Balancing idea: Scaling perks
As the title suggests, how would the game balance have turned out if perks scaled based on team size for survivor, or relative strength as a killer?
So let's say that you take a perk like Sprint Burst, and subtract 5% Haste for each survivor in your party (if the party size is 3 or more) and a 10% increase if you play solo, or make Pain Res only regress a gen by 15% for a killer like Blight or Ghoul, and 30% for a weaker killer like Trapper or Pig.
Either way, a small decrease in strength for 3 or 4-man SWF's, a slight buff for soloQ and a way to even the playing field among the killers.
Tagged:
Perks
Comments
This type of thing has been suggested before, but people always complain that they are “being punished for playing with friends.” I fully realize that not all SWF teams are sweaty comp squads, but it’s also dishonest to pretend that there is no advantage from coordinating on comms. Good teams on comms are incredibly difficult for the average killer player to deal with without using tactics that survivors consider as “unfun”.
we actually were going to get that but not with perks
In the first version of anti tunneling killers like nurse, blight, Billy, ghoul and Krause would only get 5% haste for 10 seconds if you hook different people
But killers with no mobility would get 10% haste for 15 seconds instead
Also, what I had in mind was to not make the game balance totally unbearable for either side.
I know that playing in a 4-man squad is a significant advantage, since we can always tell eachother where the killer is going.
Even as a 3-man, and getting a decently good soloQ teammate can often lead to a 3-4 out as survivor.
And yes, I know all too well about the "good teams on comms" when playing killer, as I have encountered quite a few during my killer matches, and the gens fly fast, especially if there are toolboxes present.
I'd be for giving scaling perks a shot, I just think to have it done well would take alot of time/resources I don't think BHVR would be willing to put in. Can't really do a blanket decrease all perks by x amount for SWF and top tier killers, increase by x for solo and low tier killers. Really they would need to go through each perk individually to figure out the number adjustments for all the individual perks and on killer side would also need to make adjustments for each individual killer. I think at this point in the game there's just too many perks and killers to get it done when BHVR seems to struggle with what seem like much smaller QOL updates.
I would like to have perks/items/addons be included in matchmaking. Alot of times the build is a good indicator if someone is going in with a casual mentality or a competitive one. If someone has a sweaty loadout put them in match with those that are running similar loadout because they are prepared to sweat. Would probably make matches feel better and less lopsided. Unfortunately I think this would run into same issues for BHVR to implement as the scaling perks.
I mean, it would have made sense to do something like that. But if we remember the Ratings BHVR gave their Killers back in the day… Billy got an Easy Rating while Wraith got a Intermediate Rating. It did not really make sense.
Just imagine a Perk like Pain Res being stronger on Billy than on Wraith. And there were quite a bunch of examples where they got their difficulty rating wrong.
I think scaling would be a interesting idea. They would have to work to ensure that it doesnt make perks too complicated though. As perks having 30 different stats per killer would be too much, but I dthink having perks tiers of say 2 or 3 based on killer style wouldn't be too bad.
This was sort of my thought-process too. Having 3 primary groups of killers, where the perks scale based on which group the respective killer is in. Also, perk tiers would need to go as a result of this, as all perks will essentially be tier 3 when unlocking them.
Perk example - Bamboozle
Perk example - Lethal Pursuer
In other words, small changes to the perk strength, based on the killer's tier. Granted, the numbers could be tweaked more in either direction on a more individual level, based on the individual killer's strength. Similar to how Riven mods function in the game Warframe. Stronger weapons gets a low disposition value, meaning that the stat increases are much weaker than those of a weapon with a high disposition value. And that system works incredibly well.
I'm glad they removed those ratings, though I'd love to know the thought process behind them. Especially if they do decide to scale perks one day. It'd be interesting to see that's for sure lol
SWFs -the issue here is that SWFs can be really be varied. You can have four friends playing together, where a weak player brings down the stronger members, or a comp squad that has try outs to make sure they get the best players.
Also doing this off of perks would be extremely complicated vs. say an increase in gen times.
The issue is also, conceptually, addressed by MMR depending on how much you believe MMR works.
Killers - I'll repeat that it would be extremely difficult given the amount of perks when you could make much easier changes.
I'll also add that if BHVR actually thought some killers were too strong or too weak they could just make changes to the killer.
There's an added difficulty that perk strength really varies by killer. Lengthening Lethal Pursuer for Trapper really doesn't matter because he's probably grabbing traps at the start anyway, but something like Hexes can be stronger for a Trapper than they are for a more powerful killer like Wesker. You create the possibility that a killer put in the 'low tier' bracket actually becomes 'high tier' because of the perk change.
Can do the same with killers or is it just for survivors?
How would we even do that without everyone defending that s-tiers need gen-regression?.
Both sides of course.