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Let's talk about Nurse

Hey yal!😁

Would like to discuss this: why years pass and almost every killer receive nerfs and Nurse is basically untouched in all DbD history? We have such nice perks for killers that could be balanced with all of them except Nurse. If she uses these perk they becomes broken, so for the sake of balance they are not good as they could be.

I'm sure this subject was already debated once, but I would like to participate this time.😊

«1

Comments

  • SuspiciousBrownie
    SuspiciousBrownie Member Posts: 266

    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.

  • SuspiciousBrownie
    SuspiciousBrownie Member Posts: 266

    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.

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    Wow!
    Nice reading (for me).😊
    Thanks for sharing.

    I go aboard the "balance around high skill lvl". This would make people have to work hard and become better players which in turn would create better, more enjoyable matches. There's no joy in getting stomped or a easy win.

    "Thinks that survivors as a whole need to have their "power" toned down significantly, mostly in terms of nerfing loops and not increasing gen times".
    Have to quote this again because this is SO TRUE. If survs beat you because they were better at chase is one thing (and it's totally ok), but not when the killer simply had no time to do anything. Gen speeds are indeed a big issue. Broken loops for survs also, but gen speed is a much worse problem. Survs are so busted that they need to have a ton of restrictions on tournaments. This only argument by itself proves that they are powerful.

    Nerfing survs until they get balanced would make possible to win more with other killers, which would also counter…

    the "she is basically the reason why Devs can say that this game isn’t pay to win" thing.

    Sadly a lot of what Nurse does is screwing up the other killers.😥
    Also people say she's hard to master, but being the Platinum Trophy addicted that I am I had to get the 500 Blinks trophy and have to say that if you play her 50 hours you get to X skill lvl and the same 50 hours on other killers still makes you mediocre with them.

    Here's something I've found on reddit some time ago that I think would be a great start on a rework for her.

    "My idea is to make her 110 or 115%, plaid flannel base kit, starts the trial with no blinks. No more fatigue on blinks. Blinks do not recharge automatically. As survivors breath near her, her blinks charge. Closer and heavier breathing (ex. Being chased) charges faster. A healthy survivor crouching in a corner, charges slow. Max blinks 5 or 7. So basically she has to earn her power, and choose when to use her blinks. She could use all 5 in a single chase to guarantee a down but then she has no blinks until she chases survivors for a while. And she can chase normally this way."

  • jmwjmw27
    jmwjmw27 Member Posts: 497

    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.

  • H2H
    H2H Member Posts: 772

    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.

  • GeneralV
    GeneralV Member Posts: 11,665

    To be fair, DBD was released without MMR and when the system was first introduced most people hated it.

    This was not something people wanted or asked for.

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    Makes sense about being balanced the average player.
    Thing is Nurse stomps even pro players, so something should be done.
    The counter play for her is basically a mix of guess and bait that have a 50/50 chance of work. It's not something like Nemesis Whip that you can duck in certain loops or Wesker that gets screwed by a tree.

    I'm too against changing a killer's identity through their power.
    Nurse should have the blinks much like Myers must have the tombstones, but in the former's case a rework needs to be done.
    That's why I gave the suggestion I did a couple posts above.😊

  • Reinami
    Reinami Member Posts: 5,634

    But it is here anyway. And the consequences of those decisions has born fruit.

  • jmwjmw27
    jmwjmw27 Member Posts: 497

    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.

  • Reinami
    Reinami Member Posts: 5,634

    That would be more akin to DBDs old matchmaking system that was about grades though, which is more about playtime than actual skill based MMR.

  • jmwjmw27
    jmwjmw27 Member Posts: 497

    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.

  • GeneralV
    GeneralV Member Posts: 11,665

    Yes, the blinks would have to be kept for a rework to not fail.

    It isn't a bad suggestion at all, I'd say :)

    Honestly, all I see is the huge drop in matchmaking quality after the system was added to the game, something we've yet to recover from.

    That whole situation was a mess. No one wanted that system in the game, and it was added anyway. In my opinion it is one of the worst things ever done to DBD.

    I strongly believe we should go back to the ranking system with the actual rank reset from the old days. That was the best system we've ever had.

  • SuspiciousBrownie
    SuspiciousBrownie Member Posts: 266

    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.

