http://dbd.game/killswitch
How much skill does current Spirit take?
You can’t say she takes no skill anymore because survivors now have something to react to and you can’t stand still to get free hits anymore. I would say that she is in the top 10-15 skill requiring killers in the game right now. There’s unique mind games with her that require you to execute the mind game while losing sights of survivors. With old Spirit, sometimes you didn’t really need to see them as they had no idea where you were so it wasn’t exactly a mindful mind game with that.
What are your thoughts? I definitely think the fact that Spirit is as rare as a unicorn now proves she takes way more skill than before.
(Yes I know this is like my 57396205th thread on Spirit but I just love talking with people about her.)
Comments
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Nothing changed about her skill requirement. All that got changed in terms of skill was lowering the amount of skill survivors needed tremendously.
You see Spirit less because she got dumpstered. It has nothing to with her skill requirement.
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Survivors’ skills wasn’t meaningful before though. It’s not that the survivors’ skill changed, it’s the fact they can actually use their skill to evade her now.
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It was extremely meaningful before. Most survivors just weren't skillful enough to understand how to utilize it.
It's easier to make excuses like "SpIrIT TaKeS nO SkIlL" than to actually have the player admit they weren't very good. These days in general people have very little self agency.
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Too much skill, I can't even 0k anymore.
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Then why did people like Zubat and Ussylis hate going against her even though they’re very skilled survivors?
I agree saying Spirit took no skill before was a huge reach but you need to look at the survivor POV a bit as well.
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"Then why did people like Zubat and Ussylis hate going against her even though they’re very skilled survivors?"
Hating playing against a killer does not equate to meaning she takes no skill or has no counter play. She required a completely different kind of counter play and doesn't allow survivors to play the way they normally do, aka they way they deem "fun". Pallet looping in other words.
"I agree saying Spirit took no skill before was a huge reach but you need to look at the survivor POV a bit as well."
I do. You imply by my opinion that I don't look at it from the survivors POV. That's like implying I'm a killer main just because I say a certain killer needs a buff. That's flawed reasoning. I play probably even more survivor than I do killer and had no issues with Spirit before. That was playing at rank 1 on every reset for literally years and with thousands of hours.
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It takes way more skill to play Spirit than 90% of survivors realize. It's a totally different skill set to judge distances based on sound (and inconsistent scratch marks). But survivors complained that she's "no skill, ez hit, no counterplay" so much (without ever actually trying to use her), that now she's even harder than before.
I wouldn't bother buying her unless you plan on putting in Nurse-levels of "Get Good" time. She's hard to play and only getting harder as time goes on.
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my big thing about spirit's nerf was the stealth/jumpscare aspect.
I recommend running devour, Yakuyoke Amulet, and Furin.
in my last game using the build, I mori'd someone who's gamertag was scaryspirit* after hitting them once. no hook states. big oof for them, but I bet it was scary.
*changed to protect the innocent.
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Her being strong and fun gives a good reason to try her out. Also she isn’t super buggy like Nurse is.
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I used Furin one time with Ruin Surveillance. It’s a good tracking tool if Ruin can stay up.
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I was in the process of learning her before her changes and tried her some after them.
She wasn't exactly hard to play before but being able to hide your position allowed you to do things like get gen grabs by phasing at the edge of her TR, faking phase for certain actions (not just at pallets), or give one survivor the impression they were being chased when you actually peeled off to do something else.
Now she's extremely dull to play. You make distance with her power, smack, repeat. There's no tricks, no games to play except by making some pallets a little less safe provided you guess correctly. She's just a brute force, add-on hungry chaser now with a pretty low skill-cap, especially if you go MDR+DCB that'll just inform you when it's time to let go of M2. You hold W, survivors hold W and prethrow every pallet, when your power's up you hold W+M2. Boring.
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I wasn’t trying to imply that you don’t play survivor. I’m just saying that you gotta look at the reasons why Spirit was complained about. Lack of feedback isn’t really fun to go against and she wasn’t balanced like she is now. It wasn’t about her strength at all and the things that make her strong are still there.
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She was complained about because she took a lot of skill to understand how to play against her and the average survivor doesn't have very much skill.
"Lack of feedback isn’t really fun to go against"
This statement right here is the core of why people have no understanding of Spirit. If you are looking for feedback from Spirit in the first place you fundamentally don't understand how to play against Spirit. If you are looking for feedback you are doing it wrong. You are trying to play against Spirit in the same way you play against other killers.
You played against old Spirit by reversing that thought process and making her look for feedback from you. You had to play against Spirit pro-actively, not re-actively. It's the total opposite of other killers.
You manipulate what she is hearing and seeing to force her to make guesses, not you.
"she wasn’t balanced like she is now"
She isn't balanced now. "Balanced" by dev standards is trash against even remotely decent survivors.
