Artist can't compete with the top
Better than Nurse! (not)
I think Artist is a decent killer at best, and with a few buffs she could be at a place where she can compete in top level play, but right now she just isn't. She already has so many counters. If she gets any nerfs at all, she's a dead killer 100%.
Her projectile is unique in that it just goes straight forward, not up or down (although the other ranged killers have a cap on how high or low they can aim anyway). Elevation is hard on her ability. If the crows need to hit a survivor who's on a higher floor, she needs to place and launch them from that higher floor, and by that time the survivor could react and drop the lower floor. And vice versa.
Survivors get rid of the crows way, way too fast. The fact that they can do it so fast AND be running at that same time is a big issue for me. Same could be said about Victor being attached to somebody, honestly. By the time you launch another crow at the survivor, they're already free of the first crow. So if you never want this scenario to happen, you would go around using 1 crow at a time, even to shoot them at gens across the map, and that's just inefficient for what she can do. So it's a lose-lose because of how fast the survivors get the crows off. Either you conserve your crows at all times and make zero bold plays, or you do do that and you're on a long cooldown when you actually hit a survivor with a crow and start chasing them.
Survivors being able to instantly get rid of the crows by jumping into a locker is stupid. It could lead to the Artist meta including Iron Maiden, but that's not that point. She shouldn't have to put on a perk to counter this very easy counterplay to her power.
Survivors being able to lightburn the crows, I don't even know what to say. We've seen how flashlights can completely counter the abilities of both Wraith and Hag. Why then would we want another killer who's also directly countered by this item?
The second of aura reading hitting a survivor with the crows gives you is pretty nice, and it leaves a fair amount of counterplay for the survivor in that they can trick the killer knowing that the crows' aura is being shown, so they go one way but then go the other after the aura showing is done, for example. The killer instinct from a near miss is also nice.
The slowdown on placing and launching the crows really hurts her I feel. It looks subtle, but it makes her so much weaker. Thank God she's a 115% killer, because if she was AND she had these dumb slowdowns for using her ability, she'd be a DOA killer like Twins or Trickster.
I feel that if the Artist places down 2 crows and they hit the survivor at the same time, that should be a health state. That could push her to being viable. Right now, unless you layer the crows, placing one further back and one further up but lining them up to hit the survivor one after the other (very hard to pull off consistently), the survivor will just get hit by the first crow swarm and then the second will fly past them and not even affect them. Why does there need to be a delay form the first crow swarm to the second in order for them to take damage? It makes no sense, and no it wouldn't be OP. You're still guessing that the survivor is there, which means if you launch them and they miss, you just wasted 2 crows and now you're on a long cooldown.
For the Artist to beat any survivor team, the player controlling her would have to pretty much never miss with the crows and always make them count i.e. getting an injure, and not just letting survivors get hit and then wave the crows off every single time, which is what happens in matches against smart survivors. In her current iteration, I don't see her getting higher than B tier.
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