Please stop buffing killers... Better yet, revert the buffs
Let me start by saying that I'm not a frequent flyer of this forum. In fact, I've literally never been here before and I just created an account to write this post begging the devs to please, PLEASE stop buffing killer.
I'm a killer main. I've always been a killer main. But I don't play killer anymore.
Why? Because it's just too easy. Laughably easy, to the point of being boring. It feels like I can mindlessly tunnel survivors, hardly ever use perks or abilities, give no thought to strategy and still rank up.
I came here to share my opinion, and I didn't even have to look 5 posts down to find other players writing about the same thing. So I know I'm not crazy for thinking this or the only person who has noticed a significant shift in balance with the last few updates.
I'm not sure what the impetus is for all the recent changes favoring killers and making life harder for survivors, and like I said I'm not the kind of player who's constantly on forums keeping up with news and posts from the devs. So if that information is already out there somewhere, please enlighten me. But this is the theory I have come up with...
In the past, survivor and killer were fairly balanced. However, at the higher ranks, survivors tended to play in premade teams using Discord, giving them a significant advantage compared to the way the game was designed to be played (without voice chat). The game was no longer balanced at the higher ranks, survivors won more often than killers, and maybe killer became less popular as a result. In order to counteract the apparent imbalance, the devs decide to implement patch after patch full of buffs for killers and nerfs for survivors, and now we are where we are today.
In my opinion, this was the wrong approach. Killer is now way too easy in standard matchmaking, and even when you "lose" a game (3 or 4 survivors escaping) you'll generally still get enough points to not lose pips. Hell, you can even sometimes still gain pips even though you lost.
If I'm correct and the reason for the killer buffs is to attempt to nullify the advantage of voice chat used by high rank survivor teams, then the only way you can ever make that fair is to put voice chat in the game as a standard feature for survivor players. I get that it ruins the immersion, but without that there will always be a discrepancy/imbalance between whether or not the survivors are using voice chat.
A second (and perhaps better) solution would be to rework the pip system for survivors to incentivize play that actually wins games. Combine Evader and Unbroken together into one emblem, then add a second emblem related to gen progress. For example, Lightbringer could be left how it is (points granted based on individual player's percentage of the team's total gen progress) with the second generator emblem being shared among the whole team based on the team's total gen progress so that survivors who distract the killer while their teammates do gens (especially if they are keeping the killer busy primarily through stealth/hiding and not spending much time in a chase) still get credit for helping the team. This would also solve the problem of survivors getting punished with low points/pips when they have a great game where they are never or rarely found/caught/hooked by the killer. Because let's be honest... Gen progress is what wins games for survivors, but it's not what gets you pips. Right now there's way too much incentive for people to everything EXCEPT gens, and people who are focused on actually winning the game (prioritizing gen progress over Altruism/Evader/Unbroken points) get punished with fewer pips.
But yeah, anyway... Regardless of what you guys think the solution is, the current state of the game ain't it. It's ridiculous how many terrible killers I see running around at rank 1 and 2 because it's so easy for them to win right now (or still earn pips even when they lose). And for those of us who actually know how to play killer well, it's just not fun anymore when I don't even have to strategize at all or make any kind of creative use of my perks/abilities/add-ons... I just mindlessly run at people and M1, and even on the rare occasion that the survivors escape I still get enough points to get pips. In other words: boring as hell.
/endrant
Comments
Killer has always been a miserable role to play & when the devs finally start to balance survivors out, you complain. Infact, there's so much more that they haven't done yet because survivors always seem to be put first.
Need an example? Undying got nerfed in a few months compared to DS which took YEARS. Let me give you another one: Moris, the offering that gave killers unfair kills got nerfed while keys, which give unfair escapes to survivors is STILL not nerfed.
You need to wake up.
Every week I have a match. Survivor and Killer.