"It wasn’t about her strength at all and the things that make her strong are still there."
No. The things that made her strong are completely removed. All of the counter play that survivors used to have to use that I just went over are completely unnecessary now. You can totally loop her like other killers now. The skill required to play against Spirit is very low now and instead of the survivors having to be skilled enough to force Spirit to make guesses the Spirit is by default forced to make guesses now.
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"a skill required to play against Spirit is very low now and instead of the survivors having to be skilled enough to force Spirit to make guesses the Spirit is by default forced to make guesses now."
You know funny part is that spirit cannot even guess because I do not have enough information for spirit to use to make guesses. Iron will users are completely invisible now. The good news is that from what I've noticed, Iron will is becoming a lot less used right now and my speculation for this that most survivor players seem to have replaced Iron will with Circle of healing.
The survivor that still use Iron will though, they're nearly invincible now with spirit's power. I faced one spirit that tried to chase me one game and I literally had 5 gen chase vs Spirit. I don't think I have ever done that with old spirit. Poor girl. She got bully simulator treatment.
I stopped playing her after Stridor nerf. I knew she was going to get destroyed after that change.
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When I play with Spirit, i feel like i need to sharpen my sense of game sense. guess my survivor decisions, act quick while i can't see or hear anything.
Playing with her can be really exhausting. she is hard to play until you master her right. but i can admit she is fun sometimes.
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She's still a great killer, only difference is that good survivors have a chance to read what you're doing now, which makes matches more challenging.
Do you need more skill to play spirit? Not exactly, however you wont be getting downs just because.
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That's kinda the only saving grace with less people running Iron Will now. I had the same speculation as you. As you mentioned though, if they are running Iron Will good luck lol.
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Lmao people are still saying that pre nerf Spirit's bingo bonanza was 'skillful'?
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You need at least 400 midichlorians to play Spirit well
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She requires an outsized amount of effort to achieve a skill ceiling of mediocre results against decent survivors. Just play Bubba or Demo if you want to force survivors to pre-drop and plow through pallets.
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There is absolutely no skill in rolling a dice and hoping you guess right
And the actual counterplay to her was unrealistic af in a solo q game
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If you understand Spirit it isn't rolling dice.
Her counter play also wasn't unrealistic, I did all the time in solo queue.
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If Stridor worked I'd try her again but the dev's destroyed her perk. I quit.
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I usually just play spirit with mother daughter ring and cherry blosom, I have downed survivors with Iron will. I could never really play spirit in her current form for more than day to be honest. They took all the skill out of playing her and and made her most brain dead auto-pilot killer imaginable. She is more of a play her once a week for memes killer.
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Yeah I wouldn’t mind if they reverted Stridor.
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Her counterplay was throwing a pallet and hoping for the best, since she has a lot more information.
You cant guess where she is even if you know of the animation reset thing she does when she starts phasing, because of her add ons which had a major impact of when she'd be on top of you
Even now this is still sort of true
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"Her counterplay was throwing a pallet and hoping for the best"
No, that wasn't her counter play.
"You cant guess where she is even if you know of the animation reset thing she does when she starts phasing, because of her add ons which had a major impact of when she'd be on top of you"
If you're trying to guess where she is you already don't understand how to play against Spirit because that's not how you do it.
"Even now this is still sort of true"
Even now that's not even remotely true.
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So then tell me
Whats her counterplay?
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If you scroll up I already explained it for OP.
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More than she used to, not that it is a good thing.
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I don't think she required some kind of skill both before nerf and current state.
If you consider good at listening as some kind of skill, it could be.
She's now dependent on how survivors react to her approach (directional sound).
Survivors will go down by Phase Walk if they did bad.
Survivors who are far from pallet or window will still go down.
Survivors not trying to think where she is will suffer same as they did before her nerf.
Spirit is far from skill in my opinion.
I'd say, skill is on survivors who react to invisible killer approaching with spooky sounds.
Even if some Spirit players are skillful, downing weak links easily doesn't make them feel they are skillful.
I played a lot after nerf and this is what I felt.
Even if she requires skill now or not, I don't think it's important.
Spirit is one of the trickiest killers to verse and that's why some players play Spirit.
Rather than picking niche addon/perks to prove skill, people will run good addon/perks anyway.
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That "counterplay" is assuming the Spirit is blindly phasing every time she gets the chance
All she needed to do to nullify that is stand still for a second, see what the survivor is doing and then start phasing
If she see's no scratchmarks being made she could of easily stopped phasing, a walking survivor isnt going to be too far from the last set of scratchmarks they left behind
Also feedback in a game like this is essential, the chase is what makes this game and is pretty much the only time the killer and survivor have an interaction with each other, its why killers like Spirit or Deathslinger were complained about so much. To the survivor perspective it wasnt them playing the game, but them basically watching a cutscene. They knew they didnt have much chance in chase, so good survivors would just slam gens or kill themselves on hook because no matter the outcome, that game wasnt fun. It aint fun to watch a Spirit stand still and all of a sudden your dead and it aint fun to sit on a gen half the game and escape.
