Poor Viper

[NightHour]

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

No, not poor Viper at all.


AOE Nerf but was buffed on Single Target.


Viper's were overpowered as hell in M6S adds phase, no wonder they're nerfing the AOE fall off.

[Chasingstars]

It was insanely overpowered at last raid tier so its deserved. I was barred from joining parties as a ninja because people were saying "jUsT pLaY ViPeR iT's BetTer!". Balance is important.

Oh no, ninja dethroned for once in being a job not required for a raid tier. The inhumanity.

[Deejudanne]

"Oh no, anyway" honestly doesn't matter at all, it's not noticeable in maps anyway since the range is still good enough since everyones pretty much sleeping in map contents

[Reginald_Cain]

Oh no, ninja dethroned for once in being a job not required for a raid tier. The inhumanity.

I know they don't balance around job difficulty but Ninja isn't as intuitive as Viper at all. It's nice to see it not be at the bottom of the melee list for that reason alone to me personally.

[NightHour]

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.

Viper is bad in FRU because of the sheer amount of downtime in that fight.

[Karuya]

Coming back here to give some answers and talk about today's patch.

NightHour user said "AOE Nerf but was buffed on Single Target." That's not true, you read the patch wrong, the viper got nothing in single target, the aoe BURST was nerfed, but the aoe FILLER was buffed, which is globally a really big nerf. Like i've already said, the nerf was deserved, but going from 35% aoe damage to 20% in a single patch is a really stupid move, and we now can tell this was the case with the statistics, viper has become the worst dps in P4 of FRU even including ranged dps, and viper is really bad on M10S which is the only "aoe" fight in the last tier.

NightHour also said "Viper is bad in FRU because of the sheer amount of downtime in that fight.", if that's the case then why the samourai and the reaper are actually decent ? There are a lot of ways viper can be adjusted to be fine in FRU and in any ultimate content, i gave examples in my messages.

Finally for today's patch, reaper has been buffed. That's really cool, but again actually bad : lately, the reaper has been really bad on savage content. But at the same time, reaper has always been pretty decent on FRU, even really good in the last months. Which means that today's buff is gonna balance the reaper on the savage, good thing, but at the same time is gonna completely break the reaper on FRU, it's gonna possibly get even better than the monk who has been the best melee for a long time on FRU. And it also means that the reaper is probably gonna be too strong on the next ultimate also.

Developers should have done more, in my opinion the buff is good, but it should have been balanced by a slight nerf on the gluttony which is in my opinion the reason why reaper is strong on FRU.

So yes, another example of a bad balance by the devs. And again, the viper still hasn't got anything, the viper before today's patch was second to last in the last savage tier, now the reaper is buffed so the viper is the worst melee in the las ttier, and currently is by far the worst on FRU being 10% weaker than the monk, which is roughly equivalent to a 15 ilvl difference. But yeah we should not complain, let's lose 10 hours of prog because devs don't know how to balance their game and be happy with it.

[Carighan]

FFXIV players once again struggling with the concept that if classes aren't 100% identical then they will naturally be better or worse at certain types of content.

(Also Viper has far bigger issues than whether Reaper or Monk or whoever outdamages it in a single fight that ~nobody does looking at the playerbase at large - first of all it'd need a design and an identity before we talk about balance, no?)

[Karuya]

You're the one struggling about reading apparently. The viper is not better or worse at certain types of content, since today, the viper is the worst melee in the game, any type of content, any fight, period. But yeah looking at your messages it's pretty obvious you don't care at all about performance or balance, only thing that matters to you is jobs' identity and design, which is fine and i also think that identity and design is a big problem in the current game especially for the viper, but that's not at all what i'm talking about, identity changes and that kind of thing will not happen right now but maybe in 8.0, so stop talking about things you absolutely don't know and don't care about and that i don't even talk about here. There are absolutely obvious way to balance viper even without changing anything about it's design and i've already explained it in my previous messages. I'm writing those messages with the stupid hope that a next ultimate day one patch would happen to make the viper kind of playable, and the only way would be for people to just please open their eyes, i don't know. Just look at stats.

https://fr.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/73?dpstype=cdps

This shows viper will probably be the weakest melee from now on the current savage. Not a big margin, but still the weakest.

https://fr.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/65?dpstype=cdps

This shows viper being by a gigantic margin the worst melee on FRU, being 10% weaker than monk, the biggest dps gap between two dps within the same role i have ever seen on this game for a "recent content" entire fight.

https://fr.fflogs.com/zone/statistic...s=1079&phase=4

This shows the most stupid dps situation i have ever seen on that game during a unique phase : viper being weaker than every ranged dps on a two target scenarion, and that the last nerf on aoe viper was the most violent stupid nerf we have ever seen on that game. Again, was deserved, but going from 35% aoe to 20% is absolute madness. And don't get me wrong, i'm not at all saying that black mage is fine, it is not.

Nothing to add, if people don't realize that there is a gigantic problem looking at those datas, just means they don't know how to read them, which is fine for regular players, but is absolutely not fine for a developer that is in charge of balancing the game.