Plague needs love and attention.
Comments
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I think that’s a huge mistake tbh. It’s so plain to see how much help Plague needs.
I would like to hear their rationale behind not buffing her, if that’s the case.
Today is the big day. I hope we hear something about Plague.
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Their rational would probably be in relation to there kill stats.
However we really have to stop using those kill stats in determining killer balance. Those stats are extremely flawed for a multitude of factors edging them near meaningless for determining any type of conclusions on balance.
Kill ratio =/= how balanced there are
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Eventually no one is going to play with the Plague anymore. We have seen this before. Sad to see so much work go to waste.
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I don't think she's awful but I do think the surprise Nerf on her release really crippled her. People enjoyed playing as and against her but after the nerf and the initial hype of a new killer You hardly ever see anyone play her.
The Reason I don't like her is there's just too much downsides to her power. It can be strong yes but when you have a slow down on charge, hold and on release it takes the fun of spraying vomit everywhere that she had in the PTB. Her games also go pretty fast since there's no healing involved when playing against the plague so you've more time to do gens.
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The potential she has is there, but there is absolutely no question the ptb nerfs hurt her. You can’t even study ptb footage to learn her now.
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I've main'd her for about 2 weeks now. One thing I'll add is that her biggest issue isn't necessarily unique to her. Due to the absurd number of pallets and safe loops, she absolutely requires a pallet muncher build. 2 gens usually get done by the time multiple survivors are in the Broken state, and a lack of pallets in the area of completed gens is pretty inconsequential.
I guess there's one other thing I'd add. The slowdowns with Corrupt Purge are insane. Beyond unnecessary for a power that has to be given to her by survivors. The slowdowns are severe enough it's almost necessary for the survivor to make a positioning mistake in order to hit them with it.
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Agreed. The Plague has huge potential but they crippled her.
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I would like to point out that nothing fundamentally changed about Plague between the PTB and what we have now meaning that the changes have nothing to do with her strength because people don't cleanse.
If anything the PTB version would only give further incentive to not cleanse because when Plague got the corrupt purge on the PTB version and held it she moved at 5.0 m/s (vile purge was 4.6 m/s). Afterall, who would give Plague mobility and an actually good power by cleansing? The difference was that people were looking to test on the PTB so more people felt inclined to cleanse while on live people caught onto the fact that if you never cleanse then you never give her a real power as broken doesn't threaten good survivors as it doesn't get in the way of generator progress in any direct (action speed debuff) or indirect way (mobility, actually threatening power to warrant in healing, etc)
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Plague needs love. She has many problems but she also isn't weak enough that she needs a complete rework or huge buffs. She is likely to be forgotten.
I have noticed three main problems with the Plague.
- Her chase potential is very low in vile purge once the survivor becomes broken. At that point, she is a simple killer with very little. While this isn't that big of a deal normally, she is very tall removing potential for mind games.
- Being sick doesn't do anything to hurt survivors. It doesn't slow you down doing generators and it doesn't slow your movement speed. If a Plague leaves you, you have no need to go cleanse sickness. This needs a change. I think that the sicker you are, the slower your action speeds should be. This helps to motivate cleansing.
- Plague has little snowball potential. While some may disagree as corrupt can easily down many people, the fountains fully heal survivors. This takes away at least 16 seconds of healing to full and allows survivors to immediately get on generators. She struggles to snowball because of this.
I really want Plague to be better. She had me so excited but in the end has too many flaws for me to try to play her. And this is coming from someone who has been playing as new Legion consecutively for two weeks.
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The plague just screws over benevolence emblems as well. No one heals or gets healed. Maybe if they gave decent bloodpoints and advancement toward emblems instead of just using the stick all the time, survivors would cleanse more. I think you get like a whopping +100 bloodpoints for using a fountain and that's it.
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I knew this but it became extremely apparent last night when I specifically ran a unhook/altruism build with a kit, wglf, ds, bt, and wmi. When I saw it was the Plague, I could literally hear the “curb your enthusiasm” theme playing in the background. I guess Plague counters one thing! And it’s literally the one thing that surprise! doesn’t need a counter!
It hurts Plague, it hurts survivors (in the bad way) it needs to be changed.
She should, however, be the killer that specializes in neutering exhaustion perks and now that Freddy no longer will have action speed debuffs, she should also have a drastic effect on gen progress.
