Nemesis and Wesker, two examples of terrible design
Nemesis and Wesker have two of the worst designed elements on a killer in the game (to include Nurse and all the other disliked killers in the roster).
I'll start with Nemesis and keep it very short: the zombies. The zombies are absolutely atrocious design, and rely entirely on RNG to either carry a game or throw it entirely. They can either get stuck completely in a corner of the map and do nothing all game, or bodyblock doors (with collision that never disables by the way) and pressure 2/3 gens on a 1-gen remaining scenario. There is absolutely no excuse for RNG to play such a large role in a game's outcome. I've had MANY games against Nemesis where the last gen could have been done three times over while Nemesis overcommitted to a chase, only for a zombie to wander back to the gen over and over again, and the team spending more time luring the zombie away only for it to come back than they do working on the gen. The most egregious case of a zombie interfering in the game is when they bodyblock a door to a structure (say shack) mid-chase with no recourse for the survivor. Nemesis can literally just stand still and bodyblock the survivor from the other side, sandwiching them between themselves and the zombie, and it's a guaranteed down.
Now for the most egregious design element in the game: Wesker's infection mechanic. I have many issues with the mechanical function of Wesker's power, but the worst one by FAR is how easily the killer can force a win by stacking slowdown perks and burn out the survivors' spray supply. There are 6 sprays on a map, 12 cures in total. 8 if Wesker uses Iridescent Uroboros Vial (which is probably his strongest addon btw). This means that all Wesker has to do is infect survivors 8 times while protecting a 3-gen (with Call of Brine/Eruption/Overcharge, this becomes a trivial task) to secure a guaranteed win. Being fully infected against Wesker is a death sentence in every aspect. In normal conditions, Wesker is 15% faster than you. When fully infected, Wesker is 25% faster than you. This makes it significantly easier to secure a hit. Not only this, but you are an insta-down if he hits you with his power, which is a much easier endeavor if you happen to be fully infected. In this regard, Wesker is a bit like an upside down Myers: Myers runs out of his power eventually, while survivors are limited in uses against Wesker's power. In this sense, he is the only killer in the game that can win by attrition alone. Any other killer that has a limited supply of "cures" to their power (such as the aforementioned Nemesis) don't have an infection mechanic anywhere near as oppressive as Wesker's. Being infected against Nemesis is an annoyance at best, being fully infected against Wesker is a guaranteed down. Plague has infinitely respawning fountains, Sadako has infinitely respawning TVs, Freddy has infinite TV spawns. Why is Wesker the only killer in the game that can guarantee a win if the game goes on for long enough?
Comments
Generally speaking you would need to play a hit and run playstyle if you wanted to burn through all of those cures, because getting a second hit with wesker after the first one usually does not last that long, his infection is mostly passive game delay. I don't think you should do that however since his overall map mobility is not that high to be that good for hit and run, so even though you are technically right you are also wrong in the sense that when he could afford to give up on chase and run around to find another survivor he would have probably been more succesfull by just finishing his first chase and hook the survivor.
"There is absolutely no excuse for RNG to play such a large role in a game's outcome. "
This map has way more rng than that... 1. Maps are vastly different balanced: Cowshed and shelter woods 2. The exact same map can be brokenly loaded or be completely empty and there are countless more bad rng things
In conclusion RNG is not only involved in Nemesis' terrible zombie AI.
Zoning together with a zombie is part of his gameplay, if you allow that to happen, thats on you. the zombie is slow as hell.
Also, the zombie is attracted to sound, if someone is failing skill checks, or the killer has gen perks that explode the gen, the zombie is going to travel there. the last gen is SUPPOSED to be the hardest to complete, not everything has to be a walk in the park.
There is no reasonable scenario in which all spray cans would be used up. None. How bad do the survivors and the killer have to be that no one has ended the match in that massive amount of time?
People need to stop calling things they don't like as "badly designed".
Doctor is a terrible killer with almost no hope for redemption without a complete redesign. I'll bet you $1000 I can do better with Nemesis than you can do with doctor over 5 maps of each of our choice (at least one of which is likely to overlap).
Nemesis just needs his "2.0" rework that Legion and Ghostface got.
1) Remove the "3 tier" whip system and just have Nemesis play the entire game in T3 OR give Nemesis the ability to injure and infect.
It would make far more sense for Nurse to be a "build up" killer than Nemesis. Limit her to one blink until she has blinked and hit survivors three times, then she unlocks two charges for blink. Do the same for Blight : limit his bounces to three until he has three hits on survivors from three bounces or less.
2) Increase Zombie model and hitbox sizes to be that of the killer (making them less likely to get stuck). Make Nemesis "no clip" through his zombies and make an animation of them being shoved or something when he does. Scale zombie detection and movement based on map size. For maps around 9000m² leave this as 1.0 . For maps larger than that give zombies a huge boost in the 25-50% category so zombies are interacting with players as often as they do on small maps like coal tower or PH map. The 25% bonus would be for maps +1000m² and anything larger would be 50% movement and detection.
Delete zombie detection addons. Rework them to increase survivors that are healing and working on generators by 5m/10m depending on rarity. Double these distances if the survivor is infected (do not double a double in case two detection addons are used)
Any zombie that gets stuck or is "afk" will teleport to the nearest hook after getting stuck for more than 2 seconds. They will flag the spot where they got stuck and make a log file so that the pathing error can get fixed in the future.
3) Rework almost all of Nemesis's addons so they matter. Make one of his green addons be changed to : if infected then you do not hear the killer's terror radius. Make the licker addon be : -3% move speed forever while infected. Change the zombie move speed pink addon to : increase zombie speed by 50% at the start of the game; every completed generator increases zombie speed by 50% forever.
Change the green addon that slows vaccine opening time to be : -1 vaccine in the trial.
Change the addon that reduces current vaccine count in the trial to -2 vaccines in the trial. Obviously allow these to stack so that there is only enough for one survivor if both are used.
Change the brown useless addons that do things like : show the aura when a zombie hits a surviovr to : shows surviovr aura when they are within 5m of a zombie.
Hopefully someone gets the idea.
-"I've had MANY games against Nemesis where the last gen could have been done three times over while Nemesis overcommitted to a chase, only for a zombie to wander back to the gen over and over again"
That's probably because The Nemesis was using Discordance or Tinkerer both of which make the zombie go right back to the generator. That probably not the RNG you think it is.
I agree with you about zombies. Very unfun mechanic for both sides and feels cheap.
My only problems with Wesker’s infection are that it makes it too easy to tunnel, and Iri Vial makes it too easy to run out of sprays. WIthout Iri Vial, running out of sprays due to 3-gen scenarios are either the fault of the survivors, or because of certain gen-kicking perks that are too strong right now and aren’t specific to Wesker, but with eliminating 4 sprays right at the start it becomes more of a Wesker problem. Wesker specifically only needs a few changes imo:
The base infection changes make it harder for Wesker to use it for tunneling, but as a tradeoff it starts from a higher threshold once a conspicuous action is taken, so if you get off hook and immediately sit on a gen, you have to deal with the infection more quickly than you did before. The Iri Vial change retains the information and slowdown it provides at the start of the match, but makes it no longer quickly reduce the number of available sprays compared to normal. I don’t think its Exposed effect really does much since fully infected survivors can be instadowned anyway and removing it would not really be much of a nerf. If 12 sprays seems like it's too many, that's because there SHOULD be too many given the nature of his power.