Deathslinger needs some buffs.
You have to play to such a high skill level to get value out of him it's crazy. Huntress is just objectively better in every way, and missing your shots is just way too punishing. At the very least buff his reload speed so missing a single shot doesn't mean you instantly lose chase.
Comments
With the Huntress comparison... DS should make a loud noise when he raises his gun up to shoot. He should then have to reload after 4-5 shots in a locker. Considering those changes, I'd agree with his reload speed can be buffed to the point of Huntress'.
your missing shots so you should get punished as killer for ineffective power usage. he is high skill killer but the gun has too much counter-play on survivor end along with too high terror radius with 110% m/s making pre-running gens too effective.
As someone who plays a lot of Deathslinger, YES! You reload so much that Warden's Keys feels mandatory against a good team.
Even just making his brown reload add on base kit would be nice.
And then of course give him an add on pass as his add ons are all awful except the reload ones.
Misusing your power should be punishable, I agree, but Deathslinger's punishment is massively out of proportion to the strength and difficulty of his power. A single miss can cost you the entire game. And even if you land the shot, you still aren't guaranteed a hit. And if you do hit them you still need to reload.
Nurse and Blight have less punishment than him AND don't have to manually reload after each use.
blight depends on number of charges but he does have cooldown if he misses all 5 of them. nurse has arguably most severe punishment in the entire game because she is 96% with fixed blink cooldown. I disagree on both accounts.
Deathslinger's punishment is massively out of proportion to the strength and difficulty of his power.
his punishment is align with his power. what is not align in his power is his gun strength and large counter-play towards the gun which accounts into artificial difficulty. that is just balance problem with his power(too weak).
Yes Blight does have a cool-down but you can still make distance and get an M1 hit. You can't with Slinger because missing makes you lose distance.
Nurse does not come anywhere near close to the most severe punishment. Her fatigue is short, she recharges her power during the fatigue, and the other token only takes 3 seconds and then she's back on your ass again. She has very little down time. Plus she still made distance and your are closer to the survivor you are chasing and should be able to get a hit next time. For the strongest killer in the game that can ignore everything in the game, her punishment is not that bad. Legion's fatigue is longer and more punishing than hers.
And unlike Slinger, Nurse and Blight don't have to worry about landing their power and still not getting a hit.
A miss play is far more punishing for Slinger than Nurse and Blight. He loses tons of distance from a miss, his power is hard to land, and you aren't guaranteed to get a hit in. Yes the punishment is out of proportion to his power.
I play a lot of Huntress and let me tell you that most of the time you should be able to win a chase with 4-5 hatchets, you can also use Iron Maiden to make reloading take barely any time at all. Also Deathslinger does actually make a loud noise when he's aiming at you.
that is intended design of slinger. he is suppose to lose distance for missing. when you say blight can make distance and still get an m1 hit, I think you are referring to his 115% vs 110% m/s. deathslinger has 110% m/s because he is suppose to have a perpetual mindgames with his gun where survivor is suppose to make a prediction guess for when he is going to fire. the summary is that if you sway-left to right excessively, you lose distance as survivor because your not walking in a straight line while moving in a straight means that the deathslinger gets an easier shot.
The problem is that you do not need to ever strafe because you can hear his ads and keep running forward and when he fires, you side-step left or right on reaction. there is no mindgames or prediction required. you can react to his shot as long you are 12+ meter away from him and you will be past 12 meters because he is 110% m/s. his gun has tiny hitbox and it is not hitscan so the it is gun entirely possible react to the gun. getting hit by his gun is entirely on survivor making mistakes.
Nurse and Blight don't have to worry about landing their power and still not getting a hit.
nurse relies entirely on your ability. I have zero clue what level of survivors your playing against where nurse is getting m1 hits as 96% m/s. Blight relies on the ability but less than nurse.
I had like three hundred hours on Deathslinger, but stopped playing after his nerfs.
Quick scope and low TR made him fun to play as for me. He is just a shadow of used to be.
I always thought faking ADS was main issue and they made it so you have to fake all the time (find out how survivors react), which is just so boring for me.
Shooting through gaps got way worse too, because of ADS nerf, that was fun to do.
Sad thing is he was never top tier killer, far from that, he just wasn't fun for survivors...
God I tried playing the Slinger once recently without any reload addons to test out a different build and I never realized how agonizingly slow his base reload time had felt. I had always run at least one reload addon before then and will never take one out of my build no matter what going forward.
The Slinger never really recovered from the nerfs he got hit with that raised his terror radius up to 32 meters and made him ADS like he's afraid of breaking a hip without meaningful buffs to compensate. You pretty much needed to run that M&A build to snipe survivors who weren't paying attention off generators.