But nurse and spirit ARE the only counter to high level survivors i mean watch supalf whos one of the best nurses right now scrim with oracle and agony. He needs to 4 man slug or he loses and when asked if he could do the same as say spirit "not even close". Take michael myers or ghostface for instance. No map pressure,No anti loop,their complete m1 killers and big surprise their never played in tourneys. And saying "it shouldn't be balanced around tourneys" is true but what about any killer who has a mmr like dowsey. Otz has 50 wins in a row on all his killers soon. So what happens if mmr works? Hes gonna face tourney teams and pretty much lose because thats just high mmr rn. Any further proof is here:
https://youtu.be/cVqHp6DiT-wall killers that aren't nurse and spirit need to be buffed to match SWF
Yeah, and as you can see the very same people who get carried by SWF then come and cry here things like "Omg survivor is so easy lolZXD"
Easy for you, getting carried. Play solo queue exclusively and then you'll cry less about SuRviBor Ez lOlZ
What buffs exactly do you want reverted ? You mean the hillbilly overheat buff or nurse blink cooldown buff or forever freddy bufff or did you actually mean spirit collision buff ?
There's so many, you gotta tell us which one do you mean ?
The only real "nerf" was moris. But that gave you an unrealistically broken edge. Keys I agree with. I would personally even remove the hatch altogether and make it only spawn IF you contributed a % to repairing. You crouched all game? You get nothing. Die.
Ruin + Undying was basically way too annoying and it god nerfed deservedly so.
It was annoying because it actually forced survivors to do a secondary objective -- something that has been requested for ages now. Not to mention, it actually gave the killer a chance at active gen regression.
Now if we compare that to DS which was 60 seconds of God-mode, usually punishing killers that weren't tunneling, you'd see how drastic the difference is.
This gotta be bait
That entirely depends on where you draw the line at high level play. If you're talking about the 1% of all tournament teams, then yeah nurse and spirit probably are the meta. However, every game played at tournament level has a "meta" of sorts and that doesn't usually shift until something is changed by the devs. However, if you're including high level play as a general concept (even in tournament play) then no, they aren't the only viable killers. They do certainly have an easier time of it though. Ghostface and Myers aren't strong killers because they lack pressure and don't have great chase potential as you identified. But there is no real way to change that as it's something that is unfortunately true of any M1 killer without mobility.
People like Otz are more than capable of going against most tournament teams. However, as great of a killer he is, dealing with a tournament squad requires a mindset that he isn't comfortable with (you can see this whenever the topic comes up) and if MMR works he'll be averaging 2k's against these kinds of teams. That being said, playing against a tournament squad more often than not requires tunnelling and forcing hook states through camping which is completely at odds with how public lobbies are set up (given that you aren't playing with pips in mind in a tournament setting). Trying to balance for that or buffing all killers to be viable against teams which you will rarely encounter (if ever) outside of arranged matches would gut soloq and kill the game.
this has to be bait.
seriously, he's here claiming "i can play killer with no perks, no add ons, without using my power, without even trying to win and still get ez wins every game" - thats just screams bait to me.
You lost me when you said killer was too easy. Couldn't read past that.
Fine bait
I'm willing to accept the OP's accertation that it's "EZ Mode" for him. Maybe he's just a prodigy at killer.
But balancing around Prodigies is a bad idea - so we can safely ignore him.
The problem is, against what i call "normal" survivors, the game is too easy and i generally 4k. Normal survivors account for probably 85% of my games, with another 13% being absolutely new at the game and i assume is a matchmaking fail.
However, against 2% of the the players the game is vastly different. Survivors at high MMR are extremely overpowered. I'm not even talking about SWF, even good and efficient solo players are near unstoppable. At this level, the only viable killer is nurse and MAYBE spirit. These are the teams that play perfectly efficient, because the ratio of chase time to gen speeds is heavily skewed toward gen speeds being too fast.
The problem though, is that if they fixed this ratio, then the other 98% of games that are already bad, would become completely unbearable. What they need to do, is buff that 98% of games, and then nerf the 2%. This is extremely hard to do.
All of the changes they are making to killers that are buffs, are sometimes smart. They usually only effect that 2% without making the 98% worse. The problem is, they still have a long long way to go before this problem is fixed.
And revert the survivor nerfs. At this point, killers needs some nerfs and survivors need a lot of buffs.
There is no doubt now that the game has gotten really boring and unbalanced when survivors have nothing to use in the match. Every match is a loss, unless the killer is actually a noob. Killers win too much because survivors are over nerfed.
