Nurse HAS counterplay, learn it
Comments
-
Basically hoping that the Nurse-player sucks is no Counterplay.
9 -
Well, back to a more serious discussion !
I have read quite a few topics on this forum about the nurse.
I have read carefully every intervention, whether it comes from pro-nurse or anti-nurse.
I am a main nurse, but contrary to what some would have you believe, I don't try to defend the nurse in any way, just by being logical.
That's why I'm going to bring up something that surprised me, in the criticisms that players make of the nurse.
I'm not going to focus on the empty "She's too strong" criticisms, which contain no argument, and are not followed by any evidence/videos/whatever.
On the other hand, I would like to address the following argument: "Her basic attack should be turned into a special attack."
If you analyze the discussions a bit, you realize that at the base of this suggestion is :
"Nurse should be nerfed because nurses who use Agitation and Starstruck are too strong."
And that's where the whole problem comes in.
The suggestion is stated incorrectly.
Here's a way to phrase it that I think is correct:
"Agitation and Starstruck are problematic because they make the nurse too strong."
The problem is not with the nurse.
The problem is with these perks.
(I should clarify that I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this, I'm staying neutral, and expressing myself for the sole purpose of semantic analysis)
Why is saying that the problem comes from these 2 skills important?
First of all, it is totally illusory to think about transforming the basic attack of the nurse into a special attack.
Indeed, this would deprive her of the use of all skills based on hitting survivors.
Second point (and not the least): the power of the nurse is biased by the build she uses.
We can reasonably see that we can have builds :
- S-type: Agitation, Starstruck, Flood of Rage and Pain Raisonance
- A-type: example: Pain Raisonance / Dead Man / Chili / Jolt, etc.
- B-type : in fact all builds that mix several types of perks, and that are not monstrosities, while remaining rather effective
- C-type: the rest, the fun builds (walking nurse), and those that use rather weak perks (Deerstalker, Shattered Hope, Spies from the Shadows, etc.)
Why talk about this?
Because it speaks directly to the fact that nerfing the nurse based on the most powerful build she can use (the S(upaalf) type) would be a terrible mistake.
Because by doing this, the S-build would be only moderately dangerous, but all the other builds, less powerful, would be unplayable.
If the problem is the S-build, it is not the nurse itself that needs to be reworked, but the skills that make up this S-build, namely Agitation but especially Starstruck.
This would allow both the S-build to be less powerful, while leaving in their place the nurses who use less powerful builds.
Again, I am surprised that I have not seen more instances of this reflection, which seems to me to be the closest to the real concern that this would raise.
1 -
The entirety of counterplay that exists against Nurse is "hope she screws up and blinks in the wrong direction". You have no influence over that as the Survivor, it is entirely on the Nurse whether she gets a hit or not. That is not counterplay, that is the Killer making a mistake. You also don't call a succesfull mindgame on a Trapper counterplay to his character now, do you?
Add to that one of the best map pressure tools in the entire game and you got a combo that should simply not exist.
I find it amazing that some still argue in defence of Nurse. Her being overpowered is like the most widely accepted fact in this community, yet here we are.
6 -
Your messages are so weird. Can you please stop responding to me? You misinterpret what I say, and try to argue with things I haven't even said.
You won't convince me that nurse isn't busted, so please don’t send another of your poem-responses.
0 -
Play Nurse then and learn the counterplay and where she's weak. There is counterplay. If there were no counterplay then why do Nurse players still lose? Her kill rates are not out of line with other Killers and a bunch of people in an echo chamber saying there's no counterplay does not constitute a fact. Actual data is a fact; not repeating an opinion.
4 -
Top Nurses 4k in tournaments all the time. Even players with thousands of hours of experience of playing as and against Nurse in highly competitive contexts and in coordinated, practiced teams with voice comms do not manage to counter-play her well enough to regularly get even 1 survivor out. Now imagine Nurse in the actual base balance scenario that is also infinitely more common in pubs, which is a non-4-SWF group, without any coordination or communication. They get demolished 99.99% of the time. There are multiple Nurse 4k streaks spanning 300+ matches. Not even the most armed-to-the-teeth god SWF can get even 100 4-escapes in a row, they need to settle for 3-escapes at best, and even then they don't get as high streaks as Nurse.
