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How to reduce OP killers, why Nurse and Blight are so oppressive
We all know facing mostly Blight and nurse is a drag. Especially when it's almost guaranteed to be someone who is going to make sure you don't survive. What can we do to stop that? Well, nerfing them is USEFUL- however killers still need to play the game so that will only take us so far. Which is the point, WHY are the "overpowered" killers more popular? Because the less you focus on "finding and killing" the more you can focus on "winning". Chess merchant is a perfect example of how Survivor's Win state and Killers win state created an impasse in terms of skill. Skull merchant had to be gutted because she allowed the match to continue on for FAR LONGER….. which when you look at the inherent design of the game is the main way a killer "wins".
Killer winning is as much about delaying the survivor win condition in equal measure to just finishing the mooks. You need to delay the survivors long enough to force them to run out of resources to escape you. Easier said than done.
Killers like Blight, Nurse, and POTENTIALLY Kaneki (Kaneki technically works on legion rules, but his movement is good enough that you can potentially circumvent it- especially if a pallet/window are involved- however I still feel it's too early to know for sure where they stand balance wise. See my previous post about the response to a killer that, as of this post, is still LESS THAN A WEEK OLD) are just fast with NO caveats. Unlike Legion, Xeno (the tail is negated by flame turrets- just don't place them right at the generator- be tactical), Wraith, or any other example you can think of: there is no "counterbalance" for those two examples to make their speed less impactful. Wraith can reach survivors quicker than a regular m1 killer, but the invisible state that lets him do that becomes an outright DETRIMENT in loops. Your finding time is low- but your killing time is HIGH. Legion is the same way, except they can struggle to actually reach survivors at first- but once they get the first injure and deep wound, now they can increase their momentum and apply the same damage on multiple people. In exchange for not being as good on approach, they apply enough pressure that they are already halfway to "killing time" being over for that chase when they reach the person before their power ends.
Notice how Nurse and blight have far less restrictions on their mobility? Notice how there is nothing to punish them or slow them down? Sometimes lacking an "exploitable" weakness is the best strength you need.
Nurse and Blight can be FAR more mobile than any of those other killers (Unless it's an indoor map or with too few obstacles- then Xeno gives Blight a run for his money). What do they exchange in lethality for this insane mobility? NOTHING! They reach survivors fast, they can catch up to them just as easy while trying to "kill" them (as in, even after injuring them the survivor is still vulnerable to the same type of attack unlike Legion), and worst of all they have this ability return often and fast enough to quickly recover from one chase to chain it with the next.
Every part outside of "finding" a survivor is faster for these killers, while their ability to put a survivor in the dying state is barely hindered at all. Blight can't injure you on his first dash? ram a wall and do it the second! Nurse? You can move through walls, ignore pallets and windows, all with the push of a button. Yeah- not exactly much in the way of obstacles for her. (I feel like if they gave her a similar ability as nemesis where she had an "extra" hit state that required people hit by her teleport attack to be in deep wounds before it could put them in dying state- that alone would make a HUGE difference)
The only thing a Killer needs is to
1: find a survivor- which is very easily accomplished with most perks
2: make that survivor vulnerable to death (namely by downing and hooking them) through chasing and finishing them off
3: Prevent survivors from finishing generators and leaving, which is ALSO very well covered by perks.
When you look at nurse and blight- it becomes obvious that their reduced delay in being able to find a survivor acts as a soft bonus to preventing them from finishing generators (cover more ground in less time and such). That, combined with no increase to their requirement to chase? They functionally have a built in design to win already- they have the vulnerability and prevention both taken care of by default BEFORE perks. Now they just need consistent information (very easy and plentiful) while also having the option to further reduce or delay the generator and escape processes (not as plentiful, and constantly nerfed- but it's still there).
The main issue with nurse and blight, is that the match doesn't account for their increased efficiency. Trapper's main weakness is how slow he is to "get going"- yet we are surprised that killers who are the exact opposite dominate?
These killers NEED ways to counter their inherent advantages, right now they are the only "mobility" killers who have nothing of the sort. Fixing THEM is a matter of changing that, and preventing future examples is simply a matter of comparing the pros and cons of how easy it is to finish a chase and reach the survivor to begin with.
