Can someone explain the problem with shoulder the burden?
I genuinely don't see the problem with this perk and why it needs to be nerfed.
If I understand how it works it's an anti tunneling perk that transfer the hook state from one survivor to another. So it's not undoing progress exactly but the number of hooks are still the same just transferred. This perk has been in the game for a minute now and now it's a problem? Genuinely what changed? I understood that it's possible this perk was always broken and people didn't notice but still.
I just don't see the point in nerfing this perk at all. It's decent should stay that way. But I'm someone knows then explain.
Comments
It removes opportunities that the killer could capitalise on to increase their odds of winning. It's really only an issue in SWF, which is why the PTB nerf makes very little sense, making the perk a one time use per match disproportionately affects solo queue players who can't see their teammates' builds before the match starts. Along with this, StB is the first actually interesting perk that survivors have received in YEARS, I'd much rather see it receive a complete rework rather than trying to nerf it into uselessness.
So... tunneling? Because that's the only opportunity I see.
Yes sorry, it's best used to evenly spread hook stages, so that there is no "best" target to focus on
Hook shuffling is the problem and the unimpactful exposed that the perk gives, it was always strong and took time for people to understand how powerful it is, very strong in swf and the only way to counter a good swf is tunneling and shoulder the burden is most effective at stopping it.
In comp dbd it is banned while every single killer player tunnels and the kill rate is somewhat normal.
Best way for you to understand why this perk is so good is to play against it as killer.
The only time this perk is an issue is when a swf uses it to turn a 2+1+1+0 into a 1+1+1+1. It's happened to me and it's lost me all my pressure, but it's not that common and I don't see it as an issue. Perks are supposed to be useful. They're supposed to help you win.
The only problem I see with the perk that I see as legit one is the hook shuffling that can occur mainly in a SWF, @cogsturning explains it good.
other then that the perk is perfectly fine.
Edit (oop just saw the update and they still holding strong with nerfing it Ig, not even address the main issue with perk, bit pathetic if you ask me.
Realistically there is no problem.
Shoulder the burden even has value when duplicated, if the person with the first shoulder gets hooked first. It adds versatility and flexibility on who unhooks when running duplicates.
Not only that, but they could've easily added an effect for all Shoulder players after 1 person used the perk, like being able to see the aura of the Shouldered survivor for the rest of the match, to add value for the duplicates.
The revert is just sad. They almost had it down.
killers get upset when survivors are allowed to play dbd without their permission.
I don't normally stoop to us vs them but only certain kinds of killers hate this perk and it's the sweaty ones who go for kills at 3 hooks.
The overwhelming issue seems to be that for the cost of the survivor rescuing and getting exposed for 40s (?) that you can make a death-hook survivor not death-hook anymore. Now, I've rarely played games with STB in it, and I may go so far to say I'm pretty sure I never have or else if someone brought it they didn't use it. I don't plan to get Taurie for this perk now or after to change naturally.
Not sure if this is a STB issue or invocation one but it is interesting STB doesn't make you perma-broken whole game but using an invocation which I'm pretty sure is far worse and more dangerous does. Weaving spiders….
Question: on hunter side when a survivor has that yellow hook thing does that mean STB got used? I saw this once and i didn't really know what was happening.
I don't understand it either. Deactivating other players perks is a bad precedent to set. I'm not sure how anyone could have supported the game going down that route
The issue is the downside compared to the upside will forever be disproportionate. Its an anti tunnel perk that buys your team SO much time by not having a death hook survivor, so they have to play extremely carefully aka not efficient and prevents a kill earlier than planned. It allows for so much more efficiency as truth be told 4 survivors in the trial is better than 3 by miles especially against stronger killers. Weaker ones though? This is literally a win more perk against them and is not really needed.
I would just like to see the perk entirely reworked as you can't have a meaningful downside that affects both solo q and swf near the same amount.
Now reverse your entire paragraph, take away the perk requirements and team coordination, and you understand the issue with tunneling
And ironically the nerf, whether before or after they reverted the deactivation condition, does nothing to address this problematic scenario while tripling the penalty of the perk (and more since you are a more obviously vulnerable, if you're healthy it takes a health state, and you need to take time to heal afterwards).
The issue is that it does any for of comeback when you have 2-1-1-0 hooks impossible as it turns into 1-1-1-1 and you can no longer decrease team effectivness by removing someone of the game that would otherwise win you the game. Now you would get probably 1-2k, maybe 4k if team mess up. The downside of the perk was never the problem. The problem is how competitive swf can use this perk to redistribute hooks among them.I do believe people overrate the perks as in the end the total amount of hooks remained compared to saves (pallet, flashlight, last stand), where the survivor is freed and you get no hook, this is in my opinion way more gamelosing, but STB is still very strong in preserving someone in the game for as long as possible while keeping the target of being the most valuable target as you go from 0 to 2nd hookstage and can be removed from the game easier. So it's not that free.
