Tunneling
I'm a Killer main, but play both sides.
I do see tunneling a great deal these days, even at 5 gens. It's not particularly fun nor engaging, but remains the most efficient way to win.
I know you've tried to address this and slugging in many ways. You're always trying to work around it.
I'm going to share this again as we enter Year 10, really the best and only approach to stop this is to simply remove it from the game.
Survs should simply not be able to acquire two hook states in a row.
Make the change, then watch how it effects escape/kill rate. Buff Killers as needed after the fact for this new paradigm.
This is the cleanest and easiest way to address this. As long as survs CAN be tunneled, it will remain the most effective strategy to remove a player asap.
Comments
People will just slug until they down another survivor, or just do the optimal strategy of tunneling two survivors at once.
Because you could only slug and not bring them closer to removing them from the game, i'd argue that is not an overall efficient use of the Killer's time. If needed, then give them basekit Unbreakable until another Surv is hooked.
The Killer option to slug them is mostly to prevent survs using it aggressively.
Address why killers feel the need to tunnel instead of removing tunneling. Outright removing it won't do anything but make things worse.
I agree, but there should be restrictions to stop it getting out of hand.
Survivors should be immune to hook state gain twice in a row, but lose that protection if they perform a conspicuous action + when the exit gates are powered, and in addition post-unhook Endurance (but not Haste and Elusive) should be heavily scaled back to disencourage bodyblocking.
That said, though, making survivors immune to hook state gain does seem to be the healthiest way forward that I've seen in a long while, it doesn't have the issues that intangibility presents and doesn't seem like it can be abused if Endurance bodyblocking is removed.
It is if nothing else extremely worth testing.
What would you say is "the" reason killers feel the need to tunnel?
Ask ten players and they'll give you about eight different answers, and I'm willing to bet none of those answers will be "because it's the easiest way to get value" despite that being the honest and accurate one.
i concur with your assessment.
additionally, if needed, we could make it so if a Killer does tunnel the surv, they are put into the Entity Cage from 2v8. moved across the map, no hook state gain, no unhook notification.
no matter what you try to address, as long as it's POSSIBLE, ppl will do it because it's always most efficient to outright remove a player.