Clown Reimagined: A Rework Pitch
If the controversial semi-recent changes have taught us anything, I think it should be that the Clown's power is volatile and difficult to improve in its current state. It has the potential to be OP in the most boring way possible if it's buffed too far, but he's also not very good so it's difficult to weaken those problematic parts of him in a fair or reasonable manner.
With that in mind, it's not absurd to think that maybe Clown should be given a rework somewhere down the line.
My goal with this rework is to preserve as much of Clown's higher potential as currently exists, while providing more options and weakening his annoying stuff. Clown as he exists now would still mostly work, but players who staunchly refuse to engage with the new stuff might have to adjust their play a little bit, just a small adjustment without ruining the killer they enjoy playing.
So, what would Clown's power be?
To start, the shell is a little different to what it is now. Instead of having bottle ammunition and two effects to spend it on, the Clown has two separate bottle counts that are reloaded at the same time, broken up into what we'll call "Primary" and "Secondary" bottles for ease of understanding.
The Primary bottle is the closest to what it is now, so we'll talk about that one first. Clown's Primary bottle is still the Afterpiece Tonic; it's still a pink cloud that slows down survivors. However, there is one big difference to how he works now: applying Hindered to a survivor now has something of a cooldown, where if you apply Hindered again while it's still active, nothing happens. The timer must tick down fully before they're vulnerable to another bottle hit.
This is of course to weaken just following in a straight line and throwing bottles. It's lame, nobody likes playing against it, it's the main thing to try and remove if we're reworking Clown.
Otherwise, the numbers would probably be similar to what we have now, I'm not too interested in giving strict percentages here.
Next up, Secondary bottles. This is where the real changes happen, this is the exciting new options for Clown.
By default, they're very similar to what we have now; yellow gas that takes a brief moment to activate, and that gives anyone standing in it Haste. Other than the nice consistency buff that comes from separating bottle counts, not much changes here with this rework.
Where it gets interesting is that Clown in this rework has a set of addons that change what his Secondary bottles do, as well as changing the colour so it's easy to track. For example…
- Bright red gas that reveals auras for any survivor affected
- Green gas that increases vaulting speed + likely other action speeds at the same time
- Neon pink gas that inflicts something akin to Plague's infection and causes survivors to throw up, making them easier to track over long periods
- Orange gas that inflicts a healing slowdown
- Colourless gas replacing the Pinky Finger addon, that inflicts Exposed on a direct hit but doesn't inherently come with Hindered
- Blue gas that causes the next few skillchecks survivors are given to no longer have Great sections
- Brown (? I'm running out of colours) gas that causes the next pallet vaulted by that survivor to break
Now, take all of these with a grain of salt. Some may be too oppressive or annoying to ever hit live servers and he definitely shouldn't have access to all of them, that would be a nightmare + would monopolise too much of his addon spread. The idea is, Clown would have access to a whole bunch of unique and interesting effects that would support different approaches, but he'd have to give up the Haste he'd usually get from his yellow bottles to use it.
Having this be based on addon choice also allows us to have different numbers to balance it. Some of these effects - the Pinky Finger effect and Dissolution effect especially - may warrant limiting the maximum number of Secondary bottles Clown can carry, making them a more precious resource than the Haste bottles would be to accommodate their more immediately potent effect. Similarly, a lot of these would warrant significantly longer durations than the regular pink gas, and that's fine- he's only applying that effect for that period of time and we know his only other effect is Hindered, so we can control how damaging it is.
This would also work for Clown thematically. I know most people don't care about the lore, but what I can remember of his does include him mixing various concoctions to use- it's why he has two bottles now, to my recollection.
Preserving thematic cohesion and lore accuracy is important even if most players don't think about it much, so I wanted to mention that element too.
To sum up: I think what Clown desperately needs is more depth and the removal of really cheap, annoying ways of playing him. At the same time, the killer people put a lot of time into deserves to be preserved, so fundamentally I want to make most of what changes opt-in.
Which leads naturally to: Addons that affect his Secondary bottles to give him more options that all come with their own unique balancing + potential cost. This also fixes Clown's addons being kinda… not great? on live servers right now.