Blindness Overhaul Suggestion
I don't think I need to go into a ton of detail regarding why exactly the current Blindness status effect is a little bit lacklustre, to put it mildly. It rarely does anything of note, and when it does do something, it's very frequently preying on a team of solos having no way to communicate with one another. I would like to address this with a hypothetical change, both in terms of making the status effect more consistent for killers while also levelling the playing field for solos versus SWF when facing it.
So, with that in mind, I have an idea in two parts; a new mechanic on the survivor side, and a new mechanic on the killer side. We'll start with the survivor side:
Priority Auras. Put simply, the game would distinguish between two sets of auras; that which the game provides to survivors at base with the implication that they're important to see, named Priority Auras here, and those provided by perks with the implication that they are therefore inherently optional, which we'll call Lesser Auras for convenience.
When a survivor is hooked or slugged, that aura would be considered a Priority Aura, and would no longer be blocked by Blindness, including the Blindness inflicted by lockers. This information would be considered important for the player to have and not a fair thing for the killer to remove, much in the same way that Blindness right now doesn't remove your HUD or its associated elements like the relatively new activity icons. This already has some precedence in the form of killer-specific auras like Jigsaw Boxes not being affected by Blindness, but expanding it should allow a baseline to prevent Blindness from being a solo stomper.
(It'd also allow for a new change, which is that survivors could see their teammate's auras for five seconds or so as a Priority Aura whenever someone is hooked, leaving Kindred to give the rest of the hook duration's aura reading as a Lesser Aura. That's another topic, though.)
A change like this would require a compensatory buff, though, which leads us to the killer side of things:
Dim Vision. I don't really have a snappy name for this one, but, in addition to blocking Lesser Auras from being read, Blindness would now also dim the edges of a survivor's vision and cut down on the distance they can reliably see. Similar to, but not as extreme as, Dredge's Nightfall; it shouldn't be to actually make it harder to see where you're going in chase, but it could be to obscure a killer's approach or make it a little bit harder to sniff out hexes without being right on top of them. Nothing extreme, we don't want to give every killer something on the level of Nightfall, but enough that being Blind would have a little bit of consequence beyond just hiding hooks due to a reduction in peripheral vision and a liiiittle bit of dimming beyond a certain range.
I would imagine that with this new effect, every current source of Blindness would have to be re-evaluated, and some numbers would very likely have to be tuned down, but the core idea I feel would be much more useful than what we currently have without being miserably unfun to play against.
Comments
I would like to address this with a hypothetical change, both in terms of making the status effect more consistent for killers while also levelling the playing field for solos versus SWF when facing it.
I do not see this as possible because objective of current blindness is to remove aura's but player that use aura the most are soloq. inherently, the status effect is soloq stompy. I think whole reason why they have aura locked behind perks is because the game was inherently designed to be hide & seek originally. a horror game where your meant to feel alone as you try survive a powerful killer.
the thing is fast-forwarding to dbd 2023, dbd barely constitutes as horror game. it is more like scooby doo chasing loop game. so the whole idea of inclusion and like... aura reading behind perks with blindness status effect is kinda outdated to how current dbd is played and perceived.
with that being said, bleed out slugging relies on blindness to be effective even though it is not very effective. removing is not a good idea unless you buff slugging. a lot of your post concludes something that I conclude like 2 years ago about dbd. it is funny seeing a similar opinion. at some point, twins is said to be "reworked" so I guess we will see if anything in regards to slugging changes.
People complain a lot about perks such as Windows of Opportunity and call it overpowered. You’d think they’d be happy and craving more blindness status effect inflicting perks and addons as it is now to counter this so hated perk by them.