Because this perk when used in good hands is comparable to Nurse on the survivor side. Kinda bad for the average player, but insanely strong in good hands, and believe it or not it will probably stay S-tier after the nerf. The forum is wrong here, the fact is that every top player agrees this perk is S-tier currently. A few people attempted to explain why but they got downvoted to oblivion, so fine, don't trust us and go check Wispy's survivor perk tier list on Youtube, he currently holds the survivor escape streak world record, which he beat last month from 250 to 850 with a squad running 4 copies of shoulder.
Now arguing whether tunneling is good or bad for the game is completely dodging the problem because for one this perk works also in non-tunneling scenarios (2-1-1-0) and second a bandaid overpowered perk shouldn't be a solution to a core problem, BHVR could very well look at their stats and think tunneling must be fine because a survivor squad managed to escape 850 games in a row, when in reality most players won't be able to make good use of shoulder at all. If you want more anti-tunnel, a perk that can only be used efficiently by SWFs shouldn't be the solution to it, as it stands the perk only shines in vc when you can coordinate who goes for the unhook, in soloQ you will get the hook stolen by your teammate and it will often be counterproductive.
Killers are just mad because they can only win if they tunnel someone out, and this perk forces them to spread pressure whether they like it or not. The perk isn't even remotely problematic.
As a killer, getting a second hook state on a survivor gives a lot of pressure. That person is now less likely to go for unhooks or make ballsy plays, as if they get caught they will die. The ability to remove that status, removes the pressure behind it. Lack of pressure can kill a game for a killer. It has less to do with tunneling and more to do with STB granting a bizarre way to drain pressure.
Comparably, imagine a killer perk that switches one complete gen for another. It's hard to think initially how this could be strong, until you remember it could be used to force a 3-gen, or make survivors work on a particularly exposed/unpleasant gen again. Similar kind of situation, where pressure is applied indirectly.
I've never really understood it either. Obviously it's impossible for it to be OP when it's affecting tunneling, but when we look at the scenarios people mention for not tunneling, I've never followed the logic.
What people usually point to is the idea of the 1-2-1-0 hook spread being equalised to 1-1-1-1, while saying that removes the killer's pressure.
Now, I'm not going to argue there isn't some pressure loss - a death hook survivor can be incentivised to play safer, and playing safer can lead to being inefficient, as well as ambushing two survivors with one on death hook making for easy target prioritisation - but it doesn't remove all pressure.
The killer still slowed down the game with their hook, still has pressure from the injury, still has macro pressure from whatever resources were used, and then optionally whatever perks they might've built up tokens on or whatever. The only thing actually lost is the opportunity to target a death-hook survivor if the situation arose, which isn't nothing but it's hardly problematic.
I think some people get too caught up in the idea of efficiently eliminating a survivor even without tunneling, and forget that the hooks themselves are the most important part of killer macro play. StB doesn't affect hooks as slowdown or pressure at all, just the second hook state being minor ambient pressure. Useful for the survivors, sure, but not to the degree that it's a problem.
Because it twist the killer macro play without too much counterplay. Even without tunneling you can hook the same survivor twice - alternating hooks with others - like 1-2-1-0 hooks and then the 4th comes and use shoulder, erasing all of the pressure you have. In highest level, people tend to force the tunnel with bodyblocks + DS + Unbrekable to force the killer to eat the DS and then shoulder the friend.
Personally i think this perk shouldn't work the way it is, as it should only work if someone is hooked twice in a row.
But that's pressure that'd only manifest if you decide to hunt the unhooked target, so if you're tunnelling. If you're not specifically targeting the unhooked survivor, nothing of note changes.
Not to mention that all this does is describe the function of the perk. Yes, it does a thing. Yes, it benefits the survivors.
Survivor perks are supposed to do that.
You can't. You can't force the killer to pick up.
There's no issue with tunneling. Please tell me how tunneling is an issue as people try to make it out to be. In a 4v1 nature of the game it is literally a necessary evil unless you want to mega debuff survivors when the killers ALSO playing unoptimally by spreading hooks.
Classic fashion the mysterious downvotes without trying to refute the point.