If you were to let perfect AIs play against each other, Nurse would basically always win, her potential simply is that she can land every single (well, or every second) blink no matter what.
I guarantee BHVR knows this very well, it is completely blatant for them to see if they just look at the kill rates of the top % of Nurses. The higher you go, the more closely those kill rates will near 100%, and there's likely thousands of players with 80+% kill rates on Nurse. And most likely no other killer with as many players in that range.
It's been painfully obvious for years that Nurse needs nerfs. Same for 4-SWF. For Nurse, one major adjustment for the better would be reducing her post-blink lunge range somewhat, that would actually make counterplay more consistent against her since then she cannot easily adjust anymore for inaccuracies in the blink, which can occur both due to bad play on the killer side and/or good play on the survivor side. For SWF, loadout restrictions are the major adjustment I would want to see, not least because tournaments also go to show that a whole range of killers can compete perfectly well even against the best and most coordinated of SWF teams with loadout restrictions in place. But a bunch of killers still should still get some buffs of course.
Don't get me wrong, while super good Nurse players are something you will meet much, much more often than super good 4-SWFs on voice comms, they are still fairly rare. I don't think the existence of Nurse as she is ruins DbD, not even in the high MMR realm (although that's mostly because the "high MMR" realm is capped), but she is easily enough of a problem to warrant addressing, always has been. 90+% win rates and win streaks spanning hundreds of matches should never be able to exist, on either side, that's essentially impossible in any reasonably competitively balanced game yet in DbD it's fairly common for good players, and they should work on everything to remedy BS like that. Matchmaking is of course a major culprit behind this, but not the only one.
4 -
Well actually, I think the intended “mechanics” of god loops and crazy strong pallets are awful design, so I think Nurse is good design.
3 -
Idk what to tell you, but I've played her. I'm far from great at her, but it was good enough to beat most lobbies I went up against, just took me a while to get that muscle memory down. And I have seen plenty of others play her that were much better than me - people like Scorpionz or ScottJund - that consistently obliterated their opponents without even bringing Perks.
The only times I didn't get an immediate hit after blinking were when I was using the blinks for map pressure or made a wrong call during chases. Again, that was me, as the player, screwing up and NOT a weakness of the character I played.
As for the Killrates, let's just say I am not surprised that you, as someone that defends Nurse as balanced, would bring them up thinking these proved anything. She has been dominating the bottom of those for half a decade now, yet it is still common knowledge that she is the strongest character in the game by a large margin.
1 -
Very well put, OP, and I recently played a trial against a good Nurse in which the difference between players who know how to play against her vs players who don't was evident.
Two of the survivors had no idea how to play against her, the match ended with them both on death hook. Myself and another survivor knew how to play against her and weren't hooked a single time, able to keep her busy in long chases (hence why the other two didn't die).
Nurse inarguably has counters, and most older players know how to use them against her.
2 -
So two survivors in a match against a 'good' nurse don't know how to play against Nurse. And in this game against this 'good' nurse, the nurse only gets 4 hooks?
Just to make sure: you are calling a nurse good when she loses multiple long chases, only secures 4 hooks, and doesn't get a single kill. Right?
If all of what you said is true, then the nurse was not good.
1 -
I beat over 50% of lobbies on most Killers; I just wiped groups yesterday as Clown on bad maps for Clown such as the Game. That means nothing except now that I'm over 2,000 hours of gametime I have more experience than the median.
Nurse has counterable game mechanics; for instance, charging her after she's wound up her teleport on the second story of a map but counters to Nurse are more difficult for the average person since she has very unique chase mechanics. And of course I brought up the kill rates; they're the only solid piece of evidence anyone had.
I'd argue Blight is stronger once the Blight's skill ceiling is reached versus Nurse but that's just an opinion. Nurse being strong doesn't mean unbalanced if, for the majority, she's not overperforming all the other Killers.
1 -
I mixed up the messages of two people: you and another one, my bad.
I remember you saying you knew exactly what to do when you faced the nurse, and that you were playing on servers with few people, and finally that you fell into being in a team with survivors who also knew how to face the nurse against a nurse who won the game.
However, the fact that the nurse won that game against you is not an argument for the nurse's alleged "OP" nature.
