My ideas for balancing
First things first: I love this game. But it’s not perfect. So here’s my ideas for balancing both sides.
Right now, a lot of Killers are tunneling and camping to get kills and raise their MMR. And Survivors are playing selfishly for the same reasons.
My solution to this is to change the way MMR works. Create a system that forces players to “play nice” and stop being toxic. Introduce more nuance into the system, like time spent in chase, amount of hooks, etc.
The second is balancing issues. If you look at killers like Nurse or Spirit, then at Clown or Myers, it’s obvious which are stronger. This is obviously a problem. What each Killer needs varies on the Killer, but I think a fair evaluation is that the Killers who ignore certain rules of the game (ie Nurse with pallets/walls, Spirit with LoS, Blight with extreme mobility and lethality, etc) are way more powerful than those who can’t (ie Legion or Wraith).
My solution would be to remove the things that allow those high tier killers to ignore the rules. For example, boost Nurse’s base speed to 4.6 m/s but halve her blink range and make it so she can’t pass through walls as easily.
As far as metas, it’s stale. The Survivor meta is the exact same as it was before the release of Artist, and that’s not good.
My solution is to make a lot of the meta basekit, then give the other side a boost as well. For example, make Borrowed Time basekit, but then make Pop Goes the Weasel basekit as well (or something). This way, normal gameplay is encouraged, and more variety can be found in game. Killers would be more hesitant to tunnel if they knew BT was always going to be a thing, and Survivors would be encouraged to play more altruistically if they knew that a critical Pop was just one more hook away.
Just my two cents on the situation.
Comments
You have the understanding of things backwards. The three S-tier killers are the well-designed ones because they are capable of the potential to handle any situation. Other killers are inherently not. Other killers should be brought up to better potentials (after the solo survivor experience is also buffed). Them ignoring those rules are precisely why they are well-designed. Being hard-capped by certain limits is the barrier between a killer with eh potential and a killer with amazing potential. Removing Nurse's ability to go through walls would make her literally garbage. Also, even these S-tier killers you mentioned still remain balanced, because their chases are not auto-wins even if the killer player is a god at that killer. Their chases are heavily mindgame-oriented, which is precisely why they are so high-skill. It comes down to who makes or fakes the better mindgame read, not whether you auto-win or auto-lose cause of things like what tile setup it is. THAT is skill.
Changing meta is good and all, but you need to have an understanding of why the meta exists for both sides in the first place, and that nerfing the result will just further harm the game. For instance, instead of nerfing slowdown perks or second chance perks, figure out WHY they exist and are ran. Such as tunneling being necessary to gain or regain pressure against very good survivors, while perks like Borrowed Time help minimize reckless tunneling beyond its strategic value. It is a give-and-take. To "nerf" or "solve" things like tunneling, you would have to address the need for that strategy for pressure. For instance, giving mechanical buffs to killers to replace that pressure. Thus, the need to rely on tunneling for pressure would be lessened.
Making perks basekit is not necessarily a good way to go about it. It may patch up the end result, but like I said above, it does not do anything to address the source, which is the only healthy way to "reduce" these sorts of things.
You may not understand this because you are rather bad survivor or something, but those changes just makes game die.