As a P100 Singularity Main, I believe I know why people don't play him. Here's what can be done!
Since the event, I have been grinding Singularity and have played nearly 1000 games as him. Just last week I got him to P100, and since then I have been having people come into chat and ask me for tips and tricks, but more importantly a lot of people asking how I can stand playing him so much...
I usually answer with this, One, I love playing Singularity because his whole concept and power is very fun and interesting to me, and I love being able to control a large portion of the map with my pods and having a somewhat decent chase power.
People usually then bring up their issues that they encounter when playing singularity.
- Pods are constantly disabled, and It feels like I have no power at all for most of the match.
For this, I totally agree with... however only when starting out.
At first It is almost unbearable learning to spam your pods to make the survivors use as many EMPs as possible, only to have them get rid of the 10 -20 seconds of "podding" you did, all with ONE EMP. The EMPs are by far the most crucial factor when it comes to determining what deters people from playing this killer.
While I generally don't have an issue when it comes to the EMPs, it is simply because I am constantly spamming my pods, making sure nobody is holding onto EMPs, and it's just A LOT of work for such little pay off.
The main issue that remains with EMPs is their MASSIVE range. The 24 meters for one EMPs is quite literally insane. I'll have times where I have something I really need to defend and put two pods far apart (or what I think is far enough) only to see a survivor come in with one EMP and just barely disable both. This part is what is the most annoying about this killer. I've also never understood the purpose of the slip-stream spreading between the survivors when one single EMP can remove it from both of the survivors. If you want them to actually fear grouping up, then make it so it's more punishing, so an EMP can only remove one slipstream at a time. This will make it so survivors can't remove all of your hard earned pressure so easily. And make the killer feel a lot more smooth and less chaotic not having to be spamming your camera all match just to use your power. On top of this, the range of the EMP should be reduced to half of what it's at currently so it's not being used in such a large radius to remove so much of the killers power. I had a team yesterday that made it nearly impossible to win with the amount of EMPs they were using and always had. I would check all of my pods to see them constantly disabled, and then see they would still be holding another EMP ready to just disable it again. While this hasn't really been an issue before (for me), on really strong maps, this can be excruciating to play against and make you feel powerless. Perhaps the duration of the disabled Biopod could be reduced some more to make this feel more balanced.
- "His chase potential just feels Awful, I teleport and it feels I lose distance and give them another loop around the pallet"
While this part mostly just comes from learning Singularity, I think this is a very valid complaint. Playing Singularity without the exhaustion add on, or the 5% extra move speed is almost impossible against a good team. (Especially if they have Made For This). That 5% he gets from his add-on feels almost necessary to even have a chance to use your power in chase. Which is why most people say he feels like so much work for so little effort.
You already have to be trying really hard to keep people slip-streamed, even in chase, and then once you do you have a pretty lack lustered chase power that gets countered easily with not doubling back and simply pre-throwing the pallet.
For fixing this, I think making the 5% speed base kit in his Overclocked mode would make this killer 10X more barrable for newer and experienced players. Having to rely on add-ons of purple rarity every match just doesn't feel the greatest, especially when it's not that strong.
Running the speed add-on makes him feel actually playable against a good survivor in chase, and even then, it can still be difficult to catch them.
- "Improve the placement detection of Bipods"
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to be given the go to place a pod only for it to glitch out and not get placed, or the amount of times I get the prompt to teleport to a survivor and then it places another biopod instead.
This is more just a QoL change, but it gets VERY frustrating after you've played a lot of him.
Summary for those of you who don't want to read this all:
- Reduce the range of EMPs
- Make EMPs only remove one slip-stream per EMP (making the spreading effect between survivors more punishing)
- Make his 5% speed add on part of the base-kit overclocked mode
- Improve the placement detection of Bipods
With these changes, I think this would give players a much smoother and more enjoyable experience playing Singularity, especially when they are just starting out.
Seeing he has the lowest kill rate in the entire killer roster definitely gives warrant to some buffs/QoL changes, and I hope that at least some of this feedback is helpful!
P.S. This killer is still fantastic to play as, and against! I just wish I got to play against more of them, and improving Singularity's gameplay hopefully will encourage that!
Comments
I don't see how this killer could be more enjoyable or effective while using a controller.
IDK if it's because there's just too few of them, but going against singularity feels like
a, free win - if they are using the power in a wrong way, they are just giving you distance for free. Or you find yourself in a map like Lery's which basically makes singularity M1 killer for boring match.
b, Meeting strong singularity on "normal" map on the other hand feels similar to meeting god-tier nurse. No matter what you do, you are always slipstreamed and even using EMP will prolong the inevitable for 10s. You are just going down, because there's literally nothing you can do not counting dropping pallet at the exact time when it does something - only to be shot again and repeat the same thing but with 1 less pallet in the map for only ~5s wasted for the killer (LoS blocking does not work, because he can place several biopods mid-chase covering whole loop, leaving loop does not work as he has direct LoS, using EMP buys you a few seconds - but now you have no defense - and all the destroyed biopods can be redeployed within 2-3s).
At this point - I just don't like to see the killer at all (it's by far much more benign then knight or chess merchant, but still - you just know the game will be stomp one way or another which is boring).
I posted this idea in another topic, but I don't play Singularity enough to know if it's a good idea. As a Singularity main, what are your thoughts?
What if...
There is a tradeoff at the start. If survivors hop on a gen straight away, they give up their early EMP protection. If they hold onto their EMP until they or another survivor is in chase, they forego making gen progress.
The Singularity needs time to setup, tag, and catch up, before it can use its killer power effectively. The survivors having to manually start the printers buys The Singularity that time, while the printer cooldown reduces EMP spam.