Same goes for killers, it isnt fun being a killer with no mobility and watching a survivor just hold W 30m away, you might as well be watching a cutscene
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The Dev's literally stole her base kit which was Stridor. I mean her use is going to hit 2% in a couple of months and they will fix it but how many Spirit mains are going to just not play and wait? Me def.
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Well her gameplay cieling is now lower than the skill cieling of her counterplay, so useless.
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While I do disagree, I understand your point. My thing is that Spirit has the plain control of the mind games and can abuse the directions that the survivor has to go to evade her, which leads to predictions and being able to use sound to your advantage to get the hit.
Controlling the mind game and trying to listen at the same time isn’t anywhere near Blight or Nurse levels of skill but it’s still skillful. The reason people say she’s dead is because they can’t do those things and don’t bother trying to learn it.
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Have you heard of fighting games? Like Tekken and Street Fighter. Yeah most fighting game gameplay 80% is hoping and guessing weather offense or defense and the other 20% is reads but those reads but 90% of those reads are based off your powers of observation.
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I don't know about that. when i went against old spirit, i escaped like 60% of my games and many of the chases for spirit were long when I was making the correct reads like Blueberry was mentioning. The people that complained about Spirit and Deathslinger are just bad survivor, so for them, playing vs every killer was just watching a cut-scene.
I am not sure how much looking around you can do vs a drop jungle gym pallet. As blueberry said, you force spirit to make guess on you, not the other way around. Playing killer is not about the mobility, Billy has best mobility in the game, but his mobility isn't good for the chase. killers don't need mobility, what they need is counters to shift-W towards looping aspect of the game and spirit has that. Its just that that her tileset gameplay is really crap now because of her nerfs.
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Yeah, and wanna know what fighting games are known for? Causing a ######### tone of rage
They take skill, so does Spirit. But that doesnt mean its fun to be on the receiving end
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Making a correct read is literally guessing right, a read is simply guessing with a fancy name.
Also you say we need killers that counter the shift W meta... you do that with mobility...
Hillbilly is still very solid he's just very unforgiving to play, imo he's the hardest killer to play as making a mistake can be very punishing
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Once you've been on the receiving end you learn how to deal with it and if you don't, go to the other end so you can learn to deal with it.
They way I learned how to deal with old Spirit was playing her and going into survivor and doing something called "Taking risks" so that I could get somewhere. Just because you can't play ring around the pallet with a killer doesn't mean they're broken
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Tracking by sound is not an easy to develop skill. She isn't as hard as Nurse or Blight, but she does take more skill than more than half of the roster imo.
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In the 1v1 yes, she was a bit broken. Pair up a good Spirit against a good Survivor and youll realize that the main thing the survivor will do is throw down pallets as soon as they get the chance, this is because it forces the Spirit to guess, a good Spirit is kind of like a good Nurse in the sense where theyll limit the survivors options heavily to get a hit, this also means theyll do things in a way that limits the amount of guessing needed. When both parties do this The Spirit comes out on top a large majority of the time.
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Deathslinger has no mobility, he just countered shift-w by the fact that he could shoot survivors between loops. now he has trouble going for long range shots from survivors being able react to his shot now. your post is complaining that blueberry's viewpoint of making guesses towards spirit power is invalid counter-play and that deathslinger was unfun to play against because of needing to make reads against his gun.
He's solid for low-tier play like every killer just like current spirit is.
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She's become as rare as a unicorn because if you want someone who goes fast, you can just play Blight instead since the invisibility is more of a gimmick now.
Like, her nerf isn't the worst because some good add-ons are still there, but directional audio cue shouldn't be a thing since it's a change that people already disliked in the past and Stridor has been rendered useless.
This idea of nerfing killers so that "now they will take skill to play" is some very delusional thinking a group of the community has embraced for years when the reality of what happens every time is that people either stop playing the game or just switch to the next best killer.
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A good Survivor would be able to dodge Deathslinger at range before anyway, his viability at range has barely changed.
Also "Low tier play" is Im sure all you and 99% of this forum is playing in, including myself.
Yall aint going against tourney squads, youre going against people who simply play with their friends at best, and in that setting any killer is viable.
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"That "counterplay" is assuming the Spirit is blindly phasing every time she gets the chance"
If she holds it for too long she's chasing you as an m1 killer moving at 110, aka wasting a ton of time she can't afford to waste.
