Suggestion: minor changes for Sadako/The Onryo (long post)
Hi! I'm a huge fan of Ringu and the character of Sadako as a whole (her DLC and Ghostface's being the reasons I first got into this game), and I've been playing her almost daily since I bought the DLC. I think that pretty much everything about the Sadako Rising chapter is fantastic, it's easy to see the attention to detail and passion that went into designing it and paying respect to the original IP, and that made me fall in love with the game even more, huge props to the dev team for such a great job.
However, the more I play her, the more I feel like there are a couple of things that can make her unnecessarily frustrating to play as and against, and addressing them would probably require very minor changes and fixes too that won't alter her power and overall place in the tierlist too much. I'm going to write a lenghty post to try and explain myself as best as I can and better justify my suggestions.
Sadako has three special abilities: she can demanifest to be more stealthy, she can teleport to TVs and she can Condemn survivors. When a survivor gains 7 stacks of Condemned, if Sadako catches and downs them in time, she can instantly mori them. Condemned stacks are gained by removing tapes from TVs and having Sadako teleport to a TV while the survivor is at least 16 metres near to it.
Now, the thing about Condemned is that it never really comes up in a normal match, unless the killer equips an extremely specific build that solely revolves around it. I believe the reason for this has to do with the TV cooldown: the TVs are turned off for 60 seconds after a survivor removes a tape, whereas the cooldown for Sadako's teleporting is 100 seconds. So, why would a survivor ever even touch a TV? It's much more effective to be wary for the teleport sounds and, in case you hear her coming through the nearby tv, you either hide behind a corner and wait for her to go away, having successfully made her waste a TV, or you accept the incoming chase (also a good option if you're a decent looper, since Sadako has no real chase or anti-loop power at all); by doing this you don't risk unnecessary Condemned stacks for no reason, and you also turn her power off for longer. This causes Condemned to never really matter at all during the match (at best it'll get to 4 stacks); add in the fact survivors' interactions with TVs are extremely fast and they can get rid of all stacks in a few seconds.
Currently the only way to get actual value out of her power is to run a dedicated build, made of mostly gen regression perks and the add-on Ring Drawing, which makes Condemn spread like a virus through healing. In the current meta, where self-healing is extremely common and fast (personally I've been seing at the very least 1 COH a match lately), the only constantly reliable way to get Ring Drawing value is to mostly slug and basically camp gens, which results in a very stale, unfun and drawn-out game for both sides. I do think the nerf to medikits and COH will finally help make Condemned more relevant through a hit-n-run playstyle instead of a scummy slugging one, but Condemned remains entirely dependant on Ring Drawing being equipped; without it survivors have no incentive to interact with tapes, and reaching 7 stacks through constantly teleporting to them alone is just impossible and requires you to basically ignore the other three survivors all this time. And as I mentioned before, Sadako has no chase power - playing her "normally" without forcing Condemned puts you at a big disadvantage from the start compared to other killers, simply because none of her powers can really help in a chase/loop.
As a whole, compare Sadako to Pig, which is in my opinion another low-tier killer who is super fun to play as and against: her slowdown power can be used without having to spend bloodpoints for it to be effective and it doesn't require slugging to be viable; it incentivizes survivors to interact with it (and that takes more than just 0.5/2 seconds, which is maybe a bit too short for the current state of Sadako's powers) and she has her ambush dash to at least try and get out of a stalemate situation in a loop at a safe pallet (it might not always be optimal but she has an option out at least). I think it's ok for Sadako to not have a chase/anti-loop power at all if she's meant to be played more as a hit-n-run killer, but I don't think the current state of her powers are enough to do that properly either. In my opinion, the best solution to fix these little issues would be to:
- Swap the 60/100sec TV cooldowns with each other (or at least bring them both down to 60, but either way the teleport cooldown should have a shorter cooldown than the turn-off one, to incentivize the survivor/TV interaction. And since turning TVs down help survivors more with this proposed change, it would be a good addition to increase the time needed to turn off a tv and to switch tapes by 0.5 or 1 second).
- Make Ring Drawing basekit because even with the above change, without this addon Condemned would still be almost impossible to activate, and a killer power shouldn't rely on an addon being equipped for it to be viable. Also makes sense lore-wise, considering the virus nature of Sadako in the books.
Alternatively she would definitely benefit from an anti-loop power of sorts, but I feel like the three suggestions above would better highlight her already very unique powers instead of turning her in a generic straightforward chase-M1 killer, and they are probably much easier and quicker to implement too.
I know the Onryo has mostly been left unchanged because of her high kill rates, but I don't think these changes would make them go even higher - these wins are by Condemned strat players who are using the Ring Drawing addon, gen regression builds and a slugging strategy that slows down the game a lot; chase-oriented Sadako players are obviously a minority and they are not enough to even affect that kill rate.
These proposed changes, paired with the self-heal and gen regression nerfs that are coming soon, would make the Condemned mechanic go from being either useless or effective-but-boring-and-scummy to a key mechanic in a fun, tense and scary hit-and-run match, making Sadako more viable for killers and making the Condemned playstyle actually fun to play against and counterable for survivors (because slugging won't be needed, and in the current state of the playstyle, unless you're running a full anti-slug build, there's not much you can do against a killer that constantly keeps you on the floor). So I feel like this is a good, moderate change to make Sadako more viable and even more fun for both sides, allowing for more variety in playstyle for both sides and without turning her core mechanics upside-down.