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I saw someone ask why nurse hasn’t been nerfed, and I’m curious too

I know she’s definitely the killer that requires the most skill, but I’m asking why that matters? Not in a negative way, but a very skilled nurse is almost inevitably unbeatable, especially with good perks and add ons. And if you’re solo que? That ######### is ROUGH. Survs have to rely on her to make mistakes if they want to win, not just on their own skill. And if she doesn’t make any mistakes then it’s often a gg.

Yes she takes a lot of skill, but once players achieve that there’s almost no solid counters. Pallets do nothing and if she has any aura reading or sound cuing perks, even if you break line of sight you’re dead. She’s highly mobile in chase, and the things put in the game like windows and pallets to slow down other high mobile killers, don’t do anything to her. Insta down and speed perks just make her even stronger. I’m not salty or mad, I just genuinely want to know why she hasn’t been nerfed very much when she’s by far the strongest killer once people are good with her. There definitely should be really strong killers that take a lot of effort to do well against, otherwise it would be really unfair for those players. I just think a good nurse can be too strong. It takes a very lucky build, map, and just play style to fair against one. Cracked nurses are something else.

I’m not really advocating for a change at the moment, I’m just curious. Plus there’s not that many nurses who have gotten that good. Maybe the number of players at that skill level isn’t high enough for a nerf? Or is it just because of the skill ceiling? Because spirit was a lot easier to play and still really strong before recently. They took a long time to nerf her despite her being no where near as hard to play. And good Spirit players could easily win a game with good perks and add ons while having little reliable counter play besides specific perks. And those stand still mind games were literally a guessing game. She was also a really high picked killer though, so the number of players that were good with her was def more than nurse.

I have played for a long time, about 2k hours, and I’ve only ever won against a great nurse a hand full of times, and it was always because she made a mistake or I got lucky, whether with the map, having a specific build, or being in a swf at the time. I don’t think I’ve ever had a four man escape against a cracked nurse though.

Comments

  • ElizaSteph
    ElizaSteph Member Posts: 106

    My bad, I meant a more recent one. The changes they already made did help, but even with the way she currently is, a great nurse is still very very hard to counter. I don’t think killers should just be hella easy to go against, but when the game gives you devices made for countering killers that one killer can blatantly ignore with no problem it’s really challenging. Everyone says you just have to play differently against her, but at this point a great nurse knows this and will bring perks that counter a different play style.

    If you want to play stealthy bc pallets and windows don’t really help in chase, many nurses just use perks that give location information anyway. That’s why her line of sight counter is also iffy at best on a good nurse. Distance means nothing to her in a chase. A common play is to double back and try to move unpredictably, but her blink speed is faster than a survivor and if/when she sees you on her first blink, you don’t have much time between that and the second one to get much distance. Her being able to lunge makes this harder. Ive played against good and okay ones and using strats recommended by better players helped me get better, but even then great nurses are a dif story. I’ve seen some of the best players from twitch to YouTube easily lose a game. Not because of lack of skill but because she’s just really hard to counter if she’s good at blinks. It’s all up to the survivor to be able to guess where she’ll go or think you’ll go, and a killer who’s only strong counter is guessing can be broken.


    but that’s just my opinion, and I don’t have any suggestions for a nerf. Just wanted to know if her player number was the reason she hasn’t had another impactful nerf in a while or if they think she won’t be good anymore with any.

  • ElizaSteph
    ElizaSteph Member Posts: 106

    I don’t think they made the same points as I did in their opening discussion and I wanted to make it easy for everyone to see the specific reasons why I was curious so they could respond more clearly and address my question better. Didn’t mean to be rude or anything, just wanted to have a better understanding.

  • ElizaSteph
    ElizaSteph Member Posts: 106

    I think you’re right, that makes a lot of sense :3. I think a plain nerf would just make her not strong at all maybe? And a rework be be a lot perhaps. Idk. But thanks for answering <3

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910

    In case you are curious, in regular competitive tournaments where survivors are heavily restricted and many aspects of the match are predetermined (such as map/maximum rarity of bringable items/etc), Nurse averages out to roughly 2 kills/2 escapes.

    When there was a tournament recently which tried out a no-holds-barred with absolutely zero restrictions, Nurse lost the majority of her games.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910

    Nurse basekit crosses a map roughly in the same speed a regular 115% (4.6m/s) killer does by walking. Her "mobility" is pretty much entirely in regards to in an actual chase. It's not like Blight's where it's generic map-crossing mobility at basekit. Obviously, range add-ons would change this.

  • ElizaSteph
    ElizaSteph Member Posts: 106

    Oh yeah I’m sorry, I figured. I was referring to chase because of her ability to bypass walls, windows, and pallets gives her a lot more distance in a chase as opposed to other killers like hillbilly and blight that still have obstacles. I get that she’s a really mindgame based killer and that mindgaming goes both ways, I just also think that the devs added vaults and pallets because they knew survivors couldn’t rely solely on mind games as eventually killer ability, increased based speed, and or distance closing capability would outmatch them at some point without obstacles like that.

