Opinions on the whole "Nerf Nurse" discussion?
So I've been seeing a lot of topics about Nurse being 'unbalanced' or 'unfair for players', and that she needs a nerf. And I decided to create a master thread for a whole discussion about the topic to see what everybody really thinks in general.
For me, I have 5 reasons as to why Nurse is fine the way she is, and an example of how I would balance her if it were really needed;
1.) Nurse is only as good as the player who's using her.
Nurse isn't too powerful if the person who's playing as her doesn't know how to read survivors or maneuver her in a way that a higher-tier Nurse would. If you're a beginner at playing as a Nurse, it'll be noticed right off the bat, and survivors already have the upper-hand.
2.) You really need to think when it comes to playing as that killer.
When playing as good ol' Sally, you need to consider the amount of thinking that goes into playing her as well; between learning how most survivors move, how to handle range and get to areas quicker, learning how to control and apply pressure, handling your character if there's perks or add-ons applied, tracking wounded survivors, etc.
There's a lot that goes into this killer.
3.) She isn't actually as powerful as people think she is.
While good Nurse players can karate chop you as soon as they see you, and that it's hard to lose a good Nurse, she can only do so much with her blinks and movement. Blinks have a fatigue time for a reason, and there's certain areas in a map that she either can't reach, has a hard time blinking onto or constantly comes in contact with when blinking, or can easily lose LOS on a survivor on. She has a bunch of counterplays that people aren't aware of. Pallets are also good against the Nurse if you're able to read the killer as well. While looping isn't technically an option against a good Nurse, you're still able to put some distance between you and her while she's getting ready to blink.
She's also able to be juked. Quite a lot, actually.
You rarely see it with good Nurses because of how well they can perform, but even a "God-tier" Nurse can have a hard time with a survivor that knows how to break her non-existent ankles.
Also, pacing of the game is incredibly important when going against a Nurse. She can either be up to speed, or falling behind depending on how quickly objectives and totems are being done. Immersion in-game is also important if you know your maps. It's all in knowing your pressure and timing. The quicker you get things done, the slower the Nurse becomes.
4.) Most of the time, her add-ons aren't as useful.
This is a big one. Yes, some can help in a chase, and some can cater to another person's playstyle depending on the Nurse, but lets be honest here;
the only incredibly useful add-ons are the ones that assist with her blinks (lower fatigue time, increased range, time between blinks, and occasionally additional blinks themselves).
Depending on who you're playing against, her add-ons can actually be her downfall, so it's good to pay attention to what she might be using. Does she have multiple blinks? Is her range a lot longer than a normal Nurse? Is her fatigue time more quicker? Does she chain-blink quicker than usual?
These are questions you have to ask yourself when playing against a Nurse. Then, you have to learn to adapt to the add-ons depending on what she has. You can come up with a lot of chase plans that are efficient if you consider the playstyle. The same can go for perks too!
5.) Because of how hitboxes and map layouts are, she's not as accurate as she used to be.
Self-explanatory.
How I would balance the Nurse if it were really necessary?
The only thing I could really think of when it comes to nerfing the Nurse, is to rework some of the add-ons she has. Extended range paired with the stopwatch can be a bit too much to work with, and either reducing or removing the ability to affect the charge time of a blink would help reduce some of the pressure she would apply in a chase depending on how its used. Also, adding a bit more counterplay to her would be suitable. Maybe something that could increased her fatigue time slightly or make her lose control of a blink would be interesting.
Though, these are the only ideas I have. I can't really think of much else due to how fine the Nurse already is.
If you have any comments, feel free to mention something below! This is an open topic, so I'm definitely listening to all sides!
Comments
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I agree, only her addons needs to be changed. Personally, I enjoy playing against Nurse, though I am not at the rank where there are billions of Nurses yet XD She does not need a nerf to support people not willing to learn how to play against her.
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Nerfing the addons will be a great start
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She ignores all rules in the game since she can go through any object basically so survivors can't pallet loop her or even loop her at all if she's a good nurse. You can't really hide from her on certain maps because of how open they are. She can instantly teleport to any place basically whereas other killers have to take time to actually get there. Her fatigue isn't even that long without add ons and because of that, she doesn't even need good add ons compared to other killers like Freddy who rely on them. Her basic power is strong on its own which is why people only really use her brown/ yellow add ons. Hitboxes are still so messed up and the devs know it. And yes, it does take time to actually learn her, but once you do, survivors are basically screwed.