In other words, Plague should be the poster girl for “have had enough of toxic survivors and their crap blaaaaggghhh bow down to the lady in the crown.”
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Hello
We are reluctant at the moment at modifying her. First we have other killers who are higher in the list for modification/balance needs. Second thing, our stats shows that she is top killer (4K) at rank one. It seems that once you've mastered her, she can be extremely effective. She definitely has a high skill curve.
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You're going to be asked for proof or statistics.
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There are a multitude of different factors that are affecting those kill stats to where they are near meaningless in terms of determining a killers balance. We really should stop using those to determine if killers need nerfs, buffs or tweaks. They are not accurate whatsoever.
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Hi! Thank you for replying to a Plague thread!
I don’t mean to be rude though but what your stats show and what’s actually happening beg to differ. She probably has the highest score at rank 1 BECAUSE nobody plays her. Kind of like how I could say I have a 100% snipe accuracy because I hit something afk a couple times with a body shot.
There is no way Plague is up there with the likes of Nurse and Billy. Lack of continuous streaming shows this, especially when popular streamers stream more new Legion than Plague.
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It really doesn't matter what her kill rates are at any rank. A killer who is abysmally unfun to play, and who has all of the INTERESTING parts of her power utterly disabled because survivors choose to deny it to her is in a terrible spot fundamentally.
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I haven't seen a Plague killer in a month or more. Guess players just gave up on her.
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Well 2.1k people agree which is a good 25% of your active player base that she is underwhelming and need buffs so change that reluctant to eager
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Can you relay the statistics of the higher ranks in relation to what perks and addon setups people are using with her?
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I ran into my first Plague match in over a month yesterday. Meta now is deny her the power and get an easy win.
The trade off of healing vs remaining sick or even broken is an easy choice.
Her power guarantees a down and if multiple people are near her it is easily multiple downs.
So by simply remaining one hit or sick you considerably make the game easier to win.
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Yeah and there's enough pallets and windows to making staying broken/sick not very dangerous. The gens will be done long before the survivors run out of pallets because of how numerous they are.
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What's the sample size of Rank 1 players getting 4k using Plague in that case?
If that sample size is larger than 100, or even 50, rank 1 players I'd be surprised.
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Seriously, sample size is everything.
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We're not asking for HUGE buffs, we're asking for some MINOR buffs.
For example: Fully infected survivors suffer a 10% action penalty until they cleanse themselves.
Once you make this change, wait for a few months so we can see how Plague is doing. Maybe we could nerf it down to 5% or buff it to 15%? You need to take an incremental and iterative approach to buffing these characters. Get out of your comfort zone and try some things out! :)
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I would agree, right now there is no incentive to purify, making the choice was part of the build design but after a few months it is meta, only potato's will give her the power to kill.
Right now one survivor takes the chase, drops a pallet and moves to the next, drops it till she gives up and or just moves along to the next of 12+ loops. Rest of the team gets the gens done. Normally halfway through Plague gives up or gets one down and by then its No enhanced power and 2 gens left. She is just to slow and the survivors are far to smart.
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You mean these statistics? Guess where Plague is at?
Looks like Plague is around a 2K since she's roughly a 50%. If she was top tier, she would have a higher % to be honest.
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People rarely play Hag and she isn't a weak killer. Not just strength plays a role, I think. It's probably the game feel of a killer that takes one as well. As soon as you figure out the basics of Hillbilly or Nurse, they give you a really straight forward game feel. Hag on the other hand is more complex and her ports are very unintuitive in design by the clean cut. Similar migh be Clowns bottles slow arc flights and maybe Plague.
Throwing up on survivors might be fun, but often it's hard to judge when they got injured, when it makes sense to puke on gens, when going corrupt etc. Many options in a fast paced game.
By my personal experience, she feels decend. And honestly I can't judge how strong she is on red ranks, because I have no time to play killer as much as I used to. But I wouldn't be surprised if complexity plays a role.
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I'm not being funny, but your stats are not exactly reliable and should not balance the game around these, this can be clear from a stream WAYY back when the stats were given out, it was shown that nurse was a weak killer, now I'm not sure if you know this but nurse is the strongest killer in the game, not only this but the amount of factors that take part for kills, such as being AFK or SWF being heavily altruistic or the amount of times plague is actually played are not applied to these stats. I can tell you plague is NOT played well at high ranks and if she is, it's very very rare, the amount of people that agree that plague is weak + several streamers/youtubers not playing her but playing legion instead should show this. (Similar points as other people in here)
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Plague good.
