Survivor verticality may be the satan of survivor balancing, but their strength is accompanied by maps rewarding this playstyle and is an equally big problem
because i believe it’ll be controversial, to clarify, i believe not perfect isn’t sparse enough with the places survivors can loop and get free distance at, making too many survivors too good on this map. people often don’t complain because this is an amazing map for fleetway and tripwire due to the small map size and lack of cover letting their crowd control shine in return.
mystic caverns IS verticality fuck that map. EVERY survivor with some form of vertical mobility heavily benefits to the killer’s disadvantage, to an even higher extent than not perfect. not perfect atleast somewhat makes up for it by being small. mystic is not.
green hill has the lake, broken bridge, and the cliff near the killer spawns in the back (that one’s hard to explain). especially bad for kolo and trippy due to map geometry and being extremely wide and open.
The point i’m trying to make here is that:
quickfire survivor vertical mobility options, if they must stay, should NEVER guarantee EXE giving up chase entirely. every spot that can be abused should be backed up with a soft-counter the killer can use. inconvenient, the survivor will still gain distance, but you should never have to take a long detour just to reach a survivor who got there in a matter of seconds.
survivor verticality in general should be much more sparse and i don’t believe it should EVER be a passive. passives are meant to be quirky little exclusive gimmicks that may aid a survivor in a special way from a small to medium extent. your abilities should be the driving force to end chase. not your passive.
i want to clarify im not specifically talking about silver and eggman, though those were the two i had in mind, this also heavily applies to tails’ flight with its short ass cooldown, cream’s glide, and even KNUCKLES’ glide, though rarely oppressive, def can be in the right spot
if you’re going to give a survivor verticality, make it a seperate ability and give it a meaty cooldown. change maps to have killers like 11x, trippy, and sometimes kolo have a chance at catching up by making the spots more recoverable from and could even maybe have a soft-countering crutch spot for the killers, though i don’t know how that would work
i didn’t plan this out much so lmk what you think of my shit takes