Sometimes I read posts like this and I have to wonder if the person posted it has played a single Killer game ever.
2/10 bait post. Original post got people talking, but it's full of poor ideas.
I'm no prodigy. It took me a lot of time and practice and frustration and getting quadruple-teamed with flashlights and saving my pink add ons to use when I knew a team was a premade to learn how to play killer and work my way up to rank 1. But that's the way it should be, not just in DBD but in any game. It should be a challenge to get to the top, and even when you have the skills developed the game shouldn't be so lopsided that I can win easily with no add ons, and with good add ons the game just isn't even fair.
Thanks for your thoughtful insight
A lot of problems with your logic here.
Saying that survivor is easy because you can either force the killer to overcommit or just hop on a gen if he breaks chase - this is EXACTLY the point I brought up in the OP about third party comms. If you're on comms and can communicate all that stuff with your team, then sure, survivor is easy. But the game isn't meant to be played that way, isn't played that way by a lot of people, and without comms your team doesn't know how to coordinate those kinds of actions, who's going to unhook vs work on gens, etc. That's why perks exist to enhance that kind of cooperation among teammates in the absence of voice chat. But without voice chat, the reality is a lot of survivors (ESPECIALLY at any non-red ranks) are going to spend a lot of time duplicating or canceling out each others' efforts, crouching in a corner/hiding in a locker and being all around useless while the team carries them, etc.
To say killer is disadvantaged at the earlier ranks... I also have no idea how you could find that to be true. Those are the exact games where everything mentioned above about survivors is the most true, as many low rank survivors have no idea what to do, how to work effectively with a team, common strats, etc and mostly just spend a lot of time sneaking around doing nothing. (In fact, getting through the frustration of playing solo survivor at those ranks is the entire reason I've been a killer main for most of the game's existence.
And no, I also wouldn't say that I've put so much time into the game that I'm just miles ahead of what the average player can accomplish if they take the time to learn. I have about 300 hours played and that's accumulated over the course of several years. I typically only play maybe a month or two at a time on one or two occasions each year year before I go back to other games.
It took me all of 30 seconds to find multiple other posts on this forum saying the same thing, so you're outside of your mind if you think it's an isolated opinion. There are numerous people in this very thread agreeing that killers are too strong and have received too many buffs.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Nurse used to be one of the highest skill cap killers, now she's almost impossible to get away from. Personally I think the double blink is unnecessary, but if it is kept then I think there should be some kind of turn radius cap, slowed turn speed, charge time, etc. Just really ANY penalty for missing so that survivor at least has a chance to get away. Blink already provides a lot of map pressure, it shouldn't make nurse also one of the best chasers in the game too.
Most people can't even tell if survs or killers are good when they verse them, they only see the outcome (escapes and kills).
Prolly a survivor main that wrote this in hopes killers get nerfed LMAO
As I've stated in other comments already, I don't play this game religiously or keep up with all the patches, so I'm not intimately familiar with all the specific changes that have been made. A lot of it is just general sense that I get playing the game, for example that flashlights used to be really good and popular but now you almost never see them, that killers rarely have to rely on abilities anymore and can get by just using M1, etc.
But with that caveat, here are a few specifics I would go for first based on the knowledge I have:
I could go on, but I'll stop there for now.
I agree with what you've said, but I don't think that those 2% are just "better players"... A lot of the times it's that they're on voice comms and can communicate vastly more efficiently and quickly than a survivor team that has to guess what their teammates' next plays are going to be. Which, again, is never going to be 100% fixed unless they add voice chat as a baseline part of the game for everyone to have and then balance around that.
I agree that's not really an ideal solution and I hope they come up with something better. But right now, they've gone ahead with the "balance around that" part and skipped the "add voice chat" part, which IMO makes the game way too hard for the typical solo queue "normal" survivor.
Couple things:
Pips don't matter. Up or down, makes no difference.
If you don't feel challenged as a killer, play a weaker killer. I main clown, doctor and legion and I feel like I struggle to win sometimes. I do not run meta perks. If you're leaning on Freddy with Pop, Ruin, undying and whatever else then ya, you're not going to have a hard time winning. Switch it up and learn a new killer.