Plague 4k.
Made up statistics say so.
Bye.
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They wouldn't be at rank 1 if they didn't 4k. Look at the rank 2 and lower numbers. It's not an issue of mastery when her most powerful form is reliant on the survivors complying. Multiple high level, experienced players have logically explained why she's weak at the peak of her powers. This is a really disheartening response and goes a long way to explain why this game has so many underpowered killers.
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i hope you are not serious right now. otherwise you gonna earn a well deserved ######### storm for that statement. start taking high rank gameplay issues for real already pls.
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Hm. If The Plague's average number of kills at Rank 1 is 4K, then that means there is not even a single instance of a match with a 3K1E result, since that would drop any average to 3.9999 at best. I also wonder what the sample size was, given the fact that every single match resulted in a 4K according to his data.
Since we're talking statistical data, can you give us the following information?
What is the current survival rate for Survivors in Rank 1-4, [excluding all matches that include any disconnects]** against The Plague? (To clarify, not asking for The Plague's kill rate, but for Rank 1-4 Survivors' survival rate against The Plague in general)
**Please, please stop including matches with DCs when analyzing your data, especially if you are making balancing decisions based on them. We all know that DCs (especially DCs done near the beginning of the game) have a severe effect on the outcome of the match, probably moreso than what killer was played, which is why we eliminated the possibility of starting the game with just 3 (or less) survivors.
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Guys, did you know Leatherface is top tier as well? They have the highest kill-rate in Rank 1.
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I'm sorry but this is very hard to believe about your "statistic" and make no sense like everyone else said
Also only rank 1? What about the other rank?
I'm in 12 rank and everyone keep playing "green no-mither style" and never touch fountains until they done with gen rush.
Just because rank 1 did something good doesn't that mean she is okay at all
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@Janick I appreciate you taking your time to respond to this. I do absolutely understand that some killers are in greater need of some changes and that things such as the Freddy rework easily take a higher priority however I have some questions regarding the statistics you gave us.
- Do these stats take disconnects into account? As of currently disconnects have gone rampant and it's nearly impossible to get people to not disconnect and sometimes it feels like people are always disconnecting. I feel as if because disconnecting is such a major issue the results are certain to be skewed because disconnects encourage more people to give up or allow for an easier game while the rare games that do not have disconnects are not guaranteed to be against survivors who know what they're doing.
- How many people are actually running Plague at rank 1? For reference, 1/1 games as the Plague and getting a 4k equates to the average being a 4k because almost no other matches will be able to change that result. If let's say 10 people played Plague once and in 7 of those matches they got a 4k then the result still isn't accurate enough as it clearly doesn't include the entire community. This is especially keeping my other point into account where the disconnect issue has been keeping people away from achieving rank 1.
- Are addons, particular perks or offerings taken into account? If the killer is using a strong combo like enduring/spirit fury it of course makes sense that they will be more likely to get a better result but that's the work of the perks in this example and not the power itself. Addons are also important because the only way to deal with groups who never cleanse is to run the apple addons which only grant you 1 or 2 times to use your corrupt purge meaning that if this addon was used then it also unfairly skews the results. Offerings are also important for obvious reasons such as the mori or particular map offerings.
Again, I absolutely appreciate and respect you for taking your time to respond to this. I just simply want to get a better understanding of what exactly was taken into account when these statistics were grabbed especially with the three points I've listed above.
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Imo, plague has one of the best projectiles in the game (being her corrupt purge.) Though i think that vile purge needs a little bit of buffing, especially since survivors dont cleanse.
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I could sit here, quote Janick and provide constructive feedback as to why he's mistaken about Plague's efficacy (at least at high ranks). But after 3 years of poor balance, I'm convinced none of it would matter in the slightest.
Yeah, Plague is super top tier with a high skill curve. None of the best killer streamers or players have figured her out yet, though. That's definitely what's going on here. The general consensus may be that she's god awful and boring, but surely players with thousands of hours (who have likely mastered killers like nurse) can't decode the enigma that is the Plague. She's just got such a high skill curve.
