What counts as "extreme slugging situations", for the upcoming anti-slug?
What counts as "extreme slugging situations", for the upcoming anti-slug?
If the killer is forced to slug a survivor for an extended period of time, because the only hook within range is currently broken by the Breakdown perk, would that count as an "extreme slugging situation"?
If the killer has multiple survivors slugged, but literally can't hook any of them, would that count as an "extreme slugging situation"?
Comments
Why is the solution always giving survivors more free basekit perks? I play survivor half the time and even I think this is ridiculous. This whole thing about slugging being a major problem is also ridiculous.
If you get slugged and nobody comes to pick you up, that’s a problem with your teammates, not the killer. If two or three people are getting slugged at a time because they are getting downed immediately in chase, that’s a skill issue on the survivor team. Pick up your teammates when they are down and last more than 5 seconds in chase. Problem solved.
No, that's ping ponging. Popping back and forth between survivors getting off hook is ping pong tunneling.
Here's an example of a "snowball":
I am losing a match. I only have a couple of hooks, and only have two gens left. Three survivors are injured. I down one of them. Another injured survivor, emboldened by their seemingly unassailable lead, comes in for a flashlight save, but gets downed instead. I now have one survivor on hook, and one slugged.
One of the remaining survivors is injured, the other is healthy. The healthy survivor comes in for the save, but I guess where he's coming from, and he gets downed in a trade. Instead of chasing the survivor who just got off hook, I go back to my original slug (flashlight guy), and catch him getting picked up by the last injured teammate. They both end up downed.
The last remaining guy, my original hook, gets someone up but gets downed in the process. I chase this new final survivor, down them, and win the game. The survivors abandon, I hook the bots, then get hate mail in the EGC.
That's a snowball. A series of events that turns a small thing (downing a survivor in chase) into a big thing (all four survivors downed.) Kind of like a cartoon snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger as it goes along. Hence the name. A series of mistakes by the survivors and a couple of good reads on my part won me the game.
It's also why people say that Trapper is a snowball killer. Because a game can go from just having one person on hook to a desperate situation very quickly if one or two survivors step in traps at the worst possible time. (Which is why his purple stone is also his best addon. It adds lethality to his power.) Trapper is NOT a killer that ping pongs well. He lacks the mobility and chase lethality to ping pong between survivors and keep heavy pressure.
The idea that survivors should just get zero punishment for making so many mistakes in a row, and that I should get no reward for playing well in crunch time is insulting. It should be insulting to survivors. I know I wouldn't want to be handheld to the point that several colossal mess-ups in a row had next to zero consequences. If there are zero comeback mechanics, then killers may as well tab out the moment they have one bad chase.
I’m not going to go back and forth with you over semantics. Especially when you’re including examples of snowballing, but I would not classify effectively ending the game via slugging full stop as snowballing.Tbh not hooking anyone and repeatedly slugging until you get all 4 down is probably something I would classify as excessive slugging. We can agree to disagree.
Nobody is saying that survivors should get zero punishment for mistakes. Sometimes things need to be reigned in for overall health and balancing of the game, bridging gaps, and bringing playstyles more in line. I’ve had plenty of things I like nerfed to some degree over the years for the overall health or balancing of the game either because it was used as “griefing”(even though in most cases it guaranteed wins and was used as “strategy”) or in specific scenarios it was too strong. That’s just DbD, and always has been. If it’s okay to iron out all the “perfectly good strategies” for survivor because it makes killers “feel bad” “or is too strong in the right hands”, why does that not apply to killer and how survivors feel going against some things because it feels like overkill, it feels busted,mismatched, and is also used for griefing putting people not in 4 stacks in what feels like a helpless situation where there is no winning and even worse it’s boring and not fun.
Honestly if you’re that good, maybe you shouldn’t get lobbies but against anything but 4stacks. Some of these strats requires comms to overcome or even be balanced in the slightest.
Because the way I look at it is(and I’ve played everything from solo to sweating swf, and played killer off and on over the years)either they separate entirely people who play this way from mixed lobbies, or throw a bone to help even the playing field and balance around it.
Not only is it unbalanced against almost anyone but 4stacks, it’s just not fun for people who aren’t in a 4stack because you’re on the ground relying on your teammates to hive mind.
If you want people to understand killer concerns and be empathetic maybe you should try giving that back, because the issue here with slugging and tunneling is the disparity between being on 4man comms and not being on comms in a mixed lobby.
