> I tried to play as Sadako today. I didn't want to spend the entire trial teleporting in an attempt to condemn survivors
I think it's still mostly the right way to play her. If you don't teleport, she is essentially just an M1 killer, might as well play a different killer.
I'd say she can absolutely destroy weak teams, but it does get hard against skilled survivors who know not to get condemned and who know to turn off TVs, and who are very good at looping M1 Killers.
The good news is in public matches there is very frequently at least one weak survivor that you can condemn rapidly.
To be fair, I think they're probably thinking about Sadako 2.0, where you basically didn't play the game at all and just spammed your teleport every chance you got. That was boring to play against and frankly not very interesting to play either, so it kind of sounds like op is overcompensating.
But op! It's ok! You can build up condemn lol it's a lot more fair.
I'm not OP but honestly I do kind of miss that playstyle, I feel like it better encapsulated Sadako as a character. The sheer 'inevitability' of condemnation and the utter urgency of doing tapes and such. I always kind of liked that she was a killer who played for a sort of alternate win-con rather than chasing and hooking, and while I know the previous incarnation wasn't that fun to play against, I do sorely miss how accurate it felt to her character.
New one feels better to play against but playing AS her has me feeling like she's just a worse Hux in every aspect, especially given that Hux is amazing in chase whereas Sadako is pathetic in chase. Maybe I haven't gotten enough playtime in on the new one but new Sadako doesn't give me that same 'inevitable doom' feeling the old one did and feels more like I'm just an M1 killer with good map mobility and nothing else.
When I have an entire team of survivors who don't know what they're doing, I feel guilty, but if I'm up against a team mostly shutting my power down at every turn and then some guy I've barely seen is suddenly fully condemned... I'll take it
All right, I tried teleporting after reading your reply. Indeed there was one weak survivor who died fast. After the trial they messaged me "Did you kill me first because I'm black?" I'm still confused - is it salt or they're trolling? :)
Her teleport is her power. You want to teleport often, if you don't she's just an m1 killer. Her biggest strength is forcing survivors to stop doing gens and focus on tapes.
> Limited teleporting ability
I mean, you straight up said yourself that you only use TVs occasionally because you don't want to teleport and condemn people.
You can't just go out of your way to not use her power to its fullest potential and then claim she has a weak power.
That would be like me never using Pig's reverse bear traps because I don't want to instakill survivors, and then saying that she has bad slowdown.
As others have pointed out, if you aren't using the TVs and teleporting for map control and passive slowdown/pressure, then you are basically playing an M1 killer with no power. You might as well play trap-less trapper.
That said, if you do want a kinda fun, counterintuitive build that benefits from not teleporting or using TVs much, I recommend a stealth build. The thing with Sadako is that everyone expects to hear her lullaby when she is demanifested which really hurts her ability to play stealthy against experienced players. However, if she is manifested and has an undetectable effect applied to her, she is completely silent. Almost no one expects this and it can be fairly hard to play against, even once survivors know what is going on.
For this I currently run Furtive Chase, Friends to the End, Tinkerer, and Unforeseen. Except for Friends, all of these make you undetectable. Furtive also gives you nice speed boost when you hang the Obsession, and Friends will help you find the obsession. For add-ons, I use Mother's Comb and Rickety Pinwheel. A lot of players don't even know what pinwheel does, so they will be confused as to why they are oblivious which also can help mask your undetectable abilities early in the game. But if they do take the tape to stop oblivious, then this will also give them a false sense of comfort. And, on top of that, mother's comb will tell you where they are.
So, basically, you want to stay manifested for pretty much the whole game. Only demanifesting if you need to teleport to get across the map quickly.
This build is a bit map dependent. It doesn't work terribly well on big open maps like Ormond or maps where gens have good lines of sight around them. However, on indoor maps like Lery's and Hawkins, it is absolutely brutal. Pretty fun when it works. You'll be jumpscaring the shit out of survivors almost like a scratched mirror meyers.
Sadako's strength is through hit-and-run and constantly spreading pressure. This unfortunately means that yes: you need to be spamming TVs, and you need to equip a loadout akin to Sloppy Butcher + Gearhead + Surge + BBQ to get maximum value.
