On Blight

Hey, four digit hour-count gigasweat back again. This time about blight and my general dissatisfaction with his current state.

Why should you listen to me?

• I have several thousand hours spanning pc, console, and even mobile (lol)
• Top 100 1v1 player
• Very experienced comp killer player 
• Very experienced comp survivor player
• 500+ hours on blight in public matches alone
• P100 Blight Main
• Consistently coach players on both killer and survivor
  

So what are our goals with these changes? Without a concrete idea of what we aim to fix, these changes cannot possibly be accurate.

Blight is intrinsically strong in many ways, and many of his stats are borderline impossible to tweak.

For example, you can’t make blight any slower or his power is completely incapable of outplaying loops. When this happens, he is relegated purely to zoning to guarantee free hits. 

You also cannot change his turnrate much. If you buff or nerf his turnrate too much in either direction the killer simply stops functioning. If you remember his ptb turnate addon, you will remember why vividly. You can also use current adrenaline vial and see that despite the spreadsheets list of benefits, they simply don’t compensate for how awful blight feels to play with heavily reduced turnrate. 

In both instances, these lead to blight being not satisfying for the killer, and not fun for the survivor. 

To summarize this first point, blight is fundamentally strong in many untweakable regards. This is why bhvr rarely touches this killer in terms of balancing- it's very hard to know what to change. This is also why many of the changes to blight historically have been wildly controversial.

So what can we realistically aim to do?

Nerf his zoning

Add more ways to outplay loops on the killer side

Add more ways for the survivor to outplay the blight

Make blight more difficult/Punish his mistakes harder

Make blight weaker without impeding what makes people enjoy him

So we know generally what we want to do, but why are we doing this? In general, all of these changes aim to do one of three things.

1: Make him more fun and interesting to play against

2: Make him more fun and interesting to play

3: Make him more fair and balanced (secondary)

Starting out with nerfing his zoning. 

Blight has the strongest zoning in the game and frankly it's not close. Zoning is fine as a mechanic, but if a killer becomes too good at it survivors lose much agency in chase. The obvious solution is to simply make blight lose two tokens on kick. 

We can see as with the myers rework that giving a power that breaks pallets full movement control during the break animation typically reduces survivor agency too much to be fun.

We can also see with kaneki that losing two tokens on kick leads to far more engaging gameplay on both the survivor side and killer side- as both are impossible to dodge in the open In both cases, we are aiming to add four seconds of downtime after kicking a pallet. 

This also makes blight chew through pallets less efficiently, which means he is more enjoyable on maps with fewer pallets. We want killers to have to OUTPLAY tiles, not either walk around the tile mindlessly for a 50/50 or to instantly get a hit with no interaction.

Next 

So blight is now forced to outplay loops instead of mindlessly breaking them for a free hit in more instances, how do we make playing around those tiles more fun?

The obvious solution is to re-add hugtech. Hugtech has more counterplay than bump logic, is incredibly satisfying to avoid, and incredibly satisfying to perform. In addition, it makes blight far smoother to play on indoor maps. 

All hits in this video are either a guaranteed hit with bump logic anyways or very obviously counterable.

Hugtech is the equivalent of curving on billy, and removing it has the same consequences removing curving on billy would have. It would just encourage him to feather his saw and zone instead of going for cool plays.

Being given many different versatile tools and being told to figure it out is very fun. Removing advanced techniques and alternative ways to outplay loops is not fun. I don’t have a blight playstyle anymore- blight has a playstyle. And to be completely honest- that sucks. Its just not fun. And games are supposed to be fun.

Additionally, blight is infinitely less fun to play against without hugtech. I am not alone in the opinion that blight went from my favorite killer to verse, to one of my least favorite because of just how much more boring he is now. I am not alone in this opinion. Other high level players such as Carol/Davood have also expressed this opinion. There is one objectively correct way to play most loops now and doing anything else is just a waste of time.

And you know what the worst part is? Blight is even stronger than before. He was the 2nd strongest killer back when he had hugtech, and now he is inarguably the strongest. If this was intended to be a nerf, then it objectively failed by every single metric. Hugtech removal makes him less fun on both sides and doesn’t even function as a balancing change.

So bring back hugtech, please. If there are any two changes that are objectively fantastic for blight in every way it would be to make him lose two tokens on kick and to re-add hugtech

As for other more minor changes, i would like to see his base movespeed be reduced to either 110% or 107.5%. In either case, blight will have to actually use his power to get hits which is completely fair given the strength of said power.

Then, I would like to see his maximum flick angle increased to 180 degrees (from 160.) this would just make him more fun and increase his skill ceiling without meaningfully impacting his balance.  

I understand that development time is limited as BHVR is trying to switch to publishing games instead of creating them, so i’m simply asking for the reversal of a previous change, two basic numbers tweaks, and a copy pasting of a mechanic that already exists. Ideally wouldn’t be an unreasonable amount of work given the dramatic benefits.

Counterpoints:

“Blight hugtech is an exploit though”

Yes. You are exploiting the fact that blight’s rush collision check used to move alongside blights camera to start a rush in a traditionally invalid position. However, something being an exploit does not make it an inherently good or bad mechanic. Looping is an exploit that abuses the differences in Environmental Collision Boxes between survivors and killers. Crouch tech allows survivors to dodge powers in unintended ways by exploiting killer power hitboxes not extending far enough vertically.

We can even look to other games or sports, dribbling in basketball is an exploit. You cannot run with the ball and must instead pass it, so what if you passed the ball to yourself over and over? Additionally, members of the governing rules committee at the time stated that “We [The Rules Commite] believe that the limitation of the dribble is a necessary change…” Despite that, we can all agree that this dribbling is practically inseparable from the greatest parts of basketball and is one of the most fun and interesting parts about it.

There are exploits that undeniably make games worse. If you can remember the potential energy exploit that let you have infinite charges on a toolbox. Obviously, there are no interesting mindgames, decisionmaking, counterplay, or skill on display here. Its just a MASSIVE flat bonus to gen speeds permanently. Therefore, this is an exploit that only serves to detract from the game.

We can also look at other games which remove exploits such as impact tricking in Siege. These got massively nerfed to the point of being effectively removed. And the community got extremely mad at their removal, similar to the outrage from blight mains when hugtech was removed. In my opinion, removing fun and engaging mechanics is a bad decision, regardless of intentionality.

The pros and cons of an exploit should be determined on a case by case basis. Therefore, I do not find this argument convincing.

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So in conclusion (or, if you just want to skip to the TLDR instead of reading the entire yap session)\

1: Make blight lose two tokens on kick

2: Make blight 110% base movespeed (From 115)

3: Re-Add Hugtech

4: Increase his maxmimum flick angle to 180 (from 160)