"All she needed to do to nullify that is stand still for a second, see what the survivor is doing and then start phasing"
That's why you play pro-active and bait her into phasing. You start to sprint away for a couple seconds, she will think she's gonna lose distance and phase after as you immediately double back. You now controlled when she phased.
"If she see's no scratchmarks being made she could of easily stopped phasing, a walking survivor isnt going to be too far from the last set of scratchmarks they left behind"
She is left guessing in this case as you could have gone in literally any direction. This is buy you enough time to get to the window or pallet as she may be some what close but is a 110 move speed.
"Also feedback in a game like this is essential, the chase is what makes this game and is pretty much the only time the killer and survivor have an interaction with each other, its why killers like Spirit or Deathslinger were complained about so much. To the survivor perspective it wasnt them playing the game, but them basically watching a cutscene. They knew they didnt have much chance in chase, so good survivors would just slam gens or kill themselves on hook because no matter the outcome, that game wasnt fun. It aint fun to watch a Spirit stand still and all of a sudden your dead and it aint fun to sit on a gen half the game and escape."
There IS feedback happening, it's simply a different form as you are manipulating it onto the Spirit. Strictly feedback only from the killer to you is not what makes this game. Comparing it to watching a cutscene is complete hyperbole and nonsense. They do those things instead of playing the chase because they are low skill level and don't understand Spirit. It's not going to seem like a fun game when you don't know what you're doing. These are excuses for bad play.
"Same goes for killers, it isnt fun being a killer with no mobility and watching a survivor just hold W 30m away, you might as well be watching a cutscene"
This interaction has no counter play from the killer. The example with Spirit DOES have counter play. These scenarios are not comparable.
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"If she holds it for too long"
Best way to play Spirit is using her power in short bursts because even at half charge youre still covering about 23m of distance in 3 seconds plus a speed burst at the end
Also what you keep talking about playing "pro-actively", this works just as well as Trapper, a killer who plans ahead and unless youre some mastermind of psychology and by simply that survivor existing you can tap into their head, you cant reliably do this.
Also that is not feedback, feedback is when something happens and you are given an opportunity to react to said thing happening. In the case of Spirit you see her standing still and that could mean many things. You can attempt something, however if that Spirit is sentient then there is a very low chance of it working.
Everything youre saying about Spirit counterplay is assuming like youre not even versing a player, but a predictable AI, or some one telegraphing what theyre doing, which there are many Spirit players that would be very predictable, but its the better Spirit players who made her a problem, you got almost the same result as Nurse but had to invest but a small portion of the time to properly learn her
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"Best way to play Spirit is using her power in short bursts because even at half charge youre still covering about 23m of distance in 3 seconds plus a speed burst at the end"
We all know this.
"Also what you keep talking about playing "pro-actively", this works just as well as Trapper, a killer who plans ahead and unless youre some mastermind of psychology and by simply that survivor existing you can tap into their head, you cant reliably do this."
You can reliably do it all the time.
"Also that is not feedback, feedback is when something happens and you are given an opportunity to react to said thing happening. In the case of Spirit you see her standing still and that could mean many things. You can attempt something, however if that Spirit is sentient then there is a very low chance of it working."
You are not understanding what I'm saying. Feedback IS happening, you are just stuck on only seeing it from the survivors perspective. You are the only initiating the feedback loop in Spirits case which is different than most killers. The strategy I have explained to you works on the majority of Spirits even at high mmr.
"Everything youre saying about Spirit counterplay is assuming like youre not even versing a player, but a predictable AI, or some one telegraphing what theyre doing, which there are many Spirit players that would be very predictable, but its the better Spirit players who made her a problem, you got almost the same result as Nurse but had to invest but a small portion of the time to properly learn her"
No, it works if the survivor is even remotely competent. What I have told you works regularly at high mmr. This hyperbole about Spirit requiring so little skill is just nonsense. It's an excuse to explain playing badly against her.
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"We all know this"
"You can reliably do it all the time"
As a survivor you cant avoid something that is not only moving at double your speed, but can do so repeatedly in less than 10 seconds.
If you could then why are there Survivors with thousands of hours sharing their experience and saying the same thing? You cant rely on reads alone.
On Feedback...
of course Im gonna see it from the Survivor perspective, because to them all they see is a Spirit standing still! Nowadays they can hear the phasing, and provides feedback for the survivor. But at the end of the day shes still a killer moving at almost double your speed, and you cant avoid that forever.
Also Im not saying Spirit requires very little skill, she requires a lot more than people give her credit for, but its still only a fraction of the time needed to learn Nurse, yet you still get basically the same result as Nurse
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Try and chase a survivor with iron will on spirit just saying when people track them down you cannot deny that’s skill and shadow step 🤷🏻♂️
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