TUNNELING AND CAMPING ISSUE
Tunneling and camping have been an issue for a long time now and I'm sick and tired of dealing with it the way it is.
First of all, seeing as how ESSENTIAL time management is for killers, it's quite shocking to look at the current state of the game. It seems like the VAST MAJORITY of killers nowadays are all either face-camping, tunneling or proxy-camping survivors (slugging too, but that's not what the post is about), I am a red rank Killer myself but play both sides equally and I find it equally annoying and frustrating on both sides!
Tunneling:
Tunneling is one of the most annoying ways of dealing with survivors, it takes about 15-30 seconds for 1 health state and thus about 40 seconds for a down on average. If you then make it to a hook without getting flashlight-BOMBED or sabotaged you get ONE of the TWELVE hooks necessary to kill all survivors in the trial (assuming they don't DC / don't struggle, because they're losing). On a high level of dbd that's already pretty difficult in itself, and then it would take 120 seconds until they die on the hook, if you were to face-camp them that's a HUUUGE amount of time lost. So to keep the pressure high on the survivors you gotta get another survivor on a hook or at least down them. Meanwhile, no matter what you do, one of the 3 remaining survivors is going to get the unhook inevitably, once that has occurred it's in your hands whether or not you follow through with the usual procedure with one of the other survivors or return to the survivors you have previously hooked. Now here is where the actual problem becomes apparent! Borrowed Time is pretty much in every single game at least once, so waiting out BT takes 12 seconds + a teammate taking a hit for them, it's almost guaranteed, that this survivor is going to make it to another tile in time. So that's another ~40 seconds even though they're already injured, and in your worst case scenario the survivor also has Decisive Strike still up ( even if they wouldn't have it up, a 40 second chase with the time it takes to bring them to a hook again excluded is not a good chase regardless) and thus is going to get a free get out of jail card to potentially extend the chase for another 40 seconds. Pretty much the only counterplay to that would be to slug them and to wait the DS timer out, but that's still really bad time efficiency. And keep in mind that this would only be their 2nd hook stage. Gens get done way too fast and easily to deal with such time waste.
If you want to avoid dealing with everything above, the most straight forward workaround would be camping.
Camping:
Now if we go back to first hooking one of the survivors from the beginning, and you decide to camp them for one hook stage, it's going to be a very long 60 seconds for you. It doesn't really matter if you face-camp or just proxy-camp the hook, you're bound to that location for that time, camping simply takes waaay too long.
Most matches last about 7-15 minutes, camping and tunneling survivors can take up around 50% of the match. You can barely call this gameplay at this point. Bubbas are falling asleep in the corner of the basement with insidious.
Tunneling and camping need to be fixed, as it is one of the most boring aspects of the game.
Now enough with the issues, may I introduce some solutions now.
Time is everything in this game, so something that takes up that much of your time with such little actual gameplay to it should not exist in this game. Either make camping easier by making the killer emit some kind of fear radius to prevent survivors from unhooking right in front of you or simply reduce the time between hook stages. It's not fun to get face-camped for 2 mins straight either. Reducing the overall time the survivors stay on the hook already helps with tunneling, but that still won't be enough in my opinion. Buffing, or rather fixing Monstrous Shrine would also be very helpful, because let's be honest, the perk barely does anything as of right now.
Tunneling:
As tunneling still involves chasing the survivor, I don't think it should be changed too much. The chases are still the most fun aspects of this game despite the current hold W meta. It needs some changes nonetheless, the Decisive Strike 'nerf' wasn't really that much of a nerf as some people make it out to be. The perk still works the exact same way as before, you just don't get to have god mode for 60 seconds anymore. One change I would like to see would be to remove bloodlust entirely since it kind of destroys the entire chase mechanic of the game. Instead I would like to see something like being able to break pallets faster or some kind of rage mode, to be able to walk through breakable walls like in that other indie horror game with the trapper in it.
Anyways, what are your thoughts on this?
Comments
There is no one single strategy, perk, or mechanic that reduces gen pressure like tunneling a survivor to death immediately. Survivors asked for this, in combination with failures by BHVR:
How do you expect competitive human beings to resolve this math in their head? It takes roughly 3 minutes to complete 5 generators currently, without survivors breaking much of a sweat, I'll be honest. I suspect what is happening, if you are dealing with being tunneled to death a lot right now, is that the killer you are facing has deemed you to be sufficiently below them in skill enough to be targeted. As you point out in your post indirectly, a killer does not win by 1v1'ing the best survivor on the team, they win by destroying the worst.
BHVR must, in some way, increase the value of pressure on survivors to reduce the compulsory need to immediately subjugate the entire survivor team to halt the survivor's snowball.
I fully agree with what you're saying, but there's one thing. A lot of killers tunnel and camp even if they wouldn't need to. You can never get rid of these strategies entirely, and you shouldn't try to either.
The game is not well designed. The entire gameplay loop of slugging, hooking, tunneling, there's nothing positive in those aspects. Fun death animations on the second hit or something with survivors being able to resurrect each other would be much more entertaining. And on the survivor side, the only fun thing is chases. Doing gens is boring. Being slugged or hooked means being sidelined, unable to participate. How is that a healthy aspect in any game? To make it worse, chases are supposed to be short, they're designed to be short, because long chases absolutely screw the killer. The two sides' fun are in direct opposition to each other.
The game needs a creative solution. It needs more structure. It really needs to get away from the possibility of cutting players' fun short with tunneling, camping, and gen rushing. Or it at least needs to award more Bloodpoints even when things go bad to soften the blow of short, miserable matches.
the game is old and needs a whole rework from the ground up, nothing is going to fix this until something big is changed. updates to change this somewhat will slightly change how things are done, but besides that it'll remain just the same. it needs a whole change.
Tunneling and camping and slugging are not an issue.
The 'issue' behind is that a Survivor died, and instead of learning from their mistakes, they blame a tactic, call it 'unfair', and demand it be removed so they don't have to improve.