I hate to say it, but Freddy...
Needs a total rework. He's a licensed character and a legendary killer, but his current iteration is sadly dull and uninspired.
His power and add-ons are dull, and he doesn't feel very Nightmare on Elm Street. I understand his concept can make him a difficult character to implement well, but I think it's time to go back to the drawing board with him.
He was my favorite killer in the 80s, and I never want to play him because he's just disappointing.
Comments
Main reason I hate him besides the boring part is visuals of the dreamworld and dream snares looking like ketchup.
I just want an option to play pre-rework Freddy.
Idk if he needs a total rework. I think his current power could use some adjustments, but I don't see anything wrong with dream pallets/snares and his teleporting.
Dream World just needs something threaten about it. Right now as it stands being asleep as a survivor is largely not a big deal. Being awake certainly helps when being chased by Freddy, but there's no real rush to wake up.
Yeah he’s a pretty boring killer. I don’t ever have fun playing as or against Freddy.
He’s boring and weak. At the very least the dream world needs to be more interesting somehow if not just another rework.
Like maybe make the dream world harder for survivors to navigate or let Freddy move slightly faster with each survivor that's asleep
I second this. Dream world needs to be much creepier and interesting so players have to feel forced to try and stay awake. I like the dream pallets but eventually they just know which ones aren't fake... Dream snares are useless. Definitely needs a rework to the dream world for sure.
Make it if survivors fall asleep they then have to worry about Freddys hellhounds from the second movie. They could act like nemesis zombies
I was going to comment something like this.
I can't remember the hellhounds as I thought the second movie was not so good, so not watched it often. Some kind of AI element would be great there though.
Freddy is difficult to get right because he is canonically overpowered. Therfore, if you attempt to implement an authentic Freddy he will most likely be entirely unbalanced.
teleport is fine.
the snares/pallets kinda suck. maybe let him do both without add-ons? or maybe the pallets should be sort of automatic in the dream world, ala the Doc. snares would need much more slowdown or better detriments to make them cool.
maybe we should think outside the box a bit? just spitballing here:
if we keep snares, maybe they reverse your controls.
freddy should go back to being completely invisible when you're awake.
when you're awake, freddy is Undetectable for you. alternatively, when you're awake, you're Oblivious.
when you're awake you can't pallet stun freddy.
dream world needs way more auto mindgames ala Doc, and more threat in general. maybe in the dream world Freddy also has no red stain.
maybe if you're asleep and freddy can see you (either LoS or aura), he can switch places with a targeted surv. this gives the effect of "i thought it was my friend, but it freddy all along!" as well as "i thought i was one place, but now i'm somewhere else!"
anyway, he's so awesome, give him some more oomph!
Some of his powers are laughable.
Dry, uninteresting, completely uninspired.
They originally had him pull people into the dream world and oppress players with massive debuffs and circumvent powerful survivor perks. Glad he doesn't have to pull players, but at least it was creative.
Now, he's a generic M1 killer with ketchup pools and a teleport, which look very flat - especially in contrast with much more flashy killer powers. Very boring in comparison.
He has to be reworked - for the better of the license, their business, and the game itself.
They could give Freddy an addon like iridescent stone except every 30 seconds a broken pallet becomes a dream pallet
I'd like a rework
I don't think a full rework is necessary- I've said this a few times, but all Freddy needs is to lean harder into the idea of illusory objects.
Pallets + Snares both as part of his basekit, and a full addon overhaul to have his addons primarily focus on giving him other fake objects. Fake partially-done generators that make survivors scream if they're touched, fake lit totems that inflict status effects, fake chests, fake walls, and so on.
Make the dream world slightly more of a concern to be in; survivors can't trust their eyes and ears while asleep.
Yes this sounds amazing. More voice lines too like Pinhead got.
Weak but fun, boring but strong, weak and boring. If he hits strong and fun he'll have done it all.
Can't stand the current iteration. He was wildly over-nerfed and, the worst sin, his power was made unfun to use. Slowing down to place traps FEELS bad to use. I don't care what the balance team says, you can't make killer powers feel bad to use. It's the WHOLE point of the game. It has to feel go to use your power, full stop.
what is this post on about? He already was reworked.
Freddy just needs a revert on his snare nerfs and add-ons.
fake pallets are useless vs good players. lore-wise, they do not make much sense either. Freddy lore is suppose to be about the idea that he is living nightmare, a ever presence of fear that exists everywhere. The dream world is suppose to make survivors feel a sense of fatigue.
Freddy snares make sense because he makes the survivor feel tired from running. -action speed add-ons also add onto this idea that the survivor are tired and work slower on objective. In previous iteration of nightmare, He used to be a stealth killer with perfect invisibility which made survivor feel like he was omnipresent entity and aura reading was there to give sense that he is controlling the world. In the new version, they gave him a generator teleport to make freddy feel like he's omnipresent entity around the map instead.
