The First is not fun to play (against)

Title. Not sure why adding a killer that is basically a nurse with remote injures and 110% movement speed was an idea that got past paper, let alone a PTB and now in the live game. The funny thing is comparatively very few people seem to actually play him, he's maybe one in every 30 matches I get. He currently sits lower in pickrate than Myers, Springtrap, and even Nemesis, assuming you take public statistics at face value. But why, if he's so innovative and engineered for winning games? Well, Nurse is a free character and her pickrate is below Hillbilly and Huntress, I see her even less than I do Wraith or Pig. She has undeniably been the most powerful killer in the game since her release, by definition she defies the boundaries of the game's very rules, ignoring pallets and walls alike. What's the issue then?

They aren't fun. Ask anyone who only plays the Nurse, if you can find someone who does, and they will admit the absolute frustration you feel playing them starting out. The constant missed blinks, losing dozens of seconds of chase progress from accidentally teleporting through a second floor. And at the end of the day, what's the reward when you master the character? The same exact instant hits, cheesy downs through walls or around pallets, being stuck with the same two or three perk builds every game. There's nearly no variety to her gameplay, no charm to it that most killers like Myers, Nemesis, or Springtrap can have. Just blinking, and hitting. And most survivors, especially new ones, loathe playing against Nurse not just because of her strength, but because of that monotony, doing the same thing over and over.

I think The First falls into the same category, a powerful killer with little variety in gameplay and an ability that just causes survivors to find zero enjoyment from it. The Nurse at least has to move herself to you with her blinks, with The First, he places a snare beneath you that is in diameter noticeably bigger (or at least the hitbox is more forgiving) than The Nightmare's. This snare has an activation time of .6 seconds and then will injure you if anyone on the perimeter or inside of it remains there for the rest of that same second. Doesn't sound so bad on paper, but in practice, you have only 1 second to dodge this attack, which takes only .4 seconds for the killer to charge, and .6 seconds for it to deploy. Meaning, even if you watch the killer and wait some kind of counterplay animation or noise he makes casting it, you can only ever get 1 full second before you take damage, which leaves you with only half a second to react, and with the way netcode works, the chances of you managing to make a half-second reaction and move your survivor out of the circle fast enough are close to nil. And that's without accounting for the impossibility of escaping a well-placed snare, as if you're caught directly in the middle its guaranteed death.

But all of this could be okay, with the counterplay mechanic of listening to music to limit the time he can damage with the snare/vine attack. If he's only able to use his ability for a limited amount of time, then that's counterable! You know, if he couldn't cast his ability once every 3 seconds. He gets slowed down to 3m/s when he does so, but in gameplay he can quite literally spam it every 3 seconds and down you fully in 6 seconds regardless of how good you loop or how far you run. This is a killer whose design quite literally only has the counter of "get lucky if they're bad and miss" or "hold W for as long as you can." And that's not mentioning that trying to dodge their ability could lead to you walking into their missed attack and dying that way. There's virtually zero skill involved, its brainless point and click with almost no cooldown. It makes killers like The Cannibal seem like a technical tyrant to learn and master, considering he actually HAS to loop the survivors he chases. If a Cannibal player goes against survivors that can predict when to drop a pallet against his chainsaw, he loses, every time. When a First player gets within 15 meters of you, its Goodnight Irene! Good at the game? Doesn't matter. Welcome to 50/50 simulator! Where if the killer knows how to point and click, and you didn't predict he was going to click .4 seconds ago, you lose!

If there were ever a killer in this game that needed a stats nerf, and it wasn't launch day Ghoul, its this guy. I think the reason he doesn't have as many people playing him as the Ghoul still does today is because he's literally just boring. I haven't played him yet but from watching gameplay and playing against him, it really does seem like old Freddy if his snares instantly casted and could damage you. Which seems just, awful. Does anyone on the forums here genuinely find this character fun to play as or against? And I don't mean like just in one instance you had fun, I mean like playing against The Unknown, Demogorgon, or Nemesis kind of fun. I desperately want to like this killer but no amount of practice or research has led me to a way of consistently dodging his ability, and it leaves me being the only person in my matches who doesn't give up or disconnect against him.