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(Controversial) Why do people defend the nurse for because she's hard to play?
Alright, I started thinking about this after @MadLordJack said that nurse was busted and OP and that he hated how people defend nurse because she's "the hard one".
Nurse is by far the best killer in dbd, and I see more people wanting spirit and deathslinger nerfed than nurse, who has even less counterplay. Now, I agree that deathslinger and spirit do need some tweaks to their kit, but why not nurse? I see people defend her saying "she's a high skill killer", at least with deathslinger you can break LOS and pre drop pallets, slinger takes a lot of skill to play, almost as much as nurse, and I see more people talking about slinger than nurse.
I'm not saying nurse needs a nerf or anything, but I just want to know why people defend her for being high skill. She has almost no counterplay, you can't juke a nurse, the nurse misses, and since she no clips through everything, you can't use pallets or vaults as well.
Comments
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You haven’t tried playing Nurse before, have you?
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What does that have to do with what I'm saying?
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She is very slow. When her power is on CD, she is at a weak point. She is very powerful, bordering on op, but imo she is in a good spot.
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Nurse is a shell of her former self. She used to have three blinks as default and just got absurd with add ons, plus she's buggy. On the swamp maps you can't even blink onto the piers right now and on more than one occasion I've blinked into the basement while chasing someone. She needs help.
Spirit didn't have collision when phasing and iirc Deathslinger hasn't been changed. As more people play them, people will get better at dealing with those two killers.
In days of old you used to only see Nurse and Hillbilly at high ranks and maybe the occasional Trapper. Nowadays you don't see Nurse, so people just forget she exists.
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Thanks for being civil about it, I didn't want nurse to get a CD, I just wanted some changes to her actual problems, like long blinks.
I agree that she is bordering on OP, but I don't think she needs a nerf, because of the changes the devs made to her.
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She is the strongest killer and regardless of what people say - THIS is the killer without counter play. Running back and forth and weaving about, all you're doing is trying to make the other play miss, it's their mistake to make.
That said seeing a top level nurse is extremely rare and that's why people don't complain. Nurse herself is rare let along a really good one, meanwhile people will face Spirits and deathslingers all day long and so that's why they tend to receive all of the complaints.
Trust me if every DBD killer started playing and practicing only nurse then in a few weeks survivors would be begging to have spirit and deathslinger back. Especially a slugging nurse.
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Oh yeah, I remember when she had 3 blinks and a normal lunge when she blinked.
The bugs are so annoying and kept me from learning her further, because second blinks don't work. I hate it when I accidentally blink into the basemenrt while chasing someone as well, it's so ######### annoying.
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Because statistically speaking nurse doesnt have a high win rate due to difficulty. So against the average nurse you are more likely to win against than slinger / spirit.
Also Nurse is much more interactive than slinger and Spirit. As a survivor you can see and hear nurse charge up, you can tell how long she has charged up for and react accordingly. Whereas Slinger and Spirit you have no feedback.
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For me, I think there needs to be a killer at her power level in the game. Yeah, a god tier Nurse is insanely difficult to beat for most players. You can make her take a bit longer to down you, but she will down you. However, to beat 4 god tier survivors, you need to be a god tier Nurse or Spirit. She's the counterbalance for the top percentile of survivors. Otherwise nothing would ever beat them. Freddy definitely isn't doing it because camping pallets is viable in a 4-5 minute game, so snares aren't doing much. Same for Billy. Conceivably Hag, but the stars really have to align. There's not much after that.
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Nurse requires a unique skillset that has a medium-high skill floor, and a nearly unlimited potential for skill ceiling.
To get hits with her it requires usage of her power which is also one of the most punishing powers in the game for missing because of fatigue, into cooldown, into distance lost and sometimes even missing one power usage bad enough can lose chases altogether.
But on the upside she doesn't have to worry about most conventional means of survivor protection.
So for having the most potentially punishing killer power in the game you get the upside of reducing the protection survivors get
People don't complain about it usually because not many play nurse for the simple facts that she is really punishing to play poorly as, and has a high skill floor and an even higher skill ceiling so its unlikely you are facing a really good nurse which means its usually fun for the survivors to play against, getting nurse with simple baits and jukes becomes their new playstyle of trying to get the killers power to work against the killer which more people find fun then agitating.
Also nurse has already been taken down a tier from S+++ to S tier, she is decently balanced at the moment with strong basekit and no game breaking addons so people are pretty much already happy with her large fall from op far and above the rest to extremely strong a step above the rest
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Exactly why I like playing against good nurses more than slingers and spirits, at least I get feedback and can react to her.
