Skip to content

Shoulder The Burden Is Poorly Designed... (DBD Perk Design)

Iron_Cutlass Iron_Cutlass
in Feedback and Suggestions

After making my thread on Hex: Thrill Of The Hunt, I think it is only fair to address Shoulder The Burden and how poorly designed it is.

Shoulder The Burden can completely changed the way that the game is played, it outright removes tunneling and, by proxy, can remove a lot of the pressure the Killer can generate through hooking certain Survivors. To put in bluntly, Survivors who would be dead wont be, since it forces hooks to be spread out, even in cases where tunneling does or does not occur.

Fundamentally, Shoulder The Burden in an incredibly strong perk, that (in my opinion) leans far too heavily into exchanging hook states and can punish Killers in many cases where tunneling does not occur, and (in some cases where tunneling does occur) can often lead to the tunnel target being changed since it is (often) unlikely for there to be multiple Survivors running this perk.

This is ignoring the elephant in the room… Survive With Friends v Solo Queue…

This perk's effectiveness in SoloQ is (most of the time) outright useless. You trade a hook state for your teammate only for them to still die in 10 seconds because they used their on-hit speed boost to run into a tree. The quality of your teammates cannot be ensured and this perk can sometimes often be a detriment by giving the Killer a free exposed on yourself.

Furthermore, Shoulder The Burden's main strength involves coordination. Knowing when and where to use the perk is important and having information from teammates can result in more effective usage of this perk. There are many cases where Shoulder The Burden would be amazing in SoloQ but a teammate snags the unhook before you can even get a chance to use the perk; yes "pre-game chat" exists but not all players can see it (such as Console players).

This just leads to Shoulder The Burden being a really strong perk in SWF and niche/situation in SoloQ and rather than solving the issue of tunneling it only solves it for a select portion of the Survivor playerbase (which arguably dont need that increased strength anyways). SoloQ has always struggled in comparison to SWF and I really hate to see the gap get widened by poorly designed perks.

So what's the take away from this?

Well, Shoulder the Burden is fundamentally flawed solely from a design perspective, and I really think it comes at the core of the perk itself. I think it would either take a massive rework or changes to make this perk fit into the meta without being overly strong in SWFs and/or without being overly useless in SoloQ.

I wish I could propose a better solution or idea, or something overall more constructive, but I honestly dont know what BHVR could do to exactly fix this issue.

Comments

  • Jinxcore Jinxcore

    @GeneralV said:

    Honestly, my friend, I think the perk is good and healthy for the game.

    Personally I would have replaced the exposed downside with aura reveal, but I don't the perk is causing any problems right now. I've already had it used against me, and it barely has an impact if you're already spreading hooks.

    It is good against hard tunnelers, which is something DBD absolutely needed. Tunneling should never go unpunished.

    It would be nice if solo queue managed to catch up and use this perk more often, but this is very unlikely.

    You're trolling if you think aura would be a better downside than exposed. You absorbed an entire hook state. Major value has to have major risk.

1 2 ›

Categories