The First - new killer thoughts.
Ok, I'm enjoying playing against him and I can even still loop / avoid his Vine Attack most the time, but:
1. I DO think Vine Attack could do with ONE minor adjustment, playing against him as a Survivor / Looper: the part that's kind of NOT fun about Vine Attack currently is when I'm looping, The First can simply just charge and hold that attack indefinitely, making me dodge / juke back and forth indefinitely and then release it right at the perfect moment. My only option there is to 'run away' which then just ruins my nice loop tile and puts me into dead zones for M1 attack run downs or more Vine Attacks.
2. I think he gets to reuse Vine Attack a little too often right now, so it's literal just harrassment of survivors. That isn't fun.
The rest is great. The clocks, the tunneling under ground, and his big area effect when emerging from ground feels nicely balanced.
Vine Attack feels broken, even when I'm doing well faking out the Killer trying to hit me with it. It's making looping near impossible.
If Behavior wants to stop loopers as a game feature, then I guess, just root us in place at the start of the game and let the killer just come and down us in place, it'd be about the same thing. :P
I jest, but with a grain of seriousness. It feels like Behavior keeps slanting new killers and features to anti-loop to where all the survivors get to do is run away / hide / how they don't get seen.
Since when is looping bad now? It's part of the game mechanics for survivors. Please stop nerfing survivors and making it even easier for Killers to down everyone. It's already practically zero skill to play as Killer as it is. Killer is EZ mode. Survivor is where the skill is.
Comments
This is so accurate, honestly. I think holding the Vine Attack isn't that much of a problem. It's frustrating, sure, but if you're just patient as a survivor, then you can handle it well. However, spamming the Vine Attack is a bigger problem. It's a great way of zoning a survivor into another area that puts the survivors into a worse area, right? Several killers can do that, e.g. Artist. But the difference is that The Artist has a reasonable cooldown on her Dire Crows, while Vecna has virtually zero cooldown on his Vine Attack.
In my opinion, Vecna should have a longer cooldown on his power, even if only by like half a second. This would encourage more skill expression in the character, forcing a requirement for higher accuracy and precision, as well as encouraging patience and better power management. Vecna's biggest problem is that he's such a strong character with such a low skill ceiling.
He's Nurse (Vine Attack spam), Drac (holding said Vine Attack), Artist (potential for zoning survivors), and Pig (undetectability in The Upside Down) thrown into a blender and vomited out with little thought for balancing and tuning. It's the same issue with Krasue, where she had almost zero fatigue on her powers and extremely low cooldowns on launch.
While Vecna isn't exactly as bad as Krasue's launch, I think even with a few nerfs, he'd still be at least high B-tier - mid/high A-tier.