History of: The Nurse

My post about the history of Legion and their relationship with Deep Wound seemed to be liked well enough, so why not try again with everyone's absolute favorite killer: The Nurse!

Oh boy, this is going to be a long one. And a rough one.

The Idea

To explain how the Nurse came into existence, we must first discuss DBD itself.

Dead By Daylight was never meant to take off as it did. It was largely a passion project. They didn't expect it to fail per se but didn't anticipate it being a huge success that it ended up being. As such, they had absolutely no idea how many DLC chapters they would end up creating. For all they knew, their first one could end up being their only DLC chapter.

While some may argue that DBD isn't a horror game, it's undeniable that it's at least horror-themed. May killers we have are based on some sort of horror slasher or trope. Trapper has many similarities to Jason Vorhees, Hillbilly was meant to be a Leatherface knock-off, Spirit was DBD's Sadako, and Legion was DBD's Ghost Face.

What was the idea of Nurse? A popular horror trope is a type of ghostly figure that can travel through walls. It's a popular horror, so they thought they would either a) make their potentially only DLC killer unique b) tackle the trope early and get it out of the way now in case the game becomes a success and they make more.

And thus, Nurse was created. And little did everyone know the impact she would have.

Nurse Myth #1 - Nurse was faster than survivors on release

No. It's a commonly held belief that the original Nurse was 115%.

No. She was never 115%. She was never even faster than survivors in her entire history of being in this game (add-ons aside). On release, Nurse was 100% or 4m/s, the exact same speed as running survivor. In terms of her basekit, she's never been faster than that at any point.

Perhaps there was a PTB I can't find or something, but she's never been above 4m/s in the live game.

Original Nurse

So, I assume you're familiar with the Nurse's power. If not, here's the barebones: Nurse charges a blink. When she releases it, she teleports or "warps through" objects to reach her landing zone. After blinking, she has a brief window where she either lunges, blinks again or enters fatigue, a cooldown that forces her to look at the ground and darkens her vision. This fatigue increases in length the more the Nurse blinks and if she attacks (hit or miss)

On release, she was 4m/s and had 3 blinks by default. If you stacked add-ons, you could get up to 7 blinks. Yes, 7 blinks were as stupid as it sounds.

The quick nerf

Old DBD might have notoriously been a buggy, imbalanced mess but even that wasn't gonna fly. Nurse got nerfed very fast.

• Her movement speed was slowed to 3.85m/s or 96.25%, her default blinks were lowered from 3 to 2
• she was given a Lightburn weakness so that shining a flashlight on her rendered her unable to blink AND if she was charging one she could immediately get stunned and fatigued.
• Her add-ons were also adjusted so her max blinks went from 7 to 5.

After this, Nurse was mostly unchanged for a while. Mostly, at least according to what I could find. Because of an issue with her blinks and elevation, Nurse was given a change that allowed her to affect the location of her blinks' landing zone by flicking her camera up/down, in turn allowing her to teleport up and down floors and giving her unmatched verticle mobility.

And so began, Nurse's reign of terror.

Nurse Myth #2 - She was the solution to balance issues

Old DBD was, to put it simply, a survivor's playground if the team knew what they were doing. There were spots the survivors could loop a killer infinitely with no hope to catch up, dozens upon dozens of pallets that were very strong, grossly imbalanced perks such as original Decisive Strike that would allow the survivors to break free from the killer's grasps simply for having the perk equipped, flashlights that blinded you instantly---It was a mess.

Nurse was an exception. She didn't obey the rules of traditional gameplay. she went through walls, ignoring infinites, pallets, etc. The community picked up on this, and Nurse is declared in some circles to be the developer's solution to the game's imbalances.

No. Simply put, no. That is backward design logic. Was she the community's solution? Sure, the devs didn't intend Nurse to be the unstoppable killing machine she was. She just happened to be mostly free from some of the game's glaring issues at the time.

Legacy

No, we're not talking about the outfits only cheaters use. This is about Nurse's legacy as a killer in this game that persists to this very day.

Strong but hard?

The defense Nurse was given then and is given now is that Nurse is hard to play. You need to put time into learning her before you're able to play her, never mind against survivors that actually know how to play against a Nurse because keep in mind, because she's so different from other killers, what works against most killers may not work against Nurse and vice versa.

Detractors claim she's not even that hard to play. She's the hardest to pick up, but not difficult to master. Play for a few hours, and you're pretty much unstoppable.

I'm not picking a side here. But this is a point of contention that persists to this day.

Unstoppable

"You can beat a bad Nurse. You can beat a good Nurse. You will never beat a God Nurse."

That sums up Nurse in a nutshell. In theory, if the Nurse always guesses correctly, reads all your moves, and does everything right, she can't really lose. She ends chases in seconds and bypasses conventional defenses. Most of her counterplay is breaking LoS and forcing her to guess, meaning causing her to risk making a mistake.

Some justified it with the reasoning you see above. Others thought she was a horribly broken killer that should be gutted and burned. Regardless, both sides agreed her add-ons were a problem.

