Suggestions to make the Snares useful
Two things for the snares need adjustment to give them viability:
- The snares need at base a greater slowdown effect than their current one. For Clowns bottles the base 15% slowdown makes perfect sense because the AoE is much larger for them and so is the lasting effect after the survivors leave the gas cloud. The snares on the other hand have a 1 meter area of effect, don't affect survivors until they are sleeping, can't be actively placed under a running survivor, and can be seen and avoided with relative ease. Due to these downsides of using the snares, they should be compensated by having a greater impact and slowdown effect on survivors who don't try to avoid them/get trapped by them. An increased slowdown of 20-25% (perhaps with add-on's but we'll get to that next) would make the snares enough of a threat that survivors would actively try to avoid them, and allow for greater zoning/anti-loop pressure for the killer as well as encourage survivors to want to stay out of the dream state or risk getting snared in a chase.
- The snares enhancement add-on's need different or better effects. Currently they are limited to Blindness and Hemorrhage status effects which are the weakest of the status effects when it comes to game play affecting mechanics. Temporarily affecting survivors aura reading ability, and making their blood trails easier to track are very niche and mostly useless effects when up against SWF teams, or when not bringing in the blood tracking perk Bloodhound. Those effects can remain just fine for the Common and Uncommon level add-on's as long as their effective times are also raised due to the lack of pressure they put on the survivors, but at the Rare and Very rare level they need to apply better pressure on survivors with effects like Exhaustion, Exposed, Mangled, Broken, Lowered repair speed, or even a 5% increase to the Hindered status's slow effect. Otherwise some alternative effects would be to give them either an extended amount of time on their slowdown after a survivor steps in one, grant them the ability to stun or block a survivors path for .5-1 seconds, or like the doctors shock attack, restrict survivors ability to perform actions for a short period of time after stepping in one.
Changes like these would greatly increase the threat potential of the snares, make them more versatile, and would help to up their viability to be on par with the dream pallets and make choosing snares over pallets a choice of play-style preference instead of "which one is better."
For reference here's how it worked in the movie:
I'm not saying it needs to be THAT long lasting or OP, but a brief stun, block, increased hindered effect, exhaustion, or ability to stop survivors from performing vault actions would definitely be more along the lines of the movies representation. Currently with how weak the snares are, their downsides, and avoid-ability, nobody wants to choose them over the dream pallets as the dream pallets are easier/faster to set, and flat out halt a survivor in place during the pallet slam animation ensuring an easy hit if they fall for it. The snares need to be on that level of utility, or they will continue to be regarded as relatively pointless.
Comments
From what I've noticed, snares have been pretty effective. Watching good killers utilize them properly taught me how to do the same, and I've found them extremely useful. I find the pallets to be much worse, because good survivors will keep track of the pallets they see and use. Snares are hard to avoid in the right spots, and when they do avoid them, they lose distance because they had to take a wider path to avoid them.
So far I haven't felt like they need any changes whatsoever.
They feel strong.
Snares > Pallets
Seriously, dream pallets are only good right now because it's new. But once survivors get used to it, and keep note of which pallets are real when they are awake, they will become useless. It's 100% dependent on survivors falling for it. It's only been 2 days and I've already learned how to avoid them most of the time.
Snares however you can't avoid, and they can cut short loops or make some pallets/windows unsafe. It can also be used as an early warning system for protect stuff you want to protect.
Pallets are stronger but way easy to counter. Snares are slightly weaker but almost impossible to counter.
Yeah no way. They don’t need any buffs. He can’t put 8 snares down. No way
What are the right spots? All I've ever seen be useful is putting them next to high traffic vaults like shack to force slow vaults.
Usually in the middle of the thing they're looping around. So, if there's debris on the right of the pallet, you would put it in the middle of the debris and force them into the snare. From that point on, you would either let them panic and vault into you, or lunge and hit them. Or you can just spam them everywhere and assure that they go down. Im not sure if I explained that really well, so here's a few examples to hopefully show what I mean:
https://youtu.be/xWQD4H_4wx4