An update to The Clown
Change 1: Reloading now additionally occurs passively
- The Clown now has two ways of reloading.
- Every 10 seconds, a single bottle is regenerated.
- Press and hold LCtrl to slow your movements and reload all your bottles.
- Active reload duration reduced from 5 seconds to 3
Because Clown's power has such an intrusive reload mechanic, it isn't always available to him. This can work for killers like Huntress, where the power is threatening enough on its own to warrant such limits, but Clown is not so.
Imagine how bad Leatherface would be if he had to stop and load up his chainsaw with Gasoline to get his charges back.
Giving Clown a bottle back every 10 seconds means he can reliably have a few bottles at his disposal at all times, even if he can't find time to stand still.
The main reason I'm keeping the manual reload instead of just balancing Clown around passive reloading is primarily because the reload animation gives Clown a tool with which he can fake out Dead Hard.
Change 2: Gas Opacity
- Increased the height of gas clouds to two meters.
- Moderately increased the opacity of gas clouds from the survivor POV
- Considerably decreased the opacity of gas clouds from The Clown's POV
There are a lot of cool plays you can make by denying vision with gas, but because of the physics of Gas these plays are niche, hard to reproduce, and usually accidental.
These changes give Clown extra potential for mindgames at tiles, while reducing the potential for his power to backfire by hiding survivors from view behind particularly dense bits of gas.
Change 3: Upgraded gas physics, Upgraded Throws
- The shape and size of the gas cloud now depends on the momentum of the bottle when it broke.
- If the bottle broke with mostly horizontal momentum, the gas cloud will scatter in a cone.
- If the bottle broke with mostly vertical momentum, the gas cloud will scatter evenly in a circle.
- Press LShift to toggle between Underhand and Overhand throws
- Underhand throws are what The Clown currently has, imparting a considerable amount of vertical momentum onto the bottle.
- Overhand throws are what The Huntress uses, causing the bottle to leave on a horizontal trajectory.
This has a few implications for how Clown plays in chases.
Say, for example, you're chasing at shack, and you throw a bottle at a glancing angle to hit the windowsill.
With current bottles, this will force medium vaults on the window.
With these changes, such throws will result in a cone of gas stretching several meters beyond the window, forcing the survivor to make large detours to avoid intoxication.
There are also changes to how you'd chase in the open with these bottles.
If you were to land an overhand bottle lob onto a survivor, they would effectively become unable to run in the direction they were going, because doing so entails running through a path of gas.
Change 4: Direct HIt rewards
- Survivors hit directly by a bottle suffer from twice the hindered penalty.
- Survivors hit directly by a bottle are staggered for 2.5 seconds, prevented from performing any actions (doctor shock).
Note that since Flask of Bleach is an "extra hindered penalty" rather than an increase to the baseline, that extra 5% is not doubled.
This rewards Clowns for particularly accurate throws, and gives survivors a reason to respect the bottles even if the pallet is already thrown.
Comments
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Yes! This is what I was thinking in regards to a passive charge. But also an optional reload that scales with number of missing bottles. Also incentivising direct hits is a nice addition.
The different throws are also a nice way of increasing his skill ceiling which is good. Too many killers like Wraith and Clown are limited by the contraints of their power. Having different tools that are stronger in different situations would make playing correctly and getting the hit feel so much more satisfying.
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I don't think the opacity needs changing; I find it impossible to see through gas clouds as survivor as it is because in addition to how hard they are to see through, it makes your vision blurred.
Twice the hindered status effect is far too much, but there definitely does need to be reward for it. If, in addition to cancelling actions, (which it already does) it had a similar effect to doctor's screams, but for ever so slightly less time, I think that would be perfect.
I like the passive reload; a lot of issue with the Clown is that it just feels like a waste to reload if you're not out, and even then, it's a time sink over the course of a match. It's clear that as a result, the Clown player needs to be pretty careful with bottle use, but getting them back passively would be very fair, although I think bringing it down to 8 seconds would be fine.
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All 4 are welcome changes.
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This sounds like a pretty [BAD WORD] good change.
Plus my man will probably get chase music in the next mid chapter. Since he's the next killer up for an rework.
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Another thing I'd like to add on (it's more of an aesthetic change than a balance change) is to make certain add-ons change the colour of the gas.
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So green or something for the aura ones? I can see that. Would be pretty cool.
I imagine they'll remove or rework the exhaustion one considering its from a time where exhaustion ticked down while running.
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I didn't mean for any specific action the add-on makes however now that you mention it that isn't a bad idea.
The way I meant was for any add-on to change the colour, like red, green, blue, yellow, any bright colours that would fit with a carnival.
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It's pretty damn hard to land direct bottle lobs unless you're right on top of the guy already.
If you land one from a distance, you deserve a hefty reward, which this gives you.
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Idk, I don't have much trouble hitting direct bottles; it's much harder than getting someone in a cloud for sure, but it isn't some epitome of skill. However, it still should be rewarded, just not by completely stopping a survivor from being able to do anything.
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Just landing a direct bottle isn't the hard part.
At close range, anybody can do it with a bit of practice.
What's hard is landing direct hits at a distance; If the survivor is more than a few meters away, it's a meaningful test of skill.
If you land an easy bottle from short range, you don't get much reward from the bonus slow, since you would have been able to hit them anyways.
It's only when there was more of an initial gap where it can make a difference.
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If your already within 8 meters of someone, extra slow is not going to help you as you would hit them regardless with a normal bottle and landing far away bottles might as well be pure luck. your realistically only going to hit someone with direct bottle past 12 meters if they're standing still such as unhooking a survivor.
A better reward would be that hitting a survivor with direct bottle toss would make it that hitting a healthy survivor does not grant them a 2 second sprint burst within 5 second window. It would give clown a mini-version of redhead pinky finger in his base kit and he would be only killer uniquely that could remove one of the benefits from being healthy as survivor.
Your suggestion is too close to Doctor and I do not think it would really fit him. Clown needs to find his own identity and all killers should try to be a different as possible from each other. We will see what the rework looks like in the end.
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