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Hello r/Valorant! This is Getmytrade, or Fanaefane, or that nerd you dread seeing when you’re playing against a viper on the other team 😊. As of yesterday, I am ranked #251 in NA playing exclusively Viper and I know there has been a lot of discussion in the community as to what buffs/help she needs, and I figured I would give my 2cents.

Viper’s Strengths-

Largest Collection of 1 ways in the game-

There are many Viper 1 ways that are simply No Go zones for the enemy, from Shower on Bind, to B heaven Split, or B main Ascent. These 1 ways completely lock off a team from pushing a site, forcing them towards the only other site and a potential stack from your team! They are incredible versatile with even being able to 1 way retake areas in post plant! 1 ways in areas like Stairs of Ascent B site or CT entrance of Haven A are brutal for a team trying to coordinate pushes. No other smokers can do this as to my knowledge. Of course, they require some diligence outside of just queuing up, some time in customs are needed, but they are game changing and incredibly rewarding/tough to play against.

Stalling Ability-

As mentioned with the 1 ways keeping the opponents back, now we factor in Viper’s mollys. When used correctly, the toxins and snake bite are able to stall a push on a site for around 40 sec of each round! These 40 seconds are just at a minimum as if you have comms from your teammates and ask for info such as if there are enemy’s nearby, you can hold off and wait for the late push in the round to unload your utility at the perfect moment! This puts her in the S tier of stalling with the Sage’s and Sentinels of the game. Considering Sage has the highest win % of any agent right now I feel like this is often overlooked with Viper.

Post plant secures-

Ah yes, my time to shine. A viper with expansive knowledge of post plant line ups/gameplay WILL guarantee you the round 90% of the time you can get the bomb down. With properly spaced mollies, poison orbs on bomb, you have about 20sec off the 45 sec timer that bomb needs to explode. Assuming it takes 7 sec the bomb if start this process with around 25 sec left on timer you are almost guaranteed the round! Even if you must use the molly combo early, a quality Viper knows how to position herself post molly launch to be at the right time to strike when they finally get a chance to get to the bomb.

But its not all upside with Viper.....

Viper’s Weaknesses-

She is very time consuming. The amount of knowledge and line ups you need to be able to play Viper properly even on 1 map is massive compared to other smokers. Brim and Omen can just “Default” smoke because they see how their teammates are doing it in other games when they have to fill that role. There is no default smokes for Viper. Every wall, poison orb, is something you don’t get back and must be used to maximum efficiency or it will feel like to your teammates that you aren’t even playing a smoker.

She can be very telegraphed. If you are solo smoking as Viper, putting walls down too early in the pre-round or in a predictable way, an enemy team can always choose to stack the area that you are smoking. In order to combat this, I recommend that you always ask 1 of your teammates to lurk on the other site while your team is getting pressure, so the enemy rotates off. If you have a sage (Viper’s #1 BFF) you can choose to do this less as Sage wall is pretty much a guaranteed plant.

BIGGEST POINT - Snake bites take too long to load up and get back to gun. It’s interesting that her Wall and Poison Orb can pretty much be auto equipped and shot as soon as you click for the animation, and yet her Snake Bite takes well over 1sec to just get ready to launch. The amount of times I’ve died trying to get this thing out and the enemy pushed me is way too much. It needs the animation time uptime/ and downtime to be drastically reduced. It should feel something like Spiderman shooting out a web. HOWEVER, DO NOT TAKE AWAY THE LOADING ANIMATION ENTIRELY. The reason for this being is a lot of Viper mains use the C crosshair UI above the ability to measure their line ups! If you were to make it instantaneous such as a brim stim, you could severely hurt the Viper’s Community of knowledge with their line ups which would be much more of a nerf then buff.

So all of this text to try and answer these questions.

Is she Viable?

and

Does she need buffs?

Yes, and yes.

Viper is quietly in the A tier of agents at the moment as she has the best post plant in the game, as well as one of the best stalling abilities. This means that over tuning any of her decay ratios, damage of molly, or toxin length may result in her quickly getting OP. Here is the best way to go about a Viper buff. (this will be my opinion as well as the collective opinion of the biggest Viper discord, Viper’s den.)

1. Snakebite’s loading and ending animation needs to be DRASTICALLY reduced. It still needs a loading dock in UI for line ups, but in a way it’s a Viper’s Panic button and she needs to be able to use it with urgency.

2. Reduce the amount of Orbs of Viper Ult to 6. This is my personal one. Currently, I hardly ever take Orbs from my teammates to get to Ult because it can be so difficult to coordinate my team in unison with a Viper ult. There are so many things that can go wrong. You can just get spammed with gunfire or utility from outside smoke while in ult. They can camp the spike plant and jump in as soon as you make a plant sound. There is no sight advantage for your teammates, (even for yourself it feels at times) in ult so it’s just a wild west of reaction speed and prediction. It is by far the toughest ult to use properly in the game. Adding to the fact that is so situational; do you use it to lock down a site? To entry? If you hear a full push towards you is it worth it? What if they just rotate off? Not only that, but you can go an entire half without ever getting a “real” chance to use it properly. I consider Viper more a Sentinel than a controller, which means she may be on the bottom of frags because her duty is to support the team by staying alive, rather than to get kills and die. This means farming orbs are difficult for her! Sometimes the enemy team can choose to avoid her entirely! So how is it fair for her to have to get to 7 orbs just to use an ult that you can just in many cases, avoid. Bring Viper ult to 6 orbs.

3. Make Viper’s Poison Orb have a secondary interface that will show where it will land much like Omen’s secondary interface of smokes. This will be a huge boost to new players trying to pick up Viper for the first time, and is a feature almost unanimously agreed to have helped the omen community out.

Hope you guys enjoyed my take on Viper’s current status in the meta, and good luck to my opponents trying to sniff out my molly post plant spots 😉.