Wraith has been Overbuffed and is now meta

Honestly I think that his addons (other than the Clappers) need a touch up

And if I were to change anything about base I would add a 3s delay where he cant uncloak after cloaking to deny the people who abuse his speed burst

Never thought I'd see the day when people would complain about the Wraith being OP but here we are...

Goes to show, people will whine about this game no matter what the devs change, which they in turn can use as an excuse not to implement changes that are actually needed. Smh.

Unpopular opinion but for the sake of game balance, all killers should eventually be buffed into the A or B tier. The more powerful the killer role is, the more impactful each individual survivor is allowed to be because the killer has the ability to manage them. Just nerfing killers is a kneejerk reaction, especially considering Wraith has always been nerfed with his buffs. Every single time he got one, they also detracted from somewhere.

Unrelated, but even if they balance the killers, a problem does occur in that killer in general cannot be addressed easily because each killer attacks in a different way. Wraith, Ghostface, Twins, and Oni, for example, are at their strongest when the survivors don't heal, so you need to heal whenever possible. Healing against Leatherface, Plague, or Legion is almost always a waste of time. Changing generators impacts low mobility killers way more than high mobility killers. Changing maps massively impacts trap based killers, both for good and bad, but is largely ignored by teleporting killers, like Freddy, Demo, and Nurse. I almost think they need to balance killer in general first, then do the individual killers, so they can be made to match the new standards while maintaining their strengths.

I would be more than happy to discuss the specifics of each nerf, if I could find a complete change log anywhere. I'm not really surprised nobody really remembers he got nerfed as it was always seen as an overall positive exchange.

I don't think it helps the game though to reduce the skill ceiling by nerfing killers. If you nerf the ceiling, then the average skill of the player base goes down, which is not what you want in a game that you need comfortably 1k hours in to be considered "competent" not even necessarily good at it.

What needs to happen is that weaker killers are buffed up to where stronger killers sit, and from there survivors can be buffed to account for the new, higher tier killers. This probably makes survivor players uncomfortable to read, but the unfortunate fact remains that survivor changes are going to have 4x the impact, so the systems need to already be in place for killers to succeed before survivors can get changed.

Wiki changelog isn't complete, thanks though I saw it.

If I remember right, it came when they redesigned his addons. But that was back in 2.3, so the memory is vague at best. Perhaps I'm conflating PTB notes with actual release notes after that amount of time.

His his previous windstorm debuff for the decloak speed is now his actual decloak speed.

What you linked is the wiki for wraith, what it is not is the complete changelog. Its the cliff notes at best, but I don't really think thats the argument at this point. So lets just set it aside.

You need some strong killers with disproportionately rewarded actions for the skill level involved, that is how new players are able to handle coming into an environment with more experienced players. These mechanics are called FOOS, first order optimal strategies. All they do is create a foothold for a new player. Killers like Spirit, Doctor, Oni, and Freddy roughly fit this bill.

My suggestion is not what you are saying. I would not release any new killers until the current ones are raised up to be a high tier and relatively tightly grouped compared to now. Once baseline killer role power is established, from there the new reciprocating role power can be delegated to the 4 survivor slots. (This would include buffing/redesigning perks to fit the changing meta of no low rank killers at all.) From then on, yes I would release fairly powerful killers knowing that survivors have decently strong utility tools to deal with them and only need to learn the new skill curve of the killer.

Fun comes from engagement, engagement comes from the feeling of agency, agency comes from freedom. The more freedom and power a killer has, so too does that translate to the agency a survivor is allowed to have against them. This clashing agency now creates more complex systems of engagement and ultimately leads to fun for both sides.

While this is a nice analogy, it does not work in a game like dead by daylight. In fact a more apt description to balancing this game would probably be: Trying to hold water in a perfect sphere with just your hands. All the elements you interact with affect each other, pressure, ripples, and waves resonate through it.

Every killer has their own needs, fixing the game for one would break the game for all other killers. Therefore you have to establish an environment where they can all play to their strengths. You cannot balance strictly by the numbers because the simple matter is that straining for a perfect average assumes the population itself is perfectly averaged, which it never is.

The obvious answer becomes, in that case, to relieve how painful it feels for survivors to be sacrificed. That vaguely translates into more opportunities to earn survival points, and points overall in the short term, but hopefully through increasing the complexity of the killer role the avenues for earning points can become more numerous altogether. I think most players with enough hours in the game would agree that getting 4Ks or surviving every game becomes super boring and they are pretty much over living or dying mattering to them. Its not about the end, its about the journey of the trial, so using kill rates for balance is just going to make a boring game.

I think his All Seeing Blood and his pink gen aura add-on should swap rarities.