Why do people say hag is a great killer?

Yeah, Billy, Oni, Nurse, Spirit (I would Add Freddy here) What do those killers have in common? They are really strong. Some more than others sure, but no one would put any of those in the bottom of a tier list.

You could probably argue Legion, Demogorgon and Wraith.

But wraiths power while it gives great mobility (with add-ons at least) works against him when it comes to downing people.

Demos requires setup, can be removed and is really easy to see once activated.

And Legions is great at injuring but comes with too many drawbacks, cooldown, stun, missing a hit, not being able to down, to be as good as the others.

So yes with great mobility comes great power and greater chance of winning.

I think its just the general community not understanding how to play her. She wasn't liked before her changes. And she certainly wasn't liked afterwards. The best proof of that is just how few people actually play her (although she is on the rise). I would guess its because many people didn't know how to play her, use her power that well or just didn't find her fun to play so the community in general didn't learn how to play her. But with certain larger content creators like Otz calling her one of the strongest (although I think he might overestimate her strength, he isn't wrong either), and explaining in other videos how he and others play her. People started to understand how to use her. Using her power in points between gens/gates/hooks or around central points on the map. I think people mainly used it around hooks, around gens and to counter looping. Not a bad idea but I mean trapper can do that better than her most of the time.

Thats just my guess tho. But it happens a lot in other games that something that has been out for a long time is called weak, useless or underpowered only for someone to suddenly start playing it in a different way. It usually happens faster, I remember Ana in Overwatch being called weak for the longest time. Then all of sudden within 6 months of her release and getting a lot of buffs to compete with other healers(and to cope with the cryouts that she was underpowered) some people realised that if they played her very different from other healers she was actually insanely strong. Even more so now that she had gotten buffs. Suddenly she was nerfed to be weaker than she was in her release state and was still very strong.

These things happen. The community isn't all knowing, neither is the devs. Sometimes a meta can change all by itself because some people start playing in a different way. Although in the case of DBD its been a bit too long I think when the devs are done with all these system/feature integrations and changes(things like, Server hit validation, mmr, crossplay, dc penalty, etc) they should start focusing on meta changes. And I know its probably different departments working on it but you can still tell where a lot of ressources are going right now.

A few streamers and long time killers mains have caught onto it for sure - especially the naysayers and people who used to put Hag at the bottom tiers with old Freddy who have ACTUALLY given her a try recently have found her to be extremely strong. There are a few reasons for this:

1) She used to be overshadowed by Omega Blink Nurse (Back when triple blinking distance also increased your blink traversal speed due to a bug - and less stun time on missed blink attacks) and Insta-saw Hillbilly (With old Green Carb Tuning Guide allowing you to basically down healthy survivors in many loops almost completely negating Dead Hard and forcing the meta slightly towards Vault Builds to deal with the prevalence of Billies at high ranks). Both these are now gone so the next tier down is starting to shine a lot more, Which are your Infectious Fright Onis, Stridor Spirits and Yes, you guessed it... Hags.

2) The general QoL increases to killer made over the years have also helped M1 killers a lot especially with removing some infinites and basically narrowing a lot of choice spots for Hag to put camera breaking traps compared to before - loops are less likely to chain like they used to meaning playing her with zoning in mind at each tileset basically guarantees her hits if you have good spatial awareness. Another QoL change that helped survivors (bringing tilesets closer together) which hurt every other killer has actually inversely helped Hag in terms of using less traps to break more areas of the map considering her teleport range couldn't handle THE GIANT maps (they still happen but it's not as prevalent and can be worked around).

3) The meta developed in terms of killers figuring out how to waste more survivors time more and the Hag is great at creating pressure during these moments that other killers don't really have. The main topic here is slugging then using that time to lay traps to draw more people into your web. Unbreakable on it's own is strong vs this but doesn't invalidate your traps that you're building up as you pressure and move about the map - unlike other killers repeatedly giving up chases to keep inflicting hits, force healing and recovery is extremely viable and powerful on hag just because the nature of traps. Instant teleporting, hitting then replacing the trap, then continuing on is a very common gameplay loop. You'll rack up hooks whenever you catch hurt people out of position or trying to heal, then there's that trapper bonus of just getting free downs with unexpected traps ontop of that.

4) Like you said it's rarely played and people don't know how to counter her. Urban invasion is honestly an out of favor perk atm while strong against her while Flashlights ARE strong but not unmanagable if you are aware survivors brought them. Even experience SWFs rarely know to dedicate their best looper to PRESSURING the Hag by setting off traps whenever they can through gambling or just being keenly aware when a hag is going to be UNWILLING to give up her chase to just get a free hit on you because she's about to get a hit or down. This is in reverse to the norm where it's actually on the survivors to pressure strong tilesets or lose the game against good hags (It's ironic that survivors can be told the same thing they always chime to killers). There is counterplay to her but it really isn't as easy as "Lulz just crouch and bring a flashie"