He should get a 24m lullaby, proper iron-sights and an add-on pass and i think he'll be fine.
I don't quite agree with reverting to the old 24m TR, only because with Monitor it would allow for a 16m TR with 18m effective range. I would like some add-ons to be touched up though.
I think some separate QoL buffs might be better instead. Maybe when his spear is unloaded, he moves at 4.6. Also when hooking a Survivor, it reloads the spear for free. I also wouldn't be opposed to reducing Warden's Keys a tiny bit but basekitting the Brown reload effect.
Right now he is a terror if he can stack STBFL to full. Get a normal hit then a quick shot before they even get out of the speed boost.
I think his Terror Radius should be smaller, let's finally break the 24/32 metre rule and make his Terror Radius 28 metres. Literally the only reason why his Terror Radius got nerfed was because of M&A, 28 metres on top of the 0.4 second time to ready your gun gives enough time for Survivors to escape.
His default Reload speed is awful, either make it 2.5 or 2.25 seconds or somewhere in between, 2.75 seconds just feels really bad on top if you miss.
Completely rework his add-ons, they're not interesting, some of them don't make sense and some are questionable / useless, none of them are fun.
Otherwise I think he's fine.
Not loud enough... maybe with headphones? Being chased by him, in 2-3 years of playing this game, I have never heard him lift his rifle. I'm just always constantly having to look back to see if he raised it or not. So he def is not the audible level of huntress. So, if he makes noise, then I revise my statement to "make him as loud as huntress".
It's when he's aiming at you not when he lifts his rifle. Also Huntress only makes a sound when she's fully charged as well so.
“That is intended design of Slinger he is supposed to lose distance when missing”
Yes, and it’s too punishing because of it. His power isn’t strong enough to justify such a massive weakness. Huntress is stronger and loses less for missing. He should lose some distance, but it’s too punishing right now.
1.5 second miss cool-down + 2.75 second reload time = 4.25 seconds of cool down where you are slower than the Nurse and still losing distance and don’t have a mobility power like Nurse or Blight to catch up.
That is WAY too punishing for a power that requires aim and doesn’t even guarantee a down if you land it. Just reducing the reload to 2.25 or even 2.5 would be enough to make him feel less unforgiving.
”nurse relies entirely on your ability. I have zero clue what level of survivors you’re playing against where nurse is getting m1 hits as 96% m/s. Blight relies on the ability but less than nurse”
That’s not what I meant. I meant if you land a Blink or Rush on the survivor, you get an injure/down.
If you land a Harpoon with Slinger, the survivor can still break free. You aren’t guaranteed to get the hit in even if you shot them.
Slinger’s power is arguably harder to use than Nurse and Blight and isn’t even guaranteed to award you an injure or down by using while still being more unforgiving and punishing than both of those killers.
"Slinger’s power is arguably harder to use than Nurse and Blight and isn’t even guaranteed to award you an injure or down by using while still being more unforgiving and punishing than both of those killers."
"Yes, and it’s too punishing because of it. His power isn’t strong enough to justify such a massive weakness. Huntress is stronger and loses less for missing. He should lose some distance, but it’s too punishing right now"
i mean yeah. he is not as good as nurse and blight. I thought that is ok for not every killer to be super amazing.
I don't know, I like deathslinger's precision based gameplay style. I think he loses some of his charm if he can mindlessly spam his gun until it lands.
But it's just too easy to miss/dodge for this to be that punishing.
It was fine during quick scope times, missing was basically on you, or survivor had to do great prediction, which was supposed to be rewarded.
It's not really hard to dodge now.
So either reduce punishment, make ADS fast again, or increase projectile speed.
It's not really hard to dodge now.
that is what i mean by too much counter-play.
make ADS fast again, or increase projectile speed.
I am fine with either but i prefer ADS fast over projectile speed. but projectile speed does work... i guess
He is pretty decent if you use harpoon to fast kill survivors from hooks. They can't really do anything about it if you time it right, wait for endurance to pass and then hook them again, rinse and repeat until dead. You can attack air to avoid stun in worst case. The amount of hate I get from doing it is just so funny.
I would rather get quick scope back than hit scan... It's more fun to use.
And unhooking survivor is just watching with popcorn or what?
most of the time they are not missing their shots, its server delay and hit validation, connection that sometimes takes the shot away from you.
That's true, I had a game just yesterday where shots that should have missed hit, and shots that should have hit missed, it was extremely frustrating.
Yeah I recommend just ignoring any argument about skill, its just objectively untrue.
I mean, look at Survivors who get hit through a window like 10m from said window. "Just skill it lmao"