Fair analysis, I guess a god nurse is the same as those extremely rare tournament squads, because you don't see a god nurse or tourney squad every game.
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I'd disagree and say there is at least a little bit of counterplay to Nurse. Arguably there's more counterplay to Nurse than to Deathslinger (or spirit for that matter) but that's just my opinion. The only difference is that Nurse's counterplay relies a lot less on pallets and loops, and a lot more on mindgames and jukes based on the Killer's first person POV and your own third person camera view.
Nurse starts charging up her blink, you run around the corner of killer shack for instance she blinks in front of you to cut you off but you're already running backward in the other direction where she just was. If she's high iq and predicts your backtrack, instead you predict her prediction, and COMMIT to running around the corner and past killer shack to the next jungle gym or building or whatever. Against a Nurse it's literally about Mindgaming tiles, and then gaining as much distance as possible when she guesses incorrectly and that's all you do, rinse and repeat.
Not saying that works all the time, God no, but I am saying I'd rather do that than go against Deathslinger to be totally honest, a good Deathslinger doesn't miss and you certainly can't dodge the harpoon that comes out at 40m/s especially at close range. Dropping every pallet early because you're forced to isn't as interactive and engaging when it comes to the chase.
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Exactly. I run into a decent Nurse maybe once a month, let alone a good one. I'm genuinely surprised if they can blink. I know less than 10 god tier Nurses. I don't even consider myself god tier. Good, but not at CardClasher (130 4ks in a row this week), Xeno, Knightlight, etc level.
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Nurse requires a lot of mechanical skill to play she's not something that people could just pick up very easily.
Spirit and deathslinger do take a skill but they have a much lower a skill floor meaning as long as you become accustomed to their basics you could pretty much do good with them. Even knowing the basics of the nurse you could still very easily be bullied.
Also when it comes to misplays the nurse is also very heavily punished you mess up as nurse and you're punished and it's not exactly like you could just the makeup by becoming an M1 killer because of how slow you are.
Because of this high skill high reward with big punishments for screw ups as a survivor it feels really rewarding when you outplay her
She has a lot of cues that can give you information what she's going to do.
For example while have to be quick about it you can tell when she's going to blink and roughly estimate the distance based on her hand position and how long she's been charging.
This gives you information whether it's a good idea to dodge in a certain area or two double back.
Deathslinger and spirit normally get called out because there's not much you could do to react to them you can't see spirit for the most part and deathslinger can shoot you so quickly you don't have time to react
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I really don't think she is that hard to play, more complex to understand at high level play, but not hard. If I want to relax ill play fun killers, but if I want to sweat ill play nurse or something. 99% of the time I don't want to sweat though.
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Very good nurses are hard to come by and just nurses in general because the nurse is not exactly the most picked killer due to her skill cap. You can outplay the average Nurse player by juking. However, a really good spirit or deathslinger can't be countered and are boring to face. Because you probably aren't going to face a very good nurse these days, it would be better to nerf others for the time being.
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I'm saying if you even played her once, you'd understand her limitations. She is a very difficult killer to play and an ever harder one to master. Good survivors are quite nearly impossible to catch if you aren't practiced with her. The skill cap comes from the player's usage of her power, not the counterplay survivors have (which does exist, its just not easy or always possible)
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I think a lot of it just comes down to how going against her "feels" compared to something like Deathslinger and Spirit. Nurse pretty much gets on a hill and yells out that she's preparing a blink, you can both see and hear her doing it and while she does so you can do whatever you want to try to be as slippery as possible. Meanwhile Deathslinger and Spirit have a lack of really reactable wind-up and an intentional deprivation of information respectively. Not saying that's inherently and automatically bad, it's quite simply part of their design before anyone jumps on me about it 😄
I'm not here to say one thing or another about any of the killers as I don't have that much of an opinion on them, but I quite simply feel like for a lot of players it's easier to think something like "Wow, nice blink" when a Nurse hits them as opposed to something like a practically unreactable quickscope/repeated faked ADS from Deathslinger or a Spirit appearing next to them and hitting them. They were warned that the blink was coming and the Nurse still hit them, case closed and it's kinda hard for someone to convince themselves that anything else happened.
And for the main question in your thread title, I by no means think something should be entirely excused just because it's hard to do, but as long as sufficient skill doesn't allow people to straight up make something in a game go beyond what it's designed to do in an undesirable way the I don't think it's a problem either.
An example of something that got changed for a reason like this is the Ambassador in Team Fortress 2. The tl;dr of that change is that it was a gun that essentially let a class designed around pretty close-range combat excel at any range if the user could hit headshots. It was changed to have damage falloff (something headshots normally don't have in TF2), and very similar discussions could be seen in the community. Some thought it was fine as using it in that way took a lot of skill, others thought it let the class that used it overstep the boundaries of its core design. And even though the change went through many people still have passionate opinions on it to this day.
