So the reason I feel half the roster is bad is that all of DBD's "Mage" type killers are bad. When I say "Mage" type killers, I mean killers that are more methodical and strategy oriented, (Such as Hag or Doctor) As opposed to killers who rely on brute force, (Such as Cannibal and Shape) So to mae this a little easier, here's a list on what I consider "Mage" killers, and "brute" killers.


Mage Killers

Doctor
Hag
Wraith
Nightmare
Nurse

Brute Killers

Cannibal
Shape
Huntress
Hillbilly


And then you have Hybrid Killers, who are both parts Brutes and Mages

Hybrid Killers

Pig (Due to her two different abilities being both Brute force and methodical "stop your generators)
Trapper (Due to Strategical trap placement and herding the survivors to your traps)

Excluding Nurse, (Who stil takes a metric ♥♥♥♥ ton of skill to play effectivly) Most mage type killers rely on the stupidity or general mistakes of survivors. As compared to brutes who rely only on themselves and how well they can do. For example:

Doctor: Relies on survivors not knowing how to loop properly
Wraith: Relies on people having bad eye sight
Hag: Relies on survivors not reading the loading screen
Nightmare: Relies on the dreamo0f a very soon buff

As compared to Brutes:

Hillbilly: On your ass, revs up, down
Cannibal: Behind many people, revs up, multi down
Huntress: Aim decently, wrecked
Shape: That's right, lemme siphon evil within, aaaaand insta down.

And Hybrids:
Trapper: Place trap, chase, hope someone steps in it
Pig: Crouch, no radius, charge, down, place trap

So it is at this point where we shall discuss how to make Mages better.

The Doctor's whole thing is to counter pallet looping, as well as anti-stealth.

Pallet loop denial

AS the Doctor is supposed to be a counter to looping, he does not accomplish this. The reason being that he goes down to 110% move speed while in treatment mode, and slows down even more when charging an attack, allowing the survivor to loop forever unless you switch back to punishment mode.

Anti-stealth

Something he is better at is anti-stealth, but ven this he does not accomplish due to his primary madness pop is what he relies on to find survivors, but higher rank survivors will simply run into his radius to pop first madness and give less info due to all of it popping at once.

How to strengthen the swol Doc

A few solutions I have come up with are quite simply, don't slow him down while he's charging up his arm. Give him 110% move speed, but don't slow him while charging to allow him to still chase survivors.

OR make his terror radius bigger, but when you have to snap out of it, lose all madness, making madness one have to pop multiple times in a game. It'll be a bit of cat and mouse balancing whether you want to keep zapping or go for the chase. It would allow survivors to not worry about illusions, but also give doc the ability to easily make them squeal like piggies more than twice a game.

Of course while he suffers from ranking up, he does phenomenal in obtaining points, making him the better of the mage killers.

Moving on, Wraith is meant to be an ambush killer, popping up around corners to scare the christ out of you, as well as track you down.

Ambushing

The Wraith being able to go invisible and lose his radius in theory, becomes terrifying, and to new players it is, but once you get higher up, it becomes very clear to the trained eye when wraith is coming. He moves grass, and has a sort of shimmering effect to him. It's kinda makes me sad to say that as i mained Wraith fo a while, I realized his greatest tool is body blocking. It's a wee bit sad that a killer's greatest tool isn't in his kit, but a core gameplay mechanic.

How to strengthen The Leg-Day-Skipping-Wraith

Something that would buff him to the max is give him a small windstrom, constantly. Like not too big, perhaps a .75 second windstorm forever. The add-ons would simply add on to that time, making him truly terrifying if he's right next to you.

OR make his shimmer more noticible and allow him to attack out of stealth like The Pig can, including a small wind up, but the wind up should not decrease his MS. In fact, make him SLOWER in invis instead of making the shimmer more noticable, but allow out of stealth attacking. That way you can't just always go into stealth and be faster than basic speed.

Moving to the lower end we have Hag, who was the worst killer, until something amazing happened: Freddy got released. Hag, as much as everyone hates to see it, and how much anyone complains is a defense killer. She is meant to wide range camp hooks, gens, and totems. In my opinion, I feel like that's why totems were released with here, cause she SHOULD be able to defend them very well.