Blight should have an "anti-serum" mechanic, where you have limited use items like Wesker and Nemesis. You can use them to have an area temporarily reduce his uses of his ability before cooldown. Maybe have an add-on where it will negate his power, but grant him a small speed boost to compensate (like hag's add-on that does the same thing). Nurse I already gave a suggestion for- but she in general is a bag of worms. I feel like keeping with the theme of delaying the survivors dying (because she is a NURSE) and being forced to meet a requirement. If her being able to use her special attack to down a survivor at ALL is the issue- just create a mechanic where she has a timer before her next attack can be a "killing blow". Only when that killing blow is active can she actually put a survivor in the dying state with her teleporting attack. Like Thana, the more injured surviors the greater her benefits while she waits for the killing blow to be avaliable. This could range from "faster power refill" to outright Buffing how many TIMES she can actually knock a survivor down with the special attack. She can teleport just fine, but if you want to do any lasting harm- you have to do due diligence first.
I've rambled enough, thank you for coming to this Psychopath focused fair play thought exercise.
Comments
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honestly this speaks to how weak the other killers are. i'd rather the lower caste of killers get buffed up rather than bhvr busting out the nerf bat whenever survivors complain
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Do killers really need to play the game?
I think this is a topic we could explore, perhaps consider, and lean in to the idea of outsourcing the task.
It could be really convenient next time something is OP over an entire weekend, like just one call to the killer office manager and bang! They tone it down ten notches until the dev team strolls in on Monday to rebalance.
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Just get better as a survivor.
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One would argue the opposite, S tier killers are too common because they're the only ones who can beat survivors with all their resources. And some people only have fun when they win so ofc they're going to play these killers to garuntee it. What should happen is Nurse, Ghoul and Blight get nerfed and so does survivor, cus they're all too unbalanced and break the game's core machanics
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The thing is that would be a much bigger task. I don't think they should be nuked (though there is no good way to nerf the Nurse without giving her the SM treatment, imo), but it is much easier to adjust a handful of killers down than buff like 25 others to be closer to them.
But ideally, it'd be an effort to uplift the C/D tier killers and tone down the S-tier killers so we have a narrower strength band. I don't think the extremes are healthy for the game.
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had someone rip me off the hook against a clown when the clown was following them, meanwhile I’m running a meme build”don’t spill this can”(so the only endurance would have been bt), instead of taking the killer away, and thankfully the clown had some empathy. Could have snowballed so fast.🤦♀️ yeah though yeah. It’s rough out here. They do really wild things sometimes that could cost the game really early if killers didn’t have any grace.
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well when anything remotely touches the upper caste of a and above usually it gets nerfed leaving only the s tier killers i personally wouldn't want ghoul nerfed since he's just legion with better mobility and a cooldown simulator but he will get hit with the nerf bat i just hope he won't get hit too hard or survivors complain too much since he'll be on the neverending nerf train like chucky or just destroyed like skull merchant
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Ngl have no problem with nurse or blight compared to far more other killers like over tuned singularity.
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I admit, I'm not amazing as survivor, but when I watch high level survivors on Youtube, even they have problems coming up against Nurse. Nurse definitely needs a big nerf because she's been OP since she was released. As a killer, I generally get a 3k/4k about 50%-60% of my games. But when I play as Nurse, I get a 4k in at least 90% of my games, with maybe 5% 3k. I almost never have a game as Nurse where I get less than 2 kills.
I'd like to see more M1 killers with low map mobility get a buff.
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Notice how those are the only 2 killers who are viable at the highest level of play?
If we took the best player in the entire world for each killer, I.E. the best trapper player, the best wraith player, the best nurse player, and so on. And pit them up against the best 4-man survivor team in the world, and had them play 10 matches in a row on the same map (pick one that doesn't have any or much RNG) what would the outcome be?
I'd guess that most killers would win maybe 1 or 2 matches. Maybe a handful could do 3. Excpet for nurse and blight, which i would suspect would actually reach that 50% winrate mark.
That is a bigger problem to deal with i feel.
If you nerf these 2 killers, then the top of the top mmr killer players who are playing against those types of teams, will start to go down in rank. What happens then? Then the survivor players start getting matched with weaker killer players because there is nobody left at the top. Then what happens? More and more people who aren't ready for teams like that start playing teams like that, and stop playing the game. Then we have a cascading effect where these top teams are getting weaker and weaker killers.
Post edited by Reinami on-2 -
Except what you describe it essentially what is happening, with both survivors AND killers already. Every day since I've been back, even before Kaneki went live, there hasn't been a single moment the survivor blood point bonus was under 25%. Genuinely, most survivors AREN'T top tier players. The bully squads people talked about? How many of those are just better players kept at a lower MR because there is far more effort to deal with those two killers than anyone else preventing them from playing against people who don't need those killers to do well? How are people who play the worse killers meant to go against players who are equipped to deal with blight and nurse meant to overcome those inherent bonuses?