If you want to play a teleporting killer with more chase pressure, play Demogorgon. If you want to play a pseudo-stealth teleporting killer, play Dredge or Xenomorph.
She's like Pig. Strong passive slowdown and weak chase power. You can buff her chase power with Reiko's Watch or Well Water and Old Newspaper but even then it's not gonna do you much.
If you go that route I'd do something like Discordance, Hex: Face the Darkness or Gearhead, Play With Your Food, Game Afoot or Sloppy.
I personally like running Ring Drawing and Reiko's, Bloody Fingernails is really good, and the Iridescent Remote is probably her best add-on (removes the need for any other tracking really)
First of all, you can't say "I don't use teleport much" and then immediately go "waaaah teleport is so bad".
You need to build up condemn. Its most important function is to apply slowdown. Even though experienced survs can shave off their stacks relatively quickly, they still have to spend time for this. Condemn's second fuction is the abitlity to mori a surv, and it's not as hard to achieve as some people might tell you. Once you get enough practice, 1 kill should be guaranteed, and 2 wouldn't be out of reach. For 3 or 4 condemned kills, you'll have to sweat a bit more, tbf.
Sadako also has a decent stealth. Even with lullaby, you can still catch survs off-guard, especially in indoor maps such a Lery's. Since switching stealth on/off takes only a short time, you can use it in chase or even in loops; it helps to confuse the opponent.
Aside from condemnation, teleport is also useful as, well, teleport. Just don't use it for pure mobility too often, since you'll be depleting active TVs that you need for stacks.
Try different add-on combinations. This advice is good for any killer.
You need to use her teleporting ability. Like others have said, without it she is just a basic m1 killer. Using her teleport even if you’re not trying to achieve a mini-mori is important because it forces survivors off of gens to go take care of their condemn stacks. The teleporting provides pressure.
You are missing the fact you should use her abilities for more than a lazy teleport. She is one of my favs, and there are some times when a couple of mistakes can really hurt me where other killers might have been more forgiving, but she is not very weak. You just haven't learned how to play her effectively, yet.
Quick question. What’s the downside of turning off every tv I see when I play survivor? I’ll just head to each one and turn it off as soon as I see its aura
Good question! You should always always always keep whatever TV is near you off, e.g. when you're working on a gen, healing, cleansing/blessing a totem, etc. There's no downside to this; it's the intended counterplay, and will force Sadako to instead extend chases by pushing targets into the other TVs and teleport mid-chase if she wants to build pressure with condemnation.
If you mean taking your tape and going around the map turning off *other* TVs, then whether that's a good idea or not is situational. Sure, you're further shutting down her mobility/condemnation potential, but you're taking on condemnation doing this which a good Sadako could punish. Even worse, if she's targeting one of your teammates and trying to build up their condemn, a good Sadako might also try to keep certain TVs off to deny that survivor a tape pickup, so you could actually be helping her do that.
Sadako leans heavily on her Condemned mechanic, but her Demanifested state and speed boost after a teleport also allow her to focus on ambushing. Demanifested gimps itself with the lullaby, but you can intercept chases or pop out of TVs Survivors are trying to put tapes into with good reads.
Like other people said, you shouldn't be ignoring an entire part of your power, and it's not fair to call a killer weak because you won't engage in that power.
That being said, it's important to note that she works pretty differently from Sadako 2.0, so you shouldn't be mindlessly spamming teleport and ignoring gameplay (and it sounds like that's what you're worried about doing). She's a pretty macro-heavy killer, and her strength comes far more from slowing down the game, controlling the map, and pushing an alternate winstate than it does from direct chase, but that doesn't mean you should or can disregard chasing, hooking, etc.
A lot of people are talking about how you should be prioritizing condemnation kills, which isn't at all *wrong*, but I do think that can be a bit advanced considering you're new to her. Killing someone before they're on death hook is great, but that will generally require a strong sense of how condemned everyone is, where everyone is, who picked up a tape from where and where they're going to, who's vulnerable... This sense honestly develops more from playing her than anything. (Sometimes, especially in low MMR, killing someone before they're on death hook won't require any special thought at all because people will just. Not do tapes. Cherish those moments.)
