Mage Hand is Way Too Strong - It Guarantees a Hit on Every Use
Mage Hand has been buffed into an uncounterable Scamper 2.0. Every use of it guarantees hits, and the buffs need to be reverted.
Every game I have played as or against Vecna, Mage Hand has never failed to enable the Killer to land a hit.
Mage Hand's best use on PTB was to allow the Killer to reposition underneath a pallet, giving them the upperhand for mind games. Lifting pallets AS they were being thrown also created a lot of close call scenarios - many ending with a hit already. Many players, after only playing a couple games with him on PTB where they did not learn the best-use scenarios, prematurely declared Mage Hand as useless, while they were carelessly throwing it out the power in bad scenarios and with poor timing.
Now after the buffs, whenever Mage Hand is used, there is absolutely nothing a Survivor can do to avoid getting hit. It denies the immediate options for a Survivor while providing incredibly little movement penalty for the Killer, resulting in Survivors being unable to reach anywhere unless they're already next to another resource. This feels MISERABLE to play against, and completely unearned to play with.
There is no time to reposition or find safety elsewhere, and lifting pallets is doubly punishing against Sruvivors. It's created tons of lose-lose scenarios: If the Pallet is chosen not to be thrown and held up, Vecna walks through and gets a hit. If the Pallet is thrown down, Vecna can almost instantly pick it up, walk through, and still get the hit. No matter what the Survivor chooses to do at a pallet, they get hit.
There's a lot of reasoning that "it has a long 38-second cooldown and it punishes you for using it poorly," but this is not an excuse for uncounterable powers. That doesn't change the fact that the Killer times it perfectly, then there is nothing that Survivor players can do to predict or outplay it. This is the EXACT same reason why free-roaming Scampers had to be removed this very same patch.
Please revert Mage Hand back to the way it was on PTB. Lifting pallets is way too fast, there is not enough slowdown on the Killer for Survivors to react to save their life against both holds or lifts.
Comments
Played vs vecna a few times last night.
Gotta with OP. It feels like half the stuff he can do gives guaranteed hits. Mage hand is a hit as far as I can tell, every time. I tried greeding and the duration it gets held in place seems to be long enough so the killer can hit you regardless. Then at the next loop they either spawn skeletons inside you so that you get hit or while you're locked in an animation.
Unpopular opinion but artist is actually my least favorite killer because it feels like you're just constantly put into lose/lose situations vs her and vecna gives the same feeling. I'm not sure how to fix it. Mage hand is on a razor's edge. If the numbers are adjusted too much it becomes useless. I don't want another useless killer in the game.
I'm not too familiar with Mage's hand other than he can prevent a pallet from being dropped, but can he also reset a pallet? There doesn't seem to be a counter to this, and it doesn't appear that he has a time penalty; on the contrary, he gets HASTE! LOL.
After a couple weeks of seeing how this plays out, I still very much agree with my initial opinions both playing as and against Mage Hand. Every use of Mage Hand by a halfway-experienced Lich guarantees a hit.
After several weeks I have found no way to counterplay this, other than pre-drop practically every pallet every 35 seconds until you know for a fact Mage Hand is on cooldown, which even then does not necessarily even save you, whittles through pallets like nobody's business (especially on maps that really rely on pallet efficiency to stay alive), and is also incredibly boring.
If anything, the closest thing I've found to counterplay is found only if Vecna is running Telekinesis Ring to increase the speed at which pallets are lifted - which allows Survivors to maybe sometimes run back under pallet and spam the prompt to drop it before he can M1 again, but even that is a total gamble based on how fast the server responds to which player (and does nothing to help with holds instead of lifts)
I've seen posts floating around of a proposed impending nerf to mage hand lift time back to 0.5 seconds - more needs to be done than this. Vecna needs a bigger movement speed penalty for using Mage Hand, something in between PTB and live (I think it was good enough on PTB but I think even a compromise here would be any better than how it is now), otherwise pallet holds are still going to be guaranteed hits.
I maintain still that being able to hold a pallet as Killer so that you can position yourself underneath it is incredible value as it is, that simply doesn't manifest itself with an immediate payoff - being able to position yourself under an undropped pallet means so much alone.