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Spirit change concepts

So spirit is a challenging killer to balance. She's not insanely strong but she is among the best killers still. Survivors hate her because they have nothing they have extremely little they can do to outplay her ability, which outside of nurse is not the case on most other killers. But it's one of those things where the lacking counterplay and speed of downing somebody is what makes her good in the first place, so how do you grant counterplay without making her #########? Here are a few ideas I had. I don't think they should all be done at once, but maybe having a couple would be a step in the right direction of keeping the killer effective while giving survivors a way of trying to counter her ability. I say this as somebody who plays both sides but plays a good bit more killer than survivor.


1 - Every 1.5 seconds during phase spirit can be seen for a fraction of a second. Sort of like her passive phase. This would give the survivor a significantly delayed notice, but still a relevant notice, of if spirit is mind gaming or not and make the info less one sided.

2 - Remove collision mid phase - the problem with spirit's mind games that is unlike most other killer mind games is that it's totally one sided. You have to guess where she is and hope you can avoid her but she can use collision to know where you are without question. This makes pinpointing you more of a challenge.


3 - Have sound gradually fade out during phase so that it's silent at about 4 seconds in. The biggest thing spirit players rely on by far to make phase inescapable regardless of the situation is sound. Once injured, it's pretty much a death sentence unless you're running one perk, and a single perk shouldn't be seen as means of counterplay in a game where you don't know who you're against before you load in. It's an essential tool though, so the outright removal of sound would be too much. This would create a situation where the spirit player would have to get to the survivor very quickly for sound to be a useful tool to them still and they'd have to pinpoint them quickly as well. The longer the phase the more work they'd have to do in a predictive sense to find the survivor. I do however believe that if this change were implemented, collision should be maintained since it would take more work to get close enough to use collision to detect the survivor.


4 - Prayer Beads upgrade quality to ultra rare and make it so the sound doesn't trigger until you're closer, maybe 8m and so that audio degredation mid phase is significantly slowed (presuming the 3rd suggestion was implemented)


These are just general ideas and the numbers and effects are of course open to altering, just a general idea of some ways that you could change spirit without gutting her to make things more fair from the survivor's side in terms of having a way to counterplay the character without making the character garbage.

Comments

  • TheDarkWall
    TheDarkWall Member Posts: 132

    I don't agree. While I think individually a chase needs to be tilted in the killer's favor since they are meant to eventually catch one of the 4 survivors they're competing with, it is key to the game's casual competitive level of gameplay (which is why the game has such a lasting following) that both sides be able to outplay the other to one extent or the other. As it stands, spirit's ability causes the gap in information between the killer and survivor to be so large that they don't have the chance to try to outsmart you if you're playing effectively, which is not even challenging as her. Her ability needs some sort of downside to it, and with the level of audio the game offers you, not seeing the character model itself is not enough of a downside.


    I don't even feel she must be outright nerfed, although she probably could stand a small one. I'd not be against giving her another buff in return for the implementation of these changes, but the main thing is whatever that buff would be would have to maintain that the survivor still have a chance of outplaying her.