Did base kit removal of Hag traps made her weaker?

Overall, I'm honestly not sure. It reduced the variance in her power level quite a bit though. Even just one flashlight against her felt devestating to the point where Franklin's was a must-run.

Like, Survivors have a reliable way to dismantle her web now, but it's slower than it was with a flashlight and can't be done mid-chase. I just wish there was a noise on the Hag's PoV when a trap is wiped away, because currently there's no indicator.

It was a big nerf.

I mean, it's not even a question. Hag gets ruined, far harder than any other killer, from 1 survivor interrupting her game plan. 1 survivor knows when/where/how to trip her traps, she loses the whole game. And I got tired of feeling that way, feeling that the killer was only good against bad survivors, so I quit maining her about 2 years ago. Usually people expect paragraphs of examples and proof of things like this, but there's honestly not much to talk about. You can see it. Her teleport isn't even instant except on scroll wheel which not everybody can do or wants to do. So bar scroll wheel, even in the best possible scenario you have to keep running a few seconds after in order to hit the survivor, in which case they usually get to a pallet or window.

Small tangent but worth the perspective: I disagree with Tru3 on very few things, but this killer is one I vehemently disagree with him on. "You just place traps down, get a hook, and then win! Hag is so simple/easy!" Says the guy who knows a majority of killer wins are from facing bad survivors, who knows getting a single hook can be hard vs good survivors, and who almost always faces bad survivors on Hag WITH Rusty Shackles. Rusty Shackles is the least skillful way to play Hag, because you don't have to play with camera swings in mind, and the survivors physically can't tell when a trap has been tripped. For every match that has been a smashing success with this killer, there's 10 others where the player was basically unable to play it.

When weighing the pros and cons of losing flashlight disabling but gaining rubbing the traps away, I don't know which is worse. The most skillful and riskiest way to counter Hag is through tripping her traps on purpose, because although it's very easy to avoid that hit, at least there's risk there of getting hit, a snowball's chance in Hell of snowballing. With flashlights which highlighted her traps as well as disarmed them, I don't know how Hags ever won against that. I'd have lobby dodged. But with running away her traps, it's still a no-skill non-interaction with the killer, with the only downside being it takes a few seconds. Guess what? With tripping which is usually more skillful, you can just trip 5-7 of her traps in about the same amount of time, assuming she set them all up on hook. How then is that strategy "skilless" for her and helps her win when she just loses all her traps in seconds and the person still gets unhooked? Because that's the complaint I always hear. Hags who know what they're doing don't do that. So you can tell most criticism levied against her is from low skill survivors.

Maybe I'll try using her trap range reduction add-ons, or her 117.5% add-ons, and see if that changes my perspective at all. But otherwise I don't know what to do with this killer. I don't know why she's considered A/S tier when, again, 1 survivor who knows her counter: lose the whole game!

And it's the strangest thing. So many survivors in this game are straight-up bad. But every time I've hopped on Hag, every single team knows her counterplay. They call her S tier because of those 1% of matches where she got really lucky and got a 4-man slug or something. From my experience, she's like bottom 3 killers, easily. How're you gonna get anything rolling with the killer if someone's just tripping your traps the whole time? Just hope that their brain turns off?

I don' t think the flashlight change is what hurt hag.

There was another change where they increase the trigger range of her traps and her trigger range addons got changed. I believe unless you run double trigger range addons, any survivor who runs away from the trap upon triggering it is safe from Hag lunge out of teleport.

And the biggest threat to Hag traps was always survivors triggering them when she couldn't respond and it became even safer to do so.

It was probably a nerf overall but imo it was something that needed to be done. Flashlights vs Hag used to be very strong and in some cases were too good at removing traps quickly, but at the same time if there were no flashlights in a group then traps were too difficult to counter since there was no other way to remove a trap in a key location without setting it off.

In general, I do not really feel that killer counterplay should be tied to items, the degree to which a killer's power can be countered should not be dependent upon the items survivors bring into a match when there's no guarantee anyone will bring that item. (Killer-specific items like turrets and EMPs are fine because they are always available in matches vs. that killer.)

How about a Haste effect for like 7 seconds or so whenever one of her traps is cleared? Not an add-on but in her kit?

It's really only a problem if you're predictable with trap placement or out in the open easy to see. Around corners and in grass or anywhere there's a lot of clutter most of the time they'll still trigger before the survivor realizes it's there.

Hag's real problem imo is a paradox because it has to do with trigger range. If it's too big survivors can literally run right through them and come out unscathed pretty consistently but if the range is too small they never trigger in the first place. I would imagine the fix to this I would imagine is keep it the way it is and maybe add a brief hinder to a survivor that triggers a trap, something modest like 5% for 3 seconds I think would do wonders to fix Hag's problems.

Although I'd be cautious with buffing her too much because Hag is still very feast or famine where if the survivors know how to play against her it can be a very rough game but if even one survivor screws up once it can irreparably screw the entire team.

Hag needed a basekit nerf she's too ridiculous on levels like RPD to have been left alone

So in her most ideal maps possible, against unprepared teams, then she becomes a threat. Sounds like she's not that strong.

*10 Tokens then after that the newest trap erases the oldest trap. Although to be fair it's uncommon to get all 10 down before survivors start triggering them.

Mhmm. I had to relearn the max traps the hard way. And I swear the trap limit used to be higher, and it should be. What having so few traps does is makes it way easier for the survivors to completely shut you down, because they're breaking all your traps, and you don't have a few extra placed for backup since you physically couldn't place anymore.

I think that most people, regardless of who you ask, maybe Otz, Hens, but especially the average player, have made Hag out to be this mythological tier killer who, if played correctly basically, can't be beat. But that's not the case at all, and all it takes to break that illusion is playing a few matches with her. She takes the unpredictability of killer match results and cranks it up to 11. First you'll have a 4k, then a 0k, then a 3k but only because they threw at the end, then a draw, then a 3-hook match, then a 1-hook match, then a 4-man slug at the very beginning, then a draw.

That's been my experience, and in not 1 of those matches did I feel confident that I could win. She is so anxiety inducing to play like no other killer, because you're spending minutes just fighting for a small amount of turf, and at any moment it can just disappear. I even had a match where the gens got done in 4 minutes, on a swamp map which is supposed to be her home territory. The only map I have had success on consistently is, of all things, RPD. So of course I see people complaining, "She's too strong on RPD!" No, it's just she's so pathetically weak everywhere else. Several times throughout the matches, I just have to say out loud, "This is pathetic." Between her problems as a killer, the robbed hits, the fearlessness the survivors have, teleporting to the wrong trap, walking so slow when you have to be fast. It's just too much. So I'm done testing Hag. I wanted to validate my thoughts on her, see if they were outdated or if I'd been fooling myself the whole time. Nope. She's exactly as I've described. Literal worst killer in the game if her opponents know her counterplay.