1 -
You say that the best nurses do 4K all the time in tournaments, at a very high level.
I would like the name of those tournaments, so I can go watch their replay.
And I'm talking seriously here, because I'd be interested to see what it looks like in tournaments (whether it's on the survivor side, or the killer side, for that matter).
3 -
A Killer can still be objectively good when they are outmatched by Survivors who are better. Take a sports example, Formula 1 for example. Just because Max Verstappen won the championship, and was thus better than Sergio Perez who came in as number 2, Sergio Perez is still objectively an good driver. Based on your argumentation, which in itself is based in a logical fallacy, one would have to say that Sergio Perez, having been outmatched by Verstappen, is not a good driver, which is just a load of bullcrap.
1 -
You're not wrong and there are tons of videos that prove it. However : Nurse and Blight are on a completely different level from every other killer and that's not fair to all the other killers.
As an example : generally speaking 99% of pallets are ineffective against a nurse.
Relatively speaking Nurse and blight need to move down in effectiveness (and SWF too) so that all the other killers get better.
Being that mad about nurse tells me you can't run her very well and you probably know those tips but not how to use them. Nurse was actually 100% hard countered by Spine Chill before they nerfed it (spirit too). You could see mid blink if she had the correct blink angle and could react before she blinked.
3 -
Because some nurse players suck ass at the game.
0 -
Over 95% of the players? Balancing should not be done due to a small fraction of the playerbase.
0 -
I'll be honest: I read the tips you gave, and the one about judging how far a Nurse will blink by how long she's been holding it has never, ever occured to me before, in spite of how simple the idea is!
I've not complained about Nurse in the past, although I do have difficulties against strong ones, but I'll try this info out and see how it works. Thank you for sharing!
2 -
Some matches from the previous DbD League season:
The two (in)arguably best teams in the world facing off, 4k: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1554080870?collection=-YwKfrSu7Baxxw&t=0h46m16s
Again Trauma, one of the world's two best teams, 3k'd this time by a Nurse that is not even in the top 10 comp Nurses: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1512006733?collection=-YwKfrSu7Baxxw&t=0h0m9s
FallenArt's response? Of course a 4k: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1512006733?collection=-YwKfrSu7Baxxw&t=0h12m36s
Eternal again, 4k again (and then 3k by the other Nurse against Eternal, a top 2 team in the world): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1511995197
Some 4k: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1511992637?t=0h9m13s
One of the most seasoned teams of Russian comp players getting 4k'd (and of course responding with a 4k of their own): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1493702667
Exchanging Nurse 4ks: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1489102693
Another random example of exchanging Nurse 4ks, ongoing tournament (caster is Brazilian, tournament is international): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1626117734
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1618718692 - First part is again exchanging Nurse 4ks, and then yet another exchange of Nurse 4ks after the Billy set
You get the idea.
A few things to note:
I am not saying Nurse 4ks every single time in tournaments, please don't waste the effort trying to show me an instance where that happens. Not only does that have to do with the relative skill of the teams of course, but it's also not like it is literally impossible to escape against her, it's just that even at this level she has an average kill rate of like 3.X, which is ridiculous.
Yeah there are loadout restrictions in place, but the same is the case for the killer. Want to see banned perks?
Individual: - Coup de Grâce - Deadlock - Dissolution - Franklin's Demise - Hex: Blood Favour - Hex: Devour Hope - Hex: Haunted Ground - Hex: Undying - Lethal Pursuer - Play With Your Food - Starstruck Combined: - Bamboozle + Superior Anatomy - Bitter Murmur + Rancor - Enduring + Spirit Fury - Hex: No One Escapes Death + No Way Out - Hex: Thrill of the Hunt + Hex: Pentimento - Nemesis + Rancor
But wait, there's more. Bans on top of that for Nurse specifically:
Individual: - Dead Man's Switch - Eruption - Hex: Pentimento - No Way Out - Scourge Hook: Monstrous Shrine - Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance Combined: - Bitter Murmur + Hex: No One Escapes Death - Rancor + Hex: No One Escapes Death ADD-ONS Required: + Fragile Wheeze + Dark Cincture
So all other add-ons excluded from use.
