What is going on with the Nurse
Time to make a post out-lining what I think has actually shaped the discussion of Nurse since she emerged as 'the best killer' out of nowhere(following the most severe nerfing of any character which made her for a short time 'the worst killer'). I've made it in a new thread because it's long even for me. You were warned.
So just to outline my views on the Nurse: depending on what standards you measure her by, she is the best and worst killer in the game. Almost every discussion I get involved in about her revolves around the ability of one side to ignore this and the other to force them to look at it, like the creatures in Birdbox. Both know the Nurse needs adjusting, but the former group understand that if they consent to this then survivors will continue to enjoy being balanced on a different standard; that of 'how most players who are in lower-ranks play', which if it was applied to the Nurse would mean she needs several significant buffs. The nut-shell of everything now:
- Her addons have never been changed.
- This makes the sudden recent focus on them suspicious.
- The consensus that addons hindered blinking never went away, it just got drowned-out.
- This needs explaining by those pushing for changes to Nurse.
- Survivors having become worse at the game is currently the best explanation.
- That isn't being acknowledged because it undermines the case for changing Nurse.
- It instead supports the case for changing survivors, in a way they have resisted for 3 years.
- As they will not support that, a compromise is reverting Nurse changes in patch 1.9
TL;DR version below
Other than that is a more specific issue: there have always been complaints about the Nurse, but why have they only recently become fixated on her addons? I could say that 'survivors have found a wedge-issue, a point of least-resistence and the devs are cooperating with them'. Even killer-mains after all are saying 'her basekit is fine, it's just those addons'.
My own thoughts on that are: "Am I the only person left playing this game who doesn't have a goldfish memory-span?"; the Nurse's addons have not been changed at all since she was released, none of them. There hasn't been any listed changes to the game which would have affected them either in a way that reflects the drastic change in focus that complaints about her have had. Why was no one complaining about them in 2017? Why has it only become a thing since then?
I'll reiterate something else I've already said: if you told a Nurse-main in 2017 that people would be complaining about her addons making her over-powered, they would reply "Oh I wonder what buffs they'll get to cause that?". The answer is none; they haven't been changed, nor affected directly or indirectly by any other balance, design or mechanical changes beyond the superficial. That Nurse-main would then make the obvious conclusion: "What happened that made survivors so bad then?".
One narrative pushed is that Nurse's extra-blink addons give her multiple chances to react and course-correct during a blink-chain, limiting the ability of survivors to evade. This means you no longer have to be good with the Nurse, merely adequate.
IF this were all there was to it though, I would expect Nurse to have made great strides in no longer being so weak at low-ranks and another killer to take her place as the weakest. This doesn't appear to have happened. Also, was it the case in 2017 and people just didn't realise it was the addons when they made more generalistic complaints about her? Why were Nurse-mains at the time saying they preferred not using them because they interfered with muscle-memory? Did they just not realise the utility of extra blinks?
I think survivors have stumbled over the truth but not noticed: it's not that the Nurse has extra chances to succeed because of extra-blinks, but that survivors have extra-chances to fail. Blinking with addons remains as hard as it was in 2017.
With all the focus on addons though, we're out on what has changed about blinking itself. In Patch 1.9 from January 2018, substantial changes were made to the function and appearance of her blinking, as well as the way her lunge-attack out of a blink. Killers discussed these changes and the consensus was that the changes were mostly neutral. I have now partially changed my mind on this.
I now believe survivors failed to adapt to those changes. I don't think they realised the implications of this one in particular: "Duration of the blink now depends on the how long the player charged the blink for, rather than the distance traveled during the blink. The time required to fully charge a blink (2 seconds), the maximum distance traveled (20 meters) and the time required to cover that distance (1.5 seconds) remain unchanged."
Survivors are not able to judge how far the Nurse is blinking based on how long she charged each blink; they can react, but not anticipate. A Nurse can fully-charge a blink, then aim lower at the ground to shorten the distance. This reduces the uncertainty and inaccuracy that extra-blink addons introduce. It reduces the require muscle-memory for a Nurse blinking towards a close survivor. Killers though have become so accustomsed to adapting by now that we don't realise when we're doing it; the Nurse-meta following her initial nerfs happened almost by accident too.
