Visit the Kill Switch Master List for more information on these and other current known issues: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/299-kill-switch-master-list
We encourage you to be as honest as possible in letting us know how you feel about the game. The information and answers provided are anonymous, not shared with any third-party, and will not be used for purposes other than survey analysis.
Access the survey HERE!
Nurse needs a rework (Revisited)
INTRO
So a while back I wrote a post about how nurse needs a rework, there were mixed feelings about it so I updated my arguments and points. Please read the whole post before commenting and have an open mind.
ARGUMENTs
Nurse needs a rework because she has too high of a skill cap, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it can be frustrating for people wanting to play Nurse and then getting wrecked by survivors because they are just trying to get good.
When Nurse is mastered she becomes too powerful and annoying. It's basically a guaranteed 3k because the Nurse is so good. Just think about it, she can teleport through walls, pallets, and can easily shut down a loop in seconds. Playing against a really good Nurse is boring and isn't fun because you can't loop her like a trapper or huntress etc... You basically just go behind walls or just mind game her, it's not fun, It can be satisfying having a nurse miss a hit and tricking her, but when nurse is mastered she barely ever misses any hits.
Some people say "But you rarely see a realy good nurse.". Exactly, you never see a good nurse because she has too high of a skill cap. She needs to be more accessible to people wanting to get good as her. She doesn't need to be extremely easy to play, she needs to be a little easier than she currently is.
She is also outdated. Her add-ons need to be changed. NOT NERFED, changed.
OUTRo
I'm not saying change her power but she needs to be easier to play and more fun to play against. I don't know how they can rework her without taking her basic blink aspect away but she really needs one.
I'M JUST EXPRESSING MY ISSUES WITH NURSE. IT IS MY OPINION!
Comments
-
Should we nerf survivor casue their skill cap is higher than a bit more than half of the killers while we're at it?
Reason nurse is an interesting killer is cause you can improve so much with her and that why people playing her. People who don't want to play hard killer with hight skill cap should just stick to another killer.
I don't like ranged killer? Should we make them 115% movement speed and make their ability melee OS ability now so I can enjoy them like I enjoy my M1 killer? I don't think so.
4 -
To be honest Nurse doesn't need a nerf, or a rework. She's fine as it is. She has counterplays, even if it demands to the survivor to be very aware about what is the Nurse doing, and to know how much a Nurse needs to charge to go somewhere. With these two things, and a map allowing to break LoS, you can mind game her.
It is true that at some point a very good Nurse will at least get 3K each game. BUT, this isn't because the Nurse is so damn good, carrying the player. It is because the player learned her mechanics AND learned how to force survivor to be in a spot where she can land a hit. It's not only point and blink. You really have to choose where you want to land your first blink to outposition the surv.
I'm a main Nurse, and yeah, as you said, the skill ceiling is damn high, I lost every game during one entire month. Now it's been a year that I play her, and even if my blink are chirurgical accurate, it's not rare that I'm outplayed if the survivor is very good. To outplay the Nurse, you have to be as good as her in the game.
0 -
Nurse needs a huge rework imo. Similar to Freddy (hopefully not a disaster like his though).
id test making her 110% and having her unable to blink through solid objects. This makes her easier to pick up and gives her solid counterplay on the survivor side.
2 -
*Lery's would like a word with you*
3 -
Lery’s is bad for every movement killer. Might as well add nurse to the list
1 -
Nurse is fine as is (minus her bugs), there are many other things needing tuning and reworking besides Nurse.
0 -
So she would basically become another loopable Killer that is still slower than every M1 Killer in the game? This would make her utterly useless, and she would be only 4% faster than she is now.
If anything like this was done, her power would have to have tokens & no tunnel-vision at the end. As your ideas sit on its own; she would be utterly garbage; she would still be slower than every M1 Killer, BARELY faster than a Survivor, and now loops & pallets would end her.
2 -
She can still blink through windows and pallets. She moves at 96% put that to 110% and that makes her move 14% faster.
