Freddy was nerfed for "frustrating game slowdown" that is less than every killer is capable of now
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Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But prior to patch 4.7, Freddy could run Swing Chains/Jump Rope along with Thanataphobia and force gen speeds up to 105.6 seconds. Taken directly from the patch notes, "The Nightmare has been overperforming for some time, and his game slowdown addons were still causing more frustration than we would like".
This was in May of 2021. So last year, it was acknowledged that 105.6 seconds was too slow for gens. It was frustrating. His add ons were changed so the Forever Freddy build was no longer possible.
Fast forward to July of 2022. Gen speeds have been changed to 90 seconds at base, and Thanataphobia has been buffed to a max of 22%. Meaning literally every killer on the roster is now capable of gen speeds (115 seconds) greater than that which Forever Freddy was capable of (105.6 seconds).
What changed? Why was 105 seconds too frustrating last year and 115 seconds acceptable this year? I don't really understand the logic. It still feels way too sluggish and unfun. And the slowdown reaches a point where survivors aren't being rewarded for good plays. Which was the whole point in nerfing Forever Freddy in the first place. It reminds me of the initial DS nerf only to see Mettle of Man pop up the very next patch.
Comments
Thanatophobia is not sitting at max stacks all game unless you're hard throwing.
Legion and Plague
also Pentimento exists
also a lot more slowdown perks exist than before that all stack with each other quite well.
while i disagree that this is a forever freddy situation (he not only had thana and swings, he had pop ruin and tinkerer plus a free instant teleport to the exact place where you d those perks.) it is still kinda awful to play against 4 slowdowns, especially since gift of pain exists now.
The new sloppy butcher has good synergy with it honestly.
Wow, Thana is only ever be at max if survivors let it.
I think its funny. "OMG 22% slower Gens" , "OMG 50seconds extra gen time". Generators take total 50 more charges, which can be done in 20 seconds, plus travel time. Remember the 3 gens in a chase argument? I doubt thanatophobia is often at full or even half power for a whole gen. More often, 3-4 gens will have progress before thana even starts having an impact on the trial.
Edit:
As to contribute to the topic, i guess the devs got different statistics this time around. back then it mightve been too oppressive, but now it simply isnt anymore.
Let me preface this with - yes I think gen slowdown perks are too much at the moment, considering the idea of shifting the meta was to change killers from favouring gen slowdown, but favouring gen slowdown is still the thing killers are doing.
However
Looking at Forever Freddy from a pure statistics point of view isn't telling the whole story as to why that build was exceptionally unfun and frustrating to go against. The primary difference was he could do this with add-ons AND then stack up to 4 additional gen slow downs on top of it, which were both slow down AND regression AND damage.
On top of that, to remove part of one penalty you had to go and constantly either wake yourself up, or ignore it, which slowed down your time on generators (running towards alarm clocks/team-mates), which synergised with ruin/pop 'cause he then had time to make those perks work and also do any of the things to prevent the slowdown of the other perks (healing, breaking totems, etc). FF was WAY more than just 105 seconds on a generator most of the time.
Genuinely though, I don't think generators are ACTUALLY taking a huge amount more than they were pre-patch, I think it's more a perception of gen slowdown VS gen regression/exploding/blocking. I think it's that slow down FEELS worse, because your previous 80 second generator now takes longer to complete. If you factor in the time of regression/exploding/blocking preventing you from finishing a generator (Pop, Ruin, DMS, Pain Resonance) the time to complete all 5 generators probably isn't THAT statistically different to how it is now, it just FEELS way worse because you're holding M1 on a generator much longer.
But again, that said, I do not disagree with the overall point. Whilst the perks may have changed, the overall 'gen slowdown' meta hasn't unfortunately.
Jump Rope (Version right before patch 4.7): -4%
Swing Chains (Version right before patch 4.7): -2%/survivor assuming -8%
That version of Forever Freddy should be 113 seconds
Forever Freddy rewarded you with ~11 seconds to a gen without thanat for doing absolutely nothing passively which is why it got nerfed base kit gen slowdown is a pretty bad idea since it messes with perk balance. Thanat is a weird spot because healing has been getting progressively better every update, but killers that counter healing get way too much value old thanat 4 stacks added 20 seconds to a gen vs adding 25 now which is a little excessive since that's 35 seconds longer to do a gen with gen time changes.
The longer gen times in general against killers without strong chase don't mean much in reality for any group besides solo queue. Competent survivors will drop as many pallets as needed in the first chase and still pop 2-3 gens making the slowdown only matter mid to late game. So is it purely a gen problem or solo queue problem?