This Patch Will Not Fix DbD
I want to start this off positive. The new patches are good. Its going to feel great to not get denied a kill because of E. The new endurance perks are promoting team-play without being over bearing. Niche perks have gotten overhauls. It's all really nice to see. But we still have a long way to go until the game is in a legitimate good state.
It is a step in the right direction. But even if we make a million patches like this, there's still going to be issues. The main idea of this patch was to gut the meta so new perks can make way for play. They did great with that, a good example would be Hex: Ruin and how it deactivates in 3v1's to give the team a chance.
But the problem lies with the core design of the game. Gens are stale and when 3 survivors split on gens separately, that first chase can already lose you the game. So they're boring, but can also be such an advantage in the early game that is too good to pass up for people who know what they're doing.
I doubt I need to tell many of you that, but just for the sake of this post I will. And I do understand the extra 10 seconds adding up to about a minute more time with gens overall. Whether or not this helps much will have to be seen on live servers.
So what am I getting at? Well, currently the game plays like this: Load in, Find survivor, down survivor fast, then hope to build up enough pressure to juggle things the whole match. At least for killer it is. For survivors it's basically just don't die in chase and stick on gens.
And that is the big issue. The game isn't heavily reliant on team play. Sure you could consider the whole 3 gens early and loop forever strat as team play. But it usually doesnt deviate outside of that. Many survivors don't consider hook states, support perks or game plans. Not to say this is necessary, because there's nothing wrong with casual play. But because casual play is what makes the game hard ironically. Because there aren't systems in place to encourage survivors to explore or help out their teammates before they die, the only options are gens. The gens that are the most boring part of the game.
I don't think the added gen time will be super helpful for this reason. You can still focus only one person. You can spread pressure but with things like COH or medkits being the way they are, you're unlikely to get much value from that. In all that time you can only do so much to pester survivors. This game is so reliant on perk play that removing the meta doesn't really fix much. Every killer can be countered by DS+BT+UB+DH or COH and Prove Thyself. Every killer benefits from having 4 slowdowns. So much that I doubt we will stop seeing these perks/builds after the mid chapter.
We have perks for supporting the team, yet they never see use. Killer perks don't have much variety really, which is sad. So somehow we need to take the focus off of perks and onto the actual gameplay. Gens could be reworked in so many ways and along with that would come more variety for how we play the game. Because currently there's no reason to not use the best stuff. There's nothing to dethrone it all for something new because the functionality of DbD is just a rinse and repeat action. This is an inevitable change that has to occur for the sake of the game's balance.
Comments
I am glad they nerfed meta perks from both sides but they did not fix core issues:
Early game pressure is still issue for killer.
Camping and tunnelling buffed for no reason.
I don't know is anyone testing stuffs before PTB. How they can not see issues?
I could fix it.