How are you supposed to let those other killers be good, if anything that buffs them will take nurse and blight over the edge?
If they really are the "only viable" killers, then that means they just need to bring them down to a lower level so they can make killer as a whole a better experience. If there are only two examples that "work" in high level, that means they are probably (definitely) overturned for low level, and killer as a whole needs to be changes to take into account high level play.
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I am talking about this from the perspective of a killer main. I want to play killer- but queue has been so long for enough time I've been forced to see how things look on the other end.
Yeah, MANY survivors need to get better. However, there is only so much you can do when you are in a team-based game and you are the only one competent half the time. If survivors as a whole tried to get better, improving their skills rather than just equipping the "right perks", then we wouldn't see much problems at higher ranks simply because there would be less people relying on "meta" builds that are easily countered.
However, they aren't doing that. If they were, I wouldn't have so many easy games as trapper even as I rise up.
Yes- survivors need to get better… How do they do that? Any actual advice? The game doesn't really have any after the first two matches against a killer- and guides online can only cover so much in a general sense before each killer and how they work throws a wrench into things.
I hate having to wait to play the game with bad killers because survivors are getting tired of only playing the "good" killers. Both sides have the same issue of "better gun wins" where they ignore their actual ability to play well for the strongest toys. Those two facts are far more related than they should be.
Buffing "worse" killers doesn't change the fact they have no exploitable weaknesses. If there isn't a chink in the enemy's armor- how do you win the fight? you don't.
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So, you think my suggestions wouldn't fix the nurse power problem? Or are we just talking in a general sense that Behavior is unlikely to handle what they do to her well? I want to at least start the discussion on how to actually solve this problem that has been getting worse.
Don't get me wrong- punishing survivors for disconnecting should be removed now that we have bots- but survivors might still throw their games intentionally just because they are upset. That will make the experience worse (I've dealt with it first hand) and make any improvements moot.
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That's exactly what's been happening. "I'm tired of seeing X killer all the time!" Then why do you want everyone who can compete with them to be nerfed? Food for their thoughts.
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That is definitely the problem at HIGH LEVEL play. At lower levels it's not nearly a hard to get a win even with bad killers. That's a problem when the skill floor for those better killers isn't much higher than average (blight is the hardest of the two, and I can play him moderately well) while also outright having no obvious ways to counteract those strengths or have any points of weakness. High level survivors already know enough things to even the playing field, but low level survivors have yet to learn all of this (otherwise they would be rising in the MR system). This means those killers actively stifle the growth of both killers and survivors at the same time. Worse killers are less effective to start with, and don't ever make up that difference. Bad survivors have no chance against those killers, and because all of the other killers are much more easily countered, the best players can't be given the right tools to stop Blight and Nurse without making characters like Trapper irrelevant.
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That being said, survivors DO COMPLAIN WAY TOO MUCH.
Kaneki hasn't even been out a full week even now- and yet people act like there is nothing more to learn and he is unstoppable (I've already won like 2 games against him almost solo if felt like).
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But anytime anyone ever talks about bringing teams like that down a peg, the answer is always "but they are rare"
Ok fine, i flip it back to you. Those God tier nurses and blights are also rare. Nurse often has one of the lowest if not THE lowest kill rate in the game. So why does she need to be nerfed again? Because its pretty rare to run into a good one after all.
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yes, many OTHER people do say that about survivor squads. I haven't though. I would argue the opposite.
Something coming that far out of left field ISN'T fair or fun. That's WHY Nurse and Blight are a problem.
SWF and Nurse/Blight are in the same boat. Those who take advantage of them make the game far more difficult for those of us who don't. Just being in a discord call makes most info perks on survivor redundant if you know the maps to any real degree.
The issue is very much the community refuses to give any ground on either side. BOTH sides need to have their extremes toned down.
I CAN beat a survivor group with Trapper- that doesn't change the fact a SWF group would turn him around, bend him over, and give him the thousand years of pain technique.
A person CAN do poorly with Nurse or blight, but if they aren't most people don't have the tools to combat those killers on a hot streak.
It always comes down to counterplay. The more potent something is, the more you need to fine tune the ability for an opponent to kneecap that threat/obstacle by doing the right things. Survivors don't have that against a good nurse (and to a MUCH MUCH lesser extent blight), and any killer that can't be across the map in less than 5 seconds usually is in the same boat.