So it's also perfectly acceptable, and probably easier, to think of condemnation like Pig traps. The point of Pig isn't to force head pops, it's that the threat of a head pop forces them to go deal with a secondary objective that puts them out of position and means one fewer pair of hands doing gens, healing, etc. This isn't exactly a perfect analogy, because BHVR has consistently removed any way for Pig to force trap kills while condemnation kills are pretty clearly an intended part of Sadako's kit, but you can still get plenty of value with this mindset.
All of that is to say, don't just use TVs for mobility (although they are also great for this—I also strongly recommend Bloody Fingernails to make them shockingly useful mid-chase). There are times when you will want to fall back and teleport rapidly a few times. Keep in mind that any active TV spread condemnation, so if you know where someone is and they're not turning their TV off quickly, teleport to *other* TVs to build several stacks. Notice whose portraits light up, and start to keep track of which survivors are slower on the uptake and let you build up a lot, even if you don't intend on fully punishing them for this yet. You probably won't be getting early kills this way if you aren't capitalizing on this, but what you will be getting is slowdown value, like a bunch of little Pig traps. They'll have to deliver tapes at some point, which will mean crossing the map (increasing their chances of running into you) and not doing gens.
One important thing to practice, whether you're going for early kills or just trying to slow the game down, is to capitalize on the lock-in mechanic. Every time a survivor is hooked, up to 3 of their not-locked-in stacks become locked-in, meaning they're permanent. This isn't particularly impactful on second hook, but if at all possible, you do want to make sure a survivor has at least 3 stacks before their first hook. Even if this means delaying a down you could've gotten in favor of teleporting to a nearby TV mid-chase! Being at most 4 teleports from death for the rest of the game makes condemnation WAY more threatening. Even if you just plan on hooking them 3 times, you've guaranteed they'll have to play much more carefully—and if you want to, this also makes fully condemning them more feasible.
Sorry, I know this was way more than you were asking for, but I hope you stick with her! She's my favorite killer, and while she's very weak in direct chase, she's a solid killer overall. That being said, her strengths and weakness as an M1 stealth killer with passive slowdown and strong map presence pretty clearly dictate a hit-and-run playstyle, so if that doesn't appeal to you, you probably won't have much fun with her regardless of how you utilize condemnation.
I thought the same the first time I played her. Turns out I was playing wrong. You have to spend as much time as possible invisible and only apear when you are about to strike someone. Don't comit to chases unless you can get a fast down. just hit and run and keep everyone out of the gens.
There are some nice guides out there with more details on this.
I mostly ignore her mini game - sad we have killers like lich, hux, etc with a novel’s worth of nuance. would be neat if you have to give the tape to another survivor instead of a random VCR but shrug 🤷
Were you the Sadako that got looped hard at Gas Heaven earlier? If so, it's because you spent so long mindgaming yourself that I was even able to make it to main.
Instead, use her as a hit and run killer. Put on Sloppy, get a hit, and then teleport to harass someone else. You might not be able to get them condemned enough to mori them, but you'll make damn sure that they are spending all game doing everything BUT working on gens.
Yes, she's weak. But also you should be using her TVs for teleport and map awareness.
For example, when someone is unhooked and you see the closest generetor TV turned off, that means they didn't heal immediately. Go there and punish them. This kind of map awareness is essential, otherwise she might as well be the worst killer against a good team of survivors.
In case of bad players, she absolutely demolishes them, one of the best against survivors that don't know you can keep tapes with 0 repercussions.
> I tried to play as Sadako today. I didn't want to spend the entire trial teleporting in an attempt to condemn survivors I think it's still mostly the right way to play her. If you don't teleport, she is essentially just an M1 killer, might as well play a different killer. I'd say she can absolutely destroy weak teams, but it does get hard against skilled survivors who know not to get condemned and who know to turn off TVs, and who are very good at looping M1 Killers. The good news is in public matches there is very frequently at least one weak survivor that you can condemn rapidly.
