The Perk Overhaul and The Nurse
The Perk Overhaul is coming up to shake up the game's stale meta. Killers feel like they must run slowdown perks to compete in games where generators are completed way too quickly. Survivors feel like they only have 8 or so strong perks, and have to run second chance perks in a state of the game where MMR leads to tunneling and camping. With that being said, perks aren't the only thing stale about the meta. Nurse is, has been, and for the foreseeable future, will always be the best killer in the game. She isn't placed into S tier with killers like Blight... She has her own tier. Perks are stale, but so is the highest tier of killer. With that being said, if Nurse is still far and away the best killer in the game after the Perk Overhaul, it's time for some tuning or a rework.
Comments
It's the disparity between her kill rate at all levels (lowest in the game) and her overwhelmingly perceived strength (best killer by far) that make her problematic. Nothing to do with SWFs.
These survivors you get on your teams who are dropping like flies. Is it possible that mmr is terrible (it is), and that the awful mmr goes both ways, and that these nurse players you are playing against are also absolutely boosted? (again, yes).
That is what it is like for those at the top mmr right now.
The number of boosted survivor players and killer players is astounding. "But everyone can't be boosted!" some may say. It's true, when mmr doesn't work.
The number of times I have ran a killer (nurse, too, many times) only for the other three survivors to go down all in the span of a minute, is astounding.
It also sounds like you don't have any even decent nurses on your server if you don't know what a nurse that actually truly knows how to play can do to a game. Listen to what I said. Come to some of the Korean streams and ask. Or watch. Or japan servers. They are even more well-known for their nurse killers. And these servers are fairly small, so you always see the same survivor/killer players with thousands of hours each, when mmr doesn't screw up. Doesn't matter. Nurse who wants to win just bodies them.
Delusional..
Lemma see if I can join you! Oh right, I play on console. Silly me, PC nurses will have a breeze going against me.
Actually no, it's kind of the opposite. But I guess that's something you would know if you knew how to counter a Nurse ...
Nurse should be nerfed and oni should start with his power so then there is one enough strong killer. Oni is still fair and can be looped bit but good oni would get 2 downs at start so pallet pre drop would not counter him anymore. Nurse is too op and I think blight can beat good sfw as well. Oni has arguably second best power in game so buffing him would make him S tier currently he is too weak.
Oh, so console issues are magically fixed based on your comment? Do you face range/recharge nurses while playing on console?
PC nurses dominate us. Mind telling us how to counter her then since you apparently know how to?
I use Sprint Burst, it does nothing against a good Nurse, if you run away she cuts the distance with 2 long blinks, if you wait it to force a M1 whiff for a measly 1 second longer stun it does nothing because she will be at 2 blinks distance after she recovers.
"They're changing something about the game, time to use it as an excuse to justify nerfing a killer for the 5th time this week"
She actually is put into the same tier as Blight, by the way, and you'll run into more Blight's than you do Nurse. Fun fact!
Play Nurse. Show us.
As if the perk overhaul is going to magically balance the game. I guarantee it will still be survivor sided
I played comp for 2 years. I got absolutely rolled in 20 seconds by some of the best Nurse players out there. What I'm saying is that I can count on one hand the number of times I've encountered a Nurse at that level in a public match. Yes, a god tier Nurse is insanely strong. I have a hard time seeing how that is problematic though when we're debating whether one exists on an entire server. People are encountering the 99.9% of Nurse players and they think they're complaining about the 0.01%. It's a case of needing to improve, and I understand that's hard for survivors when you only see a Nurse every so often and there's a 50% chance they even know how to blink when you do see them.
Basekit nurse is still perfectly fine, even without dead hard.
What needs tuning is her strongest add-ons. She really doesn't need them to play, especially if survivors get a nerf to their best counter to her.
Same goes for blight's add-ons though, which you seem to have declassed to lower tier than nurse's when in fact they're as much problematic if not even more in some cases (alchemist ring, compound 33).
Sadly I can foresee already we won't see any changes to those add-ons this patch, and actually what annoys me even more is that one of the best slowdowns perk you could add to her kit, DMS, seems to go unchanged. Literally incredible
All this has been repeated, in masse, ad nauseum in many other threads. There is a search button, use it.
No need to attempt a whataboutism here. My point in creating this post is that if Nurse is still the best killer in the game uncontested after the Perk Overhaul, there's no excuse for her to not receive some changes. I don't really think that's debatable from a game balance perspective of which I'm coming from. She has the lowest kill rate at all levels but she is regarded the best killer by all players in all roles at all levels of the game. That is not good game balance, at all.
A character being the best doesn’t mean they need a nerf. Bad logic
This whole thread is a whataboutism. It's literally "If perks get overhauled, whatabout Nurse".