What game are the developers even play testing if they're Q/A'ing this to begin with? What version and in what year? Yeesh. This has become a comedy.
Most Players: "Yeah, we found it. So here's the problem, and here's a giant paragraph explaining why X and Y at high ranks."
BVHR: "Well, our statistics say.."
Freddy: "Yeah? YEAH!? YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?"
-_-'''
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Tbh the stats don't mean much. Too many factors are in the game such as how many of those were SWF, how altruistic, did they do gens, what perks and addons, were they AFK or not, ect. Saying that she gets kill thus she is good is not a good motto. If 100 people all 4k as Freddy against AFK's then the stats of kills on average would be completely wrong. In all my green rank plays just today, only 1 killer was Plague. Her power is completely controlled by survivors, and it doesn't even end chases if its a map with infinites. All games i play with her, i either kill everyone since they cleanse early or loop poorly, or kill nothing since they loop me all game and they just accept the broken status.This is even before perks that makes gen rushing easy.
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But wouldn't this data be skewed by the fact she's the newest killer and thus people wouldn't know how to deal with her for a period of time post-release?
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Maybe there's a hidden M3 power exclusive to the Plague that only those high kill rate rank 1 mastery players know about.
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I'm sorry, who in Rank 1? Can YOU reach Rank 1 with her, no because the last time I saw a Dev playing killer was McLean on Twitch barely rank 13 the day before Rank Reset. Don't give us your backhanded, backwash fog-spat excuse stating that she's vIaBlE iN rAnK 1.
Give me a break.
Of that Kit Kat Bar.
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I don't even think she needs buffs, I think she needs tweaks.
She needs more opportunities to use Corrupt Purge. That's a huge part of what makes her fun.
If she needs power removed somewhere else, so be it.
The only way I have fun playing her is when I bring an apple and force survivors to cleanse and not get sniped with only one health state. Other than that, you're playing perma tier 3 Myers without the fun stealth part in the early game.
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Really? You guys are essentially saying that they are straight up making up the data. If the stats say she's 4king a majority of the time then clearly she's at least high tier.
Therefor, if she has an issue then it ought to be traceable to a non-balance issue with her. Or in other words any tweaks should not be made with the goal of making her stronger, but rather simply improving her gameplay loop's engagement.
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i don't think plague has a strength issue, i just think she's not terribly fun to play for most people because corrupt purge's use is entirely based on survivors' decision making and not your own. this means that playing against 4 competent players will prevent you from using it until the end of the game
the obvious answer is to give survivors more incentive to cleanse; make being sick more of an issue than just applying the broken status and some (incredibly annoying, by the way) visual effects. the flip side of this is that corrupt purge is far too strong for you to just be getting it all the time. a buff to vile purge and a nerf to corrupt purge might help in balancing out how she's played, but i haven't put much thought into what this would consist of so they're just loose ideas
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Is this based on all ranks or on ranks 1-5? Because the latter is the only data I care about for determining if a killer is balanced or not.
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Exactly.
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I think for me it's not always about being able to get 4 kills. It's also about being able to use her power. Currently 90% of survivors don't even bother cleansing themselves while repairing generators, basically leaving it up to them to even be able to use corrupted vile.
Understandably, not cleansing acts as a counter to Corrupted Vile, but I do feel that there should be a penalty for being in a broken status for a long time. Perhaps it doesn't need to be attached to the survivor's health, but their actions... such as repairing generators. It could be similar to what happens when in the dream state against Freddy when repairing gens, maybe not that slow, but slower than what it is now. It would only make sense that they aren't as efficient since they are supposedly sick.
I just think there needs to be a different way to obtain Corrupted Vile, Perhaps even add an add on in which if a survivor does not cleanse after x amount of time once broken, they go into a dying state. Just throwing some ideas out there.
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And there you have it. Plague's tough access to corrupt purge is her issue.
Solutions are things like:
- Making 1 fountain corrupt at the start base kit (forget what the addon for that is called)
- Having vile purge inflict a debuff that makes it worth cleansing
- Creating an alternate way to get corrupt besides corrupt fountains
And it would need to be counterbalanced. Some potential methods of doing that are:
- Decreasing charge time for vile, corrupt or both
- Decreasing the max total spay for vile, corrupt or both
- Increasing the base time to consume corrupt purge from a fountain
- Decreasing time required for a survivor to cleanse
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