Thanatophobia is Unhealthy for the Game
Current Thanatophobia
- Each injured, dying, or hooked Survivor incurs a stack-able 4.5%/5%/5.5% penalty to all Survivors' Repairing, Sabotaging, and Cleansing action speeds, up to a maximum of 18%/20%/22%.
The Problems
- Generators were already nerfed heavily in Patch 6.1.0 wherein they not only took 10 seconds longer to complete, but Killers now had the ability to apply a 2.5% automatic regression to them.
- There are certain Killers who benefit far too much from Thanatophobia's current effects alongside the Generator repair times. These include Nurse, Blight, Legion and Plague.
- This Perk can be used with other slowdown Perks in order to make the game too miserable for the Survivor playerbase, and due to its must-have nature, makes it boring to use for some Killers over time.
- The effects of the Perk are just completely removed once Survivors heal from it. This means that if Survivors have good healing builds or you are playing a Killer that doesn't get much pressure from hitting Survivors, this Perk will be nigh-on useless.
However, simply altering the numbers won't do anything to solve these issues. You can lower the numbers if you want, but the perk will still be unhealthy due to the fact these Killers can exploit it to no end. Instead, it needs a rework.
The Solution: Thanatophobia (New)
- When a Survivor is hooked, Thanatophobia activates and afflicts all Survivors with a 8% penalty to repairing, sabotaging, cleansing and blessing action speeds for the next 50/55/60 seconds.
- The penalty of Thanatophobia can stack per Survivor hooked, up to a maximum of 32%.
- The duration of Thanatophobia is reset whenever another Survivor is hooked after the prior Survivor.
- Thanatophobia does not stack with other Perks that apply a penalty to action speeds.
This new version of Thanatophobia gets rid of the Killer's ability to gain its potential through means of injuring or downing the Survivor. This means there aren't any situations where Killers who can easily injure Survivors repeatedly can exploit the Perk to its fullest potential anymore.
Instead, the new effect of Thanatophobia is that it is applied only whenever a Survivor is hooked, and for a set duration of time afterward. This incentivizes going for hooks rather than hits and rewards Killers capable of getting hooks. Since the new requirement to activate the perk is as such, and the fact that it now has a set duration of time, the Perk's effects have thusly been buffed to compensate, granting increased slowdown to offset the fact you need to hook Survivors to get it.
And since it has a set duration of time that can only be reset upon subsequent hooks on OTHER Survivors, camping with the perk wouldn't be recommended.
Pretty much a more modernized and healthy version of it.
Comments
While buffing Thanatophobia was a strange decision, given that increasing gen times was supposed to alleviate the need to run slowdown... this just seems to be moving the problem somewhere else.
When you hook a survivor, you're already applying gen pressure. You have one less survivor on gens because they're on a hook, and then at least one other less survivor on a gen because they're going for the rescue. So your 8% has diminishing returns.
What this does, is punish survivors for staying on gens when another survivor is hooked. Which means what this actually does is it rewards camping. Combine this with Monstrous Shrine and Deadlock and you've got the new camping meta that guarantees gens can't be completed before the survivor dies.
Honestly just think Thanatophobia just needs a nerf to 4% per stack. This would bring it into line with Gift of Pain at max stacks, and it will basically be just as powerful as it was before the patch.
Before the patch it was common for up to 3 gens to be done before the first down. Thana often wont affect gens for their full charges, especially at 4stacks/full power. Even with the new changes.
"The penalty of Thanatophobia can stack per Survivor hooked, up to a maximum of 32%."
Sure, because is very common hook 2 survs at once
I'd be fine with reverting back to old Thana just affecting Healing and not gens.
2 things:
other than that its actually not a bad idea (if not a bit difficult to understand)
getting 2 hooks within 60 seconds of each other seems very difficult. how about you change the duration to 90 seconds, but it no longer refreshes when hooking another survivor, so when i hook dwight and 60 seconds later hook meg, thats 8% until meg was hooked, then 16% for 30 seconds and 8% for 60 seconds after that
Thanatophobia is a fear of dying, not a fear of engineering so this would make more thematic sense as well. Not to mention it could easily be countered with Desperate Measures.