5 blink Nurse

Remember what I said about how countering a Nurse is forcing her to make a mistake and she was difficult to pick up? Having 5 blinks more or less killed that. You had 5 attempts to teleport to a survivor, counter their jukes, and... it was stupid. It was really stupid. Was it the strongest combo? No. Was it inarguably unfair? Oh yeah.

But the strongest and most unfair of all was something much different...

Omega Blink Nurse

To explain omega blink, we need to explain how Nurse's power works. Nurse's blinks work by having minimum and maximum "arrival time" of 0.25 seconds ~ 1.5 seconds. As you charge a blink, the distance the blink travels and the "arrival time" increases. But, if you were to blink 10m by flicking down your camera instead of the max 20m, you're noticeably slower because the arrival time is still 1.5 seconds.

Her range add-ons changed the variables. They allowed her to blink further yet her charge time remained the same. What this means is that her shorter blinks had a shorter arrival time, meaning she was very fast. Too fast to react, in fact.

Omega Blink took the strongest killer, gave her enhanced mobility, enhanced her lethality, and made it difficult to do anything against.

Despite these issues, Nurse was untouched, at least directly, for several years. The game changed, becoming less of the imbalanced mess that it was before, yet Nurse remained. Opinions became less and less favorable for her, especially her add-ons that outright broke her.

The Rework

Despite Nurse's issues, her rework was rather contentious. Were they nerfing an already balanced killer whose only problem was add-ons (FeelsHillbillyMan)? Were the changes just right? Not enough?

But regardless, a rework came.

• After blinking, Nurse must wait for each blink to recharge. (3 seconds per blink; the recharge begins during the fatigue)
• Nerfed maximum number of blinks from 5 to 3
• Reworked/changed several add-ons

To put it simply, her add-ons were largely underwhelming. You had gimmicky ones such as Campbell's Last Breath that after a fully charged blink, allowed you to do a half-charged blink instantly afterward ---powerful but difficult to use---and the likes of Jenner's Last Breath that allowed her to teleport back to where she originally blinked from, which is only good if you made a mistake.

Range add-ons were adjusted to increase charge time. This made it so that her shorter blinks didn't increase her speed as well.

She was also given Recharge add-ons to decrease the amount of time she needed to recover her blinks from 3 seconds per blink to 2 seconds per blink. Taking into account fatigue, you could essentially play as Old Nurse without add-ons.

And once again, Nurse was left in the closest for some time. This time, to her detriment.

Bugs, glitches, errors across all platforms...

She broke.

Over the years, Nurse broke. Especially after the game moved to Dedicated servers, she just broke. she could still be played, but she had soooooo maaaaannny buuuuuuuuugs!!!!

Here are some of the biggest ones

1. Randomly, her blinks didn't work. As in, after the first blink, her chain blink would seemingly flicker from charging to not charging until Nurse fatigues. This could continue for several seconds while the player is left as a 98.5% killer with no power.
2. The infamous "M1 Bug." If you attacked too early, Nurse wouldn't swing. However, because of issues with the severs understanding Nurse had "landed," Nurse would randomly not be able to attack when she rightfully should. When a killer has as time-sensitive as Nurse, this was a massive issue.
3. After blinking and getting stunned by a pallet, the game got confused. Some patches, she ate the pallet stun and fatigued. Others, she ate the pallet and then her camera jerked around as if she was fatiguing but had freedom of movement.
4. It was very common to begin charging a blink, only to have your 2nd blink's recharge be at 99% because the bar could be a bit deceiving and have some general server issues. This meant the progress was reset to 0 and you had to wait the entire 6 seconds all over again.

Because she became so utterly painful to play, her player count dropped. Opinions towards Nurse generally became more favorable since she was so painful to play with, making her appear to be very difficult so many "respected" Nurse players.

There were detractors, of course. Some of them were/are content creators. You may know a few. Either way, Nurse was left as-is, for better or worse.

Basics Attacks

Come 4.6.0, Trickster was added into the game and with it, Starstruck. While carrying a survivor, all survivors within the killer's Terror Radius were exposed and it would linger for 30 seconds afterward.

To a Trapper or Clown, you might get a down or two. If nothing else, it stopped body block plays.

Nurse? She had a 32m Terror Radius, could teleport next to you, and her attacks were still basic so you went down instantly.

People raised the question: Should Nurse's attacks be basic attacks?

Surprisingly, most people said no. Don't believe me? I ran a poll on this very site. Most said no. But this raises the question: Why are Nurse's attacks basic attacks?

I made a post on it but I'll give you the short version

1. She was 98.5% and functionally had no basic attack without her blinks, contrasting with the likes of 110% killers that can still chase normally if need be.
2. She predates the Basic-Special attack distinction due to her being an ancient killer. Going back to change it would cause issues, such as making her an exception to the M1-Grab cancel after a blink which would (in her case) be an M2-grab cancel, making her a unique exception which is something you don't want.
3. Her attack after a blink was designed to emulate a basic attack as closely as possible. The only differences? You did it after blinking and the range was shorter. That's about it.

