So BHVR nerfed Sadako without any buffs

The most recent PTB majorly reworked Onryo. The changes were drastic, but proved to be very well received by the community. The general consensus was that the Onryo was weaker than before, perhaps weaker than she should be, but more fun and more skill expressive. Today BHVR damaged my faith in their ability to listen to their community by releasing a developer update announcing two major changes to the Onryo that not only made her even weaker, but also damaged her underlying gameplay.

The first change is that hooking a Survivor will now lock in a maximum of 2 stacks of Condemned. This can happen again when the Survivor is hooked for a second time for a maximum of 4 locked-in stacks. This is actually a major setback for the Onryo's design.

This PTB encouraged the Onryo to hook survivors for the first time since she was released via the introduction of locking in condemned and the reworked ring drawing addon. This change goes against that design philosophy in a major way.

Locking in 2 stacks of condemned is great and all, but the stacks from that first hook are the only ones that are meaningful, since hooking the survivor a second time puts them on death hook, meaning they'll be out the game if she manages to down them again regardless of how much condemned they have.

With this in mind, hooking a survivor more than once just lost its incentive, and the incentive for hooking a survivor once just got reduced significantly, as you can only lock in a maximum of two stacks on that first hook.

Another issue with this change is that it removed a large amount of risk from disabling TVs. Turning off TVs gives you a stack of condemned, and one of the big disadvantages of having high condemned, and therefor of switching off a large number of TVs, on the PTB is the risk that you might get caught out, downed, and hooked with that condemned, preventing you from removing it. Now that risk is gone, as hooking a survivor with 2 stacks is just as valuable as hooking a survivor with 5.

The reason given for making this change is also puzzling. The claim is that this change has been made to reduce tunneling, as a survivor with lots of condemned locked in is "a clear target" as they are only a few stacks from death. Whist this may initially sound logical, a small analysis reveals the logical flaw at play here.

With the exception of locking in condemned, the only way you can stop a survivor from removing their condemned is chasing them. On the PTB, if you hook a survivor with lots of condemned, you can allow them to be unhooked, healed and go on with their day without fear of them removing their condemned. Now you're actually incentivized to tunnel more than before, since the only way you can stop them removing all that condemned is by tunneling them. This means that this change actually has the complete opposite of its intended effect.

This is, of course, in addition to making the already pretty weak Onryo on the PTB even weaker.

Another change this PTB made was removing the cooldown from the Onryo's power. The cooldown was a point of contention for many players because it restricted when players could teleport whist simultaneously forcing them to teleport every time it was off cooldown to spread condemned optimally. This felt awful.

Unfortunately this feeling is about to return, because the second change announced today is as follows:

The power meter recharges over the course of 10 seconds.

• If the power meter is full, projecting will inflict one stack of Condemned to any Survivor near a powered TV and empty the power meter.
• If the power meter is not full, projecting will not inflict Condemned and the power meter will not be reset.

This change attempts to introduce compromise, it aims to limit the speed at which you can spread condemned whilst still allowing you the freedom of not having a cooldown. Unfortunately this change does not succeed.

Whist this change does not directly prevent you from teleporting whenever you want, it does punish you for doing so, effectively restricting you to teleporting once every 10 seconds once again. In the event that you teleport early you do get to actually teleport, this is good, but it damages your "condemned economy" as you spread no condemned and you still disable the TV you teleport to. This means you can't teleport early if you want to play optimally.

In addition to not being able to teleport too early, not teleporting while the power meter is full means you're limiting the number of times you can teleport and spread condemned, hence you're once again encouraged to teleport exactly when your power meter fills up.

The reason for this change, much like the reasoning for the previous change, is rather baffling.

In the event that the Onryo knows that there are survivors in range of a specific TV they can intentionally teleport to all other TVs to hit the survivor near the powered TV with condemned multiple times. As a survivor the counterplay to this is apparent, you disable the TV, either by picking up a tape or by disabling the TV while already holding a tape. This creates a risk vs reward scenario for the Onryo, because if the survivor does disable the TV the Onryo can no longer teleport to the survivor to disrupt them.

For whatever reason BHVR seems to think that this counterplay is not sufficient, despite the community consensus to the contrary, and have therefor introduced the aforementioned change. This is especially baffling given that the community is generally of the opinion that PTB Onryo isn't that strong, and this gameplay didn't feel bad for either side.

This concludes my rant. If, by any chance, someone from BHVR is reading this, please re-consider these changes. These changes do not achieve what they set out to, and only serve to reduce the Onryo's power and make her a less enjoyable gameplay experience.

Thank you for reading.