Reminiscing about Old Freddy - And ways he could have been fixed

I, like most people, really didn't give old Freddy much credit. His power was to essentially give the survivor you found a 7 second head start in the chase, and to make the tedious slough that is repairing gens even more boring, forcing survivors to rely on the game's fickle RNG until they got a skillcheck or their repair speed would be cut in half. To be generous, he had a lot of problems.

But he wasn't all bad in hindsight.

He had something almost none of the other killers, especially the licensed ones, had. A unique identity. Even if his power was weak and merely prolonged the game it was the only one of it's kind and completely changed how everyone played the game. He wasn't a version of another killer that already existed with some minor tweaks to their power and a gimmick slapped on. Freddy was was his own killer. Going up against him was still the closest thing we have ever gotten to a new game mode in over 4 years now.

But since then he's gotten a complete rework. So what exactly was wrong with it?

It dissolved his identity completely. Compared to before where, although it was tedious to go up against, survivors were still massively encouraged to wake up after falling asleep, almost perfectly recreating a particular scene in the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie in which Nancy was trapped by Freddy in the boiler room and wakes up just in time by burning her arm, now survivors fall asleep all the time and rarely bother to wake up by finding their clock unless they happen to run near it. Let alone deliberately fail a skill check and waste valuable progress just to wake up. It completely removed the menacing presence that Old Freddy had and made him just another dude to avoid if he started coming near you. A far cry from hearing the lullaby around you, starting to fall asleep, and attempting to keep track of Freddy as your last moments of consciousness waned.

And that's not even mentioning what they've done to the rest of his kit.

Dream snares are a weirdly out of character utility for Freddy to use. Again mentioning the first film in which he appeared in, Nancy attempts to climb a flight of stairs and find that the steps are turning into a sticky goo that almost completely stops her in her tracks until she breaks free, no doubt heavily based off a common nightmare in which you're running from a monster but you never seem to gain any distance no matter how hard you run, the snares we have now depict bloody hands reaching out for the survivor and only mildly slowing them down and preventing fast vaults. Imagine if that had appeared in the movie instead of the goo on the steps. How weird would it be for these nightmarish appendages to just slow Nancy down a bit rather than grab hold of her and stop her moving entirely. I'm not asking for dream snares to be buffed to do this. But their current iteration is just a bland hybrid of Hag's and Clown's power.

And then there's dream pallets.

These, I feel, are more in-character than the snares. A survivor rushing to something they think will bring them a moment of safety but instead turn into blood in their hands seems like a totally "Freddy" thing to do. But they suffer from a usability problem. If the survivor has spent any time awake in an area of the map, and has a functioning short term memory, then the pallets are useless. They may get you some free hits here and there. But good survivors will just rely on the map's windows and basically ignore half of your power entirely.

Lastly there's the teleport.

Easily the ability that survivors now loath Freddy the most for. From anywhere in the map, at any time, he can teleport to a gen with a 1 minute cooldown reduced by 15% for every survivor asleep at the time of the teleport. It's extremely convenient, requires only a small amount of game sense to use effectively, and is the most boring movement ability in the game. The only interaction it actually has with survivors besides them committing to the gen or not, is faking a teleport in a chase or using the mediocre Class Photo add-on that removes your ability to cancel teleports in favour of spooking all survivors currently repairing gens.

In summary, everything that New Freddy has makes him a stronger killer at the cost of his identity. So what could have been done to Old Freddy to fix his problems while still keeping him unique?

First off, replacing his "dream laser" thing with survivors around him passively falling asleep while inside his terror radius. The speed at which they fall asleep is relative to how close they are to Freddy and if he can see them or not. This would be adjusted so if Freddy is right in front of a survivor they will fall asleep at the same right that they would have if he had used his power on them. Freddy would be able to track how close survivors were to falling asleep by looking at the clock around their icon, (Which would also function as a passive detection tool for awake survivors around Freddy), while survivors could progressively hear the lullaby louder and louder and periodically seeing Freddy as they fall asleep as they used to. They would still be able to see which survivors are fully asleep by looking at their icons. Freddy's base terror radius could also be increased from 32 meters to 36 to compliment this.

