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My thoughts on Artist as a high mmr killer main, after 100 games with her.
I'll try and keep this TL;DR
Overall power level. Shes B tier. Some maps bring her to A tier, some maps bring her to B- tier.
More descriptive. The overall meta of this game does not revolve around her strengths. Being an anti loop killer in a game where loops connect to the other is largely irrelevant. Combined with her nerf from PTB she isn't even the best anti loop killer in the game.
Main Issues she has. Crow power takes longer to recharge than it takes to get rid of crows, thereby making the actual skill portion of her (sniping, reads, etc) useless. 2nd main issue she has. Cleansing crows while sprinting at full movespeed means that her already giant problem of dealing with W key is made even worse.
3rd main issue she has. Her movespeed while setting up crows. We saw this with the Freddy nerf. They nerfed his movespeed while charging his traps, nerfed his teleport and he went from one of the best killers in the game to the garbage can. Slowing down killers in a chase in the hopes of MAYBE hitting the survivor with a status effect is not conducive to killer power. Her move speed while charging crows is (I believe, its 5am and im tired) 3.7 MS. Thats right. She moves slower than Nurse's walking speed while charging her main form of trying to down a survivor. It takes an entire second to charge the power, while you walk at a slow movespeed.
Lets move on to her plus's
1) Shes VERY fun to play, if a bit clunky. Her power doesn't feel completely smooth. But landing stagger crows, or setting up a proper snipe is very rewarding on the rare occasions it happens. (If you're wondering what a stagger crow is, the invulnerability time between being hit by one crow and then the second is .75 seconds. You can set crows up to aim at a generator so they hit .75 seconds apart and essentially get a free health state) It takes a bit of setup but its very fun.
2) She has good map KNOWLEDGE, but zero map pressure. Artist, a good one, will generally know where every survivor is most of the time. She just can't do anything about it. On large maps (which BHVR insist on releasing more and more giant maps) she's useless. On smaller maps however her crow knowledge actually does allow her to control more of the match.
3) Potential. She has SO MUCH potential. Which you cannot say about a lot of recent killers BHVR has released. She is a couple small buffs away from being an actual decent killer. 4.0 MS while charging power, taking a second off the recharge time of one crow, removing RPD (this one is just for me), could actually propel her to higher tiers.
4) She rewards map knowledge and killer/survivor knowledge. Her power is one of the few that actively reward people who know maps well. Predicting survivor movement based on map is a PLUS. Giving the killer the opportunity to succeed is how you design a good killer. This ties in with her potential. Similar to Nurse predictive blinks. Huntress hatchet snipes. She has potential with her power to actually influence the game based on HER skill. Not relying on survivors to be a potato.
I'm going to bed now :)
Comments
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Interesting to read.
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Sounds about right, I’ve expected people to rank her around where they rank Doctor since they’re both killers with solid tracking and zoning abilities but no special movement ability.
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Now this is the type of post I like to read.
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People thinking The Artist will actually get buffed, and not more nerfs..... 😂😂
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That's about my conclusion with some caveats:
Sniping is viable if you fire one crow at a time. You have plenty of time for the follow up. What hurts the viability of that playstyle is lockers. As a survivor, I can simply jump in and out of a locker to instantly repel crows before her power recharges. Not many survivors have caught onto this yet. A survivor has to not be near a locker for a long range shot to work.
But at loops, yeah, she's wildly overrated. There's no reason for a survivor to stay at the tile considering how slow and clunky she is when setting up the crows. You have plenty of time to chain to an adjacent tile, then rinse repeat if she tries to set up more crows.
I think the developers are struggling to strike the balance between high skill viability while not being completely oppressive at low level play.
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Everything here is accurate to what I've been gathering aswell. Let's just hope the devs are going to be smart and leave her as is, or include your ideas as buffs later on
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😂🤣 Depends how survivors with 10 hours cope with her and if they close the game or go to the shop after playing against her.
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You can snipe people by using a single crow at a time. I'm getting constant health states from long range just using 1 crow at a time. With the wallhacks of the swarm it actually becomes quite easy. You can also use things like Tinkerer or Discordance and line up crows on something like 20m apart from each other to get damage states, although I find this more inconsistent.
She's actually quite good on controlling the map, forcing survivors to repel all the time means gen slowdowns have quite good synergy with her. She's actually more of a threat at long range, juggling multiple survivors at once, than at close range, because then you can keep chaining loops, but even then her crows are a very decent zoning tool and you can force survivors into corners with them. Hold W hurts her, but what killer besides the top 3 doesn't struggle with it?
What completely ruins her are maps. RCPD and Swamp you might as well AFK.
I think she's potentially top of the A tier honestly, people are still figuring out how to play as and against her, so that may change, but I feel she's the 4th or 5th best killer right now.
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True
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My first impression as playing her was how the power certainly shuts down loops, but its pretty slow to set up, and every time I'm placing a crow I'm basically screaming internally "please don't now just leave the loop, or run in any other direction than right back into my crow". After the first few low MMR games, seems survivors started figuring out and just leaving the loop.
So feels to me Artist is particularly weak to those map RNG situations were you are basically screwed if there's any area on the map which has a high density of pallets and loop tiles.
She does seem fun to play though, and had a few fun moments getting multiple hits with one use of the power. Just hoping that moments like this are still possible as you get to high MMR. I'm assuming though that she is just as susceptible to a split gen-rush as any other Killer in the game.
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Very well said. I'm still worried even with quite a few of her weaknesses that BHVR might nerf her further in near future which would be very sad to see.
For now, I'm so glad she retained her long range sniper playstyle and all the cool prediction shots you can do through walls. I would gladly give up some of her direct damage antiloop in exchange for more power to this playstyle but I'm also very happy with the way she is now too.
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Hate to disagree but if you're hitting survivors with snipes consistently you're playing against some potatos. Obviously you CAN land snipes, I do, but doing it consistently requires you to be against people who....simply don't know how to play against artist.
Math makes this true in almost every sense. It takes 1 second to charge power, 5 seconds to recover power shooting one crow. So 6 seconds. It takes 8 seconds to remove crows. Crows stop giving vision 2.5 seconds after removing. Assuming a survivor starts removing crows as soon as they get hit, (which every single survivor should be doing) you have 2 seconds to line up a shot that you cant see through a wall anymore.
Also, suvivors can simply look behind them at the angle the crow you setup was aimed.
Believe me I WISH her sniping was better, its her actual skill department.
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Addons to make it better though.
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"Removing RPD"
I second this.
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