It turns out that she has in fact gone through a second evolution in her meta, due to being able to short-blink on a full-charge. The patch notes for 1.9 say that "The following points will address the additional balance changes that should counter balance the improved Blink", but none of the following points address blink at all, or seem to have any relevance. It's just changes to pallets, STBFL, map changes, scratch-marks and an exploit fix(listed under balance rather than bug-fixes for some reason).
Changing the Nurse on the pretense and manufactured consensus that her addons are a problem is absurd. There is nothing to explain how this could have changed since 2017, save for 1.9 changes which are really about killers adapting instinctively and survivors not at all. If it just seems like survivors really can do nothing against post-1.9 blinks, then there is the option to revert the 1.9 changes, not knee-jerk nerf the Nurse, because that is what it would be. Nothing has been learned from all the previous mistakes if this is on the cards.
Comments
@marth88gaming did you say Nurse needed NERFS?
That is your definition of it, and it makes no sense at all.
Urban Dictionary: Something that is so overpowered,that it makes all other options look terrible.
Obviously there is nothing in the world that is broken for everybody. The best gun in a Shooter might be broken for 99,9% of the Playerbase, but per your definition it is not broken, since my 98 year old Grandmother would still suck with it...
Good survivors already do bring perks to counter the best killers. Iron will and dead hard will never leave my loadout unless there is a big meta shift because those are necessary if you even want a slim chance of escaping against a good nurse.
Of course survivors have more flexibility. It is a 4v1 game. If the killer is too powerful, you get what is happening with nurse (4k's left and right). Even being as efficient as possible and still dying because nurse is broken is not good balance. On the other side of the coin, if survivors are too powerful they can be laid-back and clown around. You need good balance in a game like this or it becomes super un-fun for one side, believing you have no chance to win. Simple solution at this stage of the game: nurse nerf to take away her overpowering, dominating wins, and a major map overhaul to put more pressure on survivors, which is how they should feel - pressured. But that would take a lot of work and for behavior to admit that making increasingly larger and more complicated maps is a mistake. That doesn't seem to be the current trend.
Don't argue with Sluzzy. It's not worth your time. Imagine thinking nurse needs "insane prediction"...
When did looping become the only mechanic? Breaking LOS or stealth not a mechanic? If not, why is there perks that enhance it?
I agree base nurse is strong but so is spirit. Why can spirit have good addons but nurse cannot?
If the tactical switch in emphasis of survivor complaints about the Nurse can be used to claim that they have in fact improved against the basekit Nurse, then there are two issues.
Ruin is not mandatory. You bring perks to slow the game and so do survivor bring perks to survive longer.
you dont bring perks as killer to counter dead hard for example
@ArecBalrin
You realize the vast majority of those are 2 man's, right? 4 man swf's are about 5%, and 3 man swf's are either 10% or 15%. On top of that, they've shown that the average survival rate of 40% only goes up to 50% for those playing in swf, so not really the impact you want to believe. People enjoying some games with a friend =/= sweaty tryhard 4 man's every game. You can stop your false equivalency now please.
Why is it so hard to understand that when survivors have been nerfed so many times, that the strongest killer in the game will look stronger and stronger accordingly? Also, it should be common sense that a character with a high skill ceiling like Nurse's will feel stronger and stronger as everyone continues to get better/more familiar with her, eventually reaching a point where it feels oppressive. Compare her to someone like Trapper, who has a pretty simplistic kit, resulting in a low skill ceiling which most hit ages ago, meaning he feels no more powerful than he did years ago.
I have issues with this because Nurse's addons are not the strongest in the game. Ask a Myer's main why does he not use 'Tombstone Piece'. He will probably say: I can't pip or I won't get any points. Using Nurse's addon provides an interactive gaming experience and it follows the rules of the pipping system that the devs changed to cater to survivors. This is another case of a dog chasing his tail because here we have gamers using killers and addons so they can win and pip at Rank 1 and get a lot of points for and now we are trying to take that away. The pipping system is VERY flawed!
