When they make balance changes for melee, they have to understand that, in the context of Frontline, melee is the hardest role to play well. But when you do, it has the highest payout. We are by far the best role overall at a certain skill threshold. We're absurdly sturdy while having incredible burst, but it takes a lot of awareness to know how to play that aggressively, especially prior to the battle high change. Having that said, you can't really balance melee around overall usage statistics. More than any of the other roles, you're just going to get more people struggling to get anywhere with it. There's really few people in an informed position that uses Swift, so you can't use the poor usage rates of Swift as a metric. You should really get data from people who clearly understand the role.

On that note, viper, the heavenly emperor of padding, is already one of the most annoying jobs in the game. I am not saying it's over or underpowered. It's just not fun to fight. It was already an annoying job to fight, and it's not fun gameplay to use MNK/RPR/DNC LB to have to go through their relatively short CD that's accelerated by all the practically free assists they get for just existing. Please reconsider the 60% passive damage reduction on viper (and 55% DR on GNB, on that note). If your metrics insist the job needs help for some reason, buff it in anything that's not related to their stall-based gameplay loop.