The Perk Overhaul is to correct a long-time stale meta on both sides, killer and survivor. If we're examining stale metas, we're examining Nurse.
If you didn't understand my comment you quoted, you don't understand game balance as a whole, not just Dead by Daylight, and that's okay.
You think Pig has anti-loop? Maybe on Midwich, yea sure, but basically nothing on any other map. Hear a roar? Just W key away. Ambush is meant for just what it's name is, ambushing survivors, getting them when their guard is down or when they are in a tough position... or just getting right behind the Obsession because you want to keep those sweet STBFL stacks. Otherwise, it's kind of just useless.
The only thing you said is that people think she is good so she should be nerfed. Perks getting changed isn’t going to change the fact that this game’s mechanics are fundamentally broken. It will still be survivor sided unless that is massively changed
..no?
Nurse has never had any contention for the spot of best killer. Ever. At any point in the game's life since she's been introduced. It hasn't even been close.
People using killrates as evidence to defend Nurse dont understand that killrates literally mean nothing.
Pinhead has the highest killrate, is he overpowered because of it? No, most regard Pinhead as weak. He doesnt have that huge of a learning curve so a lot of killers are prone to pick him up. He comes with built in slowdown that can be quite oppressive against new players that arent equipped or knowledgeable enough to handle it. But experienced players can handle it quite well. So high killrates mean nothing... what about low killrates?
The issue with using killrates to defend Nurse is that killrates doesnt consider all possible skill levels for Nurse. Nurse is insanely strong mechanically, the ability to ignore all the fundamentals "rules of looping" is a powerful tool, and the high killrates with experienced Nurses which heavily reflect that; but someone who is new to Nurse is going to be horrible because of how different her mechanics are to others killers. And if a majority of players reflecting killrates are new or mediocre players, it's going to heavily sway the killrates just as it does with a killer like Pinhead. Heck, most people that play Nurse are probably doing it for Adept, Daily Rituals, or/and Archive Challenges, at least according to most Nurses Ive asked.
Killrates ≠ How Good Or Bad A Killer Is
I said she has the lowest kill rate but is the best killer. None of these two points are debatable. Please read my comments before quoting me, I'm begging you.
Let's assume it's true.
The only explanation would be she is so hard to use that it requires a lot of effort and skill to use her effectively. Something most players apparently don't or can't do.
Which means survivors losing against her are losing against someone with a lot of training and skill. Certainly way more of both than what they have.
I find that more than acceptable. Any survivor training even a fraction of what a good Nurse player had to endure would have no issue against her.
Losing against someone better who trains harder should feel normal to everyone. If anything, the real issue here is all the other killers weak players don't complain about.
Instead of crying, play her and watch how decent survivors are cleaning the floor with you. You may even start to understand how to play against her yourself.
Or you can continue being wrong (and that's 0K). Just don't expect to be taken seriously.
That won't solve the problem of her being op in comparison to any other killer, holding the game's balance back.
Uh, I just think you don't have any even decent survivors on your server if you don't know how fair nurse matches are.
This is also a fair point.
With perk balance, they have to consider all possibilities (sometimes they miss the mark, but they tend to fix things eventually), Nurse is one of the hugest reasons why a lot of perks are weaker than they should be, I think there is one huge category of perks that get thier effects reduced solely because of Nurse... Aura Reading and Exposed.
One of the hugest counterplays to Nurse is unpredictability and breaking line of sight. Aura Reading perks complete remove these as options for the survivor. There is a reason why Ive seen a lot of Nurses using perks like H: Retribution or SH: Floods of Rage; because they are insanely good on Nurse, they allow the Nurse to get a hit in a situation where otherwise they wouldnt. But perks such as these held back just because of the entire mechanical design behind Nurse.
Exposed is another, since Nurse's swings count as a basic attack, they are able to get value from exposed perks. This one is kind of a no brainer as to how this is an issue. You have a killer with insanely quick chases with the ability to insta-down a survivor, this is of course considering that your pairing it with Aura Reading perks as well. Perks like Starstruck (paired with Agitation) are absolute powerhouse perks, but a perk like Starstruck on it's own can have varying strengths depending on the killer, but most basic killers dont get as insane of value as Nurse gets with it.
Of course combining the two you still have the insane combo of H: Haunted Grounds, H: Undying, and H: Retribution, the thing that ive seen Nurses use to 4K at 5 gens all because of a single cleanse of H: Haunted Grounds, but suggesting the Nurse messed up or got unlucky they still have another opportunity to proc the effect... But Im just going to assume people are going to sweep that under the rug just as fast as Nurses sweep survivors into the Entity's grasp.
LOL, use Haunted Grounds at high mmr and see what happens.
Let me say this again: Korean server.
I don't think I need to say more...