Killers can't do their jobs and survivors don't pip when they survive. WTH? What is the objectives in the game? I honestly don't know. Survivors don't know, and the devs don't know.
You sure as hell won't catch 4 experienced survivors and hook them 3 times with 90% of the killers. That leaves only a few killers than can pip and win at Rank 1.
The devs are pulled in a million different directions and they don't know what to do. They listened to survivors to make the game fun so they changed the pipping system, that immediately disqualified most of the killers at high rank.
I think they should change it so if a survivor survives then they pip. If a killer kills 3 or 4 then he pips (like it used to be)....and not only that, give him POINTS! This way a Myer's main can use his strong addons too and we'll see a variety at rank 1.
Nerfing Nurse is nerfing one of the only viable killers at high ranks and it contradicts what the devs and survivors want killers to do. Let's ask the devs to fix the pipping system and how killers are awarded points so we can see a variety and stop the nerf nurse threads.
He did though. He specified saying they were looking at the addons, not the killers base power.
Nope. Watch it again..
This pretty much sums up why the devs should pick a set of standards, communicate clearly what those standards are and then nail themselves to them; no more making exceptions and excuses. Player discussion should be less about what we 'think' and more about whether we have an argument for what aspects of the game are consistent with the rest of it.
I can't accept point #1. To even entertain it as an idea means also having to accept that somehow no one noticed the addons could be used in the way they are now for ages and even after thousands of hours of testing, most agreed addons were a liability in 2017. The more realistic possibility is that there was a relevant change that affected the addons because the addons themselves have never been changed. Not one person has been able to point out to me what that change could be in specifics, I had to go looking myself.
I revisted the over-looked patch 1.9 changes and hit upon a possible explanation, which so far no one seems to want to engage constructively with. Doing so would cause any reasonable person to have to consider that the issue wasn't so much the changes, but the inability of survivors to adapt to them, as part of a long pattern of them not adapting. MoM was changed not so long ago and now no one is running it. They should be doing though, because it was only after months of stubborn play post-nerfs that killers discovered how to make the Nurse what she is now. Instead of adapting, survivors simply stop engaging with any change they dislike.
Since Enduring was nerfed, the combo of it with Spirit Fury is no longer enough to get someone before they can reach the next pallet or vault on almost any combination of tiles on any map. You still see killers using it though as no one knows if it might have another possible utility that's been over-looked.
Regarding #2, I do not see any person who thinks that the Nurse should be changed for reasons of her addons to be a reasonable person who is not promoting double-standards. The Nurse needs changing, but it has nothing to do with her addons: that issue has been chosen purely because it's strategic. They got too much push-back over calling for Nurse nerfs before the addons became the focus; their real intent is exposed every time they come out with 'she ignores game mechanics', an argument that is equally-applicable without addons. Addons are a wedge-issue; the real goal is nerfing the Nurse but leaving survivors intact because 'most people don't play optimally', a standard no killer is afforded: we're expected to play perfectly and then still called entitled over an imagined motive of 'killers think they deserve to 4k'.
Well, that would be because there is NO Perk to counter Dead Hard.
???
You don't need a perk to counter Dead Hard. You can just bait it out?
Try to actually read a conversation before chiming in, please, your reply missed the point completely.
1) Because she does! But that doesn’t have to mean she’s OP. The fact that she’s ignores game mechanics though means her add ons need to be very carefully thought out. Right now, Omega Blink is just way too strong, and the fact that ANYONE is defending its existence is very troubling to me. Most of her add ons have downsides because without them, she’s too strong. And yet, Omega gives you a longer blink, a faster blink, and a faster charge (because the charge is the same, but you go further, so for example let’s say to go 10 meters with base kit the charge is 3 seconds, but with Omega you can go 10 meters with a 1.5 second charge. Idk the actual numbers these are just examples to demonstrate the point). The Omega build doesn’t seem to have a downside and that’s my main issue with Nurse. I also don’t think she needs more than 2 blinks but I’d put an absolute cap at 3 tops.