The reason why freddy sucks right now is because he doesn't have an identity. His dream world does nothing to make survivor feel like they're fatigued. the slowdown for placing snares counter-acts hindered effect. The add-ons that uniquely identified him as killer no longer exist. Oblivious is useless when the killer has lullaby and his teleport was always niche tool that added very little to his power-level.
He's basically F-tier in the sense that nothing he does is better than what other killers can't do better. Almost every killer who is mobile has better mobility than he does. Clown now has better chase than his snares. His gen slowdown do not exist anymore, but even if they did, pinhead chain hunt is better than his add-ons ever were. In the end, when players used to say old freddy is F-tier, they were right in the end. Current Freddy is F-tier at doing nothing better than what other killers can do better. Adding illusion pallets does little to fix his current problems.
Having the dream world be populated with more fake objects to make survivors question what's real and what isn't would be a much, much better way of giving him an identity than just making survivors do things slower. That is and always was incredibly lazy and boring design, and we shouldn't be going back to it.
This would be Onryō. Kinda.
Onryo is more similar to Wraith than pre-rework Freddy to be honest.
I thought about her being temporarily visible when she comes near and manifests. Also her being Undetectable and completely invisible outside of her TR reminds me of Freddy. (something his rework should have had from the beginning). But yes she also has something in common with Wraith.
Here is an older post of my ideas for Freddy.
survivors already know what is real and what isn't real no matter how many fake objects you place on the map. They know it because of the killer has to be in proximity to set traps which in this case is fake pallets. Its typical strategy also used against trapper. You can stay in terror/in close proximity of the harmless killer and know approximately where the chases take place and where potential fake pallets are.
There is old saying, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer". This is exact dynamic used against pallet freddy. A lot of maps do not have places to put fake pallets and force you to break pallets first before being able to place them, but the survivor can through process of elimination know which areas the killer has chased and avoid fake pallets altogether.
Doctor has add-on called Order Carter notes and it places fake pallets automatically, but rarely does anyone really fall for his illusion pallets. The reward is not really that good either. At best, it is a hit and at worst, they do nothing.
Illusory objects are weak gimmick. they do very little. There is simply no reason to expand on them.
Fake pallets just aren't that useful, which is why they'd be part of the basekit alongside snares. You'd get a little value from them, but not that much.
But, for the others, I disagree. You're telling me no survivor would ever fall for totems that look completely identical to real hexes? No survivor would touch a generator that looks partially done? Obviously they're not going to be a Nurse/Blight/Spirit level power, but they wouldn't be useless, and they'd make him fun for both sides instead of kinda boring for the killer and extremely boring for the survivors.
My goal isn't to make him stronger. My goal is to make him more interesting and fun for everyone, and a small part of that is making sure he isn't too weak. With his current existing power and more stuff added on top of that, that's a pure upside.
My suggestion:
canonically they're not really his powers so they make little sense.
At best, survivors might wake-up more often to avoid fake totems or generators, at worst they just ignore it. When freddy's dreamworld was threatening, survivors still ignored his dream world mechanic and just suffers max penalties regardless. Suppose they were hypothetically effective game slowdown, survivors would just complain he is is strong again.
He is dead a killer. He is good cover art for the game and he is ok for new players to you know, role-play as. There is just not that much reason to re-invent the wheel with him. They could revert him into his original state and he would be a fun stealth killer that isn't that strong or they could revert his negative changes and he would be jack of many trades with a more presentable power-level. Unfortunately the game is heavily survivor bias and survivor were not fond of facing either version of him, so I would assume that he is going to stay where he is at.
How d'you mean, canonically?
Canonically what he does is prey on people via their dreams, where he reigns supreme and everything around them can be twisted to his liking. That's what he does, and illusory objects is a much more accurate representation of that than either the snares or the awfully designed action speed slowdown.
As for your last point, killers being fun to face in general is just as important as them being fun/viable to play. Survivor players are still playing the game, and if a killer's power is as boring to verse as "you spend more time holding M1", that's a complaint that's worth taking seriously. Same with his old addons, there was nothing engaging about Forever Freddy. It's not "threatening", it's "boring".
Survivor players are still playing the game, and if a killer's power is as boring to verse as "you spend more time holding M1", that's a complaint that's worth taking seriously.
how is adding extra fake generators and totems any different from holding m1 longer? Its just creating same effect with a different representation. at very best, survivors might wake up and the mechanic is ineffective because its too easy to render the effect ineffective. At the very worst, suppose that alarm clocks and failed skill-checks did not wake you up, It might have similar-levels of effectiveness. Illusory objects are also just really bad vs SWF as only one person needs to be awake for entire dream mechanic to be ineffective.
there was nothing engaging about Forever Freddy. It's not "threatening", it's "boring".
