The Black Banquet leaves a foul after-taste, and not in a fun way
Honestly previous anniversary events in the past have been some-what killer sided, mostly with the remote pallet break and remote hook. But this one is blatantly overly survivor favored.
Killers don't get much in this event, sure the poison bottle is pretty good, but its reward is delayed AND to top off the cooldown to replenish a token is about 60 seconds with NO way to gain tokens from interactions (unless I'm mistaken about that but I haven't seen/noticed it). BHVR also expects killers to poison dinner carts/tables gens or pallets but we have an extremely limited supply of them and is far more effective to lob them at survivors.
The Haste Banquet is the least interesting one, providing 5% Haste to all survivors for 20 seconds when a gen pops and 10 seconds to killers when they hook a survivor. Old Dead Hard for distance has come back with it going a little bit further, still not interesting.
The Invincibility one isn't as bad as you can most of the time wait out the survivors invincibility time, but seems to have a bunch of coding issues. Like I've seen Trickster's Knives ignore it as well as Jason's Spikes. I found out the hard way that if Singularity Slipstream teleports to a survivor near a invincible pallet, it counts as though Singularity teleported and broke the pallet WITHOUT breaking it. The Banquet special of being able to rebuild pallets when the pallet density update already screwed over killers massively is problematic, especially if they rebuild god pallets like Killer Shack.
EDIT: the invincibility doesn't protect against most killer powers.
The invisibility one, the most aggravating one (to people like me who have some hearing difficulties), making a survivor completely invisible with only their footsteps being heard except we ALL know how often this game has issues with sounds playing properly. Further more if you pair it with Ellen's perk Light-footed, this is an instant escape from any chase. The Banquet special making portals refill survivor items is a little annoying, endless med-kits/toolboxes.
By far the dumbest thing about this event is the Banquet Special healing one health state of all survivors when activated. Not even with just coordinated teams but people who understand the game can fill both tables A and B with 3 morsels each and wait for a survivor to be injured in chase and then complete table A, instant heal and then complete table B after the next injury. This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't a global heal and only a short range of the completed table heal. Sadly the strongest effect survivors have at their disposal that doesn't even require a coordinated team to pull off is probably the biggest reason killers WILL NOT want to play this event.
And to add insult to injury, BHVR has made the anniversary cakes for the 10th year go from common rarity to very rare. This makes them show up very rarely in the blood web and the best way to get a lot of them is leveling up a P100 for constant level 50 webs that come with anywhere from 4-6 Very rare nodes popping up.
This event is so survivor sided that regular 1v4 killer match wait times for me have jumped to 8 minutes with The Black Banquet wait times for killers have dropped down to estimated 20 seconds (for me). The Black Banquet is starved for killer players but offers NOTHING for them outside of completing the specific quest challenges.
There is only 2 praises I have for this event. The decor looks good and the different gameplay loop is a refreshing change to just "doing gens".
It was also a missed opportunity to have the offering screen take a bite out the 10th year offerings instead of being set ablaze.
Comments
After playing killer and survivor for a few hours at launch, I got off. There’s just nothing interactive to do as killer. In my opinion, that’s the worst part. There’s nothing fun or interesting for killer. Interacting with the tables is basically going out of your way to poison something that, to be completely honest, the survivors might not even be using at all. Survivors gain specific buffs from eating individual plates, but killers get to lob a bottle of poison. It feels completely thrown together with little thought to how 1/2 of roles would interact with the game. I
It’s survivor sided as hell but I play Nurse & Twins, so most of the annoying buffs have little effect. The instant global heal is annoying as Twins, but most of the time it doesn’t come into effect in a meaningful way. I can’t imagine playing an M1 killer and getting the unbreakable pallet buff against a swf coordinating global heals during chase.
Genuinely what was BHVR thinking? Such a disappointing anniversary. I’d rather have masquerade again. At least then it’d be interactive for both sides. Hell, buff survivor more. Just give me something interesting to do as killer. That isn’t “slow their chase down.”