the following is my opinion as a 20K hour solo survivor main, but we can agree to disagree
alien is the most unfun and oppressive killer to play against in dead by daylight history. this game used to be designed around mind gaming killers to evade chase and using resources to do so. i admit that the bugs and some of the old mechanics made it extremely survivor sided but its as if we are paying for it now.
almost every killer in the last 3 years has been designed around any combination of the following, tracking/locating survivors with ease, monitoring or cutting off whole sections of the map(3 gen strat), almost completely ignoring all resources(pallets and windows), camping or monitoring hooks and gens, brutally slowing down the game for either extremely fast 4Ks or long, drawn out, cat and mouse gameplay.
Again, we may agree to disagree AND I understand that on a competitive level the game still leans towards survivors(slightly, at least). What percentage of games played does anyone think are 2000 MMR or higher with full, coordinated 4 player teams using voice comms? If I had to guess, Id say 20% at best, and that's being extremely generous. Even top MMR teams who are not communicating in voice chat to coordinate perks and sharing knowledge are severely hindered against even mid range killer players due to things like map design, killer perk build strength, and how strong recent meta killer base kits have been designed. Not even the OG Borrowed Time was as oppressive as the killers ability to slow and stop game progression with minimal effort today.
Can a window or a pallet save you from Nemis tentacle, Tricksters blades, Pyramids damned strike if you bait or fake? Yes, of course. Can you reroute a loop to evade a crow or a remnant, absolutely. Can you split gens in an effort to minimize guards and drones, sure. Was it a thing to regularly take a hatchet in the back when you didnt fake a vault, it was indeed. But every new killer has a new counter play to learn while survivors stay the same.
With the number of players being higher today as well as killer perks being far more oppressive to players in that class(new to moderate) the chances of a killer landing a lobby of a team they can not only beat but annihilate, torment, and embarrass if they wish to is exponentially high. Something has to give because the game is becoming extremely unfun on a far more than "you win some, you lose some" basis.
I get that the devs hold onto their 60% kill rate for dear life and how important that statistic is to them but its not really an accurate representation true game play or experience. At the highest MMR survivors escape a lot more but at mid to low MMR the number of 4Ks is much higher which makes for a perfect imbalance.
I don't know where I am going with this and I don't have the answers to solve this enigma and assure myself its all a dream but I think that some subtle changes to improve overall QoL and player experience are needed. The only thing I worry about is trying to find the root of the "problem" like was done with the healing nerf. What I mean is I think a massive change to any single mechanic could have a dire effect and instead analyze all the "little things" that create instant wins on either side while also taking into account how often these "little things" occur in 4 player lobbies as oppose to players not working directly together.
I get that this kind of feels like reading word soup but as someone who has loved this game since it's first day available on console I'm just not having fun as much as I did year 1-3(for console). Don't get me wrong, when it is fun its still a shot of that "good dope" but those days are few and far between now.
Anyway, if you got this far thanks for riding my bozo bus to nowhere.
Comments
You really think Alien is worse then original legion? I mean as long as I don't get moonwalked follow by that guy I have not reached the most unfun thing in the game. And I would argue in the sense of oppresing a good Nurse is still further up, or a Good Spirit or a good Blight.
I fully agree that his counterplay is basically non existent besides the turrets and perhaps faking vaults, but outside of his tunnels he still has to walk as an 115% ms killer, so at least you can prerun to some degree?
I agree Xeno is problematic at least, but I wouldn't go as far as you did.
How can you have 20K hours on Survivors and lose? I spent Tuesday evening getting matched with 3K hours survivors who HAD NO ISSUE with me, I would write off the Killer being too weak. it plays and feels alot like Singularity imo.
Hours don't mean skill.
It's definitely true if you play only soloQ and don't try to learn.
I think most of the comp players have around 10 k hours and there is also that rule of thumb that it takes around 10k hours to master something?
I think he's more oppressive then current nurse or blight without alch ring+C33. For nurse you can go edge map. For blight you can predrop. For xeno? You can buy yourself 6m IF you spend quite some time setting up turret and are able to take the chase to him - and that's it.