Why did it receive changes if it was not threatening? I think your deeply wrong to believe that freddy wasn't strong. Although his changes were not explained in detail, they were explained prior to his changes with a perk called thanotophobia. I will give my version of the summary. survivors that took too many hits too quickly got punished by his add-ons and the two perks(sloppy+thano) and typically, survivors gen-speed is so potent that survivors do not need health-states to loop a killer because a lot of pallets in this game are safe such that they act-as stacked sequencing health-states. His add-ons in combination with sloppy and thanotophobia gave him a nearly augmented mangled status effect ranging between 30%-47% healing action penalty. Seeing such strong action penalty towards healing, Once you got hit by freddy, you were likely playing the game injured, so the typical spam health-states, bodyblock second chance gameplay was absent weakness for him. As his add-ons also slowed generators along with said perk, it created lose/lose situation for the survivor where healing is not possible but doing generator was difficult.
The chases weren't easy because of his snare-anti-loop. He was like playing against Plague as broken without ability cleanse while plague having unlimited corrupt puke in an m1 form. The only counter-play to him was his game slowdown diminishing effectiveness the more generators were complete, so if you played properly with survivor and did not make mistakes at loops, you could finish all generators by having strong starts. He had that proper Climax form that killers like EV3 Myers fail to have against strong players.
In other words, you had to be good at the game to beat him as survivor, but survivor couldn't put up with his gameplay. As result he was changed into this pointless form that barely anyone plays.
...It's different because it's not the same thing? Sticking on generators for longer is different to paying attention to your surroundings, it's the reason why other slowdown killers aren't as boring to go against- they actually ask you to do something beyond stare at a progress bar and occasionally hit space.
And yeah, I agree, pre-nerf Freddy was stronger. He was also boring as hell, because having your action speeds drained like that is dull design. It'd be better to have him be more potent in strength, sure, but the actual problem with Freddy's design at every different incarnation of his power is that he's never been fun.
You're right, I misspoke by saying that it wasn't threatening. What I should've said is that the problem wasn't just that it was threatening and nothing more, the problem is that it was threatening and extremely uninteractive. The light in the tunnel, of course, is that phantom objects and playing around the Dream World being his to control is interesting in theory if they drill down on it a little more and make the Dream World more potent, so that's why I don't think he needs a complete ground-up rework and why he definitely doesn't need any current changes simply reverted.
sticking on generators for longer is different to paying attention to your surroundings
there isn't anything in regards to paying attention to surroundings. they're either going to do fake generator(hold m1 longer) or ignore generator because they know its fake. your just debating how the survivor should get punished in-time efficiency.
An old idea for legion was that his power should allow him to mimic survivors which other player point to swf making the power useless. Illusory objects have same problem for why mimic idea fails to work. Freddy still going to get trashed on unless its like impossible to break out of dreamworld but that wouldn't really feel like freddy.
Freddy's design at every different incarnation of his power is that he's never been fun.
correction: He was never fun for survivor. there wasn't anything wrong with him on killer side. There are 27 total killers in current DBD, not every killer will appeal to every killer player and that is ok.
Oh, I think I forgot to mention that aspect of my idea in the shortened version- if a survivor touches the fake generator, it disappears and they scream. The fake generators can't actually be repaired, that would just be making survivors hold M1 for longer.
As for your correction, even if that's true - and I'd argue it isn't, he still has an uninteractive and flat power design for the killer side - that's still more than enough reason to change it. Obviously, fun is subjective and can't be the only thing changes are made to achieve, but if a killer is complained about specifically for how boring and unfun simply slowing down action speeds is, that's a good reason to look into changes. Survivor fun matters just as much as killer fun, you can't ignore it.
Oh, so now generator are not useful. Well that was easy debunk. All the more reason to not change him.
Survivor fun matters just as much as killer fun, you can't ignore it.
Don't worry. Survivor fun is always prioritized. That is why freddy is where he is today.
When Dream World itself was the threat, Freddy was considered one of the most unfun killers to play against. I always have a laugh at the fact that now people want to go back to that. The trade-off was Freddy himself wasn't very threatening at all, you could bully him super hard as he couldn't play the game until someone went to sleep and stayed asleep.
Freddy just a victim of the current state of play. He's loop centric chase killer at a point where no one wants to loop if they don't have to so his powers are less engaging overall. I don't know how you really about it though.
Unfortunately, we didn't get the cool from the 80's we got the crappy one from the remake in 2018.
His old Dream World was less a threat more than it was you had to leave due to the 50% slowdown and it made Freddy unable to hurt you.
I wouldn't say Freddy is hurt by looping not being meta as his snares were nerfed before survivors started to loop less. Snares currently are just too weak and his gen teleport doesn't do enough for 1v4 pressure since the lost of his action speed addons. 'Personally I think his Dream World doesn't need to provide action slowdown since Alarm Clocks and the slower waking each other up function as slowdown as it is. But without that action speed slowdown getting survivors to actually wake up can be difficult, because there's no real hinderance besides freddy being slightly harder to hear coming due to the non-directional lullaby.
Current Freddy has some stealth aspects, so I think it could be interesting if his Dream World did more to help him catch survivors off guard. That way there is a bigger risk to staying asleep than there currently is.