The Re-coding

Nurse was completely recoded. They took the killer's coding, and rebuilt it from the ground up to fix the myriad of issues plaguing her.

Nurse was... fun. Really. She was fun to play again. She didn't feel as painful to play anymore. Personally, I loved playing Nurse after putting months into trying to learn her bugged form. It felt so good!

Until Nurse became popular again. You see, matchmaking went from Rank Based to MMR based, which it uses to this day. This meant all good nurses were concentrated in one area. And wouldn't you know it, most survivors don't like playing against a killer that circumvents conventional gameplay over and over again.

This isn't me just saying survivor players didn't like her. I'm saying, Nurse wasn't fun to go against. This became worse and worse as time went on...

The Omega Blink Strikes Back!

Yup. In re-coding Nurse, they brought Omega Blink back.

It wasn't exactly the same. The charge time would still increase with range add-ons, but her arrival time remained 1.5 seconds at most and her shorter blinks became faster again. They brought back an aspect of Nurse everyone agreed was completely unfair. This time, it was deliberate with a bug report detailing the issue being confirmed as "not a bug."

People weren't exactly happy about that. Due to popular demand, this issue was fixed sometime later. But people still weren't happy. All eyes were on Nurse, and things got even worse...

Awakened Awareness

This was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Awakened Awareness is a Wesker perk that in the PTB did the same as now, revealing the aura of survivors within 20m if you're carrying one, but had a lingering effect of 2 seconds. this could be increased to 4 with Lethal Pursuer and had no cooldown.

And this was nerfed after it proved problematic on "certain killers." And then Nurse became utterly reviled, seen as one of the biggest problems in the game, period. The claim was that she single-handedly bottlenecked balancing in the game because of her power.

Now, killers getting perks nerfed is nothing new. Legion singlehandedly got Thanatophobia (ironically, Nurse's own perk) nerfed to oblivion. Trickster got Blood Favor nerfed because it was working on a single knife throw, so it was changed to work on health state so it couldn't proc if Nemesis infected a survivor, Legion deep wounded an injured survivor, etc.

Circumstances were different this time, however. People were already discontent with Nurse and this was seen as her simply going too far. Even the most dedicated Nurse players said that Nurse should be changed. While she wasn't the only killer Awakened Awareness was a bit problematic on (don't believe me, use it on Spirit for a bit), she was by far the biggest offender.

Ironically, this entire topic leads to something most won't believe.

Nurse Myth #3 - Nurse bottlenecks Balance Decisions

Sounds contradictory, doesn't it?

I asked a former dev myself. Did Nurse come up in balance discussions? Any merit to the belief that she affects the balancing of other killers? And so on, and so forth.

Does Nurse come up in balance discussions? "More than [I'd] think, but there's never been an instance of, 'this would be a good idea but we have one killer that it would be an issue on.'"

Considering what happened to Awakened Awareness, I believe the idea here is: Nurse does not bottleneck balance as much as people believe, if at all more than any other killer.

Basic to Special

6.5.0 was released with a few changes to Nurse

• Blink Attacks are now Special attacks. (Not gonna lie, I was shocked they actually went through with it considering the issues I was told it would have)
• Recharge and Range add-ons are scrapped entirely.
• Most of her other add-ons have been changed
• Replacing the generic chase music, Nurse was given obnoxiously loud and painful unique chase music

People are still "figuring out" her new add-ons. It's definitely a nerf, though she has some standouts.

Jenner's almost brought back 6 blink Nurse but that never hit Live. Now, after two blinks, you can teleport back to your original position and get a single-blink refunded.

Campbell's last breath went from an instant half-blink to an instant full-blink. Now, she can cross 40m in a mere 3 seconds, something even Blight can't accomplish.

Otherwise, her mobility is now pretty... standard? Crossing the map with blinks is about as fast a 4.6 killer taking into account the fatigue and recharge. She can't use Exposed perks such as Starstruck anymore, nor other M1 perks such as Sloppy (though she has a mangled add-on now), Surge/Jolt, Franklin's, or Knock Out (rework this perk, please?)

Contention Remains

While Nurse is in a healthier state, to say people are happy would be far from the truth. There are many questions she raises.

Should Nurse be completely reworked and given an entirely new power? Is that even fair to dedicated Nurse players, some of whom have been playing since 2016? Keep in mind, Nurse is completely unique; those players can't simply move on when no other killer plays like Nurse and gives them the experience they enjoy. Last time we had a killer completely reworked, it ended with an abomination that had to get nerfed back into obscurity while his original players essentially lost their killer.

She doesn't obey conventional gameplay. Is this a good thing, requiring survivors to play differently and adding variety? Is it completely backward and Nurse doesn't fit nor belong and should be removed?

How much of her strength is even her? She's a unique killer with unique counterplay. How much of her success is the average survivor either not knowing or not having the experience needed to verse a competent Nurse? Is it fair to the survivors to expect them to learn how to play an entirely new chase dynamic against a single killer?

To put it simply, Nurse is a very complicated issue, perpetually stuck in this weird limbo at the moment. I doubt we've seen the last of her changes. I can only hope that they're for the better of everyone involved.