Don't get me wrong, SWF without loadout restrictions is ridiculous (although in tournaments without restrictions a bunch of the killer characters have proven to still be able to compete with even that), but these restrictions are nothing but even the top-level comp community acknowledging that the killer side too has ridiculous stuff. Both need to be addressed.
What has to be kept in mind here is that these are some of the best survivor players in the world individually, teaming up, with years of practice and experience in that environment of playing as a team, which means high levels of coordination and communication. Not only are teams of this caliber vanishingly rare in pubs (basically non-existent; you can go years without even facing one group comparable to these), but even just the basic premise of having a 4-SWF with voice comms alone is very rare (4-SWFs make for around 5% of all matches last we got info on this, and a fraction in turn of that actually being together in voice chat), which is still worlds removed from the level these teams play at. Good Nurses are infinitely more common in pubs because all that requires is one good Nurse player... deciding to play Nurse. And the fact that good Nurse players can compete even with the absolutely ridiculous scenario of a top-tier voice-comm 4-SWF spells trouble for any pub group. 500+ 4ks in a row sort of trouble.
The main take-away here however remains that there just really is little consistent counterplay against good Nurses. Even the best survivors in the world can fall like flies and look like fools, and the best Nurses like FallenArt downright look like they are cheating, that's how impossible it can seem to do anything against them.
If you are generally interested in comp DbD and want to see some good gameplay and find out that much of the killer lineup can compete well even at that level, check out these channels, where some of the currently more stacked tournaments are going on: https://www.twitch.tv/dbdleague, https://www.twitch.tv/balticleague_, https://www.twitch.tv/phenombr, https://www.twitch.tv/championsofthefog, https://www.twitch.tv/crownperformanceleague - Note that I'm not saying the game is "killer-sided" or whatever, a reasonable take has to be vastly more nuanced than that, but it's certainly infinitely less "survivor-sided" than people sometimes like to make it out to be.
Post edited by zarr on4 -
"Nurse (...) need to move down in effectiveness (...) so that all the other killers get better."
Why not instead look at the weaker killers, by giving them a helping hand, for example? 🙂
1 -
Plz run for president at behaviour I'll vote 4 u #SmokedByDaylight
0 -
Where you got 95% from? That's a number you introduced and not me. I said "some" and not "most"
0 -
The most recent kill rate data. Nurse has the worst Kill rate of all Killers at low MMR with the Kill rate rising as MMR increases. However, at the top 5% of MMR, she doesn't even place in the top 5 kill rates. So if she's not an outlier for kill rates at, as the bare minimum, over 95% of the range of MMR where is she an issue? The top 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%?
0 -
You miss the fact that mmr of killers takes over. If you are high mmr spirit you automatically high mmr on all other kills despite not playing them
0 -
Your MMR is lower on Killers you haven't played. Each Killer MMR is separate. Your MMR is higher than a brand new player but BHVR has already stated that your MMR on a new Killer is lower than that of your best Killer. It's Survivor where you have a shared MMR no matter which survivor you play.
0 -
I wonder if this post will just be ignored. I have a feeling the people defending nurse in her current state will just pretend they didn't see this comment. Better than accepting the truth, I guess.
0 -
It's hard to take you seriously when you unironically post "lmao" in every one of your posts.
0 -
Everyone is interested to see OP playing against this
3 -
I find that hanging on the edge of the end of a wall can be a good eay to avoid her, they have to judge the blink carefully and often overshoot to when you hesr that scream run back up the wall on one side and double back and loop to the other side if she goes for the second blink. 60% of the time it works every time lol
0 -
As expected, a poster comes in and stomps all over everything these nurse defenders are trying to claim, and suddenly they are all nowhere to be seen.
Like, if you want to play an OP character, just admit it. You aren't fooling anyone by trying to convince people nurse is fine.
5 -
Who stomped over everybody? I read all the posts and I don't see it.
0 -
If you get countered by Survivors as a Nurse you should practice Nurse. A good Nurse has no counter.
4 -
There is a guy on twitch closing in on a 500 winstreak on nurse. There is no other game in which such an absurd thing happens. OP is playing some nurses randomly picking her up for archives, dailies, learning her, trying to get some easy wins with or which are just bad to mediocre. That list assumes quite a lot of things. My personal highlight is the stealth tip. If the nurse doesn't immediately find someone at a gen she goes back to the hook to confirm the hookstage/kill like everybody else or gets her floods of rage triggered.
