An intriguing Nurse suggestion I overheard (with QoL improvements for her)
With the Blight looking at being clipped even more, it becomes evident that of all killers, the Nurse now becomes the standout front runner top tier killer by quite a sizable margin… limitless potential, only hindered by the killer players skill and precision. Nurse however does have this annoying problem, where because she has this insane potential, she has some pretty obnoxious balancing features that just make her a real pain to play/learn, and really hurts any new player trying to pick her up (looking at you stun camera!).
So I overheard an idea from a far more experienced player than me that sounded like a very interesting proposal…. so I thought I would throw it up to get the thoughts and opinions from you wonderful people, as there are likely issues that I've missed, but it is still fun to think about! 😁
What if Nurse was reworked so that she could only travel through terrain on her FIRST blink? Every blink after that would not be able to go through terrain.
Blinks after the first that attempt to go through terrain would collide and stop at the terrain… this has the potential for a lot of frustration though, so I would propose giving the attacks on subsequent blinks a longer lunge to compensate for having to steer around terrain.
Now… this is a very hefty nerf. The usual Nurse playstyle of blink to last known survivor location and then blink on top of them becomes a much less guaranteed hit for a number of scenarios, by virtue of the fact Survivors have a lot more chances to make use of normal tile mechanics against her after the first blink. Any instance where the Nurse was late to catch a survivor before a pallet or window, or was slow blinking to the other side, she leaves windows where survivors can outplay her and leave her on the wrong side of the obstacle. A survivor may even be able to successfully fake a Nurse at doorways, where if she ports to catch them on the wrong side of a wall, she can't come back through to catch them.
Such a nerf however does open up possibilities of removing some of her more frustrating and unfun elements, that were a necessary evil given the raw power afforded to her, such as: -
- The post blink stun and camera lookdown can be changed to a much less severe effect. The Nurse can instead do something like have her vision dim, then glow back up/shudder as she exhales. Something a little like the "eyes adjusting to the dark" effect feature in Amnesia. This would get the idea across while still allowing her to continue to see her target.
- She could be granted the ability to hold and charge her second (and third) blink for much longer to compensate for this lack of direct pathing to help her map traversal. With the inability to go through walls, a longer charge or more charges doesn't benefit anywhere near a much as it currently does.
- The longer lunge on later blinks removes those frustrating moments for console/less skilled Nurses where when you guess correctly, position well, but just can't quite aim fast enough to actually land your hit on a spinning survivor, or get caught by auto aim on terrain (this seems to happen a lot to me as Nurse more than any other killer)…
I'd be considering adding some kind of visual effect to her view while in the first stage blink, like a discoloured or supernatural themed version of the world while she charges and commits to that first blink. Subsequent blinks then would be in the normal coloured world, signalling she has returned from whatever other plane of existence she is in and can't move through terrain.
A little unpolished as a suggestion, but an interesting idea to think about 😏