How to make Billies overheat work as a mechanic
Billy overheat mechanic has garnered a mostly negative response and my opinion on why this is the case is down to its implementation. All throughout dbd's lifespan killers have been rewarded/punished for taking risks by making use of there power in various different scenarios. Very often if a power has a negative its often also has some upside that can be leveraged in someway to be advantageous. For example Myer's tier 1 has 0 tr allowing potentially for grabs to occur coming around corners, hag spends a lot of time trapping up key locations to potentially create a snowball effect later on when the traps are triggered. Billies overheat mechanic has none of these nuances. The overheat mechanic is simply a tool to punish a killer for using there power. This is a frustration mechanic plain and it simply adds nothing to the killer players experience but anger and resentment.
But what if you could add mechanical depth to the ability an advantage like perhaps a faster charge on your saw the closer the saw gets to overheating. Suddenly the overheat mechanic has the billy player embrace taking risks of increasing steam generated to power up the saw for potentially well timed uses of the power. Counter play wise the saw is visibly redder which aware's survivor's that the billy has a faster charge on his saw. The sounds of the saw and its use across the map also lets survivors know the saw is being used. This warning lets a survivor know in advance that billies saw is primed for a fast charge.
Even if you argue billy has a strong position these changes wouldn't be straight buffs as they influence the billy to take risks and theoretically sacrifice map pressure putting strain on the saws engine for a primed saw being made available during the next survivor chase. As of right now all that's being accomplished with making billies saw overheat faster in its current state is making players upset hitting a killer who already struggles in higher ranks and making them pine for a return to the old days.
Comments
You know, I'm down for that. Make Instasaw base kit when you reach a certain high overheat threshold. It would have to be pretty high so the resource management aspect actually kicks in, but it could definitely be a thing.
You're just picking an aspect of his power and decided that that aspect in isolation should have upsides and downsides. That's illogical. The power as a whole has upsides and downsides. The overheat was added precisely in order to be a downside to a power that previously had very little of that. Not to mention that overheat is hardly noticeable as of now.
Yes but the dev have stipulated they want overheat to impact his play. So if they want to push the mechanic give a payoff. They have stated that they think billy is in a good position so if they insist on further nerf's throw him a way to play with the mechanic. There are a lot of ways to play around myers constantly changing tr. Billies kit is straight forward with limited depth on how you can use the saw. A lot of what defined his high skill level has been nerfed ie his engravings and add on options base kit billy charge time always was abyssmal. While i do agree instasaw was busted I do believe spark plug and guide where very reasonable in terms of charge speed especially when countering the long charge time on the engravings.
Base Kit Billy was strong if you knew how to play Billy. Almost all of the Billy mains I knew didn't bother with addons as they were unneeded. It sounds more like to me you miss crack Billy and Instasaw Billy than balanced game play. Both of which were key factors in the rework. So its unlikely that they will bother with implementing the very thing they wished to remove.
The overheat mechanics seem more to affect new and bad Billys more than people who knew how to play him. The overheat mechanic is the negative to his base power of being both a movement speed and a instadown tool. So im not sure how you say its just a downside without a positive.
They nerfed his turn speed at the start of his charge making it a giant arc instead of a tight turn into the normal long arc i use to be able to 360 on the top of the hills, now i can't.
i swear the rev time takes longer as well.
I didn't notice that when I played his rework for the first week when seeing if I could still curve. Than again this entire thread was about giving his overheat mechanic a better bonus anyways.