And to loop back to DBD, I don't think Nurse is guilty of anything like that. She's designed around her ability to blink from the ground up, down to practically being required to do so to hit people in the first place. Not saying nothing about her should ever be changed and that everything is perfect, but as someone that enjoys playing her but at the same time by no means an expert there's people far more qualified to ponder that than me.
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May as well throw my two cents so people don't have to go digging: I used to be a Nurse player back before her most recent nerf. She was busted OP, and I was admittedly a whiney killer that refused to take any argument against her seriously. Then she was nerfed, I stopped playing her so much, and I even though she was reasonable balanced, since it took a lot of skill and practice to recah her new skill floor.
But then I realised that that's not balance. Seriously, it isn't. If her power is still there, then making it harder to reach doesn't make it fairer, it just makes it rarer. A good Nurse is still a good Nurse, it's just that now she can be "countered" by holding W in certain situations. There's no proper counterplay to a good Nurse, her tactics are as simple as they have ever been, it's just now you get punished for missing. Except you really could just not miss, same with any other semi-ranged or fully-ranged killer.
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It's a common concept for games to develop characters that are harder to play but in turn reward for higher risks.
Nurse still goes into fatigue, longer if she misses an attack after she blinks, and also has to wait for her blinks to comeback on a 3 second cooldown. With these conditions you go into the "High risk, High reward" zone and this is what Nurse falls under.
Some on her add-ons could maybe use some number nerfs and that's about it, mainly just the blink recharge ones lol but that's debatable.
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people USED TO COMPLAIN a lot, why do u think she got the FAT NERF she got? now she is not as OP as she was and she kinda has some playing around, at least way more than before except for some addons... even if most people thought taht base old nurse was kinda fun, now you need to use insae addons (Expensive) to have what old nurse was but at least she cant be as she was PLUS THAT insane addons like omega nurse and others... she is good and strong and she got nerfed, most people relied on those addons so thats why you dotn see her that much anymore. there are just a few good insane players with her now. since omega is gone.
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Nurse has plenty of counter play. Line of sight blocking is her biggest weakness. It leaves Nurse players guessing.
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Well because nurse requires skill on both sides and the better player comes out on top. I mean you can meet the same nurse several times and have similar outcomes or diffrent ones. A really good nurse can still be won against by good survivors also nurse is a threat as killer and not a joke like others on the roster. She would have higher pick rates with less bugs but I think that the devs will never fix what they did.
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You can juke a nurse. You can juke and mindgame even the best nurses. It's very difficult, you'll get them less than an average Nurse, but Nurse absolutely has counterplay.
Personally, I find playing against Nurse to be super fun, but that's because I understand how to after struggling to play against her for years.
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What about high-skill survivors? Don't they deserve the same chance?
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Context: I'm a nurse main with 1k hours
I agree. She is by far the best killer in the game. Difficulty to use should not be the balancing factor. When I play nurse I literally can't lose against average survivors. Against depip kill squads I have to try but I'm still probably going to win.
The problem is. That tournaments and high level play have shown that the only killer(s) that can actually compete at that level is nurse and spirit.
The problem is that the gap between high skill players and low skill players is in general way too high in this game. At the highest level of play every killer except nurse and spirit is inviable. I mean it. Just watch the tournaments that people run. Now think about how the average survivor plays. I can win games with clown against them quite often.
Until they fix this problem. Buffing or nerfing anything is pointless. The core gameplay is to blame for this and needs to be addressed. So does map RNG. There are too many fundamental problems that should really be fixed before they try to fix individual killers/survivors.
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This is not true at all. I used to main nurse even before she was nerfed and there was still counterplay as well. Yes you can just weave mindlessly through places but that won't get you too far agaisnt a good nurse. It's all about taking the unexpected option. For example, you dip behind a wall and the nurse will either corner blink or blink along the wall to where she thinks you would have gone, but then you take the third option and keep running foward.
People also don't realise that pallets can actually be quite effectve against a nurse, not only scaring her but making her blink in predictable pathing.
ALSO you can react to a nurse holding their blink for longer and play accordingly. With spirit and deathsligner there's no reacting.
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God tier nurses are up there with swat team swfs. They completely break the game, but the devs couldn't care less, because you dont see them that often.
She's already been gutted and is a nightmare to play, and swf will never be nerfed, so leave her alone.
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I don't even think Nurse is all that hard. I had a more difficult time learning proper Lethal Rush and Punishment of the Damned hits than blink attacks.