They have a constant feedback loop, mixed lobbies don’t. If they keep buffing killer issues without addressing mixed lobby issues the gap just grows bigger. That doesn’t even account for skill difference when playing with friends, or just mmr doing its best with what it has to work with.
Yeah sometimes not picking up teammates is the case, but it’s not always the case. Things are nuanced, and sometimes it’s about the bigger picture.
Just curious… what "perfectly good strategy" of survivors made playing killer feel bad?
Serious answer: Because in previous years, especially earlier on in the game's lifespan, BHVR's philosophy was to give survivors (and killers, tbf) perks to deal with specific actions. Maybe they didn't realise how problematic some of these things would be, maybe it was something else, but there are a bunch of effects already in the game that help to answer various scenarios - if you're discussing a problematic scenario, and it's one of the ones that has a counter-perk, it does make sense for most people's first thought to be "well just use this effect, it already exists".
Borrowed Time existed to protect people after they're unhooked. When discussing how a lack of that protection is a big problem, it's natural to look to the Borrowed Time effect— in my opinion it wasn't the best choice, but it still made sense as something to at least consider.
Slugging isn't the same as tunnelling because it has legitimate use cases, but the same principle applies. If we're looking at problematic slugging - the killer downing everyone before picking anyone up, specific killers effectively being able to win the match off one power activation, and killers maliciously bleeding everyone out - it still makes sense to look at the currently existing anti-slug effects.
It's just a trickier needle to thread, because you do still have to leave room for legitimate slugging.
off the top of my head here’s 2 but there’s more
Bringing 4 toolboxes going full sabo and deleting most of the hooks on the maps. Couldn’t feasibly get any hooks.
Stealth also used to be so goated if your teammates all died you could evade the killer the rest of the match and slowly painfully slowly do any remaining gens to get out to get hatch to spawn. They would just wander around looking for your while you clock worked the gens.
I remember seeing threads upon threads about these things and how much it sucked.
Permanently deleting every hook on the map isn't exactly something that can be countered. It also didnt even need toolboxes, so you wouldn't have a clue what's about to happen until you hear bunch of random explosions.
The 2nd part was just painful for everyone involved. They essentially just sped that up by removing the gen requirement. Realistically, if you were the last survivor... you weren't gonna be able to solo a gen without getting found. This just led to hostage situations more times than not.
Yeah I agree. It was still a “strategy” though. You’re right it didn’t need toolboxes but they sure did help be able to do that and gens. Get with 3 friends you know are good and you could escape full team no hooks against most killers. Similar to now how you 4k multiple hooks with 5 gens up depending on how hard you want to go in as killer. That’s crazy. I’m sure all those killers were bad though and we were just that good back then. Obviously.
Realistically as survivor I was doing that back then against everyone from myers to nurse, often. It wasn’t as hard to do as people make it out to be. Stealth was legitimately that busted if you understood how to use it effectively. I would solo gens and the killer all by myself.
Generally I like to look at it as "can this be countered". If the answer is no, its probably not a good thing to keep around. You can heal slugged teammates and return them to full health. Killers COULDN'T do the same to hooks. Also unlike the slugging which involves getting into chases with each person and outplaying them to down them, breaking the hooks involved no interaction with other ppl at all.
Sidenote, while I agree it was a strategy... I was just wondering what you'd consider to be a "perfectly good strategy" as opposed to absolutely broken.
I just don’t think it’s that black and white when it comes to balancing because if the answer is join a 4man to be able or you have to run these perks and it might work still depends on teammates, to get any real interaction otherwise it’s just landslides then it’s probably a bad philosophy given that there are players who have no interest in doing that. Again it’s not always as easy as heal your teammate and get them up. I can do that until we’re all bleed out from being repeatedly slugged since everyone isn’t on comms coming up with a game plan collectively to be able to compete. Which is my entire point, because the game is centered around balancing high mmr 4 mans. This creates a gap between the two, mmr is shot for a variety of reasons.
That’s not true, you had to build for it, you had to be on comms, and then you had to break the hooks and get in there before they could hooks the person and get out of there without causing a snowball.If you wanted to go totally brain dead though with little to no risk have just one guy run the killer while everyone breaks hooks. Depends on which way you did it. It was super engaging and interactive for survivors, probably not for killer. Sabotaging similar to slugging made sense in certain situations and required skill and risk, and then there was taking the least engaging route and farming the killer, and they just had to play along, unless survivors were playing the risky way which left room for counters.It still got reigned in all the same same though because of certain ways it could be used to put killers in unwinnable situations.
