Every Change I Would Make to Wraith and His Kit
Introduction
Wraith is a very simple and basic Killer. He's very easy to play, but better players will understand that his kit doesn't offer any real help in chase potential, and won't commit to chases very long. Instead players will use his stealth and mobility to go for tags to, in theory keep everyone injured so tags can become downs. As a new player, Wraith won't be hard to mechanically master, but the way he plays will be valuable to teach new players that they shouldn't over-commit, and that you need to be paying attention to all 4 Survivors. He isn't that strong either, so his kit won't carry new players into doing well *cough Freddy! cough.* I created this discussion because I wanted to talk mostly about his base-kit, and buffs I think he deserves that will make him, much less add-on dependent (which is something the Developers seem to be leaning towards), and they're pretty simple to implement since the changes are only changing values of base-kit and add-ons.
Movement Speed
Currently, in cloak he moves 126.5% movement speed (5.06 m/s), which in the scheme of things, really isn't much faster. For his mobility to be worth it, he needs one of the 3 add-ons in the Windstorm family of add-ons, which boosts his movement speed by 15%, 20%, and 25% depending on the rarity (Yellow, Green, and Purple). As a Wraith player I always use a Windstorm add-on, and it's usually the Yellow variant, because I don't think he needs more then that. The change I'm requesting is that his base-kit movement speed is increased to 140% (5.6 m/s), and that his Windstorm add-ons are nerfed accordingly. With the base kit change I laid out, taking 5% off each add-on would make his max speed only slightly higher then it is now (with Purple and Green Windstorm as he is now he moves 171.5%. With my changes he would move 175% with the same add-ons).
His Uncloak
Something else I think he needs, is changes to his uncloak speed. As it is now it takes 3 seconds to uncloak, and he has 3 add-ons in the Swift Hunt family of add-ons that reduce the time to uncloak by 8% (0.24 sec), 10% (0.30 sec), and 12% (0.36 sec) depending on the rarity (Yellow, Green, and Purple). The current fastest uncloak, which requires the Purple and Green add-on (which also means no Windstorm), would take off 0.66 sec, and make the uncloak 2.34 sec. For such a lengthy base-kit uncloak these values aren't really worth it. I think the uncloak should be a bit shorter, to make base kit more viable, and the add-ons would get slightly increased percentages to keep them appealing. The Developers could tinker with this a lot more then I can (as they can see how the balance of these buffs actually feels), but the values I used would make the uncloak 2.6 seconds, and buff the add-ons to 9% (0.234 sec), 12% (0.312 sec), and 15% (0.390 sec). The goal of this buff was to take close to 0.5 second off the base kit uncloak, and make the fastest possible uncloak be about 1.9 sec, since I think any less might be too strong. I also made the difference in each add-on 3% so there was more variety. It's possible the buff to his Swift Hunt is too much (his fastest uncloak would be 1.898 sec which might be a bit much), but it's really hard to experiment with double Swift Hunt, since in his current state he desperately needs at least one Windstorm add-on. At the very least a decrease in his base-kit uncloak should be considered.
Some Other Small Add-on Changes
Those are two changes I think he needs to be playable with no add-ons. As I mentioned earlier, he needs a movement speed increase, a shorter uncloak would be nice, and it's possible I went a little overboard with the Swift Hunt buff. The majority of his add-ons are all very well designed. Wraith honestly has one of the strongest add-on kits in the game. I did have a few small changes that I thought of for a few of his weaker add-ons. For "The Serpent" - Soot add-on, he should have the uncloak visually appear more gradual and/or the delay before you can hit someone should be shorter. As it is now, the add-on is almost pointless, very niche, and it feels misleading and wonky with how long you can't swing. I also thought that increasing the Cloak time and buffing the "Blink" add-ons could make them more appealing, because as they are now the Cloak is too fast to warrant wanting it faster. Increasing or decreasing the Cloak time has almost no effect on gameplay, so another solution would be rework the "Blink" add-ons to do something different (maybe increase movement speed while uncloaking? Sadly that would be kind of pointless as well, which is why this wasn't my initial suggestion).
His Perks
One last thing I want to talk about, is Wraiths terrible perks. Now I understand for Predator and Bloodhound they're meant to help you learn to track, and honestly Bloodhound fits that role. I know some people who used it before, and it did it's job well. However, a problem with it is that they had trouble getting used to not having it, once they wanted to take it off. I don't know how you fix that, but instead of brighter blood, the perk could somehow indicate for you to look for blood? Honestly the perk isn't really a problem, that was just something I wanted to quickly mention. I mostly wanted to talk about the other 2 perks: Predator and Shadowborn. A problem with Predator is it can actually make tracking harder, as there will be scratch marks all over the place, so it's harder to tell where the survivor came from, and where the survivor ended up going. I'm pretty sure most people would agree with me on that, maybe I'm wrong, but easy solution make it so scratch marks last 2/3/4 seconds longer, a counter to Light Weight. Finally is Shadowborn. Now honestly, I think an FOV slider should just exist in the settings but if the Developers don't think that would be fair/balanced, or there's some other problem stopping them that's fine, but my change to Shadowborn is make it so it gives you an FOV slider from 0% up to 15% (or more if you wanna slightly buff Shadowborn). This way someone can control how much extra FOV they want, and if they want to stop using it, they can start decreasing by 1% at a time (all Shadowborn users can attest it is like a drug, and it's very hard to stop using it). I also thought of giving it a Bloodpoint bonus, because it just feels like a waste of a perk slot, unless you're already super used to it. So I thought you could gain 50/75/100% more extra Bloodpoints every time you find a new/different survivor. Also for this BP bonus (and it should apply for Distressing, Beast of Prey, and Hex: Thrill of the Hunt as well), it should apply for after the match, because reaching 8K faster in a specific category is dumb. An easy solution for this is to make the max for the category double or increased while the perk is equipped.
Conclusion
Well I went on much longer then I intended, I hope this reaches a Developer, but even if it doesn't I'd like to hear people's thoughts on these changes to Wraith, mostly on the Windstorm and Swift Hunt change, the rest were just small changes I'd make if I was a Developer and had the chance to look at every aspect of his character. Let me know if there are other changes you think should be considered as well!
Comments
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Won't reach anyone in the general discussions tab so I'd suggest making a post in there about it instead. And trust me we've been wanting these changes for Wraith literally for years now and they've done nothing but bugged him in almost every patch recently so there's no chance they'll see this lmao. I've had to stop playing Wraith almost entirely because he's unplayable without windstorm, and I don't have any available because I'm still grinding a ludicrous amount of BPs for perks on other killers and survivors and nothing is being done about that either. At least blight and Oni are fine addonless.
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As someone who enjoys playing Wraith and all the various builds that can work on him, these changes to improve his basekit would be welcome. Especially increasing his movement speed while cloaked.
I don't really think his time-to-cloak should be made slower; I would rather see the Blink add-ons reworked to have a different effect. Maybe they could reduce the visibility of Wraith's silhouette while he's cloaked and moving instead?
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@ALostPuppy Yeah I think anyone who's ever played Wraith will agree he deserves some level of speed increase in his cloak. Also where do you think I should move this too? It should be in General, but it bugged out when I posted it, and somehow posted twice so I don't know if it got messed up.
@APoipleTurtle I wasn't sure what a good change would be, but decreased visibility/less shimmer would be cool (could maybe decrease his foot stomping as well), liked the idea.
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