Honestly just look at any marth nurse gameplay and that's pretty self-explanatory as to why she needs a nerf.
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Im not saying to nerf her to the ground, but she needs some sort of a nerf
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Omega blink and Quintuple blink nurse both need a looksie; but that can be handled by looking at her add-ons. The character itself is fine and one of the only viable killers at rank one, so it would be really bad for the game if they nerfed the base kit.
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I agree with everything you said, OP. Her base kit renders DbD a game of skill vs. skill, where you'll only escape if you're better than the Nurse (assuming nobody makes mistakes).
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We honestly do not know if the Nurse is 'too strong' or not. We don't know this because whilst good survivors can beat a good Nurse, they don't talk about it; they want her nerfing before every other survivor starts thrashing her every game, again. Other survivors just don't get the memo and of course they don't listen to what Nurse-mains say.
She was the weakest killer after her initial nerf, until the new meta for her was created and made her as she is now. Survivors just don't remember this and how easy she was to beat during that short period.
If there was any consistency to the balance philosophy supposedly being aimed at balancing for low ranks, then the Nurse would have had some major buffs already considering the performance of low-rank Nurses. It instead just looks like there's a double-standard for survivors and killers.
Overall, we need the devs to talk about balance in broad-strokes again, to explain what they think it means for the game to be balanced.
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Nurse without addons is perfectly balanced, it's a fight of who better predicts opponent's next movement and that is the most fun I can have in DBD.
Only change she needs is large redesign of all her addons. They are the only thing that breaks her in the wrong way.
(Btw I wish she had some kind of ultra rare addon to give her normal 115% movement speed but disable attack blinks)
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Probably a rework to her functionality, so that her ability to proxy camp isn't so strong. Virtually every Nurse game I play faces two grim situations for survivors:
The first person caught is hooked, and then watched from a distance by the Nurse with a blink ready to just go straight to the hook with Make Your Choice, or to tunnel the first hook. (Subsequently, the hooked person suicides or disconnects, usually.) Or...
You can't really risk healing due to A Nurse's Calling virtually guaranteeing that she will land on top of you, and this is assuming you actually escaped her initially.
Yes, she requires a decent baseline of skill from the player, but it's not that hard to roll with 3 blinks and reach a decent level of consistency. Due to her mechanics, she's also ungodly strong for slugging.
The strongest part of her is having range. 3 blinks with extra range is absolutely crushing to play against, and to date, I've only faced a single Nurse running 5 blinks (to which we got steamrolled cause she was actually good; always managed to dodge 4, but never 5).
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Her base is fine, but if we add in range or extra blinks, it can get overwhelming.
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if i may quote a line from another game here
for the people playing against nurse or with her in matches
"you win some, you lose some"- Game Master from Deceit
its easy to lose cause there is not enough communication between survivors,
play with friends and you will see the real power of survivors. survivors stick together.
1v1 against a nurse is natural to be hard. its 1V1 !! in real life no dude would go toe to toe with a killer. think before asking for nurfs or buffs, instead buff your skills and your friends list for the next round of survival.
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I dont Honestly think her base kit is a problem although i do think the problem is honestly her addons the fact is she really does not need them to win and her addons just super charge her power a good example is there is a perkless nurse player named DarkestHour dudes actually a really good nurse he plays perkless and addonless and he still smashes survivors but then i see other nurse players who run ruin omega blink noed like her addons just need changing badly.
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no killer should destroy the game just because someone is good with it
people justifying how strong she is (or even denying how strong she is, which just betrays a lack of experience) by citing how much skill she supposedly takes miss the point
having played a lot of nurse and a lot of other killers, nurse is effectively dead by daylight easy mode. it'll take a few days of practicing her to get the hang of it but once you're over that hump it becomes very easy to do well with her because none of the typical chase mechanics have any impact on her. anything that a survivor can do mid-chase other than break LoS and hope she loses them is ignored. for a game that is balanced around chase mechanics, having a killer totally ignore them isn't especially healthy
addons worsen the problem: stacking range addons serves multiple purposes; not only do you go further, but you go faster because the blink charge time isn't reduced, meaning it takes less time to charge shorter blinks. this is why a nurse with range addons is impossible to juke or avoid at closer range and even extremely difficult at long range. multiple blinks give her too much of a safety net for screwing up
no idea how you'd balance nurse without just fundamentally changing her but she's pretty awful for the game
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Survivor mains don't like nurse because they can't just braindead loop her arround every pallet. She is the killer you need to respect and actually hide from.
