How would you balance Nurse?
Obviously Nurse has been S tier since her launch 10 years ago, and she is way too powerful in comparison to a lot of the roster. However, I'm not entirely sure how to even nerf her without her feeling awful to play and possibly being terrible.
Many people have suggested removing her ability to see auras, but while I think that might nerf casual Nurse players, I think Nurse mains would be pretty much just as powerful as ever.
How would you all change Nurse? Do you think removing aura reading while blinking would really make all the difference?
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Blindness while charging a blink/blinking. On top a built-in counter mexhanic for survivors to disrupt her blinks now and then.
What kind of mechanic? Are you thinking of something similar to the old flashlight mechanic that prevented Nurse from blinking?
I mean, removing Auras while she is charging a Blink or Blinking is something that comes up often. And it would certainly help. I also think that they should bring back the Pallet Stun on her, where she went into fatique after a stun. This would actually reward pallet stunning a Nurse, which is hard enough to do. And it would be fair IMO since she can ignore Pallets most of the time anyway, even with that.
However, in the end, she will always be the Killer who does not play DBD. The only way to Nerf her and make her not suck afterwards (you can probably nerf her enough that nobody plays her, but this should not be the goal) would be to rework her Power. To make her Blinks way worse, but let her not rely that heavily on them anymore.
But this would require a lot of effort and especially a lot of courage from the Devs, so it will not happen. We know there would be backlash and we also know that the Dev would then scrap any ideas they might have had to nerf or rework Nurse immediatly, we have seen this often by now.
And well, after all, I am also very sure that the Devs dont want to change Nurse. While it would certainly appreciated if there would be at least a little bit of thought if she is the strongest Killer (everyone doing a Tier List slaps her on S-Tier as the strongest Killer without discussion), Nurse is the perfect excuse for every Pay2Win complaint. Even if we clearly see that new Killers are powercreeping older ones and therefore BHVR is making more money, they can simply say that the strongest Killer in the game is completely free, so there is no P2W going on.
Made a similar thread a while ago. No aura read during blink charge was the most common suggestion. I also like the idea of a baked in counter mechanic in a similar vein to xenomorph/vecna, some kind of killer item that spawns in trial interacts with her power.
I think there should be stations, that slowly get progress and produce an item similar to singularity counterplay. The item should be a throwable, comparable to a pebble, that can disrupt a nurse blink if she's hit with it. Alternatively some sort of syringe gun thats easier to aim.
Just spitballin here.
I don't really know what else you can do to her now without completely redoing how she works.
The minority, either expert or highly experienced Nurses, will more than likely destroy you but the majority will either struggle or get flat out embarrassed depending on the map or what builds the survivors have nowadays against even a semi competent solo queue team. Thats why she has a low overall kill rate. Any more nerfs will just hurt all the mid to low level Nurses and drop her kill rate to an all time low.
You dont have to be an "expert" or "highly experienced" with her to do well. She is really not that hard to play, she has a steep learning curve and those are probably the worst games you will ever have as Killer, but after a few hours, you should be good enough to win the majority of your games with her.
Her low Killrate is mainly due to the fact that she is a free Killer and everyone trying her out will get completely destroyed. Plus many drop her quickly, since there is no need to learn Nurse nowadays. Back in the day when DBD was heavy survivor sided, you had to learn Nurse to compete, but this is just not the case anymore. (Sure, if you want to have the best chances to win, learning Nurse is still the way to go, but there is no need to go through all of the time to learn her, if you can just play Killers who can also win almost all of your games and which are learned in a way shorter time)
4.4m/s. (This is actually a buff)
make fatigue take longer while near a hooked Survivor (anti camp)
make nurse auto break downed pallets if she blinks near them. Have her lose all Blink tokens after breaking a pallet.
Yeah, I mean the reality is no one buys that excuse, and even if they do it would be the same with if Nurse wasn't #1 because Billy is free and Blight can be earned for free, so the strongest killers in the game would still be free. Honestly think they don't want to touch her because of the excuse you mentioned (still) and because they can't be bothered.
Something I've noticed is that she has good mobility w cambells despite her being the best killer in chase, I would suggest increasing blink recharge rate for her any blinks after the 1rst one as this would rewards even more when they outplay the nurse but that would be bad for casual nurse player. One big thing that might affect good players is nerfing her jennys addon (blink back) so you get the fatigue duration of using all the blinks you used, that way if you use it after 2 blinks you recover as if you used two and not one.