The blackened Catalyst

The whole problem with her ability isn't that it's too small of a radius, or that flashlights destroy it, it's that once a survivor knows it's hag, her power is useless due to one key, and one key alone: THE CROUCH BUTTON!!! Most killers take skill to avoid, hell, even freddy, requires someskill to avoid, (But he is still worse than Hag.) No skill is required to avoid her power, you just hold down the crouch key and you've beaten the Hag. And if pressing crouch while moving is hard for you, go play something easier, like "Cailou's Day at the Airport." (No disrespect to Cailou, that ♥♥♥♥ was my jam as a kid.)

Her move speed

The Devs decided that it would be a good idea to give Hag 110% move speed due to her ability to teleport to her traps. The only problem is they made almost everything a counter to her traps, so she can't teleport to them unless she has Mint Rag, the ULTRA RARE add-on that barely appears. (Which is just about the only thing that makes her viable.)

How to strengthen The True Cannibal Hag

Giving her a straight 115% Move speed is a great start, as well as removing the crouch counter all together.

OR keep the 110% MS, but only make crouching reduce the trigger effect to half it's radius, allowing the survivors to have more time to get to the thing they're trying to get to, but still allows her traps to be reliable.

OR keep Mint Rag as an always active thing, but that makes me feel like it's just a boot leg NUrse, so this is my least favorite option.

Probably the most hyped licensed killer, he also turned out to be the most of a dissapointment.. oh yeah, and he was NERFED about two weeks into his release, cause low ranks were whining about how "difficult" he was to deal with. Well look at him now, the biggest joke to this game. His whole thing is, as people also complain about, tunneling, which he's bad at, and slowing progress, which he's even worse at.

His Kit in General

Freddy can't interact with survivors outside of his "realm" meaning he can't hit or interact with any until he puts them in dream state, which is already a bad start to a killer. On the up side, nobody can see you or body block you if they aren't in dream state. However, you can still be blinded and pallet slammed.

Tunneling

As much as everyone hates to say it, his ability is very much a tunneling power. The problem is he still sucks at that, because once hooked, you have to put them in dream state again, which take a while, and assuming they haven't already healed, you still have to hit them once again, just like any other killer, but unlike other killers, they can become invincible by failing a skill check.

Slowing down the game

In my opinion, the reason they added Freddy was to pander to people's complaints about how fast the game goes, because by being in dream state, all actions are decreased by 50%, but this also counters him at the same time, because bymaking things go slower, it allows the survivors to try and fail a skill check much more often than if it went normal speed. So while it was supposed to be an upside, it also ended up being his biggest counter.

Counters

Speaking of counters, his counter is skill checks, which you think would be good, right? You have to fail a skill check in order to get out of dream state, sounds like a good way to slow things down, but in reality, gens already go so fast that it doesn't really matter if you fail ten skill checks in a row, the game will still finish fast as hell.

The silver lining

The one thing that I will give Freddy that he is VERY strong late game. His perks are all about late game, and the fact that there are no more gens to fail skill checks on, mean that his late gme is terrifying, provided you have everyone in dream state. However, no one is just gonna wait until the end game to try and kill. He needs to be good at ALL TIMES of the game. Also he's the only killer that can use insidious well, as reducing your radius to 0 allows for very nice finds on nearby survivors.

How to stengthen The Welcome-To-My-World Nightmare

Something that would make a great difference is making skill checks in dream state rare at base, no add ons needed. As well as make his terror radius smaller then than even the Hag, like 16 meters. This would allow him to stay in the chase better, since you can't see ♥♥♥♥ in the dream realm.

OR make the Pill Bottle add-on a constant thing, and reduce the time to fall asleep.

OR give him a larger lunge and attack range, plus make the dream realm easier to see in. (I really hate the way dream state looks.)

OR make it a passive thing that IF he has an obsession, they start in dream state. It would make his early game better, and pair well with his perks.

As you can see, plenty of freddy buffs await.

I'm well aware this won't happen anytime soon, I just wanted to express my opinion on what would help balance killers. I hate having to only truly fear THREE killers while playing at rank 7 and up. every killer should be viable at every rank. I shouldn't have to laugh when I see a Wraith at rank 6, or Freddy at rank 2. Each and every killer should be feared.

Special thanks to Phaedrus for pointing this "Mage Killer" thing out. Really opened my eyes.