Trapper Should Not Start With All His Traps (And Here's Why)
When the topic of buffing the Trapper comes up, a very popular suggestion is to have him start with all his traps on hand, similar to the Trapper Sack addon without the associated downside of being unable to pick up any set traps again. This, in my opinion, is a bad idea, and I don't actually think the most common counterargument - that basement Trapper is unfun for survivors - is the most compelling reason why.
It is a reason, of course, but I think the more compelling argument for why Trapper should not start with all of his traps on hand has a lot more to do with the mechanical "power fantasy" vibe of what Trapper is designed to do.
To me, the point of the Trapper has everything to do with the careful placement of his traps and the juggling of how many you have on hand, because he's meant to be a tactical, careful, planning-ahead kind of killer. If he started with all of his traps, what would stop him from just brute-forcing a down and setting up around that first hook? More to the point, would new players even understand how he's designed to be played if they're never pushed to carefully consider their trap placements?
If a Trapper player is just capable of setting everything down around their first down, it flattens down all of the killer's nuance and interesting depth. It's exactly like the Artist: Her kit is very well designed with a super high skill ceiling, something that you can spend hours learning how to use and getting the placement + timings down perfectly, but... you could instead just place a bird at a loop and force the survivor to run away, and that's a lot easier. It's not more powerful, you're still rewarded for bothering to learn how to play her properly, but it's easy and it's simple and so that's what a lot of players do.
Now, that's not to say Trapper doesn't need any help. He could do with his traps starting closer to him, and he could do with having his setup time reduced through a number of other potential methods, but at his core he should always be a tactical killer that has to think ahead and actually care about how he uses his power. It's a matter of his identity more than his strength that I'm getting at here, and those two things are just as important as one another.
This combined with the fact that things like basement Trapper just aren't very engaging for the survivor side is why I don't think he should start with all of his traps. There's a hundred other things that'd be a much better fix for his current problems, in my opinion.
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I've always said that trapper should take the traps from the lockers instead roaming around the map to take all the traps, one of the main reasons why the trapper is so weak is because he have to spend a lot of time taking the traps around the map for using his only power.
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...or we could nerf his basement playstyle (hook min distance to place traps) so he gets some serious buffs??
...or keep him in D tier :P
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We sort of get the reasoning but there's a decent number of trappers that already do something along these lines. They make a territory filled with all the traps and heard survivors to it or it's in a 3 gen (no we are not going through another whining discussion about this) and survivors have to navigate what effectively is a minefield while chased out.
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You didn't explain why his starting with all of his traps is less "tactical gameplay" than him not. You just said it gives him a tactic you don't like because it's similar (Trapper and Artist are nothing alike.) to another killer. Trapper having all of his traps at the start would offer him more tactical gameplay because you wouldn't have to spend the first 2 minutes of a match gathering and placing traps.
And basement Trapper isn't common or even a thing that affects most players. Certainly starting with all of his traps would offer that tactic more frequently instead of being reliant on RNGeesus to place your traps close to the basement so you don't have to spend 2 minutes collecting them to set up your basement hooks. But is that really a problem? Is a basement hook-and-trap setup an instant win?
Trapper right now isn't in a good place. And maybe giving him all of his traps at the start isn't the buff he needs. But this isn't a good argument against doing it, if anything it shows quite the opposite. That specific buff would offer Trapper far more tactical possibilities than he has now just from the sheer amount of time you would save not having to run around all game collection traps.
The first buff Trapper needs though is his traps need to be fixed. Especially on stairs and anything with a slight shift in terrain. That's the first place they should start with all of the killers. There are so many bugs on them that I'm surprised people still play half of them.
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I wish all his traps spawned on the map already armed and ready. It probably wouldn't amount to a lot, but those moments where a survivor accidentally bumbles into a random trap in the first 15 seconds of the match would be great.