Survivor has a similar issue where even though there is a counter its join a 4 man or everyone should be running these perks, I’m sure these knocking it out of the park situations for killer feels very interactive for survivors not on 4mans not bringing slug perks.
Distortion got nerfed because killers couldn’t swap 1 single perk to a different notification alert, and there was a plethora of counters to it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t need to be changed for other reasons.
Anyways bridging the gap and balancing around that and still pushing up lower tier killers to be more competitive is probably the best route since they have face these 4stacks too. Otherwise you’re alienating an entire portion of the player base all for the pursuit of balancing killers around 4swf even though not every lobby is 4swf and trying to pretend there’s not huge differences in performance vs 4swf and mixed lobbies, while simultaneously undermining it as “git gud” moments. When comms gives real time feedback that adds up for counterplay.
What do you think? Since we feel differently im interested in you expressing your perspective on this and this take.
How is "just break all the hooks that never come back" skillful? The only part of that to offer resistance is skillchecks. As for slugging, I never said anything about perks or special teamwork. The thing to counter a slugged teammate is the exact same thing as countering hooked teammates... 1 guy rescue them to bring them to the injured state.
Generally the "strategies" that survivors have had through the years that were discarded are a repeat of "if I do this, im 100% safe and at most all the killer can do is mildly annoy me". The double locker flashlight "strategy" being a good example of this. Y
This post is trying to gather answers to: What counts as "extreme slugging situations", for the upcoming anti-slug?
Do you two have opinions on what should count as extreme slugging?
3+ slugs same time and repeated slugs no hooks if I had to draw a line.
Nope, my general attitude when they say stuff like this is to chill and wait til we get more information. Theres no point in coming up with arguments against things that haven't been announced. It just comes across as someone who won a shower argument.
It's still uneven. We shouldn't be so complacent about steamrolls. Because just as likely as it is that the trial ends at 5 gens because the Survivors screwed up (greeding and/or bad plays, etc.), it can end at 5 gens because Killer overexerts their power. Often times, it just takes one well timed camp/tunnel and the trial is effectively over.
I suggest it a lot, but a good (actually good) scaling difficulty would be the answer to this I think. The idea of a casual mode with classes like 2v8 could help too. But as is, the risk/reward is gravely askew.
Don't ask questions you already know the answer to.
You "don't want to argue semantics" because you're wrong. Words have meanings. That's why we use them.
You talk about taking mixed lobbies into account instead of 4 mans, but the problem is that survivors can still 4 man. So, what are you suggesting? That 4 man swfs should just be even more of an "I win" button than they already are? That we should make the game miserable for killers because sometimes it feels bad to get slugged?
That's how you kill the game, by the way. If going up against a 3 or 4 man is just an automatic loss, killers will just drop the game in droves. I'm one of them. What you're talking about is just eliminating every strategy that even the best players in the world using S tier killers have to use against 4 man swfs.
The fact of the matter is that Phase 2 will either be as toothless as the anti-facecamp, or it will be absolutely busted to the point that survivors are back to ten minute queues. There is no inbetween.
None. That's the answer, right? SWFing should just be an automatic "I WIN" button, and we should sacrifice killers on the altar of "Won't someone think of the solo queue?"
Its really not... the only time your likely to see a team not get ANY gens done after the killer gets 4 full chases done, its because the killer is hacking and flying around or the team grouped up rather than hop on gens. Camping/tunneling doesnt really explain 0 gen progress, especially when no one is getting hooked so no perks requiring hooks are in play.
See? Why bother explaining it?
I very rarely run into cheaters, but I do run into a Killer slowing down the trial very early very often. Again, you're right that sometimes it's a Survivor or two throwing a wrench into the gears. Sometimes it's a Killer tunneling early. Sometimes it's a Killer getting a hook at the start of the trial, camping, downing two Survivors attempting a save, and then finding the remaining one and downing them. No matter how it works out, trials shouldn't be ending that early with so little engagement. And that does go for both sides. I don't think the gates should open with 3 hooks any more than I think the trial should end with 2 gens complete. Hence my suggestions before.
Feel like the topic is shifting. I was specifically talking about games that end with 4 slugs at 5 gens left. That generally is just a huge misplay. Ppl arnt on gens and are instead hovering near where the killer is. If you are salivating for a pallet save THAT bad, I dont think the game should protect you from the consequences.
You started talking about tunneling ppl off hook in a conversation where I thought no hooking was even being done.
It happens. 😎
I would assume it's games with extended periods of dying states with no hook or hook attempts