I genuinely think Trickster is the new worst killer

The knives have the spread of a shotgun. The problem is that a shotgun shot has multiple small projectiles, and this Killer throws one projectile at a time. If he threw multiple knives at a time then the spread of them wouldn't feel so bad.

A baby nurse with NOED can get more kills than a Trickster player from my experience and that's all I need to know.

He is slower than Pig (his 110% vs. Pig 115% speed). If you play Pig without using the crouch ever then you are at an advantage over a Trickster that is not using the knives due to the higher speed. Therefore for Trickster to be equally strong or stronger you must use the knives. But anytime you hit a Survivor with knives and don't get them to the state where they take damage, i.e. you abandon the chase to go after someone else or hit them with a regular attack after hitting them with less than the required amount of knives, you have lost time. Pig causes Survivors to lose time by putting a trap on them, which you could say is a positive time gain for Pig.

Trickster loses time with his power. Pig gains time with her traps.

For Trickster to be better than Pig he needs to be able to damage Survivors faster than Pig could with her regular attacks, and do it so quickly that the time he saves by injuring with the thrown knives is greater than the time it takes for the Survivors to remove the traps.

But then you must consider that Pig has a secondary ability, the crouch, which can also be used to injure Survivors quicker than you could with regular attacks. For example sneaking up on someone working on a generator. That saves additional time over Trickster.

I'd say it's fair to say that Trickster is definitely worse than Pig.

The problem with Trickster is that you never want to use his Power. Survivors can recover Laceration while still in a chase even, so a couple of half decent loops and you've already lost progress, making using his power to cause a loss of a health state too much of a time investment.

If you start throwing knives, but you catch up to the survivor and hit them, then all your laceration progress is lost and you would have caught up to them quicker if you'd just not bothered throwing knives in the first place.

The only place they are a benefit is if you are out in a deadzone without obstacles or loops and the survivor is so far away that you can reliably hit them 8 times and injure them quicker than you could just catch up to them and hit them and even then they still get their speed burst putting even more distance between the two of you, or on a low wall loop where you can throw over the obstacles between you and the survivor.

Also you never want to use Main Event. It's a detriment to you no matter when you use it because of the stuns that follow using it or cancelling it and the debuff preventing you from throwing knives right after it. It's really bad.

Just look at the survivor achievement Close Shave to understand how bad this killer is. The achievement isn't there to reward playing well as survivor, it's to reward you for being in a match against a Trickster trying to get some use out of his power.

To me his only decent Add Ons are the one that causes Knives to ricochet, and I think at least one ricochet should be baseline. And the add on that reduces the number of Laceration stacks required by 1.

There's no reason to use any of the others if you have these two to use instead. Maybe the Piercing Add On, but only if combined with the ricochet Add On it creates a situation where a Knife can pass through a survivor, hit the wall, ricochet, and hit the survivor again adding more Laceration.

I love everything about the Trickster but playing him. I love his design, I love his perks, I love the "idea" of his power, I love all of his voice lines, everything.

But if I had to sum up his main problem in as few words as possible it would be that he's Too Slow. Everything about him is too slow, and a character like this with the backstory he has just screams speed to me. Perhaps adding stacks of Laceration to someone he's in a chase with should increase his movement speed until the chase is over or he hits them. This would fit him thematically in my opinion as it would represent his increased excitement and bloodlust from the wounds he's inflicting on his victim.

I also think instead of having Main Event, which is terrible. He should be able to spend like 20 Knives at once and "throw" them at the ground creating a trap that adds 3 Laceration when someone runs over it. The trap would persist until someone ran over it or until the Trickster reloaded at a locker.

Also Laceration shouldn't decay, at least while still in a chase with him.

No if they change Laceration to remove its decay it should absolutely stay on a Survivor if the Trickster reloads at a locker. The only thing that should remove Laceration stacks is a loss of a health state from the Trickster either from getting hit with that final knife or a melee swing.

One of his biggest problems is that you can catch people you're throwing knives at and hit them before you get that full Laceration meter and down them with knives, making throwing knives pointless, but you feel the obligation to commit to doing that because if you stop, then the meter decays and there was no point to even starting to throw knives at them.

If you throw some knives at someone, but the chase starts going too long you should be able to leave them to chase someone else or scare people off generators and still have that Laceration stacked.