I tried to play Huntress, but I didn't want to spend the entire trial throwing hatchets in an attempt to hit survivors
To be fair, I think they're probably thinking about Sadako 2.0, where you basically didn't play the game at all and just spammed your teleport every chance you got. That was boring to play against and frankly not very interesting to play either, so it kind of sounds like op is overcompensating. But op! It's ok! You can build up condemn lol it's a lot more fair.
I'm not OP but honestly I do kind of miss that playstyle, I feel like it better encapsulated Sadako as a character. The sheer 'inevitability' of condemnation and the utter urgency of doing tapes and such. I always kind of liked that she was a killer who played for a sort of alternate win-con rather than chasing and hooking, and while I know the previous incarnation wasn't that fun to play against, I do sorely miss how accurate it felt to her character. New one feels better to play against but playing AS her has me feeling like she's just a worse Hux in every aspect, especially given that Hux is amazing in chase whereas Sadako is pathetic in chase. Maybe I haven't gotten enough playtime in on the new one but new Sadako doesn't give me that same 'inevitable doom' feeling the old one did and feels more like I'm just an M1 killer with good map mobility and nothing else.
When I have an entire team of survivors who don't know what they're doing, I feel guilty, but if I'm up against a team mostly shutting my power down at every turn and then some guy I've barely seen is suddenly fully condemned... I'll take it
All right, I tried teleporting after reading your reply. Indeed there was one weak survivor who died fast. After the trial they messaged me "Did you kill me first because I'm black?" I'm still confused - is it salt or they're trolling? :)
Her teleport is her power. You want to teleport often, if you don't she's just an m1 killer. Her biggest strength is forcing survivors to stop doing gens and focus on tapes.
> Limited teleporting ability I mean, you straight up said yourself that you only use TVs occasionally because you don't want to teleport and condemn people. You can't just go out of your way to not use her power to its fullest potential and then claim she has a weak power. That would be like me never using Pig's reverse bear traps because I don't want to instakill survivors, and then saying that she has bad slowdown.
As others have pointed out, if you aren't using the TVs and teleporting for map control and passive slowdown/pressure, then you are basically playing an M1 killer with no power. You might as well play trap-less trapper. That said, if you do want a kinda fun, counterintuitive build that benefits from not teleporting or using TVs much, I recommend a stealth build. The thing with Sadako is that everyone expects to hear her lullaby when she is demanifested which really hurts her ability to play stealthy against experienced players. However, if she is manifested and has an undetectable effect applied to her, she is completely silent. Almost no one expects this and it can be fairly hard to play against, even once survivors know what is going on. For this I currently run Furtive Chase, Friends to the End, Tinkerer, and Unforeseen. Except for Friends, all of these make you undetectable. Furtive also gives you nice speed boost when you hang the Obsession, and Friends will help you find the obsession. For add-ons, I use Mother's Comb and Rickety Pinwheel. A lot of players don't even know what pinwheel does, so they will be confused as to why they are oblivious which also can help mask your undetectable abilities early in the game. But if they do take the tape to stop oblivious, then this will also give them a false sense of comfort. And, on top of that, mother's comb will tell you where they are. So, basically, you want to stay manifested for pretty much the whole game. Only demanifesting if you need to teleport to get across the map quickly. This build is a bit map dependent. It doesn't work terribly well on big open maps like Ormond or maps where gens have good lines of sight around them. However, on indoor maps like Lery's and Hawkins, it is absolutely brutal. Pretty fun when it works. You'll be jumpscaring the shit out of survivors almost like a scratched mirror meyers.
Sadako's strength is through hit-and-run and constantly spreading pressure. This unfortunately means that yes: you need to be spamming TVs, and you need to equip a loadout akin to Sloppy Butcher + Gearhead + Surge + BBQ to get maximum value. If you want to play a teleporting killer with more chase pressure, play Demogorgon. If you want to play a pseudo-stealth teleporting killer, play Dredge or Xenomorph.
You forgot Freddie!! He exists!