Overall, the perk is too much of a game changer for how little effort it has. You can abuse it in so many different situations that have nothing to do with "It's an anti-tunnel-perk" - similar to DS where you can abuse it as a weapon that puts the killer in a lose-lose-situation. It also makes the strongest group of the game even stronger while SoloQ is still left behind. Therefore, the perk either needs a rework, big limitation, or downside to not be a balance issue, abusable perk, or something that encourage an unwelcome strategy.
The only people who think its a problems-are the ones who like to tunnel. This is the only perk that actually hard counters it.
Ahem…
The issue is the upside compared to the downside will forever be disproportionate. Its a tactic that buys the killer SO much pressure by having a death hook survivor, so they have to play extremely carefully aka not efficient and causes a kill earlier than planned. It allows for so much less efficiency as truth be told 4 survivors in the trial is better than 3 by miles especially against stronger survivors. Weaker ones though? This is literally a win more tactic against them and is not really needed.
I would just like to see the tactic entirely reworked as you can't have a meaningful downside that affects both weaker and stronger killers near the same amount.
Well we at least had an attempt at a small solution back in 9.2.0 where there WAS going to be unique hook bonuses that were weaker on stronger killers but even then, it wasn't that strong. That's why I said survivors need to get debuffed somehow to actually make spreading hooks worth it as we shouldn't be punishing the player as a dev for playing to win. Only then could we nerf tunneling in some way.
Everyone here is talking about the killers pressure and how StB removes some of that pressure. They seem to forget that survivors need ways to dissipate killer pressure, otherwise this stops being a pvp game with back and forth gameplay and just becomes a boring slog with a likely loss at the end for the survivor side.
Survivors have pressure as well in the form of gen progress and the killer has a multitude of ways to remove that pressure, they can't uncomplete a completed generator but survivors can't unkill a dead survivor either. If killers want tunneling to remain a valid strategy then survivors require realistic counterplay to that strategy. Instead we have seen nerfs to a multitude of anti-tunnel perks and even the basekit unhook protections.
With or without StB in play the survivor team requires heavy coordination to counterplay tunneling, to a degree that its unreasonable to expect solo queue survivors to counter it unless every player outskills the killer. Even in a 4 man unless every player is on the sweatier side you just lose to killers going for a tunnel so long as the killer is decently skilled. The real answer to all the complaints about StB is to create real basekit anti-tunnel that keeps all four survivors in the game so generator times can be properly balanced around that full survivor team.
Going through these
1: Gamechanger - lots of perks this is true for. An unbreakable can turn a match, a deliverance, a reassurance. They also can happen and ultimately have no meaning whatsoever.
2: What about that is abuse? I'll say one thing for the killer rulebook, they do a much better job at getting BHVR to implement it.
Also, being unable to predict perks is completely normal for the game. See end game killer builds, first use of coup, aura reads at the start of the trial (and most of it in soloq) on the killer side, or gen rush, deliverance, unbreakable, etc. on the survivor side. Now you can make reasonable guesses about what might exist, but that can be done for StB as well.
3: Not sure on the relevance of the question of 'what's the problem' with 'hey, its still usable'.
4: Mistake - If survivors know they have a perk to use, and they play around a camping killer, pressure gens, or other possibilities, its not a mistake. Using it like this is no more a mistake than a Devour killer leaving the hook or an end game build setting up their perks.
5: Slugging and tunneling - slugging maybe, but tunneling? Is there a change that doesn't result in the argument that killer's will just tunnel harder?
6: SWFs - Its kind of inevitable, but if SWFs really had that much of a jump over soloq they'd have a lot higher escape rate than the stats ever show them having.
7: Bad game design - why? What is sacrosanct about hooks that they can't be touched?
8: Downside not problematic - it shouldn't be. It's supposed to be a counter play perk.
You can abuse it in so many different situations that have nothing to do with "It's an anti-tunnel-perk"Back when they put in more hooks to counter unhookable builds, I don't remember anyone telling killers 'you can only use those hooks against people running unhookable builds'.
And, as many have mentioned, if you think the problematic situation is the 2-1-1-0 hooks, neither the change that went through or the additional in the PTB actually do anything about it. In that case people should be advocating against these changes and instead arguing for something like 'deactivates after three unique hook states'.
That's why I said survivors need to get debuffed somehow to actually make spreading hooks worth it as we shouldn't be punishing the player as a dev for playing to win.But playing to win is completely based on what the devs put in the game. If anti-tunnel had gone through than tunneling would, usually, not be the best play to win strategy. Once upon a time survivors could play to win by saboing all the hooks in the map, or hatch escapes, or luck based unhook builds, or shift-W with sprint burst and vigil. That they were playing to win isn't really relevant to discussing whether its a healthy game design or not.