That's why she is fun to play against.
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2 blinks it's enought, more than that it is boring againts her..
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@hazehound 16 perks and a nurse still can get 3k-4k without complications
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chase is between the killer than the one who is chased, the rest of the team are working on the genes. its not a 1v1 thing its a group effort to survive.
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Genes? That’d actually be interesting.
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Nurse is fine. Players need to git gud
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Nurse is fine, people just don’t like adapting. There are a ton of scenarios where she has to guess.
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we're going to make a new killer and they're going to be perfect
g e n e t i c a l l y
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The problem with allowing just anybody to speak as they wish is that it takes seconds to make claims which can take minutes or hours to dismantle by any reasonable person. I'll start with the simple:
- The Nurse 'ignores mechanics' because the game was not designed or balanced around those chase mechanics as we now know them. They did not exist when she was released and looping was not a supported gameplay feature, but an exploit that was never fixed. Infinites were grudgingly removed, but replaced by a super-buff to pallets which led to pallet-looping. Most of the killers are not designed to even cope with this style of game-play.
- The difference between how Nurse performs at opposite ends of the rankings challenge the notion that Nurse is 'easy mode' and that it only takes a few days to learn how to use her well.
- The Nurse has not had a significant buff, direct or indirect, that can explain why survivors are so poor against a good Nurse. It used to be that a Nurse would prefer to not use addons because they reduce accuracy in blinking; the idea of using extra charges to make corrections would have been laughable in 2017. The only thing that could account for the difference now is that survivors have got worse at the game and don't remember how to juke a Nurse at all. This lowers the bar and makes it seem like an average Nurse is a great one, but it's not the addons, it's the survivors.
- If you come up with a rule like 'no killer should destroy the game just because someone is good at it', you'd best also have an explanation ready for why this standard does not apply to any survivor. As most killers are designed with little utility for chases and players have had to put up with the game being changed in design around the preferred playstyle of survivors, it's fair to ask: why have they been allowed to destroy the game continually and simply get more support for it?
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i don't even know where to begin with that so i'm just going to leave it
no survivor mechanic breaks the game the way nurse does
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the thing is, you're claiming that most survivor mechanics are ignored when a nurse is in-game, though that's not entirely true. you can still loop a nurse, and you can still break LOS and avoid her if you know what you're doing.
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The mechanic which the Nurse breaks is the mechanic that broke the game first. This game was not designed as a loop-around-the-pallet merry-go-round exploiting an unplanned/unacknowledged differential in collision on level-geometry, where the killer can possibly be stalled in a series of extended chases for the whole match.
The devs said it themselves when infinites were the thing: Nurse was meant to make survivors less-reliant on the loops. They had accepted they had to get rid of infinites and wanted to wean survivors off of them and diversify their playstyles. Survivors wouldn't though and found pallet-loops as an alternative, after they had complained about killers out-playing them in the pallet stand-offs and wanted the pallets to be made fool-proof.
The problem is that survivors do not change how they play, they never adapt, they have developed a reasonable expectation that the devs will always come through for them. This will remain for as long as nerfs to the Nurse are even being considered and other killers are not brought up to her level of utility with an appropriate skill-ceiling.
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you could start with presenting at evidences or proofs just like @ArecBalrin did for his claims.
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i could've never worded this better.
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you cannot loop a good nurse lol what
i'm sorry but if you think a good nurse can be looped under any circumstances we have nothing to discuss
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i appreciate you having a strong opinion, but remember; this is an open discussion, and i'm entitled to explaining my own thoughts to you.
a good nurse can still be looped regardless of their skill level. sure, it's difficult, but it can still be done, because juking is also incorporated into the loop itself. i'm not saying you can brain-dead loop a nurse like you would with a standard killer.
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dude you should have been a dev, you understand the problem which is a HUGE step in trying to fix it.
and the fact that you list both sides on the matter. truly genius.
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you can say this as many times as you want, but if a nurse is any good at all, attempting to loop her (not just mindlessly running around her, i mean predicting her movements) results in her hitting you. if she had one blink, she'd be loopable in this way, but she has two chances to adjust herself at a loop, which means she hits you if she's any good
and in no way am i suggesting that nurse should get one blink (if she did she'd need to at least have 110 ms if not 115), and i don't know what kinds of nurses you tend to play against, but trying to loop a good nurse is a death sentence. no amount of prediction really matters at that range
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Easy fix get rid of double stun on nurse
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It really makes me sad to see any killer get nerfed unless majority agrees the killer is broken. Nurse really doesn't need a nerf, just learn how to play against her.