Kinda unrelated: without her purple addons I think she is a fun killer to verse even though I will die in 30s anyway lol.
Make her a bit like Oni, she starts as a 110 or 115% base speed killer, no blinks and then has to earn her blinks through the match, maybe just like Oni where she needs a hit/down or a hook to activate her blink state and stays in it for a minute or so
I feel like that would be damaging for who she is as a killer. doesn't follow the rules, "ignores" pallets and windows.
I mean, her completely ignoring all pallets and windows at all times is the part that makes her too strong. Even if her power was not active 100% of the time, her core identity of her blinks and being able to use them to ignore walls and resources will still be there.
I'm not necessarily saying that making her earn her power like Oni is the right way to go, but either that or adding some kind of counterplay like Xeno sound like the most viable options. If she isn't meaningfully changed then she won't actually be placed in a more balanced position.
Maybe I'm just downvote-farming but I am going to say it:
The Nurse is balanced.
Over the last 3 years every time I've looked at her kill rate on Night Light and whenever I've seen an official kill rate for her, it's been below average.
I love playing against Nurses because I know how to run them and usually they're not that good.
The only change I'd like to see is if she tries to blink through a pallet that is dropping it would intercept her, stun her and put her into fatigue. That way she wouldn't be able to completely ignore pallets the way she does now but she could still outplay them by waiting for the pallet drop animation to finish, but survivors could dumb-tech or do something since she couldn't hit them while the survivor is stuck in the pallet pulldown animation. I just think it would be more fun than what we have now.
You could advocate to rework the game mechanics to allow stuns mid-teleport or fatigue or pickups or whatever. But then you'd cry the stuns are shorter than the fatigue.
We could also fix her bugs, if were talking balance.
Isnt her map traversal still comparable to basic 115%? Maybe she needs a buff to compete with the likes of wraith or billy, lol. ( This is sarcasm )
But if you really need to "balance" her,how about making her 105%, nerfing her teleport speed/cd somewhat, but compensate by turning her fatigue into the same as everyone else's, no more staring on the floor. Just kidding, as if youd accept compensation when "balancing" her.
Hey real quick, let's say they released a survivor perk that was a little hard to use but after a few hours anyone can realistically use it and when you do you automatically win the game. Because that's what you are saying classifies as balanced right now.
I mean that would make her very boring, but balanced i guess.
Oh go away troll. You have never even played Nurse.
Lol, my man just say you think killers deserve special treatment and it's okay to have auto win features in the game.
I would relook into her general blink mechanic. Her minimum blink speed should take a little bit longer, maybe her blink lunge a little bit shorter and more important try to enhance the window nurse can be stunned when coming out of a blink. Currently she can only be stunned during the lunge I think. I think it would be fairer if a stun also works when you throw the pallet close before she appears.
I also think her tells should be a little bit looked at. In theory survivors hear how long she charges her blinks, where she looks etc. But sometimes high ping nurses are way harder to read etc. That should be looked at. Maybe even add a little sound queu where she would land during a blink, the moment she releases, opening a window to react.
That would be small adjustments which would make it a little bit easier to deal with her. I personally like nurse, because she is a game changer killer, with a different chase style. Though I understand the frustration.
Blindness during her blink charge might be also worth to look at, but I think making adjustments to her blink mechanik is a little bit more important overall.
EDIT: I also forgot to add, that stuns should do something to her as well, like slow down her blink recharge or stop it during the stun.
Whether or not @esarraf has played Nurse or not that is a pretty accurate description of Nurse. I have about 6 hours on her according to my stats page and it's incredibly easy to win on her. Half my hours on her I was trolling with half my build being Bamboozle and Superior Anatomy yet I was still able to win most my games.
The reason Nurse's kill rates are so low is because she is completely free and unlocked to all players. Brand new players that have no idea how to play the game will try to play her and have no clue what they're doing. With Trapper or Wraith they can at least just walk forward and swing, but Nurse is slower than survivors so she quite literally is required to Blink. Nurse is not a killer you can pick up in a single game and already be pretty good at, but it only takes a couple hours of playing her to get decent with her power, and it's strong enough that decent is all you really need. A lot of players probably never go past the first few matches of playing her. Nightlight and the official kill rates take into account the babies too, and if they're all getting 0-1 kills that drags it down quite a bit.