Sure, buddy. https://imgur.com/a/GzEBtHx
My mains in this game have gone from Trapper, Wraith, Huntress, Demogoron, Pig (where I started playing competitively and not just casually), Doctor, and now Oni. I never even hit max level on a survivor until about a year ago, around the same time I bought Oni. From launch until late 2019 I never leveled a survivor, and even when I started leveling one it was just as a way to spend all the excess bloodpoints I was getting from playing killer during the Blood Hunt events.
I don't run meta perks either. I don't even own Cannibal or the shareable BBQ&Chili perk, nor would I use it if I did own it. I don't use NOED, I don't use Devour Hope, don't use any Myers perks. Tbh I don't even know what's meta beyond those. The killer build I have the most fun and usually run is anti-skill check/large terror radius (Unnerving Presence, Distressing, Huntress Lullaby, Monitor & Abuse). Sometimes I'll swap in Ruin, Overcharge, Undying, or go for a basement build depending on what killer I'm playing and what sounds fun that day.
And honestly, I don't really care about pips or rank. Ever since they introduced tomes, all I ever do in this game anymore is work on those challenges and clearing the tomes (which I'm always behind on because I only really play this game a couple months at a time between long stretches of other games). The only reason I mention rank is because I want to see better players at the higher ranks, not survivors who got carried by hiding in lockers or killers who ranked up just because it's so easy to rank up as killer these days even if you lose a lot.
I know that I am on the side of killers still receiving buffs, the literal role of the killer isn't supposed to be equal to survivor because then it would be a literal 1v4.
All of that aside, I just want to see who agrees with me on this... Who else wants Freddy to go back to his first release form?(With huge nerfs of course).
Voice chat is not why that 2% does better. It certainly helps and makes them better, but it all can be done without voice chat. All it takes is for survivors to play efficiently on gens, and you are going to lose.
Sluzzy, seriously. Are you a troll master or you are talking serious on your post?
Because seems that you play an absolutely different game vs the vast majority of DBD players, revert survivors Nerf like DS? The most abused perk of the Game?
I mean, I only have 2 options here, or you are One of the worst DBD players or you just dont play the Game and come here to forums to bait people with trash post.
I agree with Sluzzy. You can gaslight all you want, but there are clearly a large number of players who think the game currently favors killers far too much.
Sounds like you need to change up your killer perks
Yes, the Game favors Killers when they are rank 15-20, when survivors are learning how to loop and the killer needs less skill to achieve 4K.
Then Killers reach red ranks and the game turns 180 degrees against them, except when we masterize Nurse, Spirit or Freddy with red addons.
Try to play Legion, Wraith, Demo,Trapper or pig vs a decent Red rank Squad and then tell me if survivors are not strong.
The problem is not the killer, the problem is the survivor carried by premades Who think that they have enough level to face a killer with consistent rank 1 skill and get destroyed and come to forum to make crypost about the Game.
This is actually a good point - that the game is moving in the direction of balancing for the exception (swf voice comms and higher ranks) instead of the majority (no voice comms and lower ranks). Which means a minority of players will be having fun, while the rest will often be left disappointed and disgruntled.
I think a lot of the struggles of this game come from the currently stated (or assumed) win conditions: escape, or kill. These two win conditions lend themselves to.... let's say "not the best behavior" rather often. On the Killer side, it leads to gameplay like slugging multiple survivors, tunneling, and camping hooks - because that's the best way to ensure kills, which is the best way to "win." These actions are also often required to complete Tome challenges - which I've said before not only encourages, but requires gameplay on the part of both Survivors and Killers that the opposite side dislikes in order to complete (basement hooks, blinding challenges are two examples)
On the survivor side, the situation is complicated because escaping, at its core, entails exactly two things: repairing gens and opening doors (yes, there is a hatch, but it's not a base objective) - and these are the least-fun aspects of survivor gameplay for a lot of folks. They are also, as you pointed out, not great for gaining points or pips (and, in the case of the door, not something every survivor gets to do even if they make it to the end of the match). Yes, a secondary objective was added (totems) - but seeing as there is no hex that makes it impossible to get out (there are some that can slow things down or make it riskier as in NoED, for certain, but nothing that makes it imperative to do totems in order to escape), the secondary objective of removing all five totems often goes ignored (and it's also not the most fun thing to do, either). So some survivors have taken to seeking out the Killer with things like overuse of flashlights, etc. either because they are bored of the actual objectives, because there is a Tome challenge they want to complete, or because they want/need the points to avoid de-pipping.
