How to make blindness addons better for killers
I think blindness is pretty neat in concept. However the problem with it is the inability to place it on the people who you really want it on.
Blindness feels like a form of 'soft pressure'. you aren't directly interfering with survivors, just denying them of information. The problem comes in when you realize most blindness addons require you to chase or hit a survivor, and the other forms of information survivors have with the new hud. Usually in chase or after hit a survivor's main source of information they care about is where the next pallet or window is. This means blindness helps with windows of opportunity, but not much else. Perks like fearmonger and septic touch are a great step in the right direction, but are quickly removed, requires survivors to commit to specific actions, and does nothing about the hud information that survivors can use to know when they should stop doing said actions to know where they need to go/who to save.
There's two things I think that could help make these addons worth the bloodpoints.
1: reverse the blindness effect where it applies to everyone NOT hit/chased, leaving them in the dark about where the chased survivor is and what's going on. This allows for uncertainty that you can take advantage of, and makes the blindness affect those who will actually care about that information.
2: make blindness either remove the hud, or put a delay on it. This would mean survivors wouldn't have access to instant information that allows survivors to quickly and easily react to changes in the match, functionally negating the entire point of blindness.
Any other suggestions on how blindness could be improved are welcome, and if there's anything about how these changes would affect the game that I missed. On the whole, I think these two changes would be a huge bonus and allow for more variety.
Comments
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The problem with blindness is that it's one of those mechanics that disproportionately negatively impacts solo queue players over SWFs on coms, and is incredibly hard to change or balance as a result. Would it be nice for blindness to be of more use to killers? Absolutely. But would buffing blindness be fair or fun for solo survivors when comparing them to SWFs on coms? No, I don't really think so.
Without some way to adjust blindness in a way that makes it fair for everyone, I'd be much more in favor of buffing or reworking blindness add-ons entirely. As an example, let's look at Freddy's add-on 'Unicorn Block'. Currently, survivors are inflicted with blindness for 60s when stepping on a dream snare. I'd like to see BHVR either massively increase the time of the effect to, say, 120s, or just rework the add-on entirely. (And his Sheep Block add-on should just be changed entirely to a different effect.)
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You make an excellent point. I had somewhat forgotten about SWFs. I do think massively increasing the duration of these blindness effects could help as well to mitigate the weaknesses without hurting solo queue too much. It would also solve the problem with most add-ons using blindness by allowing you to quickly apply the blindness and go about your business elsewhere- making much more appealing if you want to keep survivors in the dark. Granted that still doesn't change the fact that SWF will be relatively unaffected by the debuff, but there's only so much we can do about that.
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