Buff Blindness Add-on's
Out of all of the detrimental status effects in the game, Blindness is quintessentially the most useless.
1. Its effect is completely negated by SWF teams on voice comms.
2. it only affects the survivor(s) struck by it, and not the rest of their team.
3. Even though it's effects have been buffed to include hiding the auras of downed survivors, and hooked ones as well as the hooks aura, survivors still see where their team mate has been hooked due to the giant "black circle" or "bubble" that sticks around for a few seconds after the hooking occurs.
4. Lastly, all add-on's and perks that inflict Blindness currently either have a pathetically low duration, or in "Hex:The Third Seal's" case, announces its presence, and can be neutralized by a quick totem hunt.
Blindness can be useful against solo survivors, but overall In order for it to have any semblance of usefulness for the killers I propose a simple experiment in the upcoming PTB: Increase the Blindness duration on add-on's that inflict it to 90 or 120 seconds.
There are only 4 killers that have blindness add-on's, and of them 1 afflicts it for 60 seconds, 2 for only 30 seconds, and 1 for as long as the RBT stays on the survivors head, but with such a low duration they just aren't able to make good use of them. Meanwhile other add-on's can inflict Exhaustion for up to 90 seconds, or Mangled for 120 seconds, which are much more powerful detrimental effects than temporarily knocking out a survivors aura based situational awareness. I wouldn't doubt there are many killer players out there with huge stacks of these blindness add-on's because of how useless they are, and all of them cringe at having to buy one in their bloodwebs in order to get better add-on's on the same path. The Devs may have intended Blindness as a way to knock out the survivors aura reading in order to keep a single pursued survivor from locating help, accidentally lead the killer to their teammates, or thought that it would be too strong against certain perks if it had a higher duration, but in practice they amount to terribly under-powered add-on's that just waste blood points. I believe that increasing the duration of Blindness caused by these add-on's in general will make them more useful against solo survivor groups as it will allow the killer(s) to afflict more than one survivor at a time. Otherwise there's little to no point in having any add-on's apply Blindness, hell, even Hemorrhage would be better because at least that aids in tracking. This may be just a minor gripe about Blindness add-on's, but please Devs consider this proposal for the upcoming PTB since its a small adjustment, and the PTB is a good testing ground for it.
Comments
Y'know why don't we make blindness just make survivors have black screens so they can't see anything
@Kagrenac
This is a good effect, and the higher tiers could make blindness cover more of the screen or/and reduce your perception of the killer's terror radius.
Nevermind... only real "problem" is Huntress
As for Blindness reducing FoV of a survivor could work
Thinking back on the PTB for the Plague, there was a bug where the green sickness effect on the edges of a survivors screen became opaque and black. When that occurred it narrowed a survivors 3rd person FoV to a smaller area around their character and made it more difficult to know where the killer was coming from. If blindness had that effect intentionally however, or simply darkened the survivors screen kind of like how Deep Wounds or Borrowed time does, as well as taking out their aura reading, then that would make blindness a far more useful status effect that would justify a 30-60 second duration. Obviously I could see the darker effect being at max once first struck by blindness and slowly come back to normal as the duration ticks down, but it would also make Hex: The Third Seal worthy of its Hex (read OP) status, and make the Pigs Blindness add-on's fantastic. As an added bonus, this buff would actually make blindness useful against all survivor teams, SWF or not.
Perhaps this buff suggestion should be for another PTB, but for now I'm making a simple adjustment suggestion of increasing the overall duration of the current add-on's since its such a small change that could improve the add-on's usefulness, if only in a minor way.
It's little, but i wish Blindness would also remove the Red Stain.
Yeah, personally I see the stain as an extension of the Entity's aura emanating from the killers eyes. If Blindness kills aura vision, it should take out their ability to see the entity's aura/red stain as well, and would make for a decent if minor buff to the status effect, but doing so would mean that Beast of Prey would need to get a full rework... not that its very useful right now anyways.