If your argument against Nurse being the best killer in the game and having the lowest kill rate is that myself and other survivors are just bad at the game and that Nurse takes a lot of practice because she is mechanically demanding, think about it this way. The best Blight, who's widely regarded as the second best killer in the game, doesn't hold a candle to the best Nurse. Both are mechanically intensive and have very high skill ceilings, but Nurse's capacity to break the game blows Blight's out of the water. Not only that, Blight performs ok at all levels and all ranks based on the kill rate statistics even though his Lethal Rush power is very difficult. Nurse is an outlier who is a very, very poor representation of game balance.
Once again, instead coming here emotionally charged saying myself and others are bad at the game and that I'm "crying," you could take a moment to actually think about what I'm saying and try to debate that instead.
Have you considered bringing perks that make survivors want to cleanse totems then? H: Ruin and H: Devour Hope do a good job at that. My point still stands regardless, a lot of perks are held back just because of Nurse being mechanically the strongest killer.
You say that as if nurse doesn't defy the game's chase fundamentals.
In addition to this, if a nurse were to make a mistake with their blink, she can still easily get a hit due to the completely unintentional mind game. Something that should be incredibly punishing can fall so flat from being so. It's actually quite astounding...
No her powers are special and you can't do the same cookie cutter escapes like with others. She has counter plays just people don't want to learn them and instead want nerfs
Yep! Chases against her are very inconsistent and good to god nurses will end up picking up a survivor's tactics.
Name 3 VIABLE counters to nurse.
Losing LOS & double backing. Solid counterplay. Can ignore pallets and vaults. Jumping into a locker to avoid a hit is pointless. Dead hard, sick for avoiding a single hit but recharge add-ons exist.
THIS answer proves that you don't know how to play against a nurse.
Yes, used especially by survivors who want to "win at the push of a button, I'm too good".
Exactly, the naughty nurse is too strong because it is a walking bug ... not at all because the survivors are just ****ing slackers ...
I hope you realize my response wasn’t an answer, it was a question. I want an answer to my question.
With Blight losing hug tech soon, I don't think he will be that bad anymore.
Which is why as a survivor you learn to be unpredictable, the potato hold W survivors never change and then they die and come straight to this forum to cry about nurse.
TLDR.
Haunted ground as nurse? Is this 100 MMR meta?
I can tell you haven’t played at high MMR, if you use that survivors would laugh at you because lockers exist.
The same survivors at high MMR who disappear for the entire corruption intervention duration and then magically appear when it’s finished.
"I can tell you havent played at high MMR"
As opposed to you? No one can see their MMR. But Im assuming everyone is magically in high MMR and any arguments are just automatically trumped by "youre not in high MMR, but I am". Also Im assuming that youre going to just ignore my other reply as well? I mentioned that if getting people to cleanse totems is hard, just bring a totem worth cleanse, isnt as hard as yall make it out to be let's be real here, H: Devour Hope and H: Ruin are right there for the taking.
It used to be that players would say "survivors just want M1 killers to easily loop". But now that there are many anti-loop killers, the sentiment has changed to: "survivors just want to be able to 'hold w and pre drop pallets' against all killers"
In reality, holding W and pre-dropping only became more prominent the more and more anti-loop killers were introduced. And unfortunately, it is what has to be done against many killers nowadays, otherwise killers will take advantage of your misplay.
Be unpredictable don't try to dodge in Dead zones because a good nurse player can predict where to blink easier.
When in a chase always move to areas where they lose LoS because then they'll have to guess where to cut you off at, doubling back in these situations is key because if you keep her guessing then you'll have a better chance to escape. Nurses do have a harder time predicting where to blink because of the above issues.
If you are stuck in a dead zone never keep you eyes off her, you'll know when she'll blink and for how far by her actions.
Old strats that work on all the other Killers don't work on her because of the nature of her power, Nurse is also the slowest Killer as well and you have to use that to your advantage. I learn most of my survivability against her by actually playing her and learning her weaknesses first hand.
I do agree that her addons need worked on because range+speed addons make it extremely difficult to reach the Loss blockers.
SIDE NOTE: There are objects that the Nurse CANT blinks through. Play her and find out what those objects are.
Learn to counter gen speeds and DH... Oh wait
i personally dont use it but the only other counter play to her is line of sight but if its a good nurse your #########
It's not really bad logic if you want to balance this game around more than just the very best killers. Unless you enjoy the idea that only Nurse and Blight should be viable killers.
They’re not going to do that: that’s what people don’t get. No amount of buffs is going to elevate the worse killers. The game would need to be redesigned. What has BHVR done to inspire any confidence in balance?
The McClean patch. When they listened to the community and tweaked Spirit and penalized Gunslinger for ADS spam.
Who's next? Hm....