Decisive strike + Obsession mechanic changes
So after a lot of thinking on "how to fix DS without promoting tunneling but making it more fair/fun to face" I've finnaly though of an idea that imao could possibly satisfy both sides in terms of balancing this very controversial perk. Part of these new changes are some updates for overall obsession mechanic making it a baseline across all games to help close the gap between solo survivors and SWF in terms of information while also helping with new DS changes.
I'll start with the obsession changes since they are part of new DS changes.
- Obsession mechanic is now active each game even when there are no obsession perks on either side.
- It now consists of 2 new markers of entity claws - major obsession (max 1 survivor) and minor obsessions (3-4 survivors). Major obsession appears only when there is at least 1 obsession perk used in the match. Otherwise all 4 survivors are minor obsessions.
- New entity claws (small ones for minor obsession and large one for major obsession) work much like old ones with slight difference that minor obsession claws have a slight delay for giving notification that survivor is beiing chased or left the chase. Major obsession's chase notifications are instant just like they work currently. Also major obsession is the one that is interactable with perks that use obsession mechanic while minor obsessions are there only for the additional information on which survivors are getting chased.
Now for the new DS changes. Effect mostly stays the same but there are additonal conditions, notifications,effects that will help making it more true to it's main use by the community (to punish tunneling even if that isn't design that devs had in mind when designing DS) without much room for abuse or confusion.
-New DS perk description
After being unhooked or unhooking yourself, Decisive Strike will become active and usable for 60/75/90 seconds causing obsession claws to turn red for the duration.
While Decisive Strike is active, when grabbed by the Killer you automatically escape the Killer's grasp and stun them for 5 seconds.
Decisive strike becomes inactive if you start any interaction besides vaulting and dropping pallets/windows. Entering inner gate area also causes decisive strike to become inactive.
Stunning the Killer disables decisive strike for the rest for the trial and will result in you becoming the major Obsession. For 30s after stunning the killer you don't leave pools of blood, scratch marks and grunts of pain are reduced by 100%.
With this new design I want to make DS more true to the anti-tunneling design that community mainly uses it for. These changes aim at giving you a chance when you're beiing constantly targeted by the killer giving you a chance to escape without room for abuseing it for immunity running straight into killer's face since you know that no killer wants to get stunned for 5s and lose all momentum they built up.
You get longer duration + no skillcheck condition stun (since good players always hit it so removing it helps with people with low FPS or just general new players/people who are bad with skillchecks) with added stealth aspects to have very easy time to hide after striking the killer. Trade off is that you aren't allowed to participate in any interactions or you lose your remaining DS time since if you have time to do gens/heal or save teammates/do totems you aren't getting tunneled.
Also the aspect of DS that killer or survivors don't even know if anyone has it needed adjustments. Designing perk to be massive threat and only notification of such possibly game changeing effect beiing only general existance of obsession perk in the match is imao very dumb design decision. If anyone starts a game without having DS they risk getting tunneled without any safety net since that is how baseline perkless DBD works. So survivors using DS with these changes give out notification (reddening or their entity claws for it's active duration) so that survivors who don't use DS don't possibly get DS for free only because it exists and it's so impactfull that killer has to respect it on all 4 surviros even if only 1 out of 4 or even not a single one survivor has it. Perks with as powerfull effect that changes gameplay of both sides as much shouldn't be as random as DS or any other simmiliar perk right now is.
Hopefully this will get noticed by someone on dev team inspiring new ideas for DS changes since it still has a way to go to become well designed perk.
Comments
While I am always an advocate for just eating the stun as a Killer.
I do agree that yes, Decisive Strike is rather controversial and needs to be looked at.
very good idea
but:
remove "For 30s after stunning the killer you don't leave pools of blood, scratch marks and grunts of pain are reduced by 100%."
why? Imagine if all 4 run DS, then they would have free Lucky Break,iron will and dance with me and could use other perks instead
Also, keep the skillcheck
That is there to help with getting tunneled. True tunnelers don't give a damm about some DS or others survivors or gens/wining, their goal is to obliterate survivor of their choosing so this gives that tunneled survivor a very good chance to escape after killer takes their DS. With these temporary stealth buff and 5s of time you should almost always get enough distance to completely lose the killer so that he can't tunnled you unless he finds you again which would be pretty hard.
It might be a bit too much but with new disadvatages that my design for DS has I think it's fair to give real means to battle tunneling and not just more wasted time before killers downs you again. You get a chance to hide and start fresh.
Remember that survivor with active DS can't anything besides runnung around vaulting/dropping pallets. If they start any interaction they lose their DS so if killer wants to get them even when they are tottaly harmless to their preassure for those 90s they'll need to work quite a bit harder to catch them.
Also the skillcheck is imao meaningless, it beiing there is more of a meme imao (like who can't hit a skillcheck in red ranks unless their brain literally freezes) so I've removed it to make it less annoying to run.
I think all the changes are justified and would make DS far more fun for both sides. It could certainly use some more tuning but none of the changes feels like overkill to me at least.
yes but ur perk has:
no bleeding, no grunts of pain, no scratch marks, 5s stun
you cant have what 4 perks give in one, that is against the "rules"
if you really want so much good stuff in a perk, you would also need a major drawback
There is a major drawback, you can't do anything useful for 90s. You could do a gen in that time.
I don't really like this new DS idea at all.
Those mini Obsession indication whether a survivor is in a chase or not is a great idea and should be implemented in some way along with different icons to bring solo players up to SWF level in terms of information.
What i don't like about it is loseing the perk by starting an interaction or stunning the killer.Your idea in general makes this perk way more complicated than it hast to be.
Change DS that it's duration expires after another survivor gets hooked.That's the only change i would think could be reasonable but for the most part DS is honestly fine as it is.
I agree that these updates to obsession mechanic are far away from perfect and solos could use some other new features to bring them closer to SWF level. Yet that wasn't really my intention for them, I changed them mainly to help with this new design for DS.
I don't see your point on my design beiing complicated, current DS is far less clear towards new players in terms of when it activates and why then my design is.
Main reason that I can think of why you wouldn't like losing DS after preforming any intercation (besides chase ones) is because then you are probably useing DS as immunity perk to help you get away from extremely risky situations for free like saving your teammate from hook or something simmiliar. That's exactly the kind of behaviour I want to discourage with this new design. Also why would you think stunning the killer would disable your DS ? It falls under the chase interaction of dropping pallets and it doesn't matter if that pallet hits killer or not, it's still dropping a pallet thus it doesn't disable your DS.
I was once supporting the idea of DS beiing disabled by hooking someone else but after thinking about it quite a bit I found that idea to be far too abuseable for tunneling from killer's side. Decent portion of scenarios that consist of saving your camped tunneled teammate mean hook trading so killers who tunneling would get much easier time to tunnel someone as long as they do a hook trade. That could become way too common and having your perk disabled due to mistakes of someone else is imao at least for this scenario, a bad design.