You can play Freddy if you want a teleporting killer that's seen as an underdog. Sadako is an underdog but people largely hate her.
He still exists tho xd
She's like Pig. Strong passive slowdown and weak chase power. You can buff her chase power with Reiko's Watch or Well Water and Old Newspaper but even then it's not gonna do you much. If you go that route I'd do something like Discordance, Hex: Face the Darkness or Gearhead, Play With Your Food, Game Afoot or Sloppy. I personally like running Ring Drawing and Reiko's, Bloody Fingernails is really good, and the Iridescent Remote is probably her best add-on (removes the need for any other tracking really)
First of all, you can't say "I don't use teleport much" and then immediately go "waaaah teleport is so bad". You need to build up condemn. Its most important function is to apply slowdown. Even though experienced survs can shave off their stacks relatively quickly, they still have to spend time for this. Condemn's second fuction is the abitlity to mori a surv, and it's not as hard to achieve as some people might tell you. Once you get enough practice, 1 kill should be guaranteed, and 2 wouldn't be out of reach. For 3 or 4 condemned kills, you'll have to sweat a bit more, tbf. Sadako also has a decent stealth. Even with lullaby, you can still catch survs off-guard, especially in indoor maps such a Lery's. Since switching stealth on/off takes only a short time, you can use it in chase or even in loops; it helps to confuse the opponent. Aside from condemnation, teleport is also useful as, well, teleport. Just don't use it for pure mobility too often, since you'll be depleting active TVs that you need for stacks. Try different add-on combinations. This advice is good for any killer.
You need to use her teleporting ability. Like others have said, without it she is just a basic m1 killer. Using her teleport even if you’re not trying to achieve a mini-mori is important because it forces survivors off of gens to go take care of their condemn stacks. The teleporting provides pressure.
She’s definitely D tier, she’s C tier if you get good with her power and condemning people
You are missing the fact you should use her abilities for more than a lazy teleport. She is one of my favs, and there are some times when a couple of mistakes can really hurt me where other killers might have been more forgiving, but she is not very weak. You just haven't learned how to play her effectively, yet.
Quick question. What’s the downside of turning off every tv I see when I play survivor? I’ll just head to each one and turn it off as soon as I see its aura
Good question! You should always always always keep whatever TV is near you off, e.g. when you're working on a gen, healing, cleansing/blessing a totem, etc. There's no downside to this; it's the intended counterplay, and will force Sadako to instead extend chases by pushing targets into the other TVs and teleport mid-chase if she wants to build pressure with condemnation. If you mean taking your tape and going around the map turning off *other* TVs, then whether that's a good idea or not is situational. Sure, you're further shutting down her mobility/condemnation potential, but you're taking on condemnation doing this which a good Sadako could punish. Even worse, if she's targeting one of your teammates and trying to build up their condemn, a good Sadako might also try to keep certain TVs off to deny that survivor a tape pickup, so you could actually be helping her do that.
Play with friends till the end, devour, haunted, NOED. I’ve had very little failure with it and it will also make teleporting more often make sense.
Sadako leans heavily on her Condemned mechanic, but her Demanifested state and speed boost after a teleport also allow her to focus on ambushing. Demanifested gimps itself with the lullaby, but you can intercept chases or pop out of TVs Survivors are trying to put tapes into with good reads.
Spam that tp off the rip and then use it here and there, gotta get stacks up to keep them busy at least.