My goal is to make her have more consistent counterplay while also being easier to play as
2 -
Yeah, I mathed wrong.
But pallets & windows are solid, so that was not something you specified.
But still; moving her ability to go through walls takes away more than half her power's strength. It's a straight up nerf under the guise of 'counter play'.
1 -
I agree that she should be reworked, but maybe far along in the future. There are more pressing concerns at the moment and good nurse players are few and far in between.
3 -
True
1 -
That wasn't the whole point, the point is she is too good when mastered and needs to have a lower skill ceiling so she is easier to play as well as weaker when she is mastered
1 -
List counterplays
1 -
Totally agree
1 -
I intended this to reduce her power level. When most consider oni and blight to be the most balanced nurse needs a nerf to stay in line
1 -
She just needs some kind of a rework where she keeps the power she has now
1 -
Honestly, agreed. I think killers like Oni and old Billy are examples of harder killers that give you a good payoff once you master them. Nurse just takes that concept waaaay too far, to the point that playing against a super skilled Nurse in anything but a 3 or 4-man swf with meta perks is just a pointless endeavor. I'm honestly not sure how you balance a killer that can literally teleport through windows, walls, and pallets and at the end of the day master Nurses are few and far between, but when you play against one it's almost always a miserable experience.
0 -
Yeah.
I feel like her power should be reworked in a way that keeps with the original concept: a phantasmal killer that could appear out of nowhere with no warning.
Like Spirit, but trading stealth capabilities for mobility.
1 -
Agreed
1 -
What wrong with hard to play but extremely strong killer? seriously let the 5 nurse main left enjoy the hard earned win they get 9 match out of 10. If it okay when SWF sweat squad do it then it should be for that one single killer.
Not every killer should be like plague where survivor get to decide when and where you use your power.
1 -
See my point? You said the 5 nurse mains left need to enjoy their win, so she needs to be more accessible, and it's not a "hard earned" win. It's the easiest win of their life. People struggle to loop a nurse because they rarely ever go against a nurse
0 -
Why does she need to be more accessible. If you don't want to put effort in learning her just don't. I don't want to spend time learning ranged killer so I don't play them rather then complaining they are different to play.
the win is hard earned cause nurse main praticed a tons of hours to get to that point. If survivor can't adapt to nurse looping it on them.
0 -
Let us consider the following. What is nurse's power when you strip it down to the nuts and bolts? It is a dash in a straight line, not dissimilar to billy, oni, or blight. The most obvious difference is that her dash ignores terrain. (Theres a blight joke in there I'm sure.) This, by its nature, makes nurse very good at a few things.
- High, but power dependent mobility.
- Punishing mistakes. (Including routing/looping nurse as if she is a normal killer.)
- Punishing poor situational awareness. (Not paying attention to the directionality of nurse's screams.)
With that said that means the more skilled a nurse player becomes the lower the bar is for the mistake necessary that it opens up survivors for punishment. Now, I would say it does not take particularly long to get to this point as a nurse player, which is moreso based on the fact that average solo queue survivors make many mistakes due to lack of information. This, however, does not translate well to a good game close out, which is how nurse can be a very strong killer, but have a very poor kill average.
Now, what are the drawbacks to this strong power? A stun that can last as long as 4 seconds total, 3 blinks + missed lunge, in combination with the fact that she cannot charge her power at all while having a flashlight on her, and can be lightburned while her power IS charged/charging which knocks her out of her charged blink. (Lightburn is not directionally dependent like blinding, however both lightburn and blinding stack.) This does not even really cover how devastating the forced drop in her gaze is to tracking survivors that were just struck and are now sprint bursting away.
Her power also does not deal well with tight spaces, in a lot of places in a handful of maps a nurse just straight up cannot blink into them at all and there are even more spaces where a nurse player must have pinpoint perfect accuracy to blink inside a tile. You'd be surprised how much you can mess up a nurse player by still keeping your routing around objects tight because they aren't patient enough to get the blink over the debris in the way. Furthermore breaking line of sight in any sort of way makes newer nurse players much more anxious because they are worried about losing a survivor with their poor movement speed.