  • crogers271
    crogers271 Member Posts: 1,903

    I think a problem for Nurse is that she fundamentally breaks the rules of the game. Every killer has varying pros and cons to playing around loops and pallets, Nurse just jumps past those. It's why so many perks fall into the category of 'we can't have that because it would be too strong on Nurse'.

    Her biggest weakness is her ability to get across the map, but as maps shrink to bolster M1 killers, she gets stronger as well. This is kind of why Nurse is not the dominant menace in 2v8 as she is in 1v4.

    This is compounded by that until a player gets an idea of her teleports, she absolutely is garbage. So if you nerfed her power (say slowing down the speed it regens) this would become even more of a massive gulf.

    The two best ideas I've heard for Nurse nerfs:

    1: Blindness around her blinks to prevent the use of aura reading.

    2: Spasmodic addon as a basekit requirement preventing the two tap she can do so easily and making her an M1 killer at point (this would require lots of additional changes though).

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    That's exactly what I say about Nurse.
    She breaks the game! Every other killer play "by DbD rules" except her.

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    almost all killers break the rules of the game to some extent. thats what their powers do. i struggle to name a single killer whose power doesn't break the default rules of the game in one way or the other, because they always change something about the way normal match goes.

    trapper places traps that can entirely bypass the whole chase&hitting sequence. wraith breaks the rule of the terror radius, hillbilly breaks the 2 hits to down & mobility rule, huntress breaks "melee range" rule, pyramid head or sadako break the hook rule, singularity breaks "pallet stops killer" rule and so on.

    nurse is incapable of chasing survivors by W keying on them, she has to constantly use her blinks which comes with its pros and cons - ability to ignore orthodox map resources, at the cost of struggling to deal with normally unsafe or borderline deadzone tiles because of the way blinks work. nurse is the only killer where map resources almost dont matter which is both good and bad because you barely rely on them throughout the whole match and can give nurse a long chase if you're better than her at any point in the match.

    there's nothing wrong with nurse in principle. we could argue that her blink range, cd or lunge distance can be too generous and I could even agree on that, but that's not the point you're making here.

  • radiantHero23
    radiantHero23 Member Posts: 4,461

    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.

  • crogers271
    crogers271 Member Posts: 1,903

    almost all killers break the rules of the game to some extent. thats what their powers do. 

    That's true, but you have to look to my next sentence to see what we're talking about: Every killer has varying pros and cons to playing around loops and pallets, Nurse just jumps past those.

    A strong loop is a strong loop against every killer in the game, except Nurse. Now how much of a strong loop it is and how to play it varies from killer to killer, but while shack is a strong place to run against every killer, it's really not any different from any high wall loop against Nurse. The whole concept of god pallets disappears for her and only her.

    It's a fundamental difference in her design vs every other killer that makes balancing her, and introducing new killer perks, considerably difficult.

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    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.

  • CleanseThis
    CleanseThis Member Posts: 175

    I like DBD and will continue to play but in all seriousness this game has no direction whatsoever. It's a party game with MMR. It's like going to a newly opened BBQ spot where the owner put time and money into developing there menu and style of cooking and it appears to be a hit because customers keep coming back for more but the owner decided to see what their reviews looked like one day and found they have a handful of 1 stars on Google because people were upset that they don't offer Philly cheese steaks or Avocado on toast and so now they think this is their customer base and just revamp their whole menu ignoring their loyal customers who come in all the time and pay their bills and now have to quickly produce a sub-par product or else there business may fail instead doing what they originally set out to do.

  • Reinami
    Reinami Member Posts: 5,634
    edited November 19

    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.

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    That lunge is so damn criminal…
    Let's say then that she break the rules on a whole new lvl.😁

    YES! THIS!
    Bottleneck!

  • bjorksnas
    bjorksnas Member Posts: 5,692

    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.

  • Xernoton
    Xernoton Member Posts: 5,882

    Nurse wasn't left untouched. Not at all. She haa received so many nerfs over the years, I honestly find it hard to believe that people just forget about them.

    The reason she is still the strongest killer is because her power is game breaking. She ignores the very basics of this game. Of course that will make her strong.

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    That's why I've said "basically".😁
    She indeed received nerfs, but she needs a rework in fact.
    Like you said: "power is game breaking".