2) People complained that a lot of stuff was OP earlier in the game’s life that they’ve learned to counter. Also just because some people complain it doesn’t mean the entire community agrees. I don’t think base kit Nurse is OP now but when I first started playing? She seemed impossible to beat. As people get better, their opinions change, and survivors in this game have gotten way better over time, which is why you see most people saying her add ons are the problem now and not her base kit, so I’m not sure what old opinions have to do with anything. People also thought OG Freddy was OP upon release. Doesn’t make it true, it just means when you don’t know how to counter something it feels OP, until you learn to counter it.
Why not vs you?
Trying to bait forum users vs a pro nurse seems like a lopsided experiment catered to intended results.
Or get pro survivors as well.
Looping is the main mechanic for sure. I wouldn’t call breaking LOS a mechanic, more like obvious, and stealth in this game makes for painfully long boring drawn out matches and the community as a whole has shown this is not what they like, which is why the game has been switching over to a chase based system and away from a stealth based system over the last 3 years. So yeah, looping is the main defense for survivors, and Nurse ignores it completely. That is why she needs her add ons carefully balanced. You can still loop and pallet stun a Spirit, not so much against a Nurse.
I didn’t say she couldn’t have good add ons, but her current Omega blink build is way too OP in my opinion. I don’t think any of Spirit’s builds are on par with Nurse’s Omega blink.
I don't know how people keep arguing base nurse is fine.
Except, that a decent player can take the "unwinnable chase" vs her and drag it out long enough to actually do some good. You may not be able to escape her, but if you're smart, your team can get work done.
Called making the best out of a bad situation.
Dont keep this "woe is me. Its nurse theres no escape." ######### going on. It's old. It was old with legion, it was old when prayer beads were what every thread was about.
Yeah Sluzzy doesn’t seem very reasonable. I’m a damn killer main but I can still admit when something is OP. Omega blink Nurse is OP.
The pipping system is a whole different discussion. We are talking about the Nurse’s add ons, period, not the popping system. The pipping system is beyond broken for killers right now. That doesn’t mean Nurse should get OP add ons.
Because she is.
How so, please explain?
She has counterplay. You can make her lose LOS because she can’t blink 4 times to catch up to you or blink across the map. You can redirect your run so she blinks past you and she can’t correct without extra blinks/longer range. I didn’t say she was easy to verse, but she definitely has counterplay whereas omega blink or 4-5 blink Nurse is near impossible to escape. Being difficult to verse =/= OP.
Breaking LOS has an easy option for nurse. To regain LOS and not guess. You generally have two options as a survivor hang by the end of the wall and double back or keep running. If the nurse blinks to the wall you get hit, otherwise they have the second blink to eliminate most of the distance they ran. Within another set of blinks you are hit. That is not counter play. You cannot skill a straight line. It is muscle memory time/distance use the power enough and you will get this down.
I think you missed the point regarding 'she ignores game mechanics'. That is an old survivor-meme, but it's one which is incompatible with the claim that 'Nurse basekit is fine, it's just her addons' for anyone who is trying to at least pretend to be honest.
Different people have given different versions of what is meant by 'omegablink' and you haven't said in this thread at least what addons you think represent 'omegablink' so we can hardly have a reasoned discussion about that. I vaguely remember someone and it might have been you, saying that you regard 'omegablink' to be the range-addons: Ataxic Respiration, Catatonic Boy's Treasure and the one no-one uses, Wooden Horse.
Others have told me 'omegablink' is the chain-blink increases, but I'll address yours exactly how I did in the other thread: these are the very same addons which were the most problematic in 2017. Accuracy has mattered more since Nurse had her move-speed nerfed to the point where she could no longer do a conventional chase(she moves slower than a running survivor); these addons destroy accuracy over distance.
When the devs changed how blinking works in patch 1.9, it was to help survivors dodge blinks but survivors did nothing to adjust to the changes. A Nurse can't run range-addons with chain-blink addons and maintain any accuracy: they have to choose one version of 'omegablink' over the other. When Ataxic + Catatonic are being run together, the response is simple: run in a straight-line away from the Nurse then make a hard turn on the second-blink. The Nurse has less accuracy and blink-time since 1.9 is based on charge-time rather than distance travelled: they are stuck in the blink.