People don't play her now because between the awful fatigue vision, the cooldown on top of a cooldown, and the bugs, she just isn't fun. But unfun =/= bad. She's still the #1 best Killer, and I think you'd be crazy to deny that. They made her less fun to play without actually giving her a proper nerf. Unsurprising.
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Same, I think lethal rush and blighted corruption is more difficult than blinks.
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Not a good Nurse. That's the problem: every bit of counteray anyone ever comes up with relies on the Nurse not being good, then they slap on the excuse of "yeah, but how often do you see good nurses?"
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Nerfing a killer that has the highest skill cap in the game is a stupid idea imo.
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A high skill survivor would know not to get in a chase with a nurse and to slam gens.
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Eh, I'm biased because I'm a nurse main, but I don't think she needs any more nerfs to her base kit.
HOWEVER, seeing old videos of prenerf nurse (2 blinks, no addons), I realized how VERY forgiving she was of the players mistake, as you could blink again immediately even if you failed. And using double recharge addons basically gives her back her old basekit. I think they should be tones down, or not stack at all
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Its fine because she is hard to play, why?
Because, because she is hard to play, not many people play her, and when you encounter something 0.001% of your games...its hard to call it a problem.
Same with Hag really, if people played hag more often and knew how to play her, she would have been nerfed hard by now.
A lot in this game is not an issue because it does not happen that often, camping for example, if all killers just made the choice to camp, literally every killer, that would be completely within the rules of the game aaaand...it would completely kill the game off, nobody would want ot play survivor anymore and thus no matches would exist aka dead game.
Its only by the community's choices of play that this game stands
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For as long as depip squads do not get nerfed, Nurse shouldnt get nerfed either.
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By playing nurse you are playing with a high risk high reward killer.
You need a great skill and patience mostly (with the new recharge system)
You have to deal with dead zones aka nurse related bugs (places that she can't blink), so shes rewarding but very tedious to play this days, because you will have to look to the ground most of the times in the match and just float around while you wait for the long ass recharge...
So criticizing a nurse player is like a criticizing a professional football player like Messi. Nurse players deserve respect.
And to add.. she have counterplay.. plenty of in fact, DH is one of them for example as it erases all the effort she had to do to chain a hit and you make her waste a lot of time with just a single perk. Plus shes also very slow and subtle to easy jukes and plenty of tricks.
Oh and one more important thing. When you play nurse you either go rampage mode and end the match in the first minutes or you will get gen rushed in no time because of her slowness. That the way you have to play her now sadly.
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In those cases she still has an actual chance to get the hit. Again you’re relying on the Nurse to make the wrong move.
Nurse has far less counterplay than Spirit - a killer who is physically stopped by pallets and walls but in their anger people don’t realize this.
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That is true. That’s why when Nurses come to my generator I politely ask them to leave me alone and not chase me and then happily go on their way to find and chase someone else.
Oh wait.....that’s not how the game works ☹️
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I don't defend the nurse because she is hard to play, although she does require more attention than your average killer, i defend her because I find her fun to play against and even a good nurse is counterable, hard to counter yes, but not impossible.
I enjoyed coming up against her before she was nerfed, even in red ranks, and I'm a little sad that I just don't see her as often as I used to. I never understood the no counterplay argument, I found i simply had to adjust the way i played in chases, learning to play nurse in KYF also gave me some pointers on how she worked as i was taught by a decent nurse player. That isn't to say that some don't find her difficult to counter or just frustrating to play against, every opinion is valid, i get it. But I certainly don't see any need for her to be nerfed any more than she already has been.
Nurse has decent snowball capacity, but if she doesn't manage it, then she has to get really good at closing off loops and that isn't as easy as it sounds or even looks. Aiming the nurse isn't always exact, and unless you used a certain perk, you can't always estimate the distance of your blinks. You then have a short window to lash out at a survivor before the cooldown hits you and you're stuck staring at your own feet.
There are better and more experienced nurse players who could give you a far more accurate and detailed account on how it is to play a nurse, but from my experience its not a case of point her in the direction of the survivor and reap the rewards.
I miss that floaty gal.
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A good nurse just got good guesses. That's what you learn when playing as and against nurse on a high level.
So yeah that's why she's fine. The possibility to hit someone doesn't always result in a hit.
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And where exactly is the skill in that? Please, do explain the hours and hours of blood, sweat and tears that went into said good old-fashioned genrush.
