Jareix
Jareix
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As someone who's like, I'd say middling nurse-nurse main? I've played enough of her that i can blink quite accurately, sometimes even enough to snipe-grab players off of a gen. I very much employ ambush-tactics, and typically have a chase style that abuses committed actions like vaults, pallets, and drops. I'm a nurse main, but very far from perfecting her, and I don't know if how I play is optimal nor how top tier nurses play. I'm also admittedly still in my player infancy w/ only 120 hours, so feel free to dismiss my opinion, I just felt like adding it. And to summarize it, I think nurse is one of the few (if any) killers with totally unassured counterplay when in the hands of a high skill player, making the game genuinely killer sided for once. Surviving a trial with her requires far more luck for the survivor to even have a chance, namely map, perks, items, and of course good teammates.
Having said that, I think the main thing that good nurses abuse is information. If a nurse can find you, she can reach you. And if she can reach you, she can hit you. LoS is just one form of information. Sound is very much another, like footsteps, breathing, and grunts of pain. And notifications are perhaps one of the most dangerous forms of information she can abuse, since it can occur without a player's knowledge, unlike LoS.
The other thing one can abuse is otherwise impossible traversal methods. The map is her playground, what were once advantages for a survivor become their downfall, turning walls and verticality into opportunities for ambush and assured strikes, barriers to gen progress, and overall a hinderance on survivor's capacity for productivity. If the last 3 (or 4, hell, even 5 gens in vertical levels) are in somewhat close proximity, there's hardly any opportunity for a survivor to respond.
Ultimately, this leaves survivors with only one possible tactic for survival: avoid at all costs. Stealth, aura suppression perks, even lockers if you think you've been spotted. Anything to avoid chase, or escape it assuredly into hiding. But unfortunately, an encounter with her is inevitable, and if it's a good nurse the consequences will be severe.
Now, unfortunately I will also say I've very littler experience against a nurse, let alone a good one, due to her rarity as a killer among the lower survivor ranks I'm at. However, correct me if any of these things are already true, but I can think of only a few possible nerfs that could give players a chance without totally gimping her.
The first one is limiting her information, particularly during fatigue. Like I said, if she finds you, she kills you. Fatigue is perhaps your only opportunity for escape in chase, but attempting to do so successfully can be but an exercise in futility. I think one possible way to maybe nerf her is to make it so she's more info-blind during fatigue (possibly for a slightly longer period of time beyond the fatigue itself.) What I mean by this is making it so that for about half a second or so during her recovery, she is deaf and blind to scratch marks and aura, fading back into view after a short bit of time, giving survivors a bit more of a chance to disorient her.
Unfortunately, this solution does present a couple of problems: One of them making it so that early-level nurses will be even more befuddled and bewildered during her fatigue phase, making it far harder to enjoy and improve with her. The other is the fact that high level nurses can still have the advantage of getting the first hit, often what counts the most in an encounter. If they nail that hit (which for our purposes always will) then the survivor is now one hit from death, bleeding profusely, and far more loud than before. After a bit of recombobulation, the nurse can likely just find and down them again thanks to this new info, or through whatever means she'd done so before.
The alternative (and imo better) solution I thought of was Giving the survivors more information about her. Which in this case means Making it known if she is charging a blink, and possibly even if she's looking in your general direction. One form of this I thought about was making it so that her available teleport range is visible as faint embers or ash, expanding with her charge and roughly covering whatever's in her cone of vision
and within her Terror Radius(and decreasing with distance), including behind obstructions. This allows survivors to know if they're a possible target, though only somewhat roughly rather than assuredly. I'd say this is a bit more of a double edged blade. On the one hand, survivors now have a means to gauge when a nurse might be blinking, if only vaguely where and hardly when. Additionally, lower-level nurses will also have a means to gauge their own teleport distance as it stretches from their point of view, allowing them to develop a bit of a sense of range and timing as they target survivors within LoS, but still making it somewhat difficult to pull off behind walls. On the other hand, high tier survivors might be able to use this information too well, knowing when to hide or be ready to duck away, as well as how much time they might have to try and escape her reach. To compensate, I'd suggest buffing her to be able to cancel a blink. Which is to say, able to fatigue themselves quickly mid-charge rather than having to spend a blink and extra time to remain where they are (not to mention, NOT TELEPORTING INTO THE ######### BASEMENT! Ffs...)Now, again, I am too low in ranks to be able to judge how effective or ineffective this sort of info would be in the different tiers, so if someone can provide some insight as to their thoughts on how this might affect things at the various ranks, as well as tips on how I might improve as nurse, beyond "stop being merciful and just brutalize them." I always feel bad if they're all on death hook before even two gens are done, which ironically probably disrupts my mmr and keeps me at these lower ranks. So for all I know, my entire style of play is entirely defunct at higher ranks where survivors can react on a dime to when spine-chill goes off too long or being able to pinpoint my location by how my terror radius begins to grow in volume nearby, as well as having perfect communication.