The same very low and dishonest standards that were claiming basekit Nurse was broken because she 'ignores mechanics' back in 2016/17 are being applied to the new narrative that it's her addons that are the problem. There is no evidence to support this; it's just being used because group-think is all some people have and here's an opportunity. It's the standard 'not all survivors play optimally, which is why killers need nerfing' all over again. This has to stop.
What you say makes sense, but people wanted her addons to be reworked since a long time. It's just that in the mean time there were Wraith, Trapper and Freddy at the top of the list of killers in need of changes. Now that they finally reworked Freddy people have simply switched their focus on what's next, and since most people seem fine with her base kit they focus on her addons.
Sorry, but who are you quoting there? I'm not going to have a discussion with you based on you making things up about what I've said, what I think and bottom-scraping standards where nothing matters and words don't mean anything.
Looping is nothing more than a way to extend a chase so everyone else can work on gens. You do that during a chase which is exactly the same thing as juking a nurse to 'extend the chase'. A good nurse being harder to juke is no different than four survivors that are good at looping/juking. The problem with everyone arguing for nurse to be nerfed wants to ignore the highest potential for survivors. I don't care if it is rare for survivors to be that good, you are still saying it is NOT ok for Nurse to be that good while survivors can be.
You are being biased if you say Spirit addons are not on par with Nurse. She has addons that improve her power much like the Nurse. She has several addons that make her move faster, move farther on a single charge, and have faster charge time, just like Nurse.
If it's my opening-post you're responding to, then you can't say 'it makes sense' then post that 'people wanted her addons to be reworked since a long time'. The meme about her addons is a recent thing and there have been no changes that could explain how addons became the problem: they have no been changed since she was released in 2016. I explain all of this at the start of the thread: you can agree or disagree with different points, but they all build up to a case against the narrative being pushed about Nurse addons at the moment.
I can tell some people haven't even bothered reading because they want to tell me what my opinions are still.
Basically you made up a quote, argued with yourself because I do not have the views you wanted to super-impose on me and now are admitting that despite me repeating myself, you can't accurately represent that I think. You just want to settle an argument you don't understand because you can't be bothered, with a KYF match because it's easier.
Such a match would only matter even slightly if I had the views you've assigned me with, so accepting that match would mean accepting your distortion of my position, which I'm of course not going to do.
You haven't read anything I have had to say. You can't tell me what my views even are.
The Nurse is not fine. The Nurse is not without the need for substantial adjustments. She has always needed them. The problem is those driving this particular bus are blind, drunk and can't read a map. The devs must stop listening to them, they have steered the game into a cul-de-sac where the only changes that can be made represent either paralysis or fudging, hence we have a new-Freddy with no particular speciality, too many abilities and as such too many moving-parts that can go wrong.
They just don't want to be told they're talking bull and their only means of support is leaning on all the other drunk and blind people, hence the only concrete argument when I follow their logic-train back to it's origin is 'lots of people seem to think so'.
If 'lots of people think so' because 'lots of people think so', where's the origin-point? There isn't any.
No, because you're still not listening. This conversation can not happen until the standards we have for balance discussions move a lot higher.
In the rush I might have missed to say that patch 1.9 not only buffed the Nurse, but made her addons usable. So while in 2016-17 they were mostly considered a hindrance, they now are commonly used, making Nurse effectively stronger in the hands of less experienced players.
So yeah, you make sense when you say 1.9 was the big thing about the Nurse and addons weren't directly changed, but I argue that people are fine with her base kit (even after 1.9) and the fact that "the meme about her addons" is not a recent thing. Devs have been saying they wanted to change her addons since at least 2 years, but in the mean time there were other priorities so the matter got a bit lost, so no, there's nothing suspicious about it.
In any case that passive-aggressive ending wasn't really called for.