Now for his actual power, and where things get interesting. Old Freddy's biggest weakness is that once a survivor was asleep he had little tools for actually downing them. Instead relying on putting multiple survivors asleep and them wasting time failing skill checks so he could gain gen pressure, leading to games dragging on for a while with little interaction between survivors and Freddy. I think to fix this, rather than survivors being able to do less when asleep, Freddy should be able to do more. And he should be able to do enough that survivors are actually encouraged to wake themselves up rather than sit on gens. Here is what I suggest:

• Survivors no longer suffer any action speed penalty when asleep, and all of Freddy's add-ons that add further action speed penalties are changed to compliment his new power in some way. (I may do a full list of this later) And in addition the rate at which skillchecks appear for survivors will scale with how long they've been asleep for. So survivors who are falling asleep with not get skillchecks at all, and once asleep the rate at which skillchecks appear will be greatly reduced and return to normal over the course of 30 seconds, Barring exceptions from perks that generate skillchecks when used. They can still be woken up by other survivors who aren't asleep by the "snap snap clap clap" combo.
• Freddy now has a power meter that is expended when he uses it and refills very slowly over time and by a large amount when survivors fall asleep. The more survivors are asleep at one time, the more Freddy will passively disappear from survivor's vision and the more abilities he will have access to. Here's a list of them:

1. Fake pallets. These function like they do now but now an unlimited amount of them can be placed, at the cost of a small amount of Freddy's power gauge for each one created. They can also be placed regardless of how many survivors are asleep.
2. Fake generators. These are placed in the same manner as fake pallets, where you look at a spot in which a generator could have spawned and place a fake one, and will serve act as a map traversal tool and time waster. Fake generators will start with a set amount of progress ranging from 50%-70%, reduced with add-ons. After placing a fake generator Freddy can teleport to it at will like he can now, with no cost to his power. Survivors repairing the generator will have their auras revealed and will not receive skillchecks, and upon completing the generator it will explode into blood and make them oblivious for 60 seconds, the duration of this can also increased with add-ons. Like fake pallets, fake generators can only be interacted with by asleep survivors and can be placed even if no survivors are asleep.
3. Blood Rivers. A blood river is a long, scarlet-tinted sludge, filled with the bloody hands currently seen in dream snares, that are 2 meters wide and 25 meters long and go through walls. Their size can be increased with add-ons. They allow Freddy to create his own dead zones, as any asleep survivor that touches a blood river will have to perform an action for a couple of seconds to pull themselves free. At least 1 survivor must be asleep for Freddy to use this ability and it requires a "considerable" amount of his power gauge to be placed and only a 2 can be active at a time. (Since there's no way to test any of these changes I will not be giving any estimate as to the power cost. It would have to be fairly expensive to use)
4. Blood Post. A blood post is an ornate torture device is shaped vaguely like a bed appears inhabited by the dozens of souls claimed by Freddy and functions as a place-able hook, allowing Freddy to hook someone in the exact position he wants, with exceptions to placing one right next to generators, hooks and exit gate switches. Saving a survivor from a blood post takes longer than saving from a hook and will make the saviour fall asleep after the rescue. Blood posts can only be placed if at least 2 survivors are asleep.
5. The Boiler. The boiler is a unique tile that Freddy can choose to send both himself and a survivor he injures to, while at least 3 people are asleep and Freddy's power gage is full. It is fairly small and contains both windows, real and fake pallets, although all of them are highly unsafe to loop around as Freddy can see the aura of survivors in the boiler at all times. Once in the boiler survivors will only be able to escape by either surviving for 30 seconds and touching one of the steam pipes, (also waking them up in the process), or by getting downed by Freddy, where then they will instantly appear on his shoulder back in the realm. If a survivor escapes the boiler without being downed then Freddy will be teleported back to the realm from where he last was. Survivors working on fake generators can be instantly taken to the boiler.

If all of these abilities are balanced correctly, then I believe that they will allow Freddy to greatly re-attain his killer identity while making him incredibly engaging to both both as, and against. As well as properly depicting him from his appearance in the films as a cunning and malicious nightmare that makes falling asleep a terrifying prospect.

Please tell me what you think of this post and if you would change anything about the changes I have suggested!