Is Dead By Daylight beyond fixing in regards to Perk balance?
The general game I feel is fine in terms of balance. Sure some maps favor survivor, some favor killer but on the whole the general gameplay of the game, at least IMO, is in a good place.
The issue is Perks. Perks are what makes a game heavily weighted to one side or the other depending on the killer your going against.
Let's say all survivors are running Sprint Burst. If they go against a Blight or Nurse then you get your haste, turn around and the killer is already caught up and swining at you. On the flip side if you go against a Trapper or Skull Merchant and you use sprint burst well the killer either wastes a ton of time catching up or has to give up chase.
Another example is hex builds. On a killer like Jason or Judgement who can easily defend totems then hex totems are the most OP perks in the game. But you run that same build on clown or ghostface then the build just won't work as well and suddenly they are some of the weaker perks in the game purely because of the killer.
Every new DLC we get new perks and they can never be balanced for all killers. This results in a really oppressive playstyle on certain killers such as hex builds on Jason or Judgement and this usually results in a month or so of horrible games for survivors which is no fun followed by nerfs to those perks which still makes them useable on a couple of killers but just guts them for the rest.
Is there a way of actually balancing perks anymore or is it beyond help. personally the only way i can see perks being balanced is by completely reworking the best and worst killer powers to bring them all in line with each other.
Comments
No, it's not, the devs just don't understand their game as well as a player who has 5k+ hours. They seem to be leaning harder on feedback regarding balance rather than looking at spreadsheets and failing to properly interpret the data, which is somewhat encouraging.
What they really need to do is show us that they are asking the right questions. Players hate this perk, why? Is it severely overtuned, or are players using it so often because of some other underlying problem? The problem is they often nerf perks without looking at why players relied on those perks so heavily to begin with.
Survivors hate slugging, why are Killers slugging so much? Could it be that hooking has not only become less rewarding to the Killer, but more often than not acts as a detriment to the Killer? Nah screw all that, rework Knock Out and Deerstalker.
I mean there's no such thing as "balancing is beyond help" when the devs are still working on a game unlike eg a community made balance patch where there are obvious limitations. The devs have literally every tool available.
Nerf the killer, nerf the perk, rework the perk is what they've been doing mostly.
They could try a dynamic perk system to fix these specific outliers. For instance in your example Thrill on Jason could be less powerful in % than on Trapper. Though in this case a rework of the perk could be cleaner since it's not just Jason. Point is there are always solutions.
The amount of nerfing required to bring Ghoul closer to Trapper would make Ghoul mains Uninstall.
The amount of Buffs to bring Ghostface up to Jason would make Solo beg for mercy.
It is not balanceable with perks, no. if they went the route of balancing by killer rather than by perk meta maybe(?) but its going to always be impossible, that doesn't mean they cant make some things less insane though.