The devs saying they wanted to change her addons since 2 years ago is not the same as the Nurse requiring changes due to her addons. If the devs had been honest when they first knee-jerk nerfed the Nurse, they would have quickly made changes to addons back then because they were useless, one of her achievements was impossible without them and it was already one of the hardest feat-achievements. On top of that, Kavanagh's Last Breath became a joke as it buffed chain-blinks whilst removing the ability to do any chain-blinks, unless other addons compensated for the loss of blink charges. That meant blink accuracy so poor as to be useless.
What the devs are doing now is feeding into the baseless narrative calling for Nurse changes based on a lie that addons are making her too-strong. That is being argued with a straight-face, alongside the contradictory claim that she is too-strong because 'she ignores game mechanics', something that is true with or without addons, if we ignore the dishonest framing of it.
Patch 1.9 was meant primarily to help survivors; the devs had this strange idea in their heads that making the visual cues more obvious would be useful, when survivors had already become accustomed to responding to audio cues. The audio cues were now less reliable because her blink-time was based on her charge-time afterwards, where before it was based on her distance travelled. So now a Nurse could aim lower to shorten her distance even on a max-charge, but re-appear in accordance with a longer distance.
These changes do not help the addons so much; they simply change the parameters for predicting the Nurse. My view on that is nuanced: survivors did not adapt, and I never expect them to ever adapt to anything because they have become accustomed to their main exploit-originated playstyle being catered to. When ever it is threatened by killers trying a new idea, survivors will demand and usually get a restriction imposed on killers without justification.
However, in a parallel world where survivors do learn from mistakes, remember more than a few weeks ago and think ahead more than a few minutes, they still wouldn't have been able to adapt to 1.9 changes. This is because anticipation is faster than reaction: a visual cue helps more with reactions, but no reaction is so fast it can match anticipation. Anticipation is what an audio cue helps with: the Nurse inhaling says she's started charging and the next sound out of her says she's blinking, the difference between tells both the killer and the survivor where she will go: they both have almost the exact same information. 1.9 changed that.
If there can be any argument that the Nurse needs nerfing 'because of addons', the best it can manage is a reverting of blink changes in 1.9. Every other argument in favour of nerfs, using addons as an excuse, is the same dishonest garbage that has caused the worst things in the game to be introduced.
Technically they are balancing around SWF because they are bringing solos to SWF level, then buffing killers to compensate.
Not saying Nurse is fine or not, just stating the facts.
I don't want to speak for ArecBalrin or put words in his mouth, but I share in some of the skepticism he has expressed in the past about the developers not quite understanding a lot of the factors that impact the game.
We've seen a lot of threads where Peanuts has responded to suggestions with basically "whoa, players don't need all that information" with regard to closing the aforementioned gap.
But more on-topic: This is all true about Nurse add-ons suddenly being a hot button when they've been the same way for years. The easy answer is that the game has changed around the Nurse, and other tweaks have had knock-on effects for the Nurse's kit and itemization. This is one of the big challenges of developing an asymmetrical multiplayer game like this. I can't count the number of similar instances I saw back when I played League of Legends.
The point is still the same, most people are fine with her base kit. Her addons where buffed by the change that allowed the Nurse to not be forced to commit to a long blink, since that allows her to basically remove the penalty of many addons: that's why many think her addons should be reworked (essentially to fit the post 1.9 Nurse) instead of her base kit.
In any case the lack of a proper addons balance after her big nerf at the beginning was due to how BHVR worked with Starbreeze at that time, with everything being rushed and sloppy.
The issue of course I have with 'the easy answer' is that the number of changes that have happened in the game are finite; they can be read in under an hour and with CTRL+F, specific changes take seconds to find. Being able to find out what changes could potentially affect addons is not insurmountable; it's a doddle. Yet 'the easy answer' has been presented to me as some kind of monolith.
The game has changed around the Nurse. Fine, disregard anything that obviously isn't relevant to the Nurse's blink or addons: killer-specific changes, bug-fixes for bugs that don't precede the Nurse, pallet changes, map-design where not relevant to blinking dead-zones, etc. The vast majority of changes to the game are ruled-out and we're left with a lot fewer changes to consider.