Xeno can hit above/thru most loops, can always disable turret by single M2 (that is not even punishing), can hit you even if he misses by dragging his hitbox, can hit you over any pallet and over any window.
So what's the counterplay? Only those turrets and they don't give you much while taking quite some + respawn slowly. Sure enough - this is the case only if Xeno actually knows how to grab his hitbox to reliably hit you over car loops (or anything lower) even if you are crouching.
If you get a really safe pallet you can also predrop that, but yeah it is mostly pre-running. The question is what skill level on the killer I can't really tell how good you need to be to hit over some loops, for example the rock tile on Ormond with the snowmobile... I saw ScottJund getting a hit over that thing, I however have no clue how hard it is to consistently hit over those tiles... Therefore I cannot really say if it takes a certain skill level to be oppressive on the killer or not.
It is hard. Don't get me wrong - this is not something anyone can do. But if you get someone who can do that - then your personal skill or experience as survivor absolutely does not matter. You just loose - because there's literally nothing you can do - just hold-W until you die in a corner
I mean that is somewhat the same against a really good spirit, are like two pallets a map she needs to kick and everything else is useless and she will get a hit. I think old legion was even worse than that. Or when Pyramid Head first came out with the really short time betweens canceling the m2 and hitting an m1. There are many examples of killers with design that don't offer counterplay. Or Deathslinger with insta shooting. I don't think that Xeno is that much worse than those examples.
Sure, but they don't play only public games.
At some point you simply need to play with best players possible, if you want to improve. Either KYF or 1v1 matches.
There is limit how far you can get simply by public games and it's even worse for soloQ only.
True, the matchmaking is just way too bad to offer good matches.
Old spirit without sound que - agreed. New spirit? No. You can always try to greed and go for stun. You will probably loose, but you have agency - if you are at decent pallet that is (also spirit is 110% so once she is out of power, you have plenty of time to move to next loop).
Old legion - agreed. He was worse. Thankfully they changed it.
Old pyramidhead - I think this is about the same thing - you also didn't have any counterplay and whatever you did was just loosing in a different way - but again, this was changed exactly because of it.
DS - he was 110% that could be played against well on macro scale. Sure enough, in 1v1 manner you had very little counterplay, but you could still predrop once injured which worked on strong pallets - so he wasn't this bad.
But do you notice you yourself, that you are now comparing him to all the killers that needed to be adjusted? Some of those in an age where survivors had super-busted things (like 4man hatch escape you could track with map even before doing gens and key that you could always use instantly for whole team escape)? The game got a lot more balanced for both sides. But now enters Xenomorph.
I find it weird a self proclaimed 20k hour solo survivor player hasn't even give the killer more than 48 hours to decide it's completely impossible to play against.
The thing is on a macro state sure, but that doesn't say anything about counterplay in chase. From the beginning I didn't argue about the need to change him, I just said that I find it a bit over the top to call him basically the worst, because we had many more terrible designs.
As for Spirit if we look at Hens' spirit showcase I don't think you have much of a chance to get the stun, especially if the spirit just takes pallet controll. If the spirit is good ofc.
I think old DS was this bad, there was not much you could do when he was behind you sure when you were far enough to drop a strong pallet, but besides that.
I absolutely agree that we had worse things. No argument there. OG legion absolutely went into that category. 7 blink nurse sure did as well (even though at that time people didn't know how to abuse her to our current disgusting level).
As for spirit - can you provide me video? Because I didn't see that one. I know that with old MDR+amulet, you could do absolutely disgusting things (I think it was actually best presented by Ayrun - and that general looping was indeed meaningless and camping pallet while really bad was your only option) and chances were stacked against you - but you still had agency.
Xeno does not care about predrops or stuns (provided he is not so damn very far, that he doesn't even get to hit-distance before you can LoS hide).
That's the video I'm referring to, at some point they just decide to go down under the pallet because they cannot play it properly, Hens also states that on wreckers yard (i think it is?) there are only 2 pallets that can stop the spirit being shack and the crane.
