Plague adjustments to make her better in high rank play

edgarpoop

Plague is one of my favorite killers in the game, but I find that she isn't very useful at purple rank and beyond, which is a shame. Her issues become glaring at rank 4 and above. As I see it, her biggest problem is that her power forces survivors into optimal play, when in reality a killers power should do the opposite.

What I mean is this: the most effective way to complete all generators at high rank is to completely forego healing, repair generators, and loop just long enough to buy time, which most high level survivors can do against M1 killers. At the end, survivors typically get healed by Adrenaline, or in the Plague's case, a fountain. Her power literally coerces survivors into their most effective playstyle and also incentivizes them to not give Plague her most powerful form. Generators are typically repaired with minimal casualties on pallet heavy maps and survivors just cleanse at a fountain while someone opens the gate.

I think a repair speed penalty when sick, tiers to sickness beyond the broken status that inflict further debuffs, or some form of aura reading on sick survivors would incentivize survivors to cleanse. Survivors just don't treat her as a threat at red ranks, because generator repairs can always outpace hook counts on maps with a large amount of safe pallets.

Bludge23

I like the action debuff idea for full infected survivors to incentivize cleansing. I think also that having to physically walk to go get her power reduces so much of her pressure. I feel like she should be able to corrupt a pool anywhere on the map. With healing being so powerful, the fact that survivors can heal so quickly by using the pools is really bad. I was thinking why not make the healing from the pools as slow as regular healing? The games that I have had are high ranked survivors stay fully infected and don't cleanse until all generators are all done. When I want to put pressure on I can't because walking to the pools guarantee I lose any pressure on the gens and the end, the gates.

darktrix

An action de-buff isn't going to coerce good survivors into cleansing early and give plague the ability to down them even faster. Has to be some sort of additional de-buff, while also not insuring the death of all the survivors by giving her a power that is easy to hit with and destroys any looping/pallet/vault strategy (you know the only things survivors have to defend themselves). As it stands now, whenever someone cleanses too early with plague and she powers up, it feels like game over for survivors - and it usually is.

Tough thing to balance - if you make being sick more horrible than getting downed fast by machine gun vomit - then you risk people not even bothering to play vs. a plague. It's just weird plague mechanics to begin with.