2 -
Weird how no one here had anything to say about this.
0 -
You should consult, it's getting serious to be so full of hatred towards a game character at this point, you know 😁
I'll leave you to get excited on your own, Omans, because in case you haven't noticed, zarr has provided a lot of video content, and I'm going to enjoy watching it, so it's going to take a little while (because I originally asked for it because I was curious to see how a tournament went) 😄
0 -
So did old Dead Hard. The problem with her are her addons, they create a huge disparity between herself basekit and most importantly her Killer counterparts.
yall thinking her busted addons only affect survs’ performance and not other killers as well.
0 -
Nurse has counterplay but as a Nurse main (though I don't play her now as just feel bad) it pains me to have to finally admit she needs a serious nerf.
BHVR totally recoding her fixed pretty much all of the issues that made her hard to play, so now in the hands of relatively inexperienced players she can destroy solo lobbies.
Sure good survivors will always give Nurse a hard time and I am pretty decent at countering them myself. But I only play solo and when I see people with very few hours in DBD destroying my random team mates over and over... yeah something has to give.
1 -
The reason you don't see more instances of that reflection is that Agitation and Starstruck are not super op on the other killers. They are only super strong on Nurses and that is it. For example, I use Agitation and Starstruck on deathslinger and by far it is not op on him because I still need to shoot the survivors meaning I need good aim and a clear shot. Survivors have a lot of counterplay against a deathslinger since his harpoon can't go through walls and if I hit them at a pallet that was dropped all they have to do is break my chain. For nurses, they just have to blink and BAM they go down easy.
Also, most people like myself don't like perks being nerfed just because they are overall strong on one killer. The most recent example of this happening was Awakened Awareness. In the PTB AA was a fine decent perk since it kinda acted like a close-range bbq but in the live release, BHVR came out and said they had to nerf it because it was too strong on "certain killers" (aka nurse). Now the perk isn't even worth running on a lot of killers. Killing a perk potential just because it op on one killer isn't good game balancing. If its only op on one killer then maybe just maybe it's the killer that's the problem, not the perk.
0 -
In this case, we might as well code the skill in question to be less effective on the strongest killers; this would prevent nurses from using it to play very dirty, while allowing much weaker killers to take advantage of it anyway ☺️
0 -
I know you are joking, but you actually have a point. Nurse is the most egregious offender in terms of this skill range disparity, where newer and intermediate players regularly perform worse than with any other character, average players still perform averagely at best, yet advanced and top players overperform massively. An attempt to balance Nurse could definitely see her be made much more accessible for newer and average players, yet cap her top potential. And I think that's precisely what BHVR was thinking with some of her add-ons that modify her base movement speed. Making her 4.4m/s and putting her blinks on a considerable cooldown similar to Spirit would be an obvious example of such a rework.
That said, I wouldn't like them watering down Nurse. My suggestion for balancing her (reducing post-blink lunge range by some %; https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/3153211/#Comment_3153211) in fact makes her harder to play. I want her to remain a very unique and skill-rewarding character, and with that change she would require more precision because she doesn't have as long a lunge anymore that basically constitutes a "third blink" and makes up for inaccuracies in the blink mechanics and predictions, as well as nullify most survivor dodge/juke/fake attempts.
0 -
- Line of Sight break - easily done on most maps, force Nurse to guess which is always a disadvantage for Nurse.
- -most maps are open
- Judging Nurse Blink Distance - estimate how long the Nurse has been holding her blink to judge what distance she can cover, perform juke
- -oh great memorizing information that can change based on addons in a game with
- Indoor maps - self-explanatory
- -so hope for RNG or bring an offering for what may or may not happen
- Dead Hard - not very hard to use against Nurse, 3rd health state
- -Bring a perk for what may or may not happen
- Use objects as your advantage - it's not the easiest thing for a Nurse to blink past objects, so use it to make it harder for her to get a good blink
- -hope the nurse is bad
- Be unpredictable with your pathing - if you use conventional pathing, that's on you - you're making it easy for the Nurse to perform good blinks
- -hope nurse is inexperienced
- Hold W (against non-range addons) - this destroys Nurse a lot, if she makes a mistake and you hold W, she at least has to blink 3-4 times to catch up to you. Doesn't work as well against Range addons.
