Let's talk about Nurse

Definitely needs more nerfs honestly. She’s gotten many perks nerfed and has no doubt prevented countless perks from ever making it past the concept phase. On top of keeping a lot of mediocre perks awful because if they were stronger they would be insane on her.

Even a mediocre Nurse player can 4k almost every game and A nurse with 50 hours would easily outperform any other killer in the game with 100 hours. I genuinely don’t think I have ever lost a single time as Nurse except for 2 matches where I wasn’t used to indoor map blinking.

I doubt she will ever be nerfed much more because she is basically the reason why Devs can say that this game isn’t pay to win.

As weird as this sounds I would put mediocre above average. If you put 50 hours into Nurse you are going to be pretty solid but not great but since it’s Nurse it doesn’t matter and you will clap survivors anyways.

Nurse general MMR rate is so low because of the people who play her 5-10 times and get wiped out and then never touch her again. And the Hugh MMR data she had showed she was at the top 8 with a 62% kill rate.

The answer to "should you balance around high level or the average" depends entirely on the target audience. Games like LOL, DOTA, Street Fighter, Tekken, etc, are designed for competitive players and balance around the high level because those are they players they advertise to and built their game around. However, DBD is not really built to be a competitive game, and the developers no longer seek to appeal to competitive players. The fact that DBD has dropped official tournaments and releases new perks and characters every few months is proof enough of this, as is the ever growing list of never fixed spectator bugs. Their business and design models are aimed at casual players who come for the cool licenses and scary skins and maps. This is also why they hide MMR and have no real plans to change how loose its matchmaking is. Because the game's target audience is casual players, it should be balanced around the averages, which is how BHVR balances.

Nurse escapes a huge gutting for two primary reasons:

1 - Learning muscle memory for blinks is too hard for the average gamer, so low level nurses underperform significantly, thus skewing her stats.

2 - The developers have no idea how to resolve issues with the nurse at higher levels without fundamentally reworking her ability to travel through walls.

As another 4000+ hour player who mains blight, I can consistently win with sweaty builds and tunneling if I really want to, but I don't think the game should be designed around me. I can respect your opinion if you disagree, but this is why I think the game should be balanced around average players, because it is the playerbase that BHVR designs their game, updates, and advertising around.

Nurse is basically untouched in all DbD history

The word "basically" is doing so much heavy lifting here it's going to win a strongman competition.

Actually Mario Kart matches people based on racing points and has done so since… MKWii? Unsure, but at least since the Wii up to present. But you do get matched with others based on what is essentially a MMR that goes up when you place well and down when you place poorly.

I've found that the best way to enjoy DBD as a "party game" while messing around is in a custom match, the queue times and tunneling/camping have turned most of my friends away from playing this game. That said, going back to grade-based matchmaking wouldn't change much imo. Because of how large the MMR gap is tonight, I've been getting leaderboard killer mains (same 8000 hour huntress twice, 7000 hour deathslinger streamer, both on LBs) but also teammates that cannot hold chase and don't know where gens are. Grade based matchmaking felt about the same to me, except that because of the larger pool of players, most of my matches had "eh" killers and "eh" teammates.

Aside from kills = skill vs pips, is there actually a big difference between the two? I feel like they both are basically playtime with the exception of grades resetting while MMR never does. Maybe that actually does make a huge difference.

I actually wouldn't mind going back to that and trying it out to see how it does, but I get the feeling the developers feel too strongly about their MMR system to ever consider going back.

Idk what to believe honestly, people gaslight me all the time with that logic to explain why Huntress has such low kill rates. Even though she has lots kill rates at general AND high MMR which disproves that. But Nurse has high kill rates at high MMR so I chalked it up to newbs.

Nurse received a lot of nerfs over the years.

However, I thank that her core design is problematic due to it being a bottleneck for perk design, as it has been proven multiple times by now.

She should change for the game to improve.

I addressed that point as well.

Nurse is the only killer in game whose movement speed is lower than such of the survivor. She effectively moves as if she's holding her power at any given moment. She cannot close in on the survivor the normal "w key forward" way because she loses distance, so unless she manages to corner them in a literal nothing, she must resort to blinking where she has to follow the rules of her power - two straight line blinks that she cant cancel halfway through.

And while she makes usually strong tiles weak, she also makes a lot of garbage tiles pretty viable against her since such map geometry can make it harder to determine survivor's position or correct the blink perfectly.

At which point we're yet again arguing balance and not core design flaw.

She doesn't have high kill rates at high MMR though. Back when they were providing the data split between "top mmr" and "all matches" she still was often in the lowest kill rate killer.

Here is the last time i found them showing "all mmr" vs "high mmr"

She's at the average mark. 1% above the desired "60% kill rate" Which for balance purposes is solidly slightly above what they want, putting her in the "fine" category.