Blight and Nurse NEED to be nerfed, which will allow SWF to be nerfed…. after that? BUFFS ALL AROUND!
Solo queue awful? well if SWF isn't oppressive anymore there isn't a problem with fixing it and providing help!
(Although, the devs added an entire UI to the left for survivors and that still wasn't enough. There is still a point where it's a skill issue- but just insulting a player by saying that just makes them more hesitant to ever consider agreeing. It's basic Psych 101, and most people in the forums fail to get that.)
Killer too weak? Give them a little boost! Mechanic is useless? Tinker around- there isn't any glaring problems tearing the community apart! (beyond the community refusing to chill out for 5 seconds, take a break, and come back with a fresh healthy mindset. Doing that made a world of difference for how I handle this game) The world becomes our devs oysters the moment SWF and those two killers aren't strangling their creativity and the game's potential.
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no? that means whenever a survivor hits a wall and either choose to get better or cry to bhvr to get something nerfed and they always choose the latter and because they always choose the latter the vast majority of survivors are terrible at the game
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This is giving off serious "Pull yourself up by the bootstraps" energy. If the vast majority of survivors are really just that bad, then why have some people been saying playing against kaneki has gotten easier? I know you've seen that post, because you claimed it was survivors getting better at the game rather than the killer MMR leveling out. Yet here you claim all survivors don't even bother to try and get good at the game? Seems extremely inconsistent to me. If survivors could just "get better" against Kaneki within a week, why wouldn't they be able to do the same for Blight and Nurse who have both been out for years?
If you complained about survivors being able to consistently get 4 man escapes, and that the killer going against them felt impotent to stop them. What would be the difference between you wanting balance and them "crying to behavior"?
Nothing. There is no difference, because all I did was explain what is going on for survivors in solo queue in a killer perspective.
Survivors can work well together, can bring great perks and items, be extremely efficient in repairing gens, and even play extremely well. Then, one or two mistakes is all it takes for a nurse or blight to entirely shift the match back into their favor.
Most people are only "better" at killer only because they don't have to coordinate with people you can't talk to. You don't have to rely on other people to do what needs getting done, you can just do it on your own. Survivors can't do that. If you are being chased, someone still needs to do generators. If there is a totem, someone needs to deal with that while also hoping there is someone doing the other two things. If anyone is hooked or injured, that's another thing you have to deal with. Survivors have to balance all of these things, and their main tool to do that is functionally mute unless you actively get a group and play together consistently in discord.
If you're just on the forums to troll, then go to twitter. If you actually think survivor is stupid easy, then go play the role. It's giving plenty of blood points now, if there really isn't a problem with it- that should just be a bonus you can take advantage of.
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Lary is not overtuned, Nurse and Blight are. Thats why they're S tier
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As I said before sometimes tiers means nothing s a b c z whatever, everyone is different some people can handle some killers better than others hence yes my point why I have no personal issue with nurse or blight compared to others like singularity.
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Ok, well personally and publicly, Nurse and Blight are massively overtuned
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So your big rebuttal is just "nuh-uh" from what I've gathered. You haven't provided any examples to prove your point, and you just repeat your opinion without any other explanation. Am I right? Because that's overall how it comes off. If you have actual points to argue against my assessment of the current state of survivor play, feel free to actually mention them. Right now it comes off more like someone wanting to make this a "us vs them" post rather than actually trying to figure out how to make the game more fun.
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When the main tools a survivor has are pallets and windows- then you provide killers whose powers have the main effect of being able to ignore/bypass them… yeah. They aren't in the same league.
Singularity at least has to apply an effect on a survivor to break pallets faster, Blight and Nurse can ignore them Off-rip.
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I agree with you and this is also the same exact thing happening for the survivor side. Regardless of which side you play, with enough wins, you are going to inevitably meet someone who's sweatier than you and probably on 2 cans of g fuel.
And then those people who've finally met their match start to become frustrated and then blame the game for being imbalanced.
And then you have the mentality "this is a killer sided game" or "this game is survivor sided"
And then instead of proactive gameplay you just have a game of sabotage. Survivors try to hurt killers (through quitting and in-game harassment) and rage bait them. And killers try to camp gens for 20 minutes because they would rather hold survivors hostage if they know they can't kill them all. What happened to killers settling for a tie or giving the last survivor the hatch. Or survivors just letting the killer have a kill if its a 4 man escape. (Yes technically it's against the rules but that's up to behavior to bureaucraticly enforce. In other words it's just a safety rule.)