- -hope nurse is bad
- Use Stealth - should be a brainer, but somehow this is never emphasized. Nurse won't check every corner when she patrols gens and if she doesn't see you - you're likely safe. If you know she is coming, hide. You have more chance to survive than trying to "loop her"
- -hope nurse is bad or hasn't brought any perks that might sniff you out
2 -
For myself, it's because my argument is that balancing at the competitive level is harmful to a game and only suitable for spectator sports so how the top 0.1% or less of players perform is vastly outweighed by the other 99.9% of the playerbase.
@zarr does have an interesting suggestion just above but that's because he is aware and trying to think of ways to change Nurse at the top level while maintaining or improving enjoyment for Nurse players for people that aren't at the very top. @zarr is very knowledgeable about game mechanics and keeps the totality of the game in sight so his opinions are usually very interesting.
Most of the Nerf Nurse! threads aren't taking that into account and want to nerf Nurse because her counterplay and chase mechanics are different than the other Killers and they don't want to learn different chase mechanics while ignoring those who like versusing Nurse because her chase mechanics are different.
Considering there seems to be a considerable overlap between the Nerf Nurse! people and the people who defend ragequitting I'm not surprised they're not considering anyone else but themselves but their desire to make the game easier for themselves does not constitute a balancing imperative.
0 -
Starstruck, Agitation, Distressing, Awakened Awareness, Infectious Fright, and Lethal Pursuer (perks used in that sort of Nurse build) Are quite niche. They are sacrificing sometimes an entire build for a very risky playstyle. Congrats, you were able to get starstruck value and an additional down, but you have no generator regression perks. Theres a reason no one uses that build in comp or tourneys. Because slow down is a million times better, and starstruck only really works once because of the surprise factor. After that, you won't get much out of for the rest of the trial.
1 -
Yikes.
"their desire to make the game easier for themselves does not constitute a balancing imperative"
-Signed, person defending nurse.
Keep moving those goal posts, and using the stats which have been proven to not apply to nurse very well as your only argument.
It is hilarious, though. You say yourself that your MMR isn't very high, and yet seem intent on telling people who actually deal with the issue of Nurse that they should learn to play, and they just don't want to deal with a different style killer (such a lazy, lazy argument).
1 -
you realize superalf, a 5000 hour nurse main ran agitation+pain res+starstruck+flood of rage as his main build for 250 winstreak. He is now at 500 win-streak. 100% win-rate. I am not sure what kill-rate would be but I would assume 80-90%. It would depend on how many trap doors and exit gates got opened. superalf just proving nurse counter-play problems. I wish nurse was more like Wesker with the ability to go through walls, more of skillshot blink instead of teleport then m1. Survivor need to learn to play vs nurse.
Just a skill-issue.
0 -
I'm not moving my goal posts. You haven't explained why Nurse should be nerfed over incredibly good Nurses that constitute a tiny fraction of the database. I doubt you're facing SupaAlf's continuously in your random games so the only conclusion to draw is that you want Nurse nerfed for your own personal benefit either at a competition level or you just can't run Nurse; either/or or both. Your problems have to be weighed against the majority of the playerbase and Nurse doesn't have outlandish performance for the majority of the playerbase.
1 -
Pub stomping doesn't prove much. Longer winstreaks, with stricter rules and 'weaker' killers, have already been achieved.
1 -
I was serious, though.
The problem with Starstruck is that used on a trashy killer, it will give him an advantage; used by a competent nurse, it will give him an advantage may tend to be excessive.
0 -
I think the hardest part is remaining unpredictable, because unpredictable behavior eventually becomes predictable and each person catches on at different speeds. It helps if you've played killer a decent amount because you have to do this with 4 people each match. Knowing what survivors tend to do, and then doing the opposite goes a long way against a good nurse. But, also not doing those things too many times to establish a predictable pattern. Nurse is hard to face, but totally doable.
1 -
No man,,,survivor crybabies only want to face basic m1 killers that can be looped on shack for 3 gens and 2 more gens on the jungle gym connecting to shack's window LMAO
0
