What the new Sadako probably needs
While this new Sadako has lots of potential and can surprisingly feel scary and operate in very similar ways to her movie counterpart (and that's great! good job to the dev team for that) unfortunately she also currently feels like a pub stomper who gets guaranteed victories against SoloQ and on the contrary is almost always guaranteed to lose against any SWF. Another big problem is that because of how her kit operates now, it feels necessary to constantly spam teleports every time the cooldown goes off, making it feel mechanical, mindless and considerably lowering the skill ceiling she used to have. It's like the timer before a Pinhead chain hunt, except in Sadako's case the player has to manually get that timer going instead of getting to actually play the game. Since she now feels very cheap against SoloQ, lots of survivors have already started DCing on sight against her (I got more DCs as Sadako this week than as Nurse in my whole playtime...), and the community is already developing a hatred for Sadako players akin to that of Skull Merchant mains. In the long run, this could easily result in the character's pickrate dropping and leaving her in an unhealthy, universally hated state.
If this Sadako rework were not to be reverted (returning to a buffed version of the old kit, in my opinion, would always be a perfect solution), I think a good idea to balance this new version, keeping its strong points while also making it more beloved across the community, would be to apply the following changes:
- applying the changes proposed by UndeddJester in this thread. This would singlehandedly solve the "Player mori'd shortly after the start of the game" problem, while also increasing her skill ceiling and making her more palatable to all those ex-Sadako mains that are now turned off by the character, allowing for more diverse builds and playstyles. This very simple change would not only be significantly more healthy, but it'd also make the character much more fun and feel less cheap to play.
- make it easier for survivors to see TV auras after a certain % of Condemned (admittedly, I'm not sure this solution would be needed and to what degree, if solution #1 was also to be added)
- slightly buff her chase capabilities (either reverting the Bloodlust changes and giving what was taken away from Reiko's Watch to her basekit, or giving her Demanifested status something more for chases)
- the purple add-on Tape Editing Deck now actively harms Sadako, it might need to be looked into since as for now it really brings no benefit to the killer
Right now chasing with her feels absolutely terrible and much worse than before, because the Bloodlust (and Reiko's) changes are significantly more impactful than the pallet stun buff is, so many Sadako players are encouraged to simply never go for a second hit until it's time to Condemn, and instead just spam TPs all the time. Obviously I'm not asking to turn her into a chase killer, but these changes to her chase are needed if any of her tape/teleport/Condemned stats are to be nerfed, as the spam-teleport-to-condemn is the only strat she currently has going on for her. Old Sadako had a lot of variety, whereas the current kit basically discourages players from doing anything but the Teleport Spam strategy. This killer now only has one viable strategy that is always certainly countered by a SWF that knows the "script" to neo-Sadako matches, causing all games to be played in the same way with no variety whatsoever.
The aforementioned changes would both make her more forgiving to SoloQ players, making the character feel less cheap and more likable to survivors (while still being a threat), while also opening up to some of the variety and skilled plays the old Sadako could do.
Thank you devs for putting in work on this character, I hope she'll eventually get to a state where she's balanced, viable and -most importantly- fun to play as and against.
(And please zoom out her portrait a bit,, now it looks like a yearbook photo compared to the other killers' portraits :')