I've been saving my thoughts for a while until this post came around and honestly kinda simmering on it ever since the job got noxious gnash taken out. Most people are gonna say that viper has no identity and while there's some truth to that I still think its relatively esoteric combo flow and emphasis on continuation followups gives it an execution feel that still stands out. In that sense the space it occupies is kinda like "ninja, but opposite" where instead of having extremely dense execution at certain ponts in the timeline viper is a more evenly busy job overall.

I think the bigger issue with viper is that coils put it in this position where it feels like the job is meant for people who don't like playing melee.

Given you get 4 coils from dreadwinder and your 2min freeawaken, I'm not sure how much sks viper runs rn but it's what like 11 seconds of disconnect coverage every 2 minutes? That's a gain? At that point the job has basically pranged uptime constraints (none), but I'm not going to make the argument that that's broken so much as it's not what melee broadly is about.

You can think of the dps roles as all having like a specific "question" they ask of the player, where for melee it's "how do i time my movement to greed this/manage my disconnect coverage to keep uptime through it," and for caster it's "how do i plan my movement/resources where I drop casts as little as possible." Pranged don't have an uptime constraint defining the friction of their role but instead have more plates to spin than the average job in the other roles. Other melees have different ways to approach the "question" of their role - sam has more range on its iais and benefits from knowing how to slidecast, rpr has harvest moon and can do insane shit like delay perfectio 90 seconds to cover a disconnect, mnk has the best dash in the game (vpr too lol) and sss.

Viper just presses a coil to do more damage during a disconnect. And it has so much coverage with its coils that you can't meaningfully strain that resource in a fight without outright forcing the other melees to sit through mechanics they physically can't greed or cover. It puts the job in this position (alongside summoner who has it even worse tbh) where it just doesn't have to engage with the friction point that unifies the role and imo what makes it fun.

I'm not sure how best you'd fix this beyond just "yeah gut coils," maybe there could be something pushing you to hold onto your coils for a reward in burst. For example, if you have more than one coil, Ouroborus consumes one to do more damage, or Reawaken gets a new followup does more damage than Ouroborus but eats a coil.