Change for Kinship due to it's Similarities with Reassurance
Since Reassurance is extremely similar to Kinship in it's role in the survivor's strategy, Kinship should be changed slightly so it's a viable alternative to Reassurance.
- Current Kinship: If another Survivor is within 16 meters of your Hook while Kinship is active, the Struggle Phase timer is paused for 26/30/34 seconds.
- New Kinship: If the Killer is within 16 meters of your Hook for longer than 15 seconds, Kinship activates. While Kinship is active, the Sacrifice Process is halted for 26/30/34 seconds. Kinship then deactivates until you are hooked again.
With this change, Kinship functions differently enough to Reassurance that it is able to occupy a different niche. Kinship is more useful to waste a camping killer's time if an unhook is simply impossible (such as with a camping Leatherface or Tier 3 Myers with Fragrant Tuft of Hair), and Reassurance is more useful for coordinating saves by forcing the killer to abandon the hook.
The best way to make the new Kinship functional is to make the 15 second timer "charge up" over time if the killer is close, similar to gaining stacks of perks like Stakeout and Distortion. The "charge" is held, so if the killer camps for 14 seconds and then leaves, then Kinship will activate in only 1 second if the killer gets within 16 meters.
Comments
That would make Kinship busted. You could literally force the killer into a lose-lose in which the killer is forced to proc it, or make an intentionally stupid decision to prevent it proccing which would require giving a free unhook. The reason Kinship is balanced is because it requires someone to go there. Also that it only works once, not twice. A double proc is literally more than an entire hook state's worth of time (68s).
The killer could simply camp for an additional 34 seconds. Not a big deal if you are already committed to camping, or you are chasing someone near hook. Even if you are forced to proc Kinship, you are still pressuring the hook and chasing the survivor going for unhook. So you could down that survivor and hook them, and still get good value for camping effectively. The Kinship user is then able to buy time for a second would-be rescuer to come and unhook, thanks to the perk. It doesn't make camping useless, it simply makes it more of a risk and less of a free hook state.
Reassurance works a near infinite amount of times, so I think Kinship activating twice is really not a big deal. Besides, it only activates once per hook. So if a killer camps a Kinship user 100 to 0, it only activates once.
The idea is to make Kinship and Reassurance into different perks with different niches. Kinship can only be used a limited number of times, but can be activated without assistance it and has a more generous activation trigger. Reassurance can be used many times, but requires the user to be someone other than the hooked survivor and for them to put themselves in severe danger.
I'm all for perks that make camping worse. It's really just too easy to force a hook stage and a 1 for 1 in current DbD.
good change, any change that punishes camping is a good change imo even if it is camping in the late game.
camping in the late game = you didnt play well enough, so it s fine if you get punished for it by giving survivors more time to save
camping outside of lategame = L move, get punished for it
any change that amkes camping less good makes this game better, there is 0 skill evolved in camping and it only adds frustration for survivors that get removed from a game after sitting on hook for 2 minutes
Giving killer control over that perks seems like a little much. May as well keep the one time use and allow the survivor to use it on themself or something.
The point of both Kinship and Reassurance is that it requires another survivor to engage with the camping killer to activate it.
The main counter to camping is doing gens. If you want to prolong a hook state by that long then you need to sacrifice the potential gen progress by taking a survivor off gens.
This would be busted with a SWF as they could coordinate to prolong the hook state and smash out 3 gens at once.
The only buff Kinship needs is to be active in both hook states, and some kind of indicator that the hooked survivor has it. In this way it's simply the same skill used by different parties. Kinship by the hooked survivor, or Reassurance by the rescuer. Similar to BT/OtR.