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you do realize that looping is also meant to waste the killer's time and to buy time for those who are working on generators. even if it results in you getting hit, it still buys back seconds for the team to get part of the objective done.
i understand you, i'm exactly the same way with killers getting nerfed.
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yes, looping is meant to waste the killer's time, which is why looping a nurse doesn't work, because it takes her no time to hit you
not really sure why i'm wasting my time trying to explain to somebody why nurse isn't loopable when that's literally her selling point and why people play her
also enjoying the "you just don't play her" comments when nurse was the first killer i learned and one of the killers i have the most hours on. she's busted, sorry
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if you believe you're wasting your time explaining to a single person that nurse isn't loopable, i'm sorry, but i don't think this thread is for you.
you cannot generalize the fact that a factor like that is the reason why people play nurse. not everybody has the skill level of a god-tier player. some killers can be more efficient than others, i get it, but you can't tell someone who doesn't know how to handle loops well that, not everybody is perfect with avoiding a loop, even if you're a player with experience.
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if you're a good nurse, you don't have a problem at loops
this is just a fact, sorry
there's clearly a disparity in understanding of this game at work here
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Her add-ons make her busted, and any nurse worth their salt will be running whispers so you're gonna have a hard time hiding. Another thing that is annoying with her is MYC, which causes her to snowball hard because she can cover great distances quick.
Nerf her add-ons, like completely remove add-ons that add a blink and she'll be cool.
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She is fun to play against, extra blinks are op though. :)
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you seem like a really productive person to talk to
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i was talking about all loops, not just open car loops like on autohaven
if you aren't running iron will running a nurse around even a high wall macmillan loop doesn't work
i know what they were talking about, they're just wrong
and in your case, all i'm seeing you do is strawman everyone's arguments into "nerf anything that is hard for survivors" because you're too lazy to respond to anything they are actually saying
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Her add-ons need to be reworked and pallet stun mechanic need to be adjusted.
Her array of add-ons are either really strong or really pointless, and almost none of them change how she fundamentally functions. Extra blinks are too common, minus blink add-ons are uninspired counterweights, and four-five blinks are redundant.
It is ridiculous that she is the only killer in the game where you can slam a pallet on her head and she will ignore it because you didn't hit the perfect reappearance frame.
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actually, there's a known glitch for all killers that sometimes they'll ignore pallet suns.
it happened with me a few games ago while playing as wraith. while yes, it needs to be readjusted, it's also a known bug.
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So should we nerf the hell out of Hag too since she can pass through objects? Obviously not; The class requires skill after all.
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I'm pretty sure they patched the bug where you swing and the momentum is sucked into the dropped pallet.
The "feature" I am referring to is the one where she keeps floating and is allowed to continue her blink or swing despite getting stunned and the survivor being awarded for the pallet stun event.
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oh, that's not the bug i'm talking about. there's a pallet stun bug that even makes the "stun" drop sound as it hits the killer, but the killer doesn't receive the penalty for being hit.
it commonly happens while picking up a survivor.
that "feature" you're describing is also another bug. it's been there ever since nurse's rework.
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The stun not affecting pick ups is not a bug, per se. It is meant to be timed precisely. The killer has to be able to move before they get stunned. Yes, the failed pick up stuns looks exactly like the Nurse "feature", but now that I think about it, they're probably tied to the same mechanic.
Simply put, the Nurse is considered to be "in the middle of animation" when teleporting too long.
A year ago, when they "reworked Nurse" there was a time when she was crippled because she could be stunned in the middle of her trajectory, and suffer both the pallet stun and the power stun. I'd like a reasonable middle ground, where she would be put into her power-stun if she lands under a pallet, just like how Spirit gets stunned when she phases under a pallet.
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I hope not I know the devs and this forum don’t give a ######### about console but nerfing her in anyway due to crybaby pc casuals that somehow made it to red ranks and can’t handle one of the few viable killers will make her even less useful on console. This dev team really need to start thinking about the differences between the platforms especially if they are even thinking about crossplay.
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Nurse's major issue is that she takes a lot of practice to play well, but the payoff for playing her well is far beyond reasonable.
Everyone always seems to be of the opinion that just because they play a lot of Nurse, that makes it ok that she's completely game-breaking. In a single player game, sure, but when you're up against other people, their skill level shouldn't be completely null and void just because of the character you picked.
Mostly her add ons need to be seriously taken down a notch.
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