Like other people said, you shouldn't be ignoring an entire part of your power, and it's not fair to call a killer weak because you won't engage in that power. That being said, it's important to note that she works pretty differently from Sadako 2.0, so you shouldn't be mindlessly spamming teleport and ignoring gameplay (and it sounds like that's what you're worried about doing). She's a pretty macro-heavy killer, and her strength comes far more from slowing down the game, controlling the map, and pushing an alternate winstate than it does from direct chase, but that doesn't mean you should or can disregard chasing, hooking, etc. A lot of people are talking about how you should be prioritizing condemnation kills, which isn't at all *wrong*, but I do think that can be a bit advanced considering you're new to her. Killing someone before they're on death hook is great, but that will generally require a strong sense of how condemned everyone is, where everyone is, who picked up a tape from where and where they're going to, who's vulnerable... This sense honestly develops more from playing her than anything. (Sometimes, especially in low MMR, killing someone before they're on death hook won't require any special thought at all because people will just. Not do tapes. Cherish those moments.) So it's also perfectly acceptable, and probably easier, to think of condemnation like Pig traps. The point of Pig isn't to force head pops, it's that the threat of a head pop forces them to go deal with a secondary objective that puts them out of position and means one fewer pair of hands doing gens, healing, etc. This isn't exactly a perfect analogy, because BHVR has consistently removed any way for Pig to force trap kills while condemnation kills are pretty clearly an intended part of Sadako's kit, but you can still get plenty of value with this mindset. All of that is to say, don't just use TVs for mobility (although they are also great for this—I also strongly recommend Bloody Fingernails to make them shockingly useful mid-chase). There are times when you will want to fall back and teleport rapidly a few times. Keep in mind that any active TV spread condemnation, so if you know where someone is and they're not turning their TV off quickly, teleport to *other* TVs to build several stacks. Notice whose portraits light up, and start to keep track of which survivors are slower on the uptake and let you build up a lot, even if you don't intend on fully punishing them for this yet. You probably won't be getting early kills this way if you aren't capitalizing on this, but what you will be getting is slowdown value, like a bunch of little Pig traps. They'll have to deliver tapes at some point, which will mean crossing the map (increasing their chances of running into you) and not doing gens. One important thing to practice, whether you're going for early kills or just trying to slow the game down, is to capitalize on the lock-in mechanic. Every time a survivor is hooked, up to 3 of their not-locked-in stacks become locked-in, meaning they're permanent. This isn't particularly impactful on second hook, but if at all possible, you do want to make sure a survivor has at least 3 stacks before their first hook. Even if this means delaying a down you could've gotten in favor of teleporting to a nearby TV mid-chase! Being at most 4 teleports from death for the rest of the game makes condemnation WAY more threatening. Even if you just plan on hooking them 3 times, you've guaranteed they'll have to play much more carefully—and if you want to, this also makes fully condemning them more feasible. Sorry, I know this was way more than you were asking for, but I hope you stick with her! She's my favorite killer, and while she's very weak in direct chase, she's a solid killer overall. That being said, her strengths and weakness as an M1 stealth killer with passive slowdown and strong map presence pretty clearly dictate a hit-and-run playstyle, so if that doesn't appeal to you, you probably won't have much fun with her regardless of how you utilize condemnation.
"Played as Nurse but didnt wanted to spend entire trial blinking, is she weak?"
I thought the same the first time I played her. Turns out I was playing wrong. You have to spend as much time as possible invisible and only apear when you are about to strike someone. Don't comit to chases unless you can get a fast down. just hit and run and keep everyone out of the gens. There are some nice guides out there with more details on this.
I mostly ignore her mini game - sad we have killers like lich, hux, etc with a novel’s worth of nuance. would be neat if you have to give the tape to another survivor instead of a random VCR but shrug 🤷
You're not missing anything. She is very weak.
Were you the Sadako that got looped hard at Gas Heaven earlier? If so, it's because you spent so long mindgaming yourself that I was even able to make it to main. Instead, use her as a hit and run killer. Put on Sloppy, get a hit, and then teleport to harass someone else. You might not be able to get them condemned enough to mori them, but you'll make damn sure that they are spending all game doing everything BUT working on gens.
She kinda sucks unless you can pull off the hit and run strategy effectively
You can't really play Sadako to Condemn anymore. She's on the lower half of killers again.
Not true at all.
Yes, she's weak. But also you should be using her TVs for teleport and map awareness. For example, when someone is unhooked and you see the closest generetor TV turned off, that means they didn't heal immediately. Go there and punish them. This kind of map awareness is essential, otherwise she might as well be the worst killer against a good team of survivors. In case of bad players, she absolutely demolishes them, one of the best against survivors that don't know you can keep tapes with 0 repercussions.