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I'm not saying that Trapper and Artist are anything alike, I was using Artist as an example of how a simple and boring option will be taken over learning how to play a killer to a greater effectiveness, no matter how far away from the killer's clear intended playstyle it is. There are other killers like this too- Knight has the same problem as Artist, and you could argue facecamping Bubba and 3-gen Skull Merchant are the same way. These killers aren't the same, they're not alike and they don't play the same, but the core idea I'm getting at is present in all of them.
Again, it's not about strength. It's about Trapper's identity and the way players are encouraged and pushed towards playing him. It's not just about basement, it's about how Trapper having all of his traps from the get-go would make "get first down, set up everything around hook, proxy camp" the most easy and straightforward way of playing him- and that's not only not really all that fun for the opposing team, it's also clearly not how Trapper's designed to be played. There's no reason to bother learning optimal trap placements or how to corral survivors into your setup area if his kit not only allows you to ignore it, but makes ignoring it far more approachable.
If the most stale and boring way of playing a killer is also the easiest and most readily available way of playing that killer, that's how a majority are going to play them. That was the point of the Artist comparison.
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“Mechanical power fantasy he’s supposed to be” So, trash?
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Trapper should start with 4 traps in hand and 4 should be toward the middle of the map not the far corners like it can be on swamp.
Is the goal to make him suck less or be an A tier killer?
If the goal is "A tier killer" then he needs:
- Basekit bloody coil. Buff this effect to give deep wounds to a survivor already injured.
- Rework bloody coil iri addon as follows (pick one): A) Bear traps cannot be disarmed except via toolbox or sabotage skill; bear traps can only be disarmed otherwise by stepping in them. B) Bear traps are invisible until the survivor is 1m from their hitbox range. From this distance until the player touches the hit box they slowly "fade in".
- Restore the bear trap 2016 hitbox which was about 50% larger than it is now. Increase the size of the trap if necessary to make them overlap
- Rework trapper sack to give Trapper +2 traps in hand on game start and +1 trap on map.
- Increase base speed to 120% (do this to all M1 killers) OR buff Brutal Strength to read : additionally once per 60 seconds you may break a pallet instantly with a lunge attack.
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I agree actually. They need to make his basement/camping/unhealth stuff less viable or just flat out not possible, while increasing his lethality in other areas. The thing i have proposed in the past is:
There are basically a few big problems with trapper:
- His traps are really really easy to see on most maps, they have gotten rid of many places where you can hide traps in the grass.
- The RNG on where his traps spawn can heavily heavily hurt him.
- The trap setting speed is extremely long when used in a chase, meaning they basically can't be used in a chase, and then the survivor just leaves the loop to a new area. If you leave them, they know where the trap was and can easily disarm it.
- His map pressure is absolutely terrible
- RNG means survivors can escape a trap super quick or take a really long time.
- He can lockdown areas too well with a bunch of traps (shack basement etc.)
So how would you fix all of these without making him super OP or unhealthy to play against?
- Remove all the addons that let him carry more traps and rework them, he can keep 2 traps at a time, but any more and they could become too OP with the following changes
- Traps now take 1.5 seconds to set (was 2.5 seconds)
- Traps no longer have an attempt number but simply a single bar to fill up. A survivor can release themselves from a trap after 10 seconds. Another survivor can release them much more quickly in 2.5 seconds. Encouraging survivors to group together.
- Traps are no longer fully visible on the ground, and trapper slightly buries them, making it so they are much less visible. Basically, you could only see the "teeth" of the trap.
- Normalize the RNG of traps, so that the trapper starts with 2 traps, and a maximum carrying capacity of 2 traps, and that 1 trap will always spawn next to every generator for a total of 9 traps on the map.
- When a survivor steps in a bear trap, the trapper becomes excited at the thought of catching his prey. The trapper can press the active ability button, to immediately lock on to the survivor in the trap, and run directly at them, building up speed at a rate of 1 m/s until he catches the survivor. While running to the survivor, the trapper will break any pallets or breakable walls in his path. If he collides with a permanent object (wall, tree, etc.) an animation plays that looks like trapper "crashing" through the object (but does not destroy the object) and he goes through that object. If the survivor escapes the trap before he gets there, this effect will deactivate, if he is crashing through an object while this happens, he will finishing crashing through and THEN it will deactivate.
