Why I think nerfing the meta would fix the game
I'm sure someone has posted a similar discussion before and the developers have read thousands of these (if they ever read anything regarding balance), but I hope I can at least find someone else here who agrees with me.
So I joined the game fairly recently, less than half a year ago, and when I joined my first public match and faced a legion on the gas heaven map, despite the fact that I was bombarded with all this new stuff like a new map, killer, and mechanics that I have never seen before (I hopped into a locker while I had deep wound thinking it would save me), the game still fascinated me and I never lost interest. Back then, the game felt… fresh, interactive. I don't know how to explain it. And when I first discovered the blood web, it felt like a true blessing. I was given so many new "upgrades" for my character that all seemed so concise and simple, which made me feel like this game has a bright future in store for me. Which it did, but shortly after, I found out that the perks weren't as "friendly" as I initially thought.
What I'm leading to is: when I took the perk Premonition with me that day and wandered the Hawkins laboratory map like a stray cat, I genuinely felt intrigued, maybe even a bit scared. But nowadays, Premonition is a genuine joke to me. Back then, I felt that by taking it with me, I was bringing something useful, helpful. But we all know how wrong that is. And that's why I think that in order for the game to be more noob-friendly, intriguing, and scary, the meta has to be demolished. Not killswitched, but just nerfed into oblivion.
There are so many "useless" perks like premonition, both for killers and survivors, and it seems like the developers completely abandoned the idea of balancing the game and are now throwing all the new perks and killers into the safe A-B tiers, while keeping second chance perks unchanged. It's kind of obvious that they are trying to balance everything not around the bottom of the tier list, but around the top. And I apologize if this sounds naive, but wouldn't it be better if it was the other way around? I'm sure that balancing premonition or quick and quiet around sprint burst or vigil would be much harder than doing it the other way around. Some (MANY) perks just have effects that cannot be balanced around the meta effectively without breaking their original purpose.
So, why don't we just take a look at the game without any perks, as if they never existed? Probably would be balanced, maybe a bit survivor sided, especially with the pallet density update, but nothing too serious. But the moment you bring in the perks, the game becomes a balancing nightmare. Second chance perks have killers cowering in fear as they grasp onto their last pain res token, resulting in a sfw gen jockey squad tbagging a pyramid head that just decided to take someone asides from blight or nurse at the exit gates and clicking their flashlights. Seems unfair, right? For lower MMR, I think it would be the opposite with how uncoordinated boobs tend to be. Regardless of the situation, I don't think perks should ever matter as much as they do currently. It's practically impossible for a perkless trapper to win in high mmr.
Would it really be that hard to give pain res like 2 tokens instead of 4 and give it a 10% penalty instead of 20%? Would it really be that hard to nerf sprint burst into giving only like 20% haste? A newbie wouldn't get obliterated by a meta monster or swf the moment they step into the game, as it would rely more on skill than on flashbangs and dead hard predictions. They should also nerf the meta killers as well. The nerfs would ideally be equal for everyone, both survivors and killers.
TL;DR: All perks and killers should be nerfed to be at least roughly equally strong
Comments
Interesting idea, however I think it'd be better to implement more things as basekit features like they tried to do last year with the anti tunnel update. Giving killers basekit pop and survivors something akin to decisive could be a good start.