The thing you'd need to do to fix Nurse without at least vaguely changing her identity or adding entirely new mechanics is something that Nurse players would outright riot over. Aura gets talked about a lot, but a lot of better nurse players really do not rely heavily on aura reading, and its never really been integral to why she's the best killer in the game. Blindness would still leave her as top 1 of 1 out of the entire roster.
The problem is the 'booster blink'. (Editing for clarification: Booster blink refers to quickly being able to use B2, not having a second blink in general.) The lack of any kind of significant delay between blink 1 completing and having blink 2 available means that after a certain level of skill, a successful blink attack becomes less an issue of reads or winning the mindgames that make going against low/mid level nurses genuinely fun, its a matter of 'did I wait for my second charge or not'. She blinks forward into a close enough threat range, and immediately micro-blinks after to secure the hit if necessary. No survivor reaction opportunities beyond something like Dead Hard, no ambiguity, just being good enough at tracking, blink mechanics and map/terrain familiarity to secure the hit essentially every time. If you want Nurse out of S tier without a rework, you need to remove these hit confirms.
Are you suggesting remove her second blink?
No, I think that having a second blink attempt is in of itself fine, its the ability to use it to immediately correct your position and get a guaranteed lunge as long as you were close enough with blink 1 that would need to be changed.
I think nurse is one of the few killers that changes the core gameplay loop of DBD in a unique way. It makes her appear strong, and she really is, but the best nurse is only a 50/50 killer. She's slow, her power puts her in a fatigue state every time she misses, and it's a matter of losing LOS instead of looping pallets for killers like Nurse or Vecna (ST).
As for killing nurse's aura reading, that would set a bad precedent for disabling various aspects of basekit killer abilities and render a bunch of perks useless for Nurse. I don't think that's going to be a good direction for this game.
I don't think there's any way to balance her out without a total rework. As shown in this thread the nerfs will never be enough as long as her core power remains, in the past it was "nurse just needs to have non basic blink attacks and she'll be perfect" but after that it was "good nurses ran aura aways, nothing nerf" and now we are seeing the same thing with aura perks, and I imagine it will be the same "good nurses aren't effected by this"
I'm in the 'rework' camp, though I'd give blindness for her a try as well, because I think she's a flawed design:
1: She's absolutely awful to start off, and way too strong once mastered. Neither of those are very interesting games.
2: Skill expression is too much on her, not enough on the survivors.
3: Being her design violates other basic concepts of the game, cool perk ideas have to be thrown out because 'what about Nurse?'
We have a few perks that demonstrate your point that got nerfed, and they weren't even autowins. DS people argue can't be 5 seconds because that would be way too powerful, but starting survivors can't even reliably hit the skill check. Old MFT, 3% for most survivors who aren't looping experts wasn't really that big of a deal and not worth just staying injured.
Probably the closest autowin that definitely got nerfed would be the old, old BNPs with continuous skill checks.
Blindness while charging blink and bring back lightburn, it made sense to get rid of it for wraith but it should have been kept for nurse.
This does not stop good nurses, good nurses aren't even using aura builds, all it does is widen the gap between good nurses and not good nurses even more. She needs a complete and total rework.
I've always thought a version of Spasmodic Breath (lose power after blink hit but normal move speed) should be basekit, and then give her some buff or ability while in that mode to compensate.
This would nerf her, give her a reason to use chase perks or perks she otherwise would never use, and still keep the general idea behind her the same.
Otherwise, if it's just simple changes, the blindness during blink charge is a pretty good suggestion I'd be for.
@esarraf is always a troll when it comes to talking about Nurse. They can't actually come up with a good argument as to why the Nurse is actually a mad dog killer who is problematic in DbD. So they come up with some ridiculous analogy in a one ore two liner, without actually adding to the discussion. I have tried to have this discussion with them in another thread and this was their modus operandi with every single post.
I still think the Nurse is balanced. I have more fun playing against Nurse than as Nurse.
Playing Nurse is not an automatic win. If she was, more people would be playing her and she's have a better kill rate. If she doesn't land her blinks and get those hits, the fatigue is really punishing. She has the worst map traversal in the game thanks to her fatigue and her movement speed. And Entity help her if she gets a survivor as good as me on Lery's.
