Simple Balancing Suggestions For Top Issues
Quick Info About Me!
Hey there! I'm Lollipop! I’m brand new here and this is my first post! I decided to share some of my thoughts and address the top issues I find with DBD currently. I mainly want to throw ideas out to the community, especially since a lot of balancing has been done these past months. As for me in the game? As a player? I have many hours into this game, I play all killers, and I play a perkless and itemless survivor. I always choose the brightest outfits possible as a Feng Min. I consistently win, but sometimes I feel bad for the opposing side and give them free kills or free escapes. I would like to consider myself AT LEAST above average at this game. I tend to not side with either killer or survivor, instead I always try to think for what is best and healthy for the community as a whole.
How do I determine what is in a need of balancing?
Dead by Daylight is a party game. It really should not be taken too seriously. However, even party games need balancing when certain mechanics start being unfun and unfair. After all, that is what games should be! Fun and fair! Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfun things people find with this game. Most of these are obviously subjective and can be shrugged off. For this post however, I will be addressing mechanics that are NOT ONLY unfun but ALSO unfair. I define unfair as something with little to no counterplay, an undeserving sense of victory or loss, and unreasonable. Below I go through each issue I find to be unfair. I describe why and then I proceed to offer suggestions. I believe the why is not too important, but I still provided my thoughts on the topics.
The purple and pink keys!
WHY? These keys are notorious for easy escapes for not only the key bearer, but sometimes quite possibly the entire team. The main issue is these keys make the game far too easy for survivors and much more difficult for the killer. Getting an escape with the key requires very little skill from survivors. Take this single scenario as an example. 3 survivors left, 1 generator left to complete, and everyone is on death hook. Looks like the killer will be rewarded for playing well and the survivors will likely lose. Yet suddenly they all found hatch and escaped! Results show all the survivors pipped up, but the killer only black pipped for getting a single kill. Does this scenario sound familiar to any killers? What happens when a killer wants to prevent a hatch escape when a key is present? Usually a lot of toxic decisions occur such as tunneling/slugging/camping the person with the key for the entire match. Most killers believe they have no choice because even if the killer finds the hatch and closes it, the survivor can open it right in front of the killer anyway. The killer has no good counterplay or prevention to keys. It is simply unfair. A survivor escaping just becomes inevitable when a key is present.
SOLUTIONS. I believe there is a very simple solution to this. It will not completely solve the issue, but it will be a good step forward. Make it so that opening the hatch with a key is NOT an instant action. Make it take time to open the hatch. I would personally make it exactly like totems. Opening the hatch with a key will take the same amount of time as totems and if the killer interrupts you, you must start over much like you would with a totem. Preventing, counterplaying, and protecting the hatch suddenly becomes doable. You can even add things such as notifications when the survivors are working on it, aura detection of the hatch for the killer, ect, ect.
All the mori offerings!
WHY? Moris are powerful tools the killers can bring that may completely turn the game around. The main issue is that it becomes too powerful to the point where it becomes impossible to win as a survivor. I am sure there are many survivors who have had matches where someone gets instantly downed, hooked, and moried. The remaining survivors are left with many generators to complete and a 3 versus 1 scenario. Most survivors see no chance in winning anymore. It becomes unfair. Most give up and suicide on hook. The problem here is the killer works very little and the survivors need to work much harder for any success.
SOLUTIONS. There are TWO solutions I came up with without changing the concept of the moris. Meaning, ebony moris will still be able to mori everyone and ivory moris will likewise have its single usage. Here is my first solution. Killers will have a time limit to mori survivors after being unhooked. Killers will need to be able to down the unhooked survivor within 1 minute before they lose their “mori-able status”. This status will always proc after any unhook. The survivor will get rewarded in this scenario for outrunning the killer. The killer will be punished if they become too obsessed with the survivor and ignore generators. The SECOND solution is similar. After a survivor is unhooked, they will become mori-able after 1 minute. In this case, it will prevent immediate tunneling and it will at least punish the killer for wasting time going for this single person instead of going for them later. This will also give the survivor a somewhat of a fighting chance. None of these two solutions completely solve the problem. Killers can still do the same thing they are doing currently. They can slug survivors and simply wait to combat this for instance. Cypress mori is not really an issue, but as a slight input from me, I would buff it to where you may mori any survivors on death hook. Much like how the upcoming Pyramid Head killer is able to execute survivors.
Generator objectives being too quick and easy!
WHY? I believe the biggest issue with generators is at the very start of the game. This is the first phase of the game and personally I find it to be the most important. Getting a great start can sometimes mean an inevitable win for the killer. During this first phase, you will often see 3 survivors are on generators and 1 survivor occupied with the killer. After downing and hooking, 3 generators are suddenly complete. More than half of the objective is completed because the killer did not have enough time to stop it. This leaves the killer with a sense of loss and hopelessness for the rest of the match. HOWEVER, this is only truly present in the beginning. After the first hook, I would say the next phase of the match starts. This is often indicated by the rotating roles of “1 survivor on a hook, 1 going to save and heal, 1 on a generator, and 1 occupied with the killer”. Generators become much slower like this, especially when you consider generator stopping perks or other abilities. This is the phase that needs to be extended, but how can we do that?
SOLUTION. Much like endgame collapse, the game should start with a timer. During this time, survivors will have to search for generators and “activate” them for repair use. For the sake of an example, we can say the match will start with 10 generators for the survivors to locate. Survivors must “activate” 7 of these generators before they may begin repairing them. The extra 3 generators will be blocked off. If the time is up before the survivors activate 7 generators, the entity will randomly choose the rest of the remaining generators. This will halt generator progress at the start of the match. Furthermore, I think it would be interesting as well because survivors can strategize where they want these generators to be and which ones to not activate. “Activating” these generators can be as simple as touching them. If this gives the killer too much of a power role, generator speed can revert back to what it used to be. The point of this solution is to have that middle phase be extended.
Comments