The Dead Hard Change is Bad for the Game
Dead Hard will activate after safely unhooking a Survivor. When activated, press the active ability button while injured and running to gain the Endurance Status Effect for 0.5 seconds, then become Exhausted. Dead Hard will deactivate when it successfully protects the user from damage.
I'm sure tons of players are thrilled to hear that Dead Hard is receiving a big nerf. The thing is, current Dead Hard has lots of counterplay. Furthermore, Sprint Burst was already arguably better than Dead Hard anyway.
Even running under the assumption that Dead Hard needed a nerf, this is a very poor way to do it. Bad players will just switch to Sprint Burst. Good players are still going to be able to use the perk very effectively at pallets and in loops to cause major headaches for the killer.
That is, unless the killer uses the very niche strategy of TUNNELING. Instead of going after the player who did the unhook who could have Dead Hard, why not go after the hooked player instead? The hooked player can't have Dead Hard anymore, so what's stopping you?
Regardless of whether Dead Hard needed a nerf or not, this wasn't the way to go about it.
Comments
They're making it a more situational Exhaustion Perk. Akin to how Head On can't be used at any given point in the Trial, you need to think about when to use it and it isn't always available just because you're not Exhausted.
In all honesty it could probably be buffed to no longer require the Injured state as well, more or less being a "protector" avenue for an Exhaustion effect.
I also fully expect Sprint Burst to get some kind of passover to be more situational as well, first to address the unwieldiness of needing to walk in order not to consume it while not exhausted, and to remove the skill-gap of 99% SB by making a conditional trigger.
Also no doubt that there is likely work being done on how to address the prevalence of tunneling.
You said it yourself, "directly off-hook" and "survivors often lack the coordination needed". People are unhooking in front of the killer, and they need to have SWAT like voicecomms to be able to do a body block when someone is unhooking. This problems was there long ago, and DH and healing changes or not they would still be problems because those problems are created by the players, not the balancing of the game.
And don't get it personal, but the last posts in this forum complaining about the DH change are all about how it would make tunneling worst somehow, something that was never said in any point before when someone was saying DH needed a nerf as far as I know. If it was you who come up with it, well, you are simply wrong.
Oh I'm not the blue guy. I'm the green guy. Blue guy is my ######### teammate that just got downed and prevented me from unlocking Dead Hard
Is Head On a situational perk? It doesn't have an activation requirement like Dead Hard. Really the only situational thing about it is that you need a locker and a killer to be near a locker.
But by that logic, you can also call Balanced Landing a situational perk because you can only activate it if the map has an elevated ground
Okay but now if you tunnel, you also prevent other survivors from ever getting that third health state. Essentially, the same issue as Background Player
And why you want the poor blue guy dead? Don't unhook him in front of the killer so he doesn't goes down the moment he touches ground!
Yes to both being situational. (Albeit Balanced suffers from inconsistency in map design)
Current Dead Hard can be used nearly anywhere nearly anytime, whose conditions are while Injured, and without Exhaustion. Conditions which are more of a formality, as a Survivor that gets chased usually isn't Exhausted if they don't have another Exhaustion Perk, and then they get Injured if it isn't an instadown Killer.
The initial nerf to Dead Hard was more of a thematic rebranding, since it didn't address the root problem of Dead Hard in which it allows the Survivor to mitigate an otherwise chase-ending hit at the VERY last moment of the chase, where other Exhaustion Perks usually would have already had to address the opportunity cost of their design (Sprint Burst used early (99% is still a problem), Lithe only on Vaults, Balanced on falls, Head on using Lockers and 3s charge, Smash Hit is still trash because the opportunity cost is should be dropping the Pallet not also stunning the Killer).
Which is what this change seems to be attempting to address: It's still the same power level and amount of agency when it is up, but it isn't up as much as other Exhaustion Perks can be now.
Though I do hope that they remove the Injured restriction to the new iteration of Dead Hard, but at the moment that would probably conflict with other Perks that use the same input press were Dead Hard to lose the Injured requirement.
Can't wait to be farmed in front of the killer without having my own DH active and having to run anti tunnel perks because solos being the monkeys they are will only care about their DH,,,guess those dust collecting bnps and toolboxes are about to be put to use
It would not give those "monkeys" their DH either because it only activates after a safe unhook, so... it's time to learn to not unhook somebody in front of the killer!
A safe unhook means that the unhooked person won't get into dying state the first 10 seconds after the person gets unhooked,,you do realize that unless you stand still the person will get the DH but the killer will be free to tunnel you because you were farmed in fron of them or them being too close ?
Some Score events. Challenges, or Perk-activation conditions require that a Survivor is unhooked safely.
For an unhook to be considered as such, the just unhooked Survivor must not enter the Dying state
for the following 10 seconds.
Right on the money, we are going to see MORE tunneling if this change goes live.
If we are going to go with this style of change where you need to 'earn' a Dead Hard, I would recommend a different avenue.
With those changes DH will only hit the powerful enough killers to help even the playing field. I personally would increase the Endurance duration to .75 due to how laggy the game is, but that is a personal gripe.
I’m so glad this is happening! At least 3/4 survivor’s run this perk every single game. It’s an extra health state that you can use infinitely. It’s broken.
To be fair the *tunneling* your talking about is quite literally the objective of the killer. Look I understand every survivor has had to deal with their fair share of a face camping buba I'm not saying you haven't. And I agree is annoying to play against. HOWEVER...I think that the majority of complaining about tunneling comes from killers defending hooks within an area, and then they just get called campers. If you are the weakest link on the team, I'm sorry but in gonna put you in hook to lure out your buddies till they make a mistake and I can apply pressure to them and the gens near by.
If the killer defends gens properly or defends hooks, they are playing the game AS INTENDED. It's the same argument i would make for survivors using obnoxious perk combinations to bully a killer or someone using a gen rush build. It's is all AS INTENDED. this is what the game has evolved into, and it's been headed here for a long time.
I understand the frustration with tunneling to a degree, but yall really need to cut us some slack. We are just playing the game and trying to have a good time, just as much as you all are playing the game and trying to have a good time as well.
When something like 3 gen skull merchant comes along and breaks the game? That deserves to be fixed. Dead Hard being changed to change the meta and shake up the perks brought? I guess we will have to wait and see. We don't even know how this will perform in the ptb, and everyone is losing their minds. Killers took nerfs, survivors took nerfs. Let's just play the damn game.
Isn't that what already happens without any type of reward? Like I said in another post, that has being one of the main reasons people complains about "tunneling" and was there since I started playing as survivor. That won't change whatever the state of DH is.
And hey, maybe survivors will stop to use the basekit BT to shield others instead of getting the hell out of there as now their own mates will go all "You didn't allowed me to get DH!". Another point for the change!