Fixing the Captured Haunt/Basic Attack combo bug was a mistake

When the Halloween event launched, I really loved playing it on both sides. I thought the smoke bombs were fun to play with on survivor. In fact, I hope they return as a regular item or perk in the future, as they enable stealth play from survivors, which is something many survivor players feel has been lacking from the game.

The double-tap with the Captured Haunt was very powerful, but I thought this was offset by the fact killers needed to do a side quest to get the power (huge loss of pressure), and it wasn't that good on many killers who were already some of the best in the game (Nurse, Blight). I thought trying to line up a perfect double tap was a lot of fun and spiced up killer gameplay.

After it got removed, I still thought it was fine. But after playing for a lot of time afterwards, I now feel as though the event is an enormous headache as killer.

The smoke bombs are still very good, but the addition of the rift is an enormous boon to survivors who know how to use it. A lot of survivors seem to think it's worthless, since it tells the killer if you go in and makes you broken and you can't hear their terror radius, but let me tell you it is a very powerful tool for survivors who understand it.

Ducking into the rift mid-chase gives you a separate landscape stuffed full of expendable pallets, some of which are very strong. If the killer follows you in there, they cannot benefit from a lot of strong perks. Surge won't work, hooks in there can't be used for Scourge Hook perks, anything which keys off of the killer's terror radius (ex: Coulrophobia) stops working.

And the killer's benefit for having to deal with all of these new survivor tools, plus reduced viability of many strong killer perks, is having to do a side quest for a ranged attack which is only useful in narrow, unobstructed hallways or against survivors in the open who aren't trying to dodge. I guess you could also use it to camp, but nobody wants that to be more effective, so I can't say that is a selling point for the mode.

If the double tap was still in the game, I would say the tradeoff is worth it, but I really feel that the event has been unfun as killer ever since it got removed. You just have to deal with so many new mechanics without having anything interesting of your own as compensation. There's also the bug with the smoke bombs where survivors permanently lose their scratch marks, which I won't hold against the event from a design point of view, but it is yet another point of frustration when it happens.