The Nurse has a high skill floor but once a player gets decent with Nurse she doesn't become an unstoppable powerhouse as people like @esarraf would have us believe.
And another thing with Nurse is it is incredibly easy to get rusty with her. Yeah, if you're a Nurse main and play her nearly everyday you'll do quite well. But if you spread your playtime across multiple killers and/or don't play Nurse for a week, it's quite easy to eat dirt for a couple matches until you get your mojo back.
It doesn't surprise me that others in this thread are calling for her movement speed to increase to balance her, which I think would be a massive buff no matter how much more punishing her fatigue would be.
Have you ever watched comp DBD? Obviously pubs aren't going to play out the same way as a comp match, but I think the way that comp matches are played against Nurse is a testament to how deadly she is to even the most skilled survivors.
The strategy they use against Nurse is to have designated "death spots" that they would run to and die at to take the Nurse away from gens being done on the opposite side of the map. Often times they don't even bother trying to run her and just go there immediately, instead of "last for 30 more seconds" or something it's literally just "well if you're dead already then at least do it in a good spot." Most chases, even against these extremely skilled players, still are very quick. The strategy works a bit better on bigger maps, but in general the survivors are completely expected to lose.
There is a reason why, unless you have seen a tier list different from all the ones I've seen, that every tier list without exception has had Nurse as number 1 since 2016. A decent Nurse is already A tier, a master Nurse is uncounterable. This is why in my original post I mentioned that I do not think Blindness when she is Blinking would be enough, as good Nurses don't even need aura in the first place and often don't run it.
I used to think blindness would fix nurse, but if its a p100 thousand hour nurse it wouldnt do a damn thing. It would honestly need a entire rework to just nerf the gmod nocliping killer because litterally nothing else will be effictive enough.
Lol, okay you want to talk ######### then we can. Nurse straight up ignores any and all mechanics survivors have that no other killer can besides maybe Judgement. Playing Nurse is extremely easy to do so and saying 'ooh what if you stop playing the auto win killer and get rusty' is not an argument it's just nonsense you made up to try and defend a broken killer. Nurse fundamentally does not work and ruins the game for everyone else by existing. You want to know why most killer perks are bland and boring as hell? It's because Nurse. When one specific killers existence is so bad that the devs have gone on record saying they can't allow perks like Awakened Awareness to exist because nurse there's no defending her. Feel free to call me a troll if that's all you can come up with, I understand if you are having such extreme difficulties in comprehending why nurse is bad for the game then I don't think you'll come up with any actually good insults.
I wouldn't.
At high end (top 5% of players) she unbalanced strong. But in the hands of the other 95% she's a joke. She's balanced by the necessity of these numbers. The game isn't balanced by how the top 5% of survivors use perks or strategies, as that would get survivors nerfed into the dirt due to coordinated SWF's.
You just don't balance games based off of the top 5%. It's senseless, and leads to bad game balance. Much as people like to complain about the nurse, it's not common to see a cracked nurse in the queues. You're far more likely to hit a totem Jason, or a four-slow-down Kaneki. I'd focus game design balancing on those more common elements. Addressing Totem Jason being too strong is going to result in more quality of life improvements than aiming for high skill spectrum Nurses.
That or, I mean, go ahead and nerf Nurse, no skin off my nose to be clear. Just seems like a silly and awkward place to focus balancing when she's not that recurrent of an issue. Maybe you just encounter cracked Nurses more than I do.
It's pretty well established that DbD cannot be balanced around comp where you have players who are in the top 0.01% of the skill bracket and there are Nurse's who can blink with pixel-perfect accuracy. How many Nurses do you encounter that are that good in public matches?
Tier lists are generally based on potential. In the right hands the Nurse has the potential to be S-tier. But in most players' hands who miss a few blinks they quickly find gens getting done and gates getting opened and that's why she has a kill rate <50%. That's why BHVR keeps leaving her where she is despite continuous whining from the community and her continued placement at the top of tier lists. Tier lists are opinions, unlike the stats.
Nice try. You just hate Nurse and appear unable to apply logic in a discussion about her.
Nice try. You just hate Nurse and appear unable to apply logic in a discussion about her.No one forces you to engage with people on the forum if you don't think its worth your time, but if you're going to respond to someone it should actually include some type of response and not just avoid what they typed.
Remove her mangled addon and the aura thing
The issue with aura builds is, that it waters down the skill needed to play the killer. Same with judgement. Thousands of hours should still mean something imo.
