Comprehensive Trapper Feedback

XRuecian

I decided to write this feedback after spending some time playing trapper. I am by no means a top-tier player yet, but i believe i have seen enough to give some useful feedback. I doubt much of what i say here will be new to anyone who is familiar with all of the killers, but i wanted to write it anyways just to reinforce the feedback for the trapper.

When i first started playing DBD again after over a year, i started playing trapper (at low ranks) and at first, i thought it was great. People were getting trapped, i felt like i was properly placing down good traps and it was working. However (similar to the wraith) i realized that it had nothing to do with the trapper or his traps, i was just playing against new players who were still unfamiliar with the game.

First off, this feedback is being based around average and higher skill level play. If you are still new to the game, all killers probably feel overpowered to you. But once you grow and learn, this will change. So please, if you are a survivor who is still below rank 12, don't come here and give feedback about things you still haven't learned.

As soon as you get to around rank 10+ you quickly start to see the real differences in killers start to appear. Almost nobody ever steps on my traps anymore unless i literally force them into a place where they have no choice (and no dead hard). There is literally nothing i can do to change this. No matter how skillful i get as a trapper, it will not make my traps magically better. When playing against survivors who are aware and skillful, the trapper might as well not have any killer power at all. The traps are, if anything, wasting your time more than helping you because of how far spread out they spawn in the map. I started noticing these problems at mid-ranks. I can't imagine how much worse it must be for trapper at top ranks.

If you compare trapper to other killers abilities and skill-ceilings, you can't say that trapper is in a good spot when Freddy can basically do what trapper does, but faster and more efficiently, while still having a mobility power as well.

Freddy can use his snares to stop looping, it takes almost no time to set freddy's dream snares, his snares are invisible, he doesn't have to pick them up to use them again, and he STILL gets a mobility skill, on top of having no real terror radius. When comparing killers, there is really no way you can say that trapper is on-par with the others.

The main problems trapper has right now that needs to be fixed:

1- The traps take up too much of your time to pick up and set. Mostly because of how far away they are. Time is the most important resource in DBD. Everything in this game is a race. Making a killer who has to spend SO MUCH of his precious time to set up traps (that barely have success) is such an enormous downside for the trapper. This could be fine if he had enough upsides to compensate, but he doesn't. You could fix this problem by either making the traps set a little quicker and perhaps adding a couple more traps to the map overall (or make them spawn a little more centralized so you dont have to walk all the way cross country to get one trap.

2- He is overly addon-dependant. The trapper is almost unplayable without using a bag addon. This should be a glaring obvious problem for the developers that something is wrong with the trapper. Addons are supposed to be additional bonuses to help your playstyle, not required pieces of equipment to make your killer powers viable. Without a bag addon, trapper can only hold one trap at a time. If you are new to the game (or haven't played trapper much) this might not sound like a huge deal. But being able to only hold one trap just reinforces the first problem. If i have to walk super far to pick up one trap and bring it back, and then walk BACK to the same corner again to get the second trap, i now have to spend 2x as much TIME traveling to get traps. Being able to hold just TWO traps makes an unbelieveable difference in time saves. Now you can pick up two traps when you go out of your way to get traps in the corner. Not to mention being able to hold 2 traps really allows you to use much more interesting tactics in-the-moment when you need to set something up. The trapper should probably be able to hold at least 2 traps by default. Another problem with the bag addons is they actually add MORE traps to the map (making the bag addons even more necessary.) The bag addons should just let you carry (and start with) more traps, NOT change how many total traps are on the map.

3- The trapper has too much counterplay. As soon as you go up against mid-skill level players or higher, the trapper starts to feel like an M1 killer with no power. Your traps can be disarmed in just a couple of seconds, they are way too easy to see on a lot of maps, and even when you hide them very very well, a good player will still never step on a trap. AND even if you do snare a survivor, unless it happens directly beside you, it basically does you no good. You might have spent a full 30-40 seconds picking up and setting traps, just to have a survivor finally hit one and escape in one attempt in like 4 seconds. There is very little you can do with your own skill as a trapper to fix this. At least other killers have abilities that, if mastered and used well, can be used to keep up with the skill level of survivors. The trapper hits a skill level ceiling very early and survivors will continue to grow past it. You should make the trapper have more powerful traps that if used well will rewards good skilled play, and perhaps that can be used in more ways than just setting a beartrap on the floor so that he has more options available to mix things up. Another huge problem is that an injured survivor stepping on a trap has literally zero consequences. If you are healthy, and you hit a trap, you at least become injured. But if you were already injured, you can just step on a trap, probably escape within seconds, and be just as injured as before. This seems a little unfair for the killer. The player made a mistake, they should be punished for it in some way. I think if an injured survivor steps on your trap, they should have a much lower chance of escaping without help, and perhaps get the BROKEN or MANGLED/HEMORRHAGE debuff for a bit if they do escape. Traps should also have a bit higher minimum snare-time. Some players escape traps in one try, which is 4 seconds. Even if you happened to be close, 4 seconds is often still not enough to get to them. I think this could be increased to 6-8 seconds per escape attempt instead of 4. Traps are also disarmed a little too quickly (and easily). I think the skillchecks for disabling traps should be just a tad bit harder, and if you fail the skillcheck you should get injured or revealed, or something. There should be a risk-reward tradeoff for attempting to disable the killers power. Let's also mention that players can dead-hard over your traps. If a player can dash over my traps, shouldn't i be able to walk over my OWN traps too? At least if im not carrying a survivor, i should NOT have to worry about stepping on my own traps. Imagine if hag had to avoid her own traps. It's silly.

4- Your traps dont blend at all on some maps. Especially the indoor maps which obviously have no grass to hide traps in, not only do you have to traverse a maze just to FIND your traps to set in the first place, but then there are so few places to hide a trap that they become useless. You should probably make the traps slightly change colors depending on what map you are playing on. They dont have to be super camouflaged, but placing a peach colored trap to a concrete floor is basically useless. And even if you use a tar bottle addon to darken your traps for those maps, now you have a dark brown trap on a concrete floor, which is still just as visible. The camo-addons should actually change the color of your trap to blend with that specific map environment.

The trapper seems like he would be my favorite killer to play, if i didn't feel like i was shooting myself in the foot when i do. I have to basically rely on luck rather than skill to catch survivors (Escaping a trap is literally luck based). He actually doesn't need any huge reworks to become viable. Its mostly just a few number tweaks that are keeping him behind. Too much of his kit takes too much time out of him, giving the survivors pretty much at least one if not two guaranteed generators at the beginning. Especially now that Hex:Ruin was changed. And i liked that Ruin was changed, i didn't like the fact that it felt like a necessary perk. But now it has unfortunately pushed trapper even further down. Basically all that really needs to be done is make his traps slightly more difficult to escape (and less RNG based), punish injured players for stepping on traps again, allow trapper to carry 2 traps by default, and make his traps spawn a little more centralized so that he doesn't have to waste entire minutes trying to get all of his traps. He doesn't need more mobility, he doesn't need new powers, he doesn't need magical throwing traps. He just needs a little quality of life tweaks and he would be in the perfect spot.

Iron

I agree with this analysis, honestly I would love to see him start with and be able to hold another one or two traps on hand, this would make setup a lot faster as I've spent many matches running around not being able to place more than 2-3 traps before I need to pressure gens.