What do you think about Trickster? (power level)

Trickster is really good in some situations and really bad in others, unfortunately when it comes to pure viability I find the situations in which he’s bad far more commonplace than the situations in which he’s good.

I also find Trickster’s power to be incredibly self-defeating. Trickster is a ranged killer who is incredibly reliant on mechanically tracking to consistently hit shots, pretty much indisputably more so than any other killer in the game… but your aim and tracking gets thrown off at distance by completely random recoil which you literally cannot control. He’s also a ranged killer who accomplishes far less when landing clutch shots in extremely narrow and critical windows of opportunity on account of one knife only dealing a sixth of a health state, so to end chases quickly you need to maintain a consistent and uninterrupted line of sight on survivors… but he has a reduced base movement speed which makes it all but impossible to outposition and catch up to survivors who break that line of sight using just about any tall object.

Trickster is riddled with these forced obsolescence caveats to his power—drawbacks that artificially make him terrible because he’s a nightmare of balancing that the team evidently could not pull off—I say “artificially” because without actual proper balancing of his kit, the situations where he works still have him feeling incredibly oppressive and unfun. But those oppressive scenarios are so uncommon against survivors who understand what walls are that they don’t nearly make up for all the instances where his power is so useless that being a 110 M1 killer is the superior option. I truly do believe that, in spite of the few things he is very good at, Trickster is the worst killer in the game.

Trickster got hard nerfed from the new Dead Hard, way more than any other killer. It just feels so ultra mega bad, when Trickster goes through all the effort of dancing around to fill up the laceration meter, and then someone presses E to get a speed burst, and it completely resets his laceration meter. Previous DH was so much better, where the knives would just phase through the survivor, and their laceration meter would stay the same.

Very situational, certain maps are a free win while others you are pretty much playing a 110% Killer without a power, the Main Event is even more situational, on perfect conditions it can rack in 4 downs (done it once) on average it really doesnt do much, maybe a hit or a down where you wouldnt have with regular toss speed.

On a curious note, I found Trickster was super strong on old Haddonfield because of the open main street, low inner fences and short bush walls, he caught you there and you were 100% dead (the high fences being on the outter ring of the map werent that useful for Survivors).

I haven't played as him. But in my survivor experience he is incredibly terrain dependant. In open ground he will shred you pretty quick with those knives of his. But if you can find a decent loop you can juice so much extra chase time out of him to let others gens.

I find a lot of trickster players are reluctant to try and M1 with him. So they rely on the knives to hard and waste time trying to hit you through vaults or around loops. Which is easily avoidedable once you getvused to it. But he is super frustrating to play against if you aren't good at using terrain.

Side note i find tricksters are often the most salty killers and I've seen a fair few ragequit or refuse to attack survivors after a while.

He is currently underwhelming in Power Level IMO. Like I really like playing him but I know hes not great. I think his biggest issues is his speed. I 100% understand why ranged killers are 110, however tall rock loops and wall loops are especially bad for trickster because he doesnt have the same advantage huntress or deathslinger have in only needing to hit one shot to damage. If he cant shoot over a loop in alot of cases he needs to bloodlust the pallet because if he lands the 1-2 daggers it will reset the loop because of his slow speed throwing as well as losing bloodlust. All other 110 killers have their power to counter these loops but without trick blades trickster will actually take longer if they try and use their power.

He is stronger in open areas than other ranged killers but I wouldn't say by that much. Mainly because hes only stronger against full health survivors since he can keep throwing without the delay of cleaning a weapon when he injures one.

I think hed be in a good place if he either lost the lullaby so he could sneak up, or became a 115.

Depending the length of the rock loop huntress and trickster can line up a shot. But huntress just needs to hit it once where trickster is resetting his loop for 1/3 of a damage.

Huntress Lullaby is because she can do long range damage by landing a hatchet and no indication would be super strong on her. Trickster cannot do that because you get the lovely notification of knives 1 and 2 going into you and you still need to get hit 4 more times

As much as I love Trickster, I definitely think he is a low-B high-C tier killer. He's a little too map-dependent, but that's not always a bad thing. I do think his main issue is his lack of mobility, especially on the larger maps. On large maps he just struggles to apply gen pressure, especially against really well-coordinated survivors (swfs or otherwise) who bring gen-speed repair perks. He also is pretty weak when it comes to looping, especially high walls. Like I completely get why he, as a ranged killer is slow, but again it just leaves him being played like an extremely slow M1 killer because tall walls negate his power. And again, if it's a large map with high walls and really spread out gens, Trickster might as well just go wait in a corner for the EGC and try for some plays there.

Then there's the artificial difficulty with his recoil, IMHO it is complete bull mostly because it's just "random". His recoil, IMHO is at its worst with a controller (though I think this is a controller support issue across the game and not just with Trickster) which gives him another factor of artificial difficulty that he really doesn't need. Players can't adjust for random, it's just there because the devs couldn't think of a way to balance his power properly.

Anyway, my 2 cents when it comes to buffing Trickster would be to either reduce his terror radius/lullaby so he can be more stealthy (in character with his lore and how he would stalk his victims), buff his movement speed to 115 to compensate for the larger maps and when he enters Main Event his movement speed drops to his current movement speed. I'd also remove the BS recoil so that way I know that I'm missing my shots because I suck at aiming, not because some RNG decided that I should miss that particular shot.

In one word: obnoxious.

I wish his power gets reworked entirely honestly. Going against him can be brutal on certain maps if you're caught without line of sight blockers or in a total dead zone (and a handful of Trickster players I've gone against will not leave hook...). Playing as him, I've only done a small handful of matches, but he doesn't feel really good to play from a gameplay as well as lore perspective.

Using throwing knives to perform for tourists as a child, you would think he knows a couple of cool techniques that require precision and accuracy to hit targets. Sure, his backstory revolves more on his aspect as a K-pop star, but his power is just chucking them without really caring, and I'm not sure if that should be taken as a "He sucks with knives now because he got fame hungry and stopped practicing!" or "This was overlooked because we wanted to focus on making him a K-pop star!" I'm more inclined to think the latter, as his Mori shows he can still land his shots just fine...

I think a little more intricacy in his kit would've been nice such him throwing a volley of 3-5 knives at once (horizontal, vertical, etc.), or allow him to aim at walls to ricochet his knives for trick shots for damage vs holding down his power to make his hits accurate.

Trickster is one of the best camping killers in the game, maybe only behind the Cannibal. I'm surprised i don't see more Tricksters camping, but it still probably needs a bit of a nerf around hooks only.

Otherwise, he's mediocre against good survivors. You'll probably never get 6 knives in time against someone at a long wall jungle gym.

I think the biggest one for me is Main Event - I usually end up with Main Event right after I down someone, and by the time I hook them (since I avoid slugging unless I'm sweating for ranks) there's not enough time left to find another survivor to use it on. If I do get to use it on a second survivor in chase, those survivors probably weren't going to escape with or without Main Event.