    That’s how I understood the game and was why I figured we had those things in the first place. But it’s fair to say maybe with nurse I should try and think differently. It’s just kind of tough when it seems like the devs made killers have to follow certain rules (like having to either break or go around pallets, and not being able to travel through solid objects) all while giving survivors specific tools to use in order to make it more balanced. Then they designed a killer that goes against that and made it all about mind games alone. If mind games weren’t enough counter for the devs to be considered fair, it’s difficult to understand why it’s fair for that to be the result of going against a nurse yk? Because once she’s skilled enough, recovering from a miss isn’t very hard as you don’t make much distance from a whiff or miss, and you can’t get distance from her breaking a pallet because she doesn’t have to.


    I didn’t mean for this thread to be Survivor main whine or anything and I hope it didn’t seem like that, I just figured that with a killer so many people have a problem with countering there would be a nerf at some point, but after reading around I guess that would call for a rework which would be really lame and a lot of work.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910
    edited January 2022

    Don't worry, it didn't come off as whining to me. Was just originally confused why there was a second thread. Hope I helped answer your questions. And yes, she makes chase dynamic drastically different from other killers. It becomes very heavily mind-game oriented. Who can make the better read? Who can throw off the other person's reads? Who can adapt better? So on and so forth. Which boils it down to pure skill. Nurse missing a blink attack is quite punishing basekit (aka, not using double recharge). Feel free to ask if you have any other questions.

    Also, another reason people have a weird perspective of Nurse is because she does what a killer should be able to do. You take most regular killers to strong tile setups and you can essentially guarantee a won chase 9/10 times. (By won, I don't mean escaping, I mean buying enough time to be worth it, which is ~30 seconds for downing a healthy person). This ends up with regular M1s particularly just auto-losing at very strong tile setups because they are just straight up not capable of dealing with it, when playing at high enough level where people will take advantage of that to the extreme. (Not that it's wrong for the survivors to do that, this is more just a map/tile weighting issue). In other words, it's not that Nurse is punished "too little", but that other killers are comparatively punished far too hard. Does that make sense?

    Also hope the earlier mention of statistics is sort of reassuring, in that Nurse still ends up evenly matched regardless assuming equal levels of skill.

  • Altarf
    Altarf Member Posts: 1,046
    edited January 2022

    Nurse is the most unique killer in the game, and statistically is performing terribly. BHVR don't want to nerf/change her because of this. In fact, if the community wasn't so dead-set on her indisputably being the strongest killer, I'd be willing to bet she'd be buffed to 4.4m/s by now, because BHVR's statistics-based balancing is terrible.

    I don't really think she should be nerfed either... but if I had to, I'd change her add-ons. Buff the meme/gimmicks to actual usefulness, nerf the range add-ons so they actually increase Blink charge time, rework Fragile Wheeze so you can't just ignore the blink recharge.

  • StarLost
    StarLost Member Posts: 8,077

    Because BHVR balance almost entirely around gross kill rates, which is why Wraith, Cenobite and Slinger got nerfed despite being mediocre at high MMR. Nurse has incredibly low gross kill rates.

    You can't say 'we don't care about high MMR play' and then nerf a killer because of high MMR play.

  • Tr1nity
    Tr1nity Member Posts: 5,047

    The kill rates dont lie.

  • ElizaSteph
    ElizaSteph Member Posts: 106

    This makes a lot more sense when you say it like that, I appreciate all your advice and tips, thanks a lot! :)

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910
    edited January 2022

    Furthermore, SBMM (MMR) exacerbates this because of how poorly it does at matching even-skilled players together. When one side is a lot better than the other, it's a lot more noticeable on a killer like Nurse, because she is one of the truest representations of killer skill versus player skill (for the person being chased) put to the test. Even with uneven matches, weaker killers cannot take advantage of it to the same extent, which becomes "normalized" when it's actually most killers end up quite subpar against really high levels of play.

    Since learning Nurse takes a ton of investment and skill and player/map knowledge, on average, a good Nurse player will be a lot more skilled than a good player for a regular M1, for instance, since the Nurse needs to learn a lot more, compared to killers with better base movespeeds or simpler abilities. Other killers can rely on their movespeeds to try and brute force a loop which works against survivors that are not that good. However, Nurse is slower than survivors, so her power is the only way to land any hits if the survivors don't just straight up walk into you when you're not even blinking. The skill floor itself to approach Nurse is much higher than other killers, which leads to this mismatch.

    Also, just as a disclaimer, a lot of this applies to the higher end of skilled players. The differences become most acutely noticeable as player skill increases higher and higher. But since there are not many people at that level of skill, the chances highly skilled players will get highly opponents is not that likely, which further makes it seem "overbearing" when that's just to be expected. Think about it this way. If someone in say, the top 10,000 chess players in the world went against someone who doesn't even have the capability of reaching nationals, the result should be obvious, right? Or a nationals player going against someone that just won some random school's chess tournament? It's the same for this.