Attached to this is the idea that 'people just didn't know and now they do', to which I say "100% horse-manure". As soon as someone was onto something after Nurse's uber-nerf, she was tested to destruction and throughout 2017, no one disputed that addons were a liability, not an advantage. The idea that people didn't know that 'omegablink'(of which I've been told of two completely different addon-builds by different people) had such advantages is utter poppycock.
This is not the butterfly-effect; many tiny but un-describable changes somehow just enabling Ataxic Respiration + Catatonic Boy's Treasure to fast-blink a bigger distance or Campbell's Last Breath + Fragile Wheeze allowing course-corrections as survivors try to dodge. The changes are countable, describable and fall-short of any case for changing the Nurse how survivors have always wanted, based on 'OP addons' that were a joke just two years ago and haven't ever changed.
It's not simply that the devs are balancing around the low-ranks. When they want to nerf a killer, they have inevitably responded to feedback based on low-ranks. When they want to buff survivors, they look at high-ranks: what are killers doing and what would stop or frustrate them?
They almost never give buffs that would help low-rank survivors more than high-rank survivors, only the opposite. This is despite the fact that such buffs would help solos more than they would SWF, which people keep claiming is a goal the devs are serious about. I'll believe it when I see it.
If people(by which you mean mostly survivors) were fine with her basekit, I would have stopped hearing the perennial survivor-meme about the Nurse: "She ignores game mechanics". They're still saying it and that's what gives the game away that addons are merely a wedge-issue, not a legitimate discussion about balance. Basing proposed changes on opportunism creates problems. Talking about mechanics, with specifics in regards to cause and effect, hard-facts; those solve problems.
The Nurse IS committed to a long-blink: the time spent in a blink since 1.9 is based on the time that it was charged. She can not do anything for that base duration, even if she doesn't travel far due to lower-aiming. The response survivors should have is to pay attention to the patch-notes and what addons actually do; but most of the discussion around the Nurse fail to talk about her blink mechanics or even specify what addons are being spoken about. It keeps becoming more clearer that the term 'omegablink' is confusing people more than it is clarifying.
It's a long-standing double-standard and encapsulates almost every complaint killer-mains have about the game's history of development since release.
@ArecBalrin I love how you actually argument this thread. Really mature, and rare.
A lot of this is pure speculation, which the devs do not engage with along with other types of feedback which might come back to haunt them if they gave straight answers. Take it all with a pinch of salt; there's alot of it in these parts.
One belief is that they are scared of the game suddenly failing. The company has a patchy history; it used to be called 'Artificial Mind And Movement' if you want to google that. They never expected DbD to be the success it became, they weren't prepared for it. If you are familar with the plot of Mel Brooks' film The Producers, that's similar to the scenario BHVR would have faced.
BHVR were able to use the proceeds from the game to buy the IP from Starbreeze, who they had developed it for as a for-hire project, so now they own their game in full. This might give the impression that they're swimming in money; but Starbreeze were struggling.
Most of BHVR's income right now is coming from selling DLC for DbD. If the player-base collapsed, it would make the game less attractive to get into or to invest in as a player. So they may be scared of what the majority of players think, or what the players who buy the most DLC think. Many long-time killers don't buy any DLC; I learned my lesson after the Hag and won't pay another penny for anything. It also means killers are ignored, but that doesn't feel like it has ever been different.
They currently have only one game that has been a success and it needs to stay that way until they have another hit at least. Deathgarden looks like a flop though and it's a weird decision to revisit asymmetrical multiplayer so soon, given that people who play DbD are going to keep playing DbD. Maybe they were trying to target people who used to play DbD but don't any more. Maybe they thought their experience developing DbD, the most successful asymmetrical multi-player ever, made them experts on the genre; so Deathgarden failing must have come as a shock and they are being extremely cautious now.
I for one think they should be more open and engaging. They should do what few developers do: explain their method for making decisions, draw up clear standards and then nail themselves to them.
You are so fixated on proving that the players trying to get nurse nerfed are trying to create some sort of deception by talking about Nurse addons, and it is rather tiring. Did you know survivors are not a single entity with a single train of thought?
