enix for being so bad at game designing/balancing that i don't even want to play my favorite job anymore.