A lot of people are saying Vyper needs a nerf. While I think the dread around her is generally overblown and she obviously hasn't been out for long enough to tell how strong she actually is, there was one thing about her that notably felt "cheap" to me, regardless of her actual strength. Vyper's defining feature for her gameplay is how she interacts with the game's sliding mechanic. She's a character with an insanely high fire rate and dps, dampened by the fact that she empties her magazine in a second if firing normally (as well as her massive spread but that's besides the point for now). In order to fire continuously, she needs to take advantage of the universal mechanic of having a bottomless clip while sliding, something she is better at doing than most characters due to her passive ability and its upgrades. This is a super interesting and compelling character design to me, a character that recontextualizes a universal mechanic is always a cool design space to play around in and Vyper is for the most part a super clean execution of that.
The one place where that falls apart for me is that the premise of "you have to fire while sliding or else you'll have to reload" doesn't feel like it actually holds up, because reloading doesn't feel like an issue. Her reload time is pretty standard, and considering what it's actually doing is refreshing her ability to have infinite ammo it feels strange for it to be so inconsequential. If the feeling of playing the hero is meant to be around sliding as much as possible to make use of your bottomless magazine, which to me is by far the most interesting version of the character, then reaching the bottom of your clip in a bad situation should be an "oh crap, I fucked up" moment. This is maybe even more true when it comes to towers, where the bullet spread drawback of the weapon is much less of a factor, and your ammo is all that's limiting how fast you can melt away the health bar of an objective. When you mess up and run out off ammo, (or run out of stamina, and then consequentially out of ammo), it should hurt, so that mastering your sliding and conserving your ammo to use the character effectively feels that much more clean.
There are many ways you could try to achieve this feeling. You could just straight up increase the reload time, you could make Vyper suffer some negative effect or vulnerability while reloading, you could make it so Vyper can't reload while sliding, idk I'm sure there are plenty of things you could try and already have tried. The main issue I ran into when thinking about it was that because of how much more realistic it is to maintain slide uptime in the late game than the early game, any drawback that would be meaningful once a build comes online would feel agonizing if it was applied equally during early game, so it feels like whatever punishment is applied to reloading needs to scale with the game phase. My idea was to have your reload time scale with your fire rate, or alternatively simply with your level. I think changing the way simple stat changes affects your character could lead to some interesting decision making, but I could see players not enjoying the items they buy making them weaker in some aspect, so it might be a difficult needle to thread.
I hope this post managed to give yall on the dev team some kind of insight or inspiration you didn't already have, and I look forward to seeing where you take the character.
The one place where that falls apart for me is that the premise of "you have to fire while sliding or else you'll have to reload" doesn't feel like it actually holds up, because reloading doesn't feel like an issue. Her reload time is pretty standard, and considering what it's actually doing is refreshing her ability to have infinite ammo it feels strange for it to be so inconsequential. If the feeling of playing the hero is meant to be around sliding as much as possible to make use of your bottomless magazine, which to me is by far the most interesting version of the character, then reaching the bottom of your clip in a bad situation should be an "oh crap, I fucked up" moment. This is maybe even more true when it comes to towers, where the bullet spread drawback of the weapon is much less of a factor, and your ammo is all that's limiting how fast you can melt away the health bar of an objective. When you mess up and run out off ammo, (or run out of stamina, and then consequentially out of ammo), it should hurt, so that mastering your sliding and conserving your ammo to use the character effectively feels that much more clean.
There are many ways you could try to achieve this feeling. You could just straight up increase the reload time, you could make Vyper suffer some negative effect or vulnerability while reloading, you could make it so Vyper can't reload while sliding, idk I'm sure there are plenty of things you could try and already have tried. The main issue I ran into when thinking about it was that because of how much more realistic it is to maintain slide uptime in the late game than the early game, any drawback that would be meaningful once a build comes online would feel agonizing if it was applied equally during early game, so it feels like whatever punishment is applied to reloading needs to scale with the game phase. My idea was to have your reload time scale with your fire rate, or alternatively simply with your level. I think changing the way simple stat changes affects your character could lead to some interesting decision making, but I could see players not enjoying the items they buy making them weaker in some aspect, so it might be a difficult needle to thread.
I hope this post managed to give yall on the dev team some kind of insight or inspiration you didn't already have, and I look forward to seeing where you take the character.
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