- Do an addon pass to eliminate problematic addons like, disarming injures a survivor, and rework the bag addons to do something with this speed boost.
- Rework the iri addon that automatically arms traps to make it so he loses the speed boost activatable when a survivor gets trapped, but instead gains a 15% haste (3 stacks of PWYF). So if he wants to use traps to delay, and more actively chase a survivor instead, he can do that.
- Placing or setting a trap will now disarm all traps with 12 meters of it. Preventing you from mega trapping the basement and hardcamping it.
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Put simply trapper would become a 3 gen machine if he started with all of his traps. Which is utterly insane. I was doing a bear trap challenge with trapper on eyrie and managed to collect every trap on the map and set them up around a tight 3 gen. One of which was in killer shack. It was not a pleasant game for the survivors involved.
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You wanna talk about identity? His name is Trapper, he only uses Bear Traps. He is not actually a Trapper, he is a Bear Trapper…
Give him another Trap <_<
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The (much) bigger issue is the Realm Beyond.
With the "new" grass reskin that is slowly creeping its way into all the maps, it is basically impossible to play Trapper in a fun, unique and interesting way on many maps. The new grass makes it way too easy to spot his traps to the point where a trap that is not actively locking something down as a zoning tool (i.e. a trap inside a pallet is not placed to actually catch anyone, just to render the pallet useless during chases) is useless.
This heavily affects your possibility to be creative with your trap placements, which in return makes the Killer extremely stale and boring for everyone - the Survivors that go up against the same strategy every game with the Killer as well as the Trapper players that are forced to play this strategy to be able to have success with the character.
If you wanna buff Trapper, the very first thing you wanna do is thicken the damn grass - and maybe add some more patches of grass on maps while you're at it too!
Next thing you wanna do is get rid of the god damn RNG bound to his traps.
Trapper is the only Killer in this game whose entire power is based soley around RNG. You would assume that a Survivor getting trapped should reward the Killer for hiding the trap well, predicting the Survivors pathing and overall result in a payoff for all the time he had to invest into this setup - but nope, whether you actually get value out of your trap or not is up entirely to random chance. How fun.
This just further disencourages risky and unorthodox trap placements and further solidifies the traps as nothing but a zoning tool meant to scare Survivors away rather than actually catching them.
These two things need to change ASAP just to lay the foundation of a functional Killer power. Once this is done, then we can start debating buffs or nerfs to him, because as it stands right now he is so increadibly inconsistent that it's basically impossible to tell just how strong he can actually be (you can decimate a team on Dead Dawg Saloon and in the very next game not get a single trapped Survivor and lose horribly because you were sent to the Eyrie of Crows).
If you buff him now all you achieve is that you make already boring playstyles more effective, which means these will be nerfed eventually and then Trapper is left with nothing. History has shown that BHVR will not counterbuff a character when they nerf something on them they deem "problematic" - they'll simply remove that aspect and then call it a day, even if what they took is the only thing that made this specific character a unique character (I'm looking at the Deathslinger here, who to this very day has not seen compensation buffs for the removal of what was essentially the entirety of his power).
Trapper needs to be fixed, not buffed (yet).
Post edited by Mister_xD on2 -
Agreed.
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Starting with all traps at once is a bad idea for gameplay reasons. Like OP said, being able to easily set up around the first hook. And also being able to immediately walk over to a 3 gen and lock it. He can still do that now, but it's a race against the clock for both sides if he tries it.
I play a stupid amount of Trapper. Getting 2 or 3 traps at a time from lockers would be nice. I always end up at a point in the trial where I have 4 traps I can't reasonably go pick up without throwing the game. I'd also like to see trap disarming fill a laceration meter for survivors. The same survivor shouldn't be able to harass traps the entire match without any downsides. You can only hide them so well on a lot of maps, and you can't make them so unpredictable that they'll never be run through.
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