The end result is that the game becomes having the words on your screen "you escaped" or "merciless victory". And the game is not even about having fun and enjoying the experience.
This is certainly an issue and a question to ourselves. Are we playing to see some specific words on a screen and have satisfaction in a specific in game- event (escaping or killing all survivors)? Or is it for the gameplay?
Because at the end of the day, the person who's sweating their chest off, becoming stressed over winning in a game is going to have less fun than a casual zen player.
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Most of this post feels like a needless digression. Most of the problems you mention are made WORSE by Blight and Nurse being so much better than other killers by default.
Sweaty killers and survivors? Survivors have to deal with a blight and nurse, who both reduce how effective the main tool survivors rely on (Pallets and windows) to win the match. They have had to adapt to that. Killers have been forced to adapt to survivors playing increasingly optimized builds to have a chance against those sweaty killers, becoming sweaty themselves.
It's a vicious cycle, that is only reinforced by Blight and Nurse.
How are you supposed to argue that this game Isn't killer sided to someone when we can't even admit that Nurse and Blight ARE overtuned? How are we supposed to argue survivors aren't given an advantage when they get to keep things that make other killers exponentially harder, just so they can have a chance against the two killers that outclass them all (Styptics being an example, but also just think of how many "QOL changes" were focused on reducing the pressure killers could place on survivors)?
These two killers totally alter how the devs have to handle balancing this game, and it gets in the way of actual improvement.
Remember when nurse could just teleport and instantly put a survivor in the dying state with exposed because of a single perk? How that one perk alone made her near unstoppable in competent hands?
That perk wasn't THAT strong if survivors didn't just harass killer while they were picking up a dying survivor, however nurse alone forced behavior to change how it works so nurse wouldn't cause that problem.
Those two killers stick out like a sore thumb, and make the game worse for it. Yet anytime someone tries to talk about fixing the problem, people try to shift the conversation away from the gaping wound on the balance of this game.
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the game is inherently us vs them because this is a pvp game where 1 guy goes against 4 (unless bhvr is going to bust out killer bots when there isn't enough killers or when the killer disconnects) the killer should have the advantage because he can only chase 1 person at a time while the other 3 can focus on the objective the reason i say survivors are terrible is because they don't focus on gens solely and get scared of tr, are bad at looping or doing something else
"making the game more fun" for whom killer or survivor? since it's a pvp game you can only focus on 1 sides fun or the other and the devs choose to focus on the survivors fun because statically survivors are the majority since they are the 4 in the 4v1. it's also the reason why the majority of killers are unviable when you get to the upper tiers when why you see mainly blights spirits nurses weskers but when something strong comes out here comes survivors to cry and have killers dumpstered for months or years until they're merciful enough to buff some killers
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So moving beyond how every other comment you make is about how survivors just want hand outs, the GAMEPLAY is us vs them. Taking people being on the opposite side in a pvp game is just a personal failing tbh. Heck, saying that one side enjoying the game means the other side can't is just a silent admission you only care about winning. I can lose a game and still have enjoyed myself, it's about the game not the win screen.
Beyond that, Killer DOES have the advantage. Survivors rely on pallets and windows to survive when detected- and there are PLENTY of info perks before you even talk about killer powers. The longer a match goes on, the less resources survivors SHOULD have at their disposal. The skill in killer comes from forcing them to use those resources while also being enough of a threat to other survivors that they don't breeze through gens. The problem with killers at high tier isn't "they are weak" it's that survivors are actually good at the base game mechanics and basic teamwork. If this game didn't have solo queue- then that would be a much easier problem to solve. However- solo queue exists and is the MAIN REASON I don't play survivor often compared to killer.
Survivors win more often at high ranks because most killers aren''t usually dealing with a good team until that point. If other solo-queue players did gens while I was looping the killer, at least 30% of losses that had all 4 of us die would have gotten at least one person out. Good survivors don't struggle with that, they are always trying to be efficient with their time. When match starts? Survivors have the most leeway, and good survivors do as much possible during that time frame to have the best chance at winning. Blight and Nurse? They basically can ignore that early game build up altogether (blight is so fast that survivors have no room to build momentum before you are on at least one of them, and Nurse can just ignore pallets and windows).
Blight and nurse aren't strong at high level play because they are "the only viable killers" they are the best because you can more easily negate the ONLY advantage survivors have outside of teamwork. Pallets and windows can CARRY a game when used right, it's a matter of conserving them when possible so they can continue to do so later on.
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