Removing EMP's when repairing gens also means survivors cannot easily horde EMP's and sit on a gen, saving it for if/when the chased survivor needs it and swings by. Instead, the survivor will have to leave the gen, grab the EMP, catch up to the chase to aid, and then go back to the printer later to start it over again.
singularity is really really tricky to buff i agree with the comment above a good singularity is very oppressive and leaves you very few options in chase.
i think the payoff to a good use of his power is decent in most matches, it's already much better than most killers but people don't really wanna do much effort to learn him when there are easier killers to play i really think wesker just rotted people's brains that if a killer isn't a dasher or easy to play they just won't bother.
plus a large part of why people don't play him is that he requires fast inputs and turns which controller players struggle with (a common problem with a lot of killers on console)
i can agree with improving the detection of camera placement plus the Survivors so it doesn't get blocked by a twig or whatever small thing that hides the Survivors model.
if you make it so emp range is smaller or only affects one Survivor singularity becomes a 3 gen nightmare, hens already did a 3 gen singularity against a swf team in customs and they struggled I'd totally agree with those when they fix the 3 gen issue like they promised.
giving him 5% haste is just leaving even less options for Survivors in chase when you already have overclock so it's just a lose lose for Survivors.
"when they fix the 3 gen issue like they promised"
They didn't promise this. They said they're buffing Deja Vu until they have a way to resolve the 3 gen issue.
Just like they said they're adding Bloodlust to the game until they can resolve problematic map designs.
I definitely agree with soma photo problem vs stronger teams. i don't know about EMP change. I think it might better to improve singularity tracking capacity and ability to spread infection instead. he's suppose to infect most of the team but he has no tracking tools at base to do that. effort it takes for survivor to remove infection is a lot easier then it takes for killer to macro infection. it might better to give him some QOL tracking improvements.
Here's an example.
-> When Singularity looks through bi-pods, he can see aura of generator intensity of the generators -> gives clues for where to apply infection. It fits his lore. He is like rogue AI that supposedly is smarter then humans and understands technology.
-> When a survivor is within radius of bi-pod, the bi-pod is shown in yellow within 20 meters -> this gives information to switch to camera to infect survivors. This also fits his lore because he is suppose to be hunting survivors.
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Another aspect that I find cumbersome for him is removal of pods and the restriction of pods. the pod limit of 8 makes feel little bit limiting because in practice, he needs few pods to use in chase and few pods he uses to survey gens. using pods in chase makes him lose pods for infecting survivors in macro game. I am not entirely sure for what would be good solution for this. a possible idea I had was something like this.
-he can place 2 pods above the limit but the pods above the limit only last 20 seconds
another change that would be interesting is if you hold M2, you can press... secondary power which I think CTRL by default, the button that reloads clowns bottles to remove camera's that you face. right now, if you want to remove pods from distance, you need spam pods to reset entire map. he has limited control over pod removal. this would give some more control over it.
I would go more along lines of qol minor buffs. not massive direct power-level type buffs.
Note that the EMP range is 10 meters and not 24 as you wrote it.
If you also keep in mind that pod-infection range is 15m, you can space your biopods so that only one can be disabled with a single EMP, while they still cover areas pretty well. Though I admit - trying to do optimal trigonometry for pressure made my head hurt, and I started to feel an urge to play Bubba instead, and do absolutely no thinking at all during the trial.
Firstly, the EMP range is not 24m. It's less than half of that at 10m. The problem people have is their abundance as while they take 100 seconds to print, the 100 seconds restarts the moment you pick up an EMP. So, especially after everyone grabs one and the next ones are printing, you can end up with 7-8 EMPs in the game at once and you can only chase 1 survivor at a time. It can easily get overwhelming.
This is weird because I honestly don't know. I don't know if it's mostly MFT that causes this feeling or if it's because the 5% haste feels like a must anyway. I can't tell. Just nerf MFT and then we can judge properly. As is, it's confusing.
Pretty self-explanatory. Not much to add.
I bought Singularity and I was severely disappointed in bHVR over it. Ill give you some feedback on these points.
I would not say Pods are constantly disabled, rather Survivors have a way easier time to remove them during chase increasing the length of each chase, every god damned time. The times I actually see a pod camera that is blocked is tops 2 times a match. But the result of that is the same, it feels I have no power at times OR WORSE, that I have to work overtime every chase to try to keep my power up, but end up with no results.
When you are honestly trying your best but the game spits in your face. That is a moment to stop playing Singularity-
A solution here would be to set a max to the amount of pods that can be destroyed by each EMP or give pods a grace period, where they have to shoot one time or have been teleported to one time before they can be disabled.
I agree with this sentiment, however I don't think its about the speed from addons or exhaustion. I think its the slowdown that Singularity gets for 1.5 seconds that frustrates me the most. For all the work I give in keeping the survivors podded, the only bonus is a tp with a slowdown and spirit fury if they use a pallet. not very impressive.
Like if the TP was more like Hag or Nurse, where both characters are almost instantly into the action of the chase, ready to perform a move is way better than the slow impotent tps that the singularity has atm. Its so cruel from bHVR here I am working HARD to keep survivors podd'ed and they cant even give me an action packed teleport? I makes no sense to remove a chance for action with slowing everything down. It just feels awful
yes. they never stick, any chance of creative use of the environment is made impossible by now allowing the pods there.
My conclusion is that the Singularity was designed to be balanced before being designed to be fun to play and I will await bHVR to address the issues in a future patch, like they spent so much time on making a cool Killer. Why not make it worth their time and OUR time? Makes so little sense to me.