The Plague
I've been playing as the Plague for the last couple days and have some balance feedback on her. For some background, I have about 520 hrs in the game and currently sit at rank 7 killer.
The good: she has good snowball potential and is fun to play.
The bad: She is almost completely reliant on survivors making mistakes. Corrupt Purge is not threatening due to how inefficient it is to obtain and how slow she is while charging and holding it.
Theoretically, not cleansing and leaving yourself in the Broken state would be a mistake, and that is true for a survivor that isn't particularly good at looping. However, the Plague lacks the map presence and mobility to really take advantage of multiple survivors in the Broken state. Coupled with her unusual height and 32m terror radius, she is extremely loopable by good survivors. There is no penalty to the sickness other than being Broken, and being Broken just doesn't matter when the killer is way on the other side of the map.
Corrupt Purge should be the answer to survivors not cleansing, but again, it relies on survivors cleansing as well as wonky hit detection. At my current rank, it's almost always an all or nothing deal as far as cleansing goes. Once one survivors cleanses, they all cleanse. As I mentioned earlier, Corrupt Purge suffers from an efficiency problem. How far do I have to walk to get it? How much generator pressure should I sacrifice? I spent all this time putting survivors in the Broken state, and now they're all instantly healed. Again, inefficient. If it's not efficient to get multiple survivors sick, then why am I doing it at all in place of M1 hits and ending chases sooner? Even when a Corrupted Fountain is in a convenient place, survivors either A: hide and wait it out or B: take advantage of her reduced movement speed and obstacles on top of the sketchy hit detection.
In her current state, she easily beats newer players and lower ranked players but gets outright bullied by survivors who understand how she works. She only wins when survivors get caught in dead zones, lack cleansing coordination, and generally make mistakes. Her Corrupt Purge is rendered moot because of the pressure loss to obtain it and the angles lost because of how slow she moves while charging and holding. The Broken state only penalizes survivors in proportion to their skill, not necessarily the killer's. And maps are way too big for a killer of her mobility and terror radius to fully take advantage of it. Overall, she's just a mid-tier noob stomper and I can't really see myself using her that much.
The game currently has enough noob stomper killers. I get that you want new players to not feel overwhelmed, but I guarantee a rank 15 killer is going to be just as suboptimal as those survivors. There seems to be a strange assumption that killers will be more or less optimal and skilled across ranks but survivors won't. Two friends recently got the game and didn't realize they should traverse the map with Hillbilly's chainsaw. Trust me, you can release strong killers and not decimate lower ranks. I would love more killer variety and viability at higher ranks.
Comments
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No. Plague is good as she is. She is viable, she is fun to play - perfectly balance. Better Behaviour doesn't touch her.
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If you think she's viable you don't play at high ranks.
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Well said OP and I basically agree with it all. Plague is fun but not rank 1 viable.
What it all boils down to is that the devs think the broken status and just staying injured in general is way more dangerous than it actually is.
With her high TR and tall height she is one of the most loopable killers in the game. Loops are too powerful for staying injured to matter. There are enough pallets and windows that they can finish all 5 gens before they run out.
Against good, high rank survivors you might get corrupted vomit once or twice if that.
Also because they aren't healing at all whether they use the fountains or not, she has zero slow down. This means she gets gen rushed to hell.
She needs extra penalties to staying infected/broken to make survivors cleanse. She already loses all pressure having to walk out of her way to pick up the Corrupted vomit even if she gets the opportunity. Not to mention she's even quite loopable while having Corrupted vomit because of its slow projectile speed.
Post edited by Blueberry on2 -
Yup. Perhaps her biggest problem is how Corrupted vomit works. At high ranks, once one survivor cleanses, they all cleanse, and it's often in Narnia and not near an objective. By the time you walk back to where everyone is, the duration is halfway gone, you've lost gen pressure, and it's such a slow charge and charge movement that it's extremely difficult to hit at a loop. I mean, theoretically, you force a cleanse, you get them broken again, and then gain Corrupt Purge....but there are 5 gens to repair in a trial, not 10.
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A bigger issue than anything else is that the devs have said they actively don't want all killers to be viable in low ranks. They are specifically designing killers to be viable, at best, in the mid ranks. Any time I've seen them respond to things like this, it's simply to say that they don't want other killers to be buffed or even tweaked to make them better across all ranks.
Which, honestly, is baffling to me. Survivors complain constantly that they see too many Billies, nurses, and spirits, but the devs apparently support those being the only killers some players see?
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