Unless you mean to think that we only look at top 1%, or maybe top .1%. But again, if we do that, you need to explain why we shouldn't balance for those level of players, and why survivors don't need massive nerfs.

I think both sides need something to compete at the highest level, watch any tournament and even if they have a nurse involved there is a high chance they lose. At the highest level nurse its balanced, so you want to balance her around the average level. But as soon as you do that there is now a permanent gap between what the highest level survivors can do that killers can't. It creates a gray area where only one side can compete. If there was a way for nurse to be less competitive at all but the highest level id be all for it but creating a gap like that isn't fine.

Premise:

why years pass and almost every killer receive nerfs and Nurse is basically untouched in all DbD history

Reality:

Give me back 2016 Nurse then. There's no differece right?

The premise of this thread is bogus.

it makes more sense to disable auras while she's holding blink.

it's fine when she sees them in fatigue or while blinking, but at the moment where she chooses blink location it's too good.

probably

I understand your type are never satisfied.

This is fundamentally the problem with nurse and one of the reason I've personally given up her as a "second" main. The games are unbearably easy minus the one in the blue moon game and as a result it's sapped any sense of challenge or enjoyment. The other issue which a lot of nurse mains here love to conveniently gloss over or downplay is the absolute stranglehold she has on game design (which BHVR have already confirmed) and we've seen from patchnotes where perks had to be changed. Doesn't matter whether you balance for high, mid or even low mmr when you have a killer who's issues transcend the game itself.

It's also one of the reasons that I don't think nerfing aura reading will do anything. Those of us who've played her for a long time could already function well without aura reading; sure the additional perks now make it way easier but you learn through good positioning where the survivor is being funnelled to or at least "likely" to be. The real answer, should have happened years ago, which is a complete redesign of her power and accepting that on demand teleportation (not conditional like Hag's or Dredge's) was a mistake. The counterpoint which I'm sympathetic to is that a ton of us bought skins for her and she's probably the only barrier (minus blight) to the argument that the game isn't pay to win.

Dracula is hard to play?

There are a ton of killers that are a lot harder than nurse, which are still weak. There where also a lot of killers in dbd´s past that where extremely simple to play but broke into a-tier and above (New rework Freddy, Sadako 2.0)

Difficult to play does not endorse the killer to be so strong that it becomes a problem for the game. If we want the game to be in a more healthy (less tunnel, camp, slug and genrush) state, some killer powers need to be adressed. Nurse and Blight are amoung these killers.

Its not about making every killer equally strong, its about making the desparity in power level less big. A game with less unhealthy gameplay WILL be a playing field for a Nurse.

Isn't her basic lunge worse than average? I'm not sure entirely.

Edit: It is, unless you move after blinking

read the thread. or this very comment where I say nurse's issues are balance issues and not her design.

>First: Her design is literally:: "if I make no mistake, I win"

I really dislike this strawman argument. Firstly, it's very selective, secondly this is just not true.

Nurse still has her limits outside of chase and even in direct interaction it's still possible to delay her, stall her with resources, etc. Flawless nurse still struggles and probably loses vs flawless survivors.

Survivors entire design / balancing is "if I make no mistakes I win", but people kinda dont have an issue with that because mistakes are unavoidable.

It only works if you consider nothing but chase and only chase while survivor is in range of her ability. Because otherwise it doesnt sound so perfect anymore. You can still path well, you can still be efficient on gens, you can still throw resources (DS, babysitter, DH, etc) at her, you can stall her hooks and punish slugs with comp corner, lockers, etc.

In chase you can path in such a way that she has to make a read on you and guess what you're going to do which gives her a fair chance of making a mistake.

It's not an issue in itself. A lot of things in this game if you take them in vacuum are "if you make zero mistakes with it, you always win" and just like with all things like that, "win" doesnt imply winning the game, it merely implies winning the "Interaction" or "getting value". but there's more beyond that which is what I've described above.

>Second: Improving the game overall does not only involve a slowdown mechanic for killer and an anti - tunneling, - camping and - slugging mechanic. It also involves structure and loop design. Maps are the main issue, most killers struggle with. Loops like shack are straight up unfair for your normal m1 killer, not even going into god-pallets… If these fundamental issues are addressed and design is adjusted to be more fair for m1 - oriented killers, killer powers like nurses or blights will be straight up overkill.

I dont think it's okay to put everyone on the same design rails just to address game's current issues. Firstly because old issues will be replaced with new ones, secondly, because a lot of things do more good than harm. A lot of things are the way they are because that's how the game can be fun for people that use these things or that's how developers can keep the game both casual and semi competitive without forcing neither group into playing the way they dislike. They have to be kept in check, but ultimately DbD has to be unfair because that's how a lot of people have fun in it.

Any chase power boils down to either guessing or either side winning every time they dont make a mistake. that's how how this game works.