Tired of overpowered Nurse

Let us consider the following. What is nurse's power when you strip it down to the nuts and bolts? It is a dash in a straight line, not dissimilar to billy, oni, or blight. The most obvious difference is that her dash ignores terrain. (Theres a blight joke in there I'm sure.) This, by its nature, makes nurse very good at a few things.

• High, but power dependent mobility.
• Punishing mistakes. (Including routing/looping nurse as if she is a normal killer.)
• Punishing poor situational awareness. (Not paying attention to the directionality of nurse's screams.)

With that said that means the more skilled a nurse player becomes the lower the bar is for the mistake necessary that it opens up survivors for punishment. Now, I would say it does not take particularly long to get to this point as a nurse player, which is moreso based on the fact that average solo queue survivors make many mistakes due to lack of information. This, however, does not translate well to a good game close out, which is how nurse can be a very strong killer, but have a very poor kill average.

Now, what are the drawbacks to this strong power? A stun that can last as long as 4 seconds total, 3 blinks + missed lunge, in combination with the fact that she cannot charge her power at all while having a flashlight on her, and can be lightburned while her power IS charged/charging which knocks her out of her charged blink. (Lightburn is not directionally dependent like blinding, however both lightburn and blinding stack.) This does not even really cover how devastating the forced drop in her gaze is to tracking survivors that were just struck and are now sprint bursting away.

Her power also does not deal well with tight spaces, in a lot of places in a handful of maps a nurse just straight up cannot blink into them at all and there are even more spaces where a nurse player must have pinpoint perfect accuracy to blink inside a tile. You'd be surprised how much you can mess up a nurse player by still keeping your routing around objects tight because they aren't patient enough to get the blink over the debris in the way. Furthermore breaking line of sight in any sort of way makes newer nurse players much more anxious because they are worried about losing a survivor with their poor movement speed.

This panic can be used very effectively by survivors to bait nurses into poor positioning. It feels like people don't seem to realize the exact range at which to deal with nurse. You are really looking at a short-mid range, just enough room that a nurse must use blink to get to you, but not so long that you can't bait out the 2nd blink to get the maximum time out of her power CD. These 3-4 seconds add up swiftly in combination with the time she actually spends in a chase. As everyone is aware, palettes do not normally do much against nurse, however due to the straight line nature of her power it is very easy to geometrically deduce her line of approach and thereby decide which objects can be safely used to block her coming out of lunge or alter the possible path of her blink. There is only 2 choices, either she makes it through or she doesn't. You know if she does, what exact direction the lunge is coming from and its possible curvatures (the hitbox of her lunge is slightly larger than it appears, a relic of a time before it was standardized FYI.) You can also be assured that the nurse knows where you pivoted to and is ready to follow up, using this information and awareness on a killer by killer basis you can easily decide how/where to pivot effectively to dodge.

Always remember, when given the choice, her power will always put her on the closest side of an object from where she used her power, therefore if you can force her into a position where she would blink -inside- an object it will stop her on the other side, putting you into a position where you can pivot for the 2nd or 3rd blink as necessary. The time to cause a nurse to make a mistake is in the final split second before the release of the blink, it is a very tight and crucial window in which to position properly for the juke, or follow up blink. During this time a nurse player is operating on muscle memory, they are no longer operating on sensory input as the time it takes for the information to travel from their eyes to their brain becomes too great. (Similar to a professional baseball player.)

Everyone seems to be so focused on the fact that normal palettes and such things don't work against nurse's power, completely ignoring the fact that she is one of few killers that you can simply run around in an empty field and never be hit if you understand how her power works and the pathing necessary to counter it.

All this laid out, unlike most other killers, nurse's efficiency is the most visibly seen as the skill level of the player rises. e.g. Nurse spends less time in CD as they need fewer blinks and they miss fewer lunges, ability to track survivors without using their eyes when in CD results in much less loss time in chase. This returned time drastically increases the oppressive feeling of nurse's power. (Similar to how survivors simply being -efficient- on generators feels like 'gen rushing' because of the visibly rising effective efficiency.)

With that said, I would face nurse every day over Freddy. His counterplay is to run across the map and shake a clock every few minutes to make him an M1 killer that can teleport to gens sometimes. With nurse her moment to moment chase feels so engaging and honestly very satisfying when you outplay a nurse, but at the same time it is not as bitter because you know that the nurse player is genuinely better, even if it was just that outplay this time. Freddy's skill floor is just so low that anybody can get amazing results with him, and most of the time instead of feeling outplayed he just feels annoying, or if they are actually good killers, mind numbingly oppressive. At least with nurse I can visibly appreciate a player's specific skill with nurse more apparently than other, intensely strong killers. (Looking at you spirit.)

I personally feel that the reason survivors hate nurse so much is because there are so few moderate-good nurse players to play against, and therefore they are never forced to learn how to counter her, as her counterplay is incredibly specific to nurse alone, and does not really translate skills against other, more standard killers nor do the skills of looping standard killers translate well to dealing with nurse.