Lol. Content creators start crying about Aura builds and suddenly the entire community hates aura perks. Many such cases.
Everyone with a tiny bit of gamesense says so. For ages.
He's guilty of replying to several long posts of mine and others with one or two liners that add nothing to the discussion so I am just giving him some of his own medicine.
I'm not sorry if I offended your delicate "neighborhood watch" sensibilities in doing so. At least the rest of my post that you're whining about added something to the discussion.
Arguably @ForTheEntity is entirely in his rights here. Esa just outright entered the thread straw maning and insulting people. No one owes anyone a response. Like you said, no one forces anyone to engage, but if we're going to, they should be actual responses contributing to a sensible, mature discussion of the topic at hand. Not a 'Lol your opinion is invalid.'
Calling For the Entity out for this behavior when he's responding with the energy he's receiving is not sensible.
just the pallet stuns and aura removal while holding breath would make her so much better to face. I think it'd be a fair nerf along the lines of removing Ghouls damaging vault that change alone made him so much less toxic to face without actually changing anything
Esa just outright entered the thread straw maning and insulting people.In this thread, where?
The first post is a pretty straightforward forum style question - what if this rule applied to the other side? There's a couple of responses that I imagine could be made to that, but its a pretty logical question to bring up. @Arcturus brings up the idea its a valid point.
The second post is responding after being called a troll and reiterates the previous point
The third post Esaraf is far more confrontational (though this is in response to twice being called a troll), but he lists a number of reasons for why Nurse is a problem (3), which is in response to being told: "They can't actually come up with a good argument as to why the Nurse is actually a mad dog killer who is problematic in DbD."
In this thread, none of that seems to be straw manning and the insults come after they were already started.
Honestly as a whole I just think that particular discussion needs to simmer down. These kinds of issues can be discussed respectfully without insulting each other, and I understand that it seems like there's some bad blood between @ForTheEntity and @esarraf from another thread, but when they have had a heated argument in the past they should not carry it over to other threads.
I genuinely do not think it's only the top 5% of players. I think her kill rate is so low not just because she is difficult to get the hang of in the first couple hours, but because she is completely free to new players. A player that is a decent killer all around can become pretty good with Nurse in a few hours, but a lot of people don't bother doing that.
My lifetime kill rate is being massively dragged down by a bunch of games (in my first couple hours of playing her at that lmao) where I ran Bam and Superior Anatomy for memes, and I've given a ton of hatch escapes to survivors I feel sorry for, and yet it's still at 70%. I have only 6 hours on her throughout 5 years of playing and I'm sure if I wanted to I could easily hit 80% kill rate if I stopped giving hatch and ran normal builds, possibly more.
A decent Nurse is already an A+ killer imo. A good Nurse is S tier, and a master Nurse is uncounterable. Most of the Nurses I encounter are one of the first two. If it's the first then I have some hope. If it's the second the game is probably over from the start. The few times I've felt like I've gone up against an extremely good Nurse the game was over within 5 minutes.
I do agree there are more prevalent issues though, this thread isn't about "Nurse being nerfed is the number 1 priority," after all she's been number 1 for 10 years. However I would like to see her changed at some point.
While tier lists are subjective, I think if the community has reached an almost clear consensus on who the best killer in the game is for 10 years straight it means way more than any statistics. The devs make nerfs and buffs based on statistics all the time, it's why the meme "nerf pig" is a thing, as even though Pig is not that incredibly strong, her headtraps are confusing for new players and often get them killed, inflating her kill rate. Kill rates are often tied to how intuitive or confusing a killer's counterplay is and how confusing the killer is to play, not just how powerful they are.
Also, BHVR hasn't just left her where she is. They may be slow with changes, but Nurse has only received nerfs since her release. They have even acknowledged before that she is the best killer in the game, and even as recent as the 9.2.0 or 9.3.0 PTBs Nurse was one of the killers they specifically picked out to not get as many benefits. Despite the kill rates BHVR seems well aware of how powerful she is, but properly balancing her while also not making her feel super clunky to play would probably need some big change they clearly don't have time for considering we've been waiting on Skull Merchant's rework for years.
Does this not apply on the inverse side though? Why does a thousand hour trapper fare so poorly against 4 man swf or against any team with a moderate amount of game knowledge ignoring comms entirely?