This panic can be used very effectively by survivors to bait nurses into poor positioning. It feels like people don't seem to realize the exact range at which to deal with nurse. You are really looking at a short-mid range, just enough room that a nurse must use blink to get to you, but not so long that you can't bait out the 2nd blink to get the maximum time out of her power CD. These 3-4 seconds add up swiftly in combination with the time she actually spends in a chase. As everyone is aware, palettes do not normally do much against nurse, however due to the straight line nature of her power it is very easy to geometrically deduce her line of approach and thereby decide which objects can be safely used to block her coming out of lunge or alter the possible path of her blink. There is only 2 choices, either she makes it through or she doesn't. You know if she does, what exact direction the lunge is coming from and its possible curvatures (the hitbox of her lunge is slightly larger than it appears, a relic of a time before it was standardized FYI.) You can also be assured that the nurse knows where you pivoted to and is ready to follow up, using this information and awareness on a killer by killer basis you can easily decide how/where to pivot effectively to dodge.
Always remember, when given the choice, her power will always put her on the closest side of an object from where she used her power, therefore if you can force her into a position where she would blink -inside- an object it will stop her on the other side, putting you into a position where you can pivot for the 2nd or 3rd blink as necessary. The time to cause a nurse to make a mistake is in the final split second before the release of the blink, it is a very tight and crucial window in which to position properly for the juke, or follow up blink. During this time a nurse player is operating on muscle memory, they are no longer operating on sensory input as the time it takes for the information to travel from their eyes to their brain becomes too great. (Similar to a professional baseball player.)
Everyone seems to be so focused on the fact that normal palettes and such things don't work against nurse's power, completely ignoring the fact that she is one of few killers that you can simply run around in an empty field and never be hit if you understand how her power works and the pathing necessary to counter it.
All this laid out, unlike most other killers, nurse's efficiency is the most visibly seen as the skill level of the player rises. e.g. Nurse spends less time in CD as they need fewer blinks and they miss fewer lunges, ability to track survivors without using their eyes when in CD results in much less loss time in chase. This returned time drastically increases the oppressive feeling of nurse's power. (Similar to how survivors simply being -efficient- on generators feels like 'gen rushing' because of the visibly rising effective efficiency.)
With that said, I would face nurse every day over Freddy. His counterplay is to run across the map and shake a clock every few minutes to make him an M1 killer that can teleport to gens sometimes. With nurse her moment to moment chase feels so engaging and honestly very satisfying when you outplay a nurse, but at the same time it is not as bitter because you know that the nurse player is genuinely better, even if it was just that outplay this time. Freddy's skill floor is just so low that anybody can get amazing results with him, and most of the time instead of feeling outplayed he just feels annoying, or if they are actually good killers, mind numbingly oppressive. At least with nurse I can visibly appreciate a player's specific skill with nurse more apparently than other, intensely strong killers. (Looking at you spirit.)
I personally feel that the reason survivors hate nurse so much is because there are so few moderate-good nurse players to play against, and therefore they are never forced to learn how to counter her, as her counterplay is incredibly specific to nurse alone, and does not really translate skills against other, more standard killers nor do the skills of looping standard killers translate well to dealing with nurse.
In conclusion, I would propose the reduction of the forced downward camera rotation of nurse, by about 15-20 degrees.. Of all of her drawbacks, this is the one that probably harms newer killers the most as it directly interferes with even the most beginner skills such as tracking and situational awareness. I think this would allow for a smoother gradiation of nurse skill groups between "poor" and "godly" and not make the transition to the latter group as uncomfortable as sitting on a cactus.
1 -
Okay
0 -
True
0 -
Tell me the last time you had fun against a good nurse
0 -
On Blood Lodge a few days ago. I think I was the only one to escape through a gate after all gens were done. One other person might have as well. Almost died going for another hooked survivor end game, juked her at a jungle gym by the gate though.
0