  • SunsetSherbet
    SunsetSherbet Member Posts: 1,607

    People convinced others that she requires you to spend 5000 hours with monks in Tibet before you can even get a killer with her, thus her strength is fine. Though in honesty I personally think she's easier than several killers released over the past two years.

    In true honesty it's that there isn't much way to nerf her to the point she's not good anymore (generally the intent of DBD nerfs) without making her the worst killer in the game by a large margin. What are you going to nerf about her even? Also why must it always be nerfs? Why not BUFF things to her strength? And there isn't a huge outcry to have her nerfed because a bad nurse is a joke, and not enough people actually face the good nurses to care. Their data also shows she has a horrible kill rate so if anything, she needs a buff going by the devs logic.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910
    edited January 2022

    Her difficulty floor is from learning the muscle memory for her power. Her ceiling, and what makes her as strong as she is, is the difficulty in learning how best to apply the power to the map/chase, and for bettering your mindgames and fakes and reads against people that know how to play against Nurse. The ceiling is a relatively slow-growing one, as you continue to meet better and better players and have to better yourself to match.

  • Yatol
    Yatol Member Posts: 1,960

    because Nurse has a huge learning curve and is hard to master.

  • SunsetSherbet
    SunsetSherbet Member Posts: 1,607

    I still think Blight is a far harder killer to master than her due to needing to memorize the collision of virtually every object in every map. I'd also put Pinhead as more difficult to use despite getting not even a quarter the power Nurse has, which has been a big complaint for Pinhead. Bad reward for the effort needed.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910
    edited January 2022

    Nurse has to learn blink collisions as well, there are multiple areas with inconsistent blink hitboxes that prevent Nurse from blinking accurately through certain objects. Pinhead's difficulty is also partially due to just not having mobility, and his main chase tool being RNG because you can break your own chains, they can spawn in useless locations, etc. I do agree Pinhead needs certain buffs.

  • JimbusCrimbus
    JimbusCrimbus Member Posts: 1,106

    Nurse is fine.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910

    I mean, in actual restricted tournaments to restrict busted things from either side, she averages out to 2 kills, 2 escapes.

    Huntress played literally 1 single match in the no-holds-barred tournament. That is not conclusive data at all.

  • FIzzbin
    FIzzbin Member Posts: 21

    She doesn't need nerfed. She is one of the only usable killers at high MMR.

  • LordGlint
    LordGlint Member Posts: 8,488

    You mean Ive been wasting my time with these monks and their crappy wifi? FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!

  • Lx_malice
    Lx_malice Member Posts: 1,417

    She's just a killer that requires different counterplay than other killers. With how little people play her, you're bound to have a difficult time learning how to best utilize that counterplay. Lets say a nurse has put 500 hours into nurse alone and she's placed in a lobby of survivors who have only played against nurse a grand total of about 50 times. Then we'll say that only 15 of those nurses were actually decent. Do you think they're going to know how to efficiently run her? Probably not. She is probably going to have an easy time ending chases because of the survivors' lack of experience against her while she has 1k hours on the killer alone. When I play nurse the majority of survivors are very predictable and im sure this is why. They think there's one simple trick you can use to juke a good nurse but theres not. It goes deeper than that. How can you build up your experience against good nurses with them being so rare? Well you can run custom games with them like tourney squads do, but the more accessible way is to just play her yourself.

  • Tsulan
    Tsulan Member Posts: 15,095

    High skill ceiling + lowest kill rate. Thats the reason she doesn´t get more nerfs.

    The last time i played against a tournament level nurse was over a year ago, in a private match. So the chances of playing more than once per year against a "unbeatable" nurse are somewhere near the chances of winning the lottery.

  • Harold_Shipman
    Harold_Shipman Member Posts: 737

    As strong as she is, the most problematic thing is her synergy with certain perks, particularly insta down and aura reveal perks. Making her blink attack not count as a basic attack would go along way toward countering this, and also allow said perks to be buffed for other killers, as right now many perks are held back because if they buffed them they would make nurse even stronger.

  • SuzuKR
    SuzuKR Member Posts: 3,910

    Her attacks are basic attacks because her power isn't what she attacks with. Also that's a pretty huge nerf for no reason to a balanced killer.

  • Barbarossa2020
    Barbarossa2020 Member Posts: 1,369

    Im of the opnion that the devs do most of their balancing based upon stats, and for 90% of her games Nurse is a 2k killer which is what the devs think is fair.

    But she is fairly popular so you see her often.

    Where as someone like Clown which is a low played and low tier killer, has a "op" addon so even if Clown is only in 1/100 games with that addon, he can 4k so therefore that's against the 2k 2 survive balance.

  • LordGlint
    LordGlint Member Posts: 8,488

    She's actually been nerfed afew times. What exactly would you want to see nerfed anyway, or is it just her whole power you just dont like the idea behind?