A related issue to the above is the sense of urgency on both sides of the match. This results in both sides trying to win as quickly as possible - which, given that queue times can be terribly long, means that folks are sometimes sitting in a lobby twiddling their thumbs for 15+ minutes, only to play a match for 5 minutes because one side or the other has pushed things to EGC and match over so quickly. All this does is send everyone back out into the queue instead of still playing in a match. So the reality is that players spend more time waiting to play than actually playing. Read that again: players spend more time waiting to play this game than actually playing this game. This is bass-ackwards. We need reasons for matches to last longer while still remaining fun, exciting, and engaging for both sides.
(Tangentially, I've been super happy with the new Chapter because despite all the whinging about Trickster, for some reason this Chapter has led to a surge in people playing, which at least for me, has lowered queue times across the board, no matter what time of day I'm playing - but I know this is not likely to last forever)
Speaking of points and pips? The emblem system is such a broken mechanic. An easy fix until they can figure something out would be to eliminate the cap on each emblem. Just let people earn points doing whatever it is they are doing. Categorize it if you must, but putting a cap on an emblem punishes players on both sides. If a cap must exist, put it on the total number of points able to be earned in an individual match. So, for example, make 30,000 the cap for base points earned in a match (add-ons for bloodpoints would be able to boost that amount just as they do now).
Refer back to my original post regarding voice chat. Even if survivors aren't allowed to use voice chat during these tournaments (I have no idea if they do or not), they've played enough together to know exactly how their team plays, what their strategies are, etc which would nullify the need to have voice to begin with. The only way they're ever going to balance tournament-level play with average Joe play (at least with tweaks to the perks and abilities that currently exist in the game) is by adding voice chat to the game, as I've already stated.
Part of the problem is that many players don't even know when they've screwed up or what they did wrong because nobody ever points it out to them unless they happen to all be PC players and people stick around for post-game chat. So regular players are always going to be far less coordinated than high rank or premade/voice chat players simply for that reason.
If you think killers don't need nerfs you just need to get better at killer.
I agree, which is why even though my original point was that killers should stop receiving buffs, I also mentioned that survivor emblems need to be reworked so that you don't get dog water survivors getting carried to high ranks by their teammates who have to step up and take all the risks.
And yes, it is also too easy to rank up as killer. In a close match, the killer will still rank up while survivors only do if they happened to be in position to get a wide variety of actions completed and/or were lucky enough to not be targeted by the killer. You can have 3-4 survivors escape and killer still gets pips. Whereas on the survivor side you can completely dominate, do tons of gen work while stealthing your way around the killer every time he comes close, escape unscathed and still get 0 pips. And your teammate who sat crouched in the corner waiting only for 100% free unhooks but barely touched a gen still gets pips lol.
If you're talking about me, I don't even own Freddy. Nor will I ever buy him until they make him an actually fair/challenging killer to play. Same reason I don't own bbq&chili or use NOED.
I don't actually agree that it is too easy to pip as Killer. If anything, it might be that it is too easy to pip as Survivor, which leads to bad Survivors at higher ranks for otherwise lesser Killers to feed from.
Bro I HAVE been rank 1. I don't even own Spirit or Freddy and I haven't played Nurse since long before they gave her double blink. Trapper was my first main, I took a long break from the game and came back as a Pig main and Pig was the first killer I really played competitively with. I still think both are plenty strong. So if those are your "hard" killers idk what to say.
Pig weak IMO
Is this some brilliant form of reverse psychology? I can't tell.
I DUNNO - SEEMS LIKE A VALID POINT!!!!!!!!!
Survivors are the power role, killer designs are weak and carried by good players.
yeah tbh i never read that far.
they lost me after the sentence i quoted xD
Its not too easy to pip as a killer, there are many games where I can not get chaser score simply because the game says I didn't get into enough chases despite winning a good majority of them.