Caps for buffs and debuffs.
I have seen and heard a lot of suggestions of hardcaps for certain buffs/debuffs so i looked at some actions that might or might not benefit from caps.
Why caps at all?
some things in the game are extremely broken or unfun to play against and a cap would make these things less good without manually tuning every single aspect; also some things cant be changed without overnerfing them without caps imo
Things that could use a hard cap:
- self-healing speeds for survivor
- generator slowdown for killer
- generator regression for killer
- generator speed-up for survivor
self-healing is pretty self explanatory; a survivor should not be able to solo heal themselves within 4 seconds. I am thinking about a hard cap for self-healing so it lasts 15 seconds minimum. Altruistic healing speeds can be as fast as they want to be imo as long as they cant be used for bullying like old CoH since it requires 2 or 3 survivors to not do gens.
Having self-healing speeds that are technically faster than the cap only help if you have a debuff applied like mangled, but they can never make the healing faster than 15s. (cap is debatable on what is balanced)
generator slowdown for killers are all the effects that make a generator slower to repair, not perks that regress progress over time or instantly like surge or Ruin. Things like Thanatophobia or Gift of Pain or in this category.
They can all stack together but i am thinking of a hard cap of 40% slowdown so you cant stack 4 slowdown and make generators take years. If you wanted to stack dying light, pentimento, gift of pain and thanatophobia; even if all were active at the same time you could only increase gen times by 40% meaning generators can "only" take 126 seconds to be repaired from 0 to 100.
While the exact % cap is debatable, I think this would make it so no future or present killer can just make a game super unfun to play by just making gens take years. This would also allowobjectively bad slowdown perks like Dying light to get buffs without feeling oppressive. It also spices up perk variety for killers and a mechanic similar to exhaustion sounds decent enough.
generator regression are all perks that instantaneously regress a generator, stuff like surge, pain resonance and pop for example count; perks like Ruin, Call of Brine and overcharge do not count. the extra regression from missing skillchecks against huntress' lullaby or overcharge also count.
This cap would make it so a generator can only lose so much progress before finally not being able to regress anymore. The cap is counted seperately for all generators. It probably does absolutely nothing in the early game but it might make 3-gen scenarios or similar things less impossible to do. The cap i had in mind is that any generator can only regress 75%-100% through instant regression.
you only ever have to repair a generator twice? i dont know about the actual numbers. numbers are something you determine through testing.
generator speed-up includes literally anything that makes gens take less times. Toolboxes, perks and Brand New Parts. Any generator now has to be repaired for at least 40 seconds. no more near instant generators!
as i stated before, all numbers are completely random. if this ever were to be implemented, this would have to be tested to adjust the numbers so they actually do anything or arent too strong for one side.
also this could make perk balancing easier. Dying Light for example is trash because buffing it and it stacking with other slowdowns would be really OP. This would make perk balancing way easier. since perks could be adjusted without accidentally combo-ing with other perks in really bad ways.
thoughts?
Comments
There's already a healing speed cap, IIRC - just one that's the same for self-healing and regular healing. While the cap on self-healing could stand to be less insane than it currently is, you're basically eviscerating green medkits with 15s - I'd think something like 8s or 10s is more fair. (And then we can unfuck Botany.)
I'd love to see that concept applied to gen slowdown. First off, stacked slowdown games are just 100% miserable experiences and I see no reason to incentivize them, but it'd also allow them to create more slowdown perks without the fear of "this would be OP with Thana, so we can't do it." Or slowdown addons, for that matter. Looking at you, Freddy.
I don't like the idea of capping how much a gen can be regressed, though. If there's a hotly contested gen, the killer should be allowed to fight for it instead of automatically losing at some point. All instant regression perks have the prerequisite of a survivor being downed, which makes them inherently counterable. It won't feel like that in solo queue when potatoes are dropping left and right, but I think the earn condition on those perks is fair and stuff like stealthing or throwing pallets like confetti will make it easier to last long enough so that the gen gets completed. So does having the whole team pile on a single gen.
Gen speed-up is tricky, because how do you measure that against multiple survivors contributing to the same gen? Multiple survivors contributing multiple addons? And BNPs are in their own weird category with the instant 10% progress.
yep, the self-healing cap exists to absolutely ######### over green medkits since they are currently the most broken survivor item. they are the reason I think self-healing speeds should be capped. Maybe you re right and self-healing could be capped at 10 seconds. (imo this is still too fast). also botany knowledge should ve gotten something like "botany knowledge does not work when self-healing with a medkit" instead of the minus efficiency when using a medkit in general
yep that was the reason I think slowdowns should be capped, just so some killers, like freddy, can get their old power back while not making everything infinitely more miserable. also allows for current and future perks to be buffed without all stacking with each other making games impossible to win.
imo the gen regression aspect is solely there for scenarios where the killer did not do a good job but is hyper stalling the last few gens with perks. for example with this you can "only" use the old pop on the same gen 3-4 times before it simply does nothing to it anymore. sure there are countermeasures against it, like playing well, however matches that get dragged out usually lack pallets and sometimes gens are in dead zones and completely impossible to do against stacking gen regression. This change allows a killer to stall to get some more hooks. If they did well before the hyperstalling, they'll win since survivors are dying and nobody is able to do gens anymore since they are dead. If they played badly before, they are not able to make a comeback just because they picked a regression perk. That is why the cap is so high at 75%-100%.
gen speed-up is tricky just because multiple survivors can work on the same gen. I think this cap should only apply to doing gens solo? maybe doing them as 2 people? i dont know. all i want is there to be some cap so you cant spam use BNPs on one gen.
Maybe just a cap that you can only use 1 BNP per generator? it is the same part so logically speaking you probably wouldnt just replace the same part with a new version over and over and then suddenly the gen works.