Pyramid Head's cages are still terrible
With the dev announcements today, we've seen that the only changes being made to Pyramid Head is to his Punishment of the Damned. However big issues still exist with his cages, a fundamental part of his power.
To sum up his cages:
Pros:
- Disables/avoids Decisive Strike, Borrowed Time, Sabouteur, Boil Over, Deliverance, Breakdown, Flip Flop, Camaraderie, Babysitter, Breakout, Off the Record.
- Saves ~10 seconds of carry time.
Cons:
- Disables BBQ and Chili, Pop Goes the Weasel, Dying Light, Hex: Devour Hope, Hex: Huntress Lullaby, Make Your Choice, Thrilling Tremors, Furtive Chase, Blood Echo, Dead Man's Switch, Forced Penance.
- Moves the survivor as far away from you as possible.
- Disables your ability to know where the survivor is.
- Relocates the cage if you go near it.
- Presents survivors a very low risk situation where they can save instantly because you are guaranteed to be nowhere nearby.
- Cleanses two survivors of Tormented.
So what does this mean? Pyramid Head's cages are a liability. Their only purpose is to avoid Decisive Strike and Borrowed Time, but the countless downsides to doing so mean that in most cases it would probably be preferable to tank DS or BT because you'd save more time than caging does.
It's a very similar situation to Legion's meganerf; when the changes to Pyramid Head's cages came in, they didn't think through "How does this all stack up with the downsides cages already had? Do they need ALL these downsides, or just one or two?"
Cages being as far away as possible from you AND invisible mean that you lose basically all of your map pressure by using them. The survivor is teleported away, you don't know exactly where to, the other survivors are able to safely unhook them in a matter of seconds. Now instead of a survivor on hook while you chase someone or pressure hooks, and other survivors waiting to make the decision to unhook in case you're nearby, you're instantly back to 4 survivors doing gens. At most, the only time you want to use cages is on the second hook stage to avoid DS from the first unhook, and disable it for the second.
So what should happen with cages?
Rather than teleport the cage as far away from Pyramid Head as possible, and make it invisible, the cage now appears exactly where the survivor is downed. The range in which the cage will teleport should be increased to about 10m, instead of requiring basically facecamping as it does now, but will not teleport for the first 15 seconds.
What this means is that the killer now knows where the survivor is caged, and is near to them. Survivors are no longer encouraged to rush the uncage instantly, because the killer is no longer on the opposite side of the map. This means that caging someone still provides a similar amount of pressure to a default hook, rather than a drastically reduced amount.
The killer is still prevented from "camping," as if they linger around the cage will relocate pretty soon, but won't do so instantly, allowing them time to move away, as well as combat some instantaneous hook bombing.
Comments
Forgot to mention, the benefits are also basically cancelled out. It disables two of the top tier meta survivor perks, but at the cost of the two top tier meta killer perks, hardly a net gain in value.