She is extremely good against dumb survivors and, lo and behold, we don't really have a shortage of those. If a hag gets into a last gen situation all you have to do to beat her is everyone run in, start on gens, when she hits you run out, heal, rinse repeat until the gens are completed. That's literally it and there's nothing she can do about it. She chases someone, she loses. She carries on hitting and placing traps, the gen eventually gets done and it's an automatic loss because she's a very cool killer design that isn't flawed in the slightest :)

It boils down to how many seconds on average it takes a killer to get a hit over the course of the game. The faster a killer can get hits the faster they get downs. Hag is one of the only killers that gets hits with pretty much no chase period. She spends extra time in the beginning setting up a web of traps, gens outside that web start to go, but then once those are done the survivors are forced to enter her territory and she gets hits the moment they start triggering the traps. Smart Hags put the traps in chokepoints that survivors will run through when chased off gens as opposed to right next to gens, so crouching near the gen doesn’t avoid the trap, and will have traps that are in a close enough region of the map such that if you get hit by one trap you have a decent chance to sprint toward another trap and get a second hit a few seconds later. Since none of the hits require her actually chasing survivors for more than a few seconds she is extremely time efficient once the traps start triggering.

Her main weakness is against a full swf using a flashlight to sneak around near Hag and disable her traps. You can potentially deal with that by, for example, setting up a couple of traps and then forcing the player following you to set them off to down them, but either way being “weak against a full swf team that specifically coordinates against you” isn’t exactly a problem unique to Hag.

Personally I think she is among the top five killers with the top three being Spirit, Nurse and Freddy and her and Billy being four and five. Most streamers seem to put her fairly high as well. (And Michi is the best Hag main streamer I’ve watched, the things and foreplanning he can do with traps are pretty wild. If you ever want an insight into how an expert Hag player treats traps check out his Hag guide, he does some pretty neat tricks with traps like using the forced camera turn to steer runners into the wrong sides of loops.)

She's the strongest camper outside of a face camping Bubba and there's still no true hard counter to camping in this game. At best, you're just going to end up taking the person's spot on hook.

She causes all players to walk instead of running in most games.

Did I mention camping? She can patrol halfway across a map and stop gen progress and still teleport back to a hook or something else she is guarding without even actually being there. She can literally apply pressure in multiple places across a map.

It is not the same map traversal at all unless you add in specific perks

When Hag teleports, she knows at least a survivor is there, she knows where they went, and if she is close enough when the trap triggers she gets a hit just because of that

Yes, you need to set up your traps unlike other killers, but she has an undeniable strong teleport ability which is different from the one of other killers

Freddy (and Demo) can teleport to gens (portals for Demo), but it is not an instant teleport, and survivor can get a lot of distance before the killer is even there

Nurse can teleport nearly istantly, but she has to guess where a survivor is unless she has it in her FOV, and if she misses she's fatigued

Spirit and Billy simply have fast map traversal, but they can only patrol gens (even tho they do it fast) if they have no idea where survivors are, and is not an instant teleport like Hag's

She's strong, you can say she's not the strongest killer in DBD, and I could agree with you, but you can't say she's not a great killer

While other Killers can traverse the map better than her she can traverse the map when it counts, when people steps on a trap. Her skill acts as map traversal and detection at the same time, thats why is weaker than Hillbilly or Nurse map traversals, you must place traps in not so obvious places for her to work, if you put them where everyone expects them they will crouch over them.

Also she has very small and has 24 meter TR radius, with M&A its only 16, Hag is very stealth when approaching unsuspecting Survivors.

Because most the population on average isn't very good and she's a noob stomper. More so than most other killers. She's a killer that's significantly stronger than most if the survivors don't know what they're doing.

She's countered quite easily by good survivors.

Won't work against a good hag. The strategy fails on the "run out" part. A good Hag will predict the path you use to run out with and trap it in advance. So she hits you and you run away, hitting her trap and getting downed.

Honestly, I think it heavily depends on the player. Like, sure, Hag has the potential to be one of the best Killers in the game, but only if you know how to play her (and as others here said, Survivors aren't giving each other the locations of your traps.) I honestly suck at Hag and never got a single kill as her. Same for Nurse and Billy. On the other hand, I consistently do pretty well with Trapper, Wraith and Legion, Killers I've seen a lot of people call complete trash on every rank. While I do think some Killers need to be adjusted or buffed, I also think once in a while a player will click with a Killer and manage to make them work well enough.

Of course, I'm a rank 17 and a casual player at best, so feel free to take this all with a grain of salt. Just sharing my two cents.

It is so hard to give accurate information of traps to each other.

People really under estimate how important communication skills are which most people just don’t have.

Hence the vast majority of relationship problems.

Yeah, I agree. I've played against several SWF groups who clearly could not communicate (when they can, which is often noticeable, I normally end up losing miserably as I'm a decent enough Killer at best.) Still, there's a disadvantage to a Hag who goes up against a SWF group who CAN communicate.

(Honestly, I still think the best way to play this game is with friends. As in, all of you, including the Killer, know each other and are communicating. It's so much more fun that way. But I digress.)