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I disagree though. You can see what a nurse is going to do. You have no idea what a spirit is going to do on the other hand. A complete guess which basically means that a bad spirit can get you just as much as a good spirit. Yea you can do things which "delay her" but you will still go down. If you use the argument that it's about making the nurse to make the wrong move couldn't you use that for literally every other killer in the game? The difference with nurse and deathsligner is that there is no right or wrong move. There's only lucky or unlucky.
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I defend her as if you are not good as her, you WILL NOT win unless the survivors make a mistake themselves
Her m/s is so slow that blinks are a requirement for movement, her CD is so long that you can't catch up to a survivor using an exhaustion perk and that extends the chase long enough for generators to start popping.
If you are a bad nurse, you will always lose
If you are a decent nurse, you can lose
If you are a good nurse, you could win
If you are a god nurse, you can win
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Where exactly did I say it took skill? It doesn't, but a player who was good at the game would know their skill doesn't mean much against a Nurse, Deathslinger, Spirit and would therefore not get in a chase and slam gens. I'm all for these killers becoming more skill based to play against but the truth is that's never gonna happen so the way you counter these killers is hardcore stealth and gen rushing, and try and have fun chases with the other killers when you run across them. So don't put words into my mouth I complain about these killers more than anyone on this forum.
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Because survivors can bully bad nurses but hardly bully bad spirits. /s
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Devs; We want the game to be easier for new players, and more fun for new players
Also Devs; Here's Nurse with an incredibly high skill cap - but easy to counter for morderatly good, and experienced players, top tier perks everyone would want for their killers, and a napkin to cry in when you're dead.
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i dont.
if we ban survivor stuff because "if used optimally its OP", when only like .5% of people can ever use it like that, the same should apply to killers.
Nurse, if played optimally, has no counterplay. she is the only killer in the game where this applies and its way too good.
i do not think she should simply be nerfed though. they already tried that and the killer became almost unplayable (cause she became super unfun to play), i think they should give her a mini rework like Doc received it. keep the main aspect of her power but drastically change the way it works - have her still blink around, but have the blinks work differently.
its a hard job but its a necessary one.
and if they do it well, she might turn out to be good (not OP, but good) AND fun! thats the best case scenario i personally hope for.
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I think the reason people tend to defend nurse is
1: We were lied too about her add on rework
2: She has a bunch of bugs that make her difficult and unfun to play
3: She takes skill to git gud with.
4: A good nurse is actually fun to play against.
Even killer mains and survivor mains both agreed her add ons were too strong. It was nice to be on the same page about something for once. So the devs said they are going to rework her add ons. Then they slapped us with a CD to her base kit. Which many feel her base kit was perfect before. The fact people want her nerfed again when she was already hit pretty hard feels like survivor mains trying to "Have their cake and eat it too"
Since her rework she has a lot of bugs. Failure to teleport through objects, dead zones, failure to blink a 2nd time, auto locking onto walls/hooks when landing on top of a survivor. These bugs have been in here for like a year and the devs haven't touched them. Have they even acknowledged them? DS is bugged and gets patched in 2 weeks. Playing as Nurse is a chore. Your the best killer in the game but your fighting 5 opponents. The 4 survivors and the game itself.
Nurse is S tier but your not going to pick her and get 4ks.(Unless the survivors suck) You need to put a lot of time into her to be a god nurse. Putting in that much work and then being hit by a massive nerf that kicks her out of S tier just feels like a portion of your life wasted. She mixes up the meta. Instead of doing the exact same thing you would do to every other killer you have to change it up with her. I still get "supposedly red rank" survivors that still treat her like a M1 killer. Looping a pallet until I catch them. Those survivors #@$% their pants when they see me blink through the loop and hit them. It's like they're saying "Hey wait. you cant do that. HAX!!!!!!"
A baby nurse is a joke. A god nurse feels like it's impossible but how many of those do you run into? Anything in between keeps me alert. As survivor I like an average nurse match. The jump scares, the thrill of the chase, trying to mind game the killer instead of endlessly pallet looping. It makes the match more interesting then running the same route until you run out of windows/pallets.
Post edited by EvilJoshy on4 -
"But you rarely see good nurses!"
When was the last time you saw a genuine good deathslinger?
Back to topic, nurse has many 50/50s which gives her counterplay. If you can read your opponent correctly you will win in a chase until you're stuck in an uncounterable situation like a deadzone or such. Saying "A good nurse wont miss a blink" is about as absurd as "a good deathslinger wont miss a shot". It's completely unrealistic and kinda shows someones inexperience playing a killer.
Plus, people have had up to 4 years practice against nurse, while more recent killers who are complained about have only been out for a bit. If people actually had practice against slinger and PH, they really wouldn't be complained about as much. Still would be complained about because survivors don't like killers with strong chase, but complained about a lot less.
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