Did meta shake-up really do anything to pain res?
I think it was already 2nd to other perks before the shake up but it was still up there. Now its 2nd currently in pick rate but most of the meaningful nerfs were reverted, same or higher than it was before. Sure the killer doesn't know where the scream is but they can just run DMS combo again and don't have difficulty finding out which one blew up anyway. Funnily enough the perk was buffed because of 15% of 90 seconds vs 80 seconds it had before. I do think overall 6.1.0 was a good patch. But it did overall nothing to this annoyance of a perk. Especially when the reason they reverted one of the changes was a meme combo with merciless storm which could have been a easy fix. What do you think? And what would you change to actually make it fall out?
Comments
The no scream bubble is a significant nerf to its strength. It’s no longer an info perk like before. (Some players use Surveillance in combo with PR; that actually lets you know which gen was hit.)
But all it’s competition pre-6.1.0 was nerfed even harder. So now it’s the best stand alone regression perk.
I was gonna say in terms of playrate it itself seems pretty much the same before and after the change. Probably because its solo strength is still amazing.
the most meaningful change other than the removal of pain res dms (which they should redo, that combo bullies babies and does nothing against good players, its not healthy) was the removal of its locating, which has remained
i used it as my info perk in most builds bc it was mini pop + info on what gen has most progress + info on how many survivors are there and who they are. but now its just the regression so its not just everything packed into 1 perk
i think they just change it to 6.1 pain res before they readded dms comboing and the perk is perfect in terms of balance and strength
No
Travelling to and kicking gens can be a massive time sink, which is why it still has any value. Despite people complaining about stacking 4 regression perks on here, regression perks got hit pretty hard across the board, which is why it still ends up being one of the better ones even when worse than its former iteration. Its also part of why people stack so many regressions in the first place: They all got weaker but the issue of why people ran them was barely addressed. Its why Pentimento is popular now even with how fragile and inconsistent it is, at least it is a potent slowdown that gains value even from people needing to get off a gen to cleanse it.
Gen speeds need to have less variables in either direction, considering how important they are to the pace of the match. The more slowdown/speed up options they have, the harder it is to balance around them.
It also really depends on the killer. I get massive value from it on someone like blight or billy (and maybe wesker) since i can easily traverse gens anyway to find which one exploded. So i feel stacking multiple slowdowns on blight especially is unnecessary. Doesnt stop the call of brine,eruption,pain res,dms blights though. Really depends ig. On the opposite spectrum i see what you see. Running it on myers and having to run around checking each gen burning time.
Actually on Nightlight Pain Resonance is more popular now than it was before the rework. Here's the snapshot of its usage history, 6.1.0 is the rework.
tbh ive been seeing a lot of people switch it out for deadlock, as it does a similar job of isolating and identifying the furthest progressed gen, giving you an idea of where to next apply your pressure. Its obviously not the best at that due to its limitations of blocking the gen (preventing regression) and requiring a gen to be finished before it takes effect. The fact it gets used for that purpose at all despite tells the story that it was an important aspect of pain res that got removed, like the aforementioned pentimento deconstruction. A lot of killers simply want direction on where to apply their pressure, and need that information to be on relevant terms.
Believe it or not the Pain Res change actually nerfed Dead mans switch. they nerfed it because of pain res... so its not very useful by itself unless on a high mobility killer
Thank you for that! Interesting to see.
Deadlock is definitely seeing more use, its Nightlight usage almost tripled from about 3.2% to 9.6%. However Pain Resonance's usage also went up considerably as I mentioned in the post above, and in fact 23% of the people who use Deadlock on Nightlight also use Pain Resonance with it, it's a popular combo.
Ye, I know people pair them a lot, but they synergize somewhat poorly which is why I didn't bring it up. I think the reason a lot of people run both is desperation more than anything, really. People stack everything they can to slow down momentum regardless of how well they work together, just like how people used to pair pop with ruin just to try to cover each other's weaknessess regardless of working together like oil and water.
Sure, I agree they have some anti-synergy. It probably doesn't interfere too much with how they work individually though and since they're both really good slowdown perks that's why they get used.
exactly, just like with old pop and semi-old ruin. They're effective perks that clash but their value is too necessary to just ignore, so it becomes a reasonable sacrifice to one's loadout to shoehorn both in. Its a perfect example of the type of thing the meta shakeup was supposed to address, and exactly why OTR got made into a swiss army knife of anti-tunneling. Thats why it feels bad that they know gen speeds are a problem, but can't find a way to properly address it and rely on people bogging down their build variety even when they blatantly doesn't work well together.
No, not really. I still think survivors should not scream at all, even if it doesn’t show the killer where it was. Given that information, I can often figure out which gen it was anyway if I already knew that survivor’s general location, so it kinda still is an info perk even if it’s not really meant to be.
For example if I know a specific survivor is most likely working on a certain gen, or I see someone running towards a gen, and I hook someone else and I hear that survivor scream, there’s a decent chance that gen was the most progressed one. And if I have that kind of information, then the perk is really no worse than it was before (and arguably is slightly better because as you said, 15% of 90 is greater than 15% of 80 - 13.5s instead of 12s).
(As a side note, if the devs still think merciless storm + PR would be an issue without the scream effect, just hard cap the number of skillchecks merciless storm can produce. It wasn’t really a problem in the first place, but they seemed to think it was.)
To be fair, the rework did make loadouts without any slowdown at all more successful. (I haven't run any slowdown in any loadouts for a few weeks and am running about a 68-70% kill rate for instance). It's just that slowdown is still also really useful and probably a little bit of an easier feeling way to go than something like a pure chase build or whatever so gen slowdown is still very common. Also gen slowdown pairs well for people that play more defensively (aka "campers") so that probably plays into it too.
Gen speed is too variable of a concept though, which is why success and failure unfortunately falls into the anecdotal/situational bracket. Like most major elements of the game, there is too much variation in either direction to actually create direct causality, only correlation. I remember Otz recently breaking down the overall variation of gen speeds in either direction and it was kinda nutty for how crucial of an aspect of game balance it is, let alone the fact that it can be progressed in 1-4 instances simultaneously as well as regressed or even blocked for durations. Just feels like that needs to be a place to start instead of just adding on and adjusting more layers in either direction when the foundation itself is extremely weak.
I don't know if I agree if the metadata is there. With a perk like windows of opportunity or empathy (for example,) you can easily deduce a LOT of additional info outside of the aura reading itself, just by understanding the possibilities that sliver of data helps dictate: Pain Res is much more limited in that regard, since it kind of requires other data to be provided to make similar considerations. Even something like wesker's sprays can be used as a tracking tool not necessarily for the killer instinct itself, but more for "if one survivor is infected and i get a KI and they're cured, I now know exactly where that survivor is" with minimal external data required to make such a deduction. Or even just a survivor being unhooked then quickly healed, knowing that they have to have stayed at the hook to heal unless something like an instaheal is in play. The data that pain res gives is just not enough to make those types of deductions without needing additional data to corroborate or disprove similar deductive reasoning.
Clarification edit: The reasoning with the scream is sound, but it is similarly far too limited.
I guess I should clarify that it won’t always give you as much info as it used to. It definitely doesn’t and sometimes it won’t help you figure out anything. My point is more just that it sometimes does give useful information still in addition to the regression and I don’t think it should do that as much as it currently does.
Oh of course, I was just emphasizing that it still requires more data outside of what it provided, unless you happen to be in earshot of the gen itself. Its basically just an extension of the radius from hearing the sparking of the gen in that regard.