Some people believe nurse base is fine. They commonly say "her addons are broken, but don't touch my base Nurse!" Some people believe nurse base is not fine. They say "she breaks the mechanics of the game." Some people believe even the addons are fine because nurse needs to be this strong. If you read between the lines of what they are trying to say, it would be "I am not a good player and I want free wins as nurse, even against players much better than me."
When people say that she breaks the mechanics of the game, yes, that means they believe her basekit needs to be tuned down. A lot of people say this.
You say people don't talk about the actual blink mechanics...? Seriously? That is a large portion of what people discuss...i have no idea why you are trying to push this narrative, but it is getting old. It truly seems like all you want to do is make up facts and say people are wrong because their thoughts don't align with those facts. You never responded when I said that when I started the game in early-mid 2018, many forum posts were about how Nurse base as well as her addons were too strong. But that doesn't fit your narrative, so why would you respond, right?
People have refuted all of the points you have tried to make. Please read carefully.
The game is the best it has ever been for skilled killer mains. It is still extremely good for skilled survivor mains too. But there are still outliers, things that are too strong for the current state of the game. Whether or not nurse players believed her addons weren't helpful when she was released is truly irelevant to the current situation. Since I started playing this game, nurse has been head and shoulders above every killer, both at base and with her addons. Survivors haven't "chosen not to adapt because they only want to loop and are lazy". That idea is ludicrous.
Skillful killers as a whole are much better than they were, and Skillful survivors as a whole are much better than they were. Claiming the opposite is simply wrong.
I've read carefully and you haven't addressed anything. Everything you're accusing me of, you're doing right in this post. You even quote me as saying something I never have, it doesn't even resemble my opinions.
I do not deal with narratives and generalities; I deal with specifics and standards, both of which you have avoided.
People are still making Nurse threads? There is like 50 of them.
It’s this simple...
Nurse at base is fine, don’t change ANYTHING about her base-kit.
Nurse’s strong add-ons like five blinks and omega blink need a rework. At MOST, Nurse should have an ultra-rare that gives ONE additional blink but that is all.
People also bring up “skill” and “competitive” when this game requires very little skill on either side and it is NOT meant to be competitive at all. The ONLY killer that requires skill is Huntress and somewhat Nurse.
What more is there to discuss?
If the devs are serious about being fair to both sides and/or serious about balance, then they would engage in some official tournaments with the best DBD survivors pitted against the best Nurse players. If the nurse wins every game with it being obvious the survivors having no chance to complete all 5 generators then I'll be cheering along with everyone else that wants her nerfed.
I would wager the best survivors would be near impossible to beat, even with Nurse.
Nerfing Nurse for the pure sake that "Survivors don't like or can't bully one particular killer" is a knee-jerk reaction that the devs are in a habit of doing all the time.
There's no grounds at all for claiming 'basekit Nurse is fine, it's the addons'. Nothing about the game has changed that would make the addons the issue. I started this thread to examine how people came to think this was the case, but so far people believe it because 'lots of people believe it' and it's a self-reinforcing cycle.
Trying to follow the chain back to it's source seems fruitless; no one can come up with a self-sustaining argument for why Nurse's addons are the issue. They have not been changed since Nurse was released, nor have they been affected by the rest of the game changing, nor did people just simply learn ways of using them that didn't exist in 2016 and 2017.
The closest there is to a change with a knock-on effect is patch 1.9, which is more an issue of survivors failing to adapt to changes to blink that were intended mainly to help them dodge blinks, which they apparently paid no attention to.
I didn't quote you even once, but now I will:
Your narrative, a tired one at that, is that "nothing has changed that would warrant current talk of nurse addons being broken".
All of your points stem from that belief, when it is wrong. People have been complaining about both base Nurse and her addons since I started playing the game. Why are you assuming this is a recent discussion? Instead, you choose to blame an ENTIRE group of players (I thought you don't do generalities?), saying survivors simply are choosing not to adapt to blink mechanics.
Finally we agree on something, for different reasons. I would love to see the blood bath that would ensue from such a tournament. The nurses would dominate.