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    i feel like the bottleneck is very much solveable by adding mechanics that were normally added to powers that warranted that later on.

    she's outdated, but not ultimately flawed in that regard.

    as of now, the only bottleneck in her design is how she can point&click with auras. fix that and that's pretty much done.

  • Mr_K
    Mr_K Member Posts: 9,245

    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.

  • Dadeordye
    Dadeordye Member Posts: 64

    Now thinking of that… makes sense.
    Aura perks are the most affected by this.
    So we make them not work with her by adding total blindness in her Fatigue?

    C'mon man.
    You're smart. You understood the point.😁

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    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.

  • radiantHero23
    radiantHero23 Member Posts: 4,461

    Shes mostly fine for the current version of the game.

    In a version of the game, where killers play for hooks rather than kills and survivors cant push gens extremely hard, her power becomes a problem real fast.

    Im all for a version of the game, where killer power-levels are closee together. This is fundamentally not possible with killers like nurse. Her core design is problematic for an improved version of the game.

    If we stick with this version, where lower tiers struggle on a fundamental level, then yes. Shes absolutely fine. If we want to improve the game overall, so that lower tiers have a better chance and dont struggle every game, Nurse (and other killers as well) have to change.

    Im all for your suggestion, however, I can also already hear the crowd saying: "so you only want us to play slowdown then?".

  • Mr_K
    Mr_K Member Posts: 9,245
  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    here's a thing: we cant have all killers on the same power level when some killers have skill floor, ceiling and counterplay of the legion, while others are like singularity. all while in reality of devs wanting the game to be both casually and semi competitively appealing.

    most of the recent killers have been A tier and most of them with a few exceptions (chucky) warrant that power level because they either are difficult enough to use, have a lot of room for skill expression or have a lot / powerful counterplay by design.

    so this dream of "every killer is on the same power level" doesnt really work because killers are never going to take same effort or skill or be equally or even remotely equally interactive. nor survivors they face are all going to play above a particular level, in a particular way, etc

  • ClarityOfWill
    ClarityOfWill Member Posts: 206

    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.

  • Ivantxugp_
    Ivantxugp_ Member Posts: 12

    Nurse is a trash killer and bhvr won't nerf her cause its one of their excuse not to say this is a pay to win game period

  • radiantHero23
    radiantHero23 Member Posts: 4,461

    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.

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    and that doesnt contradict the point im making in the slightest because I've already acknowledge nurse needs to be balanced, because her power is overpowered on top of having that particular design.

  • SoGo
    SoGo Member Posts: 1,521
    edited November 21

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

    Edit: It is, unless you move after blinking

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

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

  • radiantHero23
    radiantHero23 Member Posts: 4,461

    I just commented on your responses. Sorry, if that was not fitting.

    If you want to understand what im on about, heres an example of why i think that Nurses design is problematic.

    First: Her design is literally:: "if I make no mistake, I win". If a nurse is on point, there is no counterplay. That phrase in itself implies that there is no counterplay whatsoever, because all "couterplay" comes down to her missing. Its the same issue that m1 killers deal with at a lot of tiles right now. If the survivor doesnt make a mistake, the m1 killer loses by default. That, in my opinion, is not good design.

    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.

    These are the main two reasons to why I think she HAS to change on a fundamental level.

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    >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.

  • radiantHero23
    radiantHero23 Member Posts: 4,461

    Did I say that you can't win against Nurse?

    What I said is, that she has no counterplay in chase, because the counterplay is her making a mistake. Pallets and windows (the two main recourses for a survivor in chase) are more often gonna get you killed against a nurse. This is not good. I think there should be counterplay to a killer in chase. Nurse currently has none.

    I said, that I have an issue with m1 killer gameplay coming down to survivors having to make mistakes. I heavily dislike tiles like shack.

    Your last argument is flawed in itself, if I'm not misreading it. This game does not work for both sides, which has been proven again and again. Comp people force their own rules into the game to make it more fair. While casually (which are a majority of the playerbase) suffer from their optimization dripping onto the live servers.

    Case and point: tunneling, camping and Gen-efficiency.

    There needs to be a middle ground where good gameplay gets rewarded > the stuff you prepared pre match.

  • Toystory3Monkey
    Toystory3Monkey Member Posts: 895

    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.