Question for Artist Players
I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but I tried Artist today for the first time and I don't understand how she works. I have 3 birds I can play and shoot. If I hit them directly it injures them and when it goes through a object or is too far away it just swarms them.
I don't understand the swarming. Why do I have 3 birds if I don't have enough time to use more then 1? I placed 2 birds, swarmed the survivor and before I could even place the next bird down after my cooldown they already got rid of them.
Am I doing something wrong?
Comments
Firing 2 birds in your first interaction is where you're going wrong. You won't usually have time to line another shot up unless you either only fire 1 or the Survivor's progress on the removal action is interrupted (usually by dropping a pallet or vaulting), or if you use the addons that change the timers on your cooldown and on the time to disperse the swarm. Firing 2 or more is better to *confirm* a Bird Strike injury or down when you need to shotgun or block off multiple angles.
Artist is an extremely difficult Killer who is also very punishing when you don't play her correctly. Artist Syndrome (where a Killer's skill floor is too high to make them popular even if their skill ceiling is also incredibly high) is named after her for a reason. She also suffers in the Hold W prerun meta since her best strategies rely on containing a Survivor in a loop and then forcing them to misplay it. You're never gonna do well with her first try, but keep at it and you'll be birding people left and right.
As @Wiccamanplays said shoot one crow to swarm a survivor during chase. Then follow that up with another when you cooldown ends as the survivor takes 8 seconds to remove them minimum if they don't use a locker to do it. You can fire again after 5 seconds if you only shot one crow. If you shot two its 9 seconds so survivor usually will get the birds off before you could line your next shot. Still as you can first snipe them with one and then use all thee in spread battern to make hitting more likely to cause the damage. I rarely use her deny loops I just do shots through objects to swarm and then damage. You also need to be good of estimating where the survivor will run to get those hits and in the end you can use the birds to zone people even from distance as if they are swarmed they are afraid to run over the flight path you set.
She is really fun when you get those nice hits with her but her learning curve is high. I myself like playing her because I seem to be good in estimating where survivor will run and manage to do some real nice snipes even cross map downs with her.