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Flashlights

Twinblades713
Twinblades713 Member Posts: 8
in Feedback and Suggestions

Currently, flashlights are useful but so niche in their use that I think it would improve the game to broaden their scope of use. This doesn't have to be difficult or fancy to pull off. My perceived flaws with the flashlight game are:

  1. They are instantly counterable by the killer who can see how many flashlights are on the team, or is just scarred by blind saves, by means of Lightborn. This causes a subculture of "perk/item canceling". Survs bring flashlights, killer brings lightborn and flashlights are useless. Or killer brings lightborn and survs don't bring flashlights, - Lightborn is wasted.
  2. They have virtually one single use - blinding a killer at the precise moment they pick up a comrade survivor. This is virtually both the best case scenario, and the only scenario a flashlight is useful.

My suggestions are as follows:

  1. Make flashlights no longer cause killer to drop survivors. In exchange, several aspects of blinding can be toned - either up or down.
  2. Give flashlights more base battery time.
  3. Make blinding improve speed of wiggle progress while also still blinding the killer - this would still make hooking a survivor difficult and still allow the possibility for "flashlight saving."
  4. Make lightborn lessen the effects of blinds instead of completely negating it. Instead of full blind, it makes your vision blurry.

Results: This would make it feel much better for both sides. Survivors won't feel countered by a single perk when they pick flashlights, and killers won't feel completely robbed if they get flashlight blinded on repeat. Instead it deepens the skill matchup of blinding killers and avoiding blinding's negatives as the killer. This would also compliment other builds like Sabo and blocking for survivors and builds like agitation/mad grit/starstruck for killers. IMO this suggestion would improve the overall meritocracy of blinding in game.

Outliers like flashbangs can easily be toned to fit in with this newlly proposed meta. For example since flashbangs are (somewhat) harder to acquire, it could easily -still- cause the killer to drop, or if that's too strong it would cause a full blind instead of a blur effects on a killer with lightborn.

My goal here is to improve balance and counterplay for both sides, not to nerf either side.