Dredge and Wesker were cool additions but after that it's really abysmal... knight, SM, singularity, reworked sadako, alien are all awful, I want to see dev gameplay against knight and xeno just for a laugh, all loops are useless and survivor skill doesn't matter it's not dbd
Dredge had basically the Artist problem with holding his power and placing it on one side of the loop and then chasing into that, where you get hit unless there is a connected tile.
I mean Xeno just came out and I think claiming he's on Blight / Nurse level is an exaggeration, but the lose/lose situation is very much a pain. I don't doubt it'll be nerfed because they nerfed other killers for that reason exactly, but they'll certainly take their sweet time and wait until the DLC sales slow down (otherwise they would have fixed this issue post PTB when everyone pointed out that they made the same mistake for the 5th time or something)
you see it directly on the video. Stacks are highly against you, but if you stun spirit, you do have agency and can get to next pallet (and die there, because getting 2 stuns in a row is just too unlikely). But at least there's something to be done.
But yes - it's very good example of how broken the killer is (TBF - the match might be more interesting if there were absolutely no restrictions - so 4 survivors bringing 4 BNP's - as they are vs most OP version of spirit - and see where the balance is in that case)
He literally comments on the play in the sense of "People will be saying why are the survivors not winning those pallets?" You're not supposed to win those pallets, this is a top tier spirit, you're not gonna win those pallets" The whole reason why he was surprised when the spirit got stunned is because it is so rare, and when it basically never happens then can you even consider it as something you can do? Dying under the pallet is ofc a thing though.
As for the no restrictions thing, I think there was a tournament once like a year ago or so? I think ScottJund made a video on it, I'm sure you can find it eventually. But I don't think so, it just shows that some things should not be in the game, like busted items and addons for example.
I know that video and saw it. Funny thing is - those ended up pretty even. And this was also counting in artist and not just blight/nurse/spirit.
Artist is debateable 4th or 5 th best killer in the game. Even if they are quite even it is still kind of boring to just rush through the objective like that... I don't know I would prefer the game to be more on the chase and less on the macro game.
sure. Agreed. But that one was a test. And it clearly showed that the game is balanced even for highest MMR (by the fact, that both sides had broken-OP things at disposal). Which is very good. There were a lot of people saying killer is unplayable at high MMR...
Right now most broken things for both sides disappeared. I wonder how the test would look like now - but if it's anything like the last results (just with longer matches with more looping and less camping as there are less OP things) - then that would be good.
Who participated in the tournament? Was it the top comp teams as well? Because otherwise I don't know what it showed in that regard...
I have vague memory, but if I remember right, it was oracle vs some other super-strong comp team. But it's long time ago so I am not 100% sure about my statement
Because that's the point a few weeks/months ago Otzdarva and Co did a content creator/streamer vs comp team thing with a Wraith and they had a rather weaker comp team and then V1 I think it was? Complained that it was basically not comparable to the top comp teams and the outcomes were drastically different so depending on the teams competing it might show something or not.
The Wraith still was really good and all but never played outside of normal matchmaking.
How many comp survivors solo que 100% of their matches?
I was about 40 matches, and 40 4 kills in. also, i only solo. Alien needs a coordinated team to even stand a chance.
Also, comps have rules. Public games do not. IDC who says what, any Bare Bones comp where perks, Addons, and items are completely disabled almost any 20K hour comp team will beat the best killers on any toon in DbD history. Coordinated SWFs who understand core fundamentals and mechanics are no match for any base kit killer or player controlling the sticks. There is always RNG and other factors but overall the killer is at a massive disadvantage.
Now, at low tier play killers can easily mow down any team in public matches with ease. If anyone wants to see a video of my 3 year old daughter get 21 4 kills in a row with Alien base kit I will send the link. She doesnt understand anything about the game, she just button mashes. A toddler mowing down teams with ease is a perfect showcase of the difference between top tier comps and public games.
since the prestige update i have never had a teammate higher than P3. literally, never. almost ALL of my teammates are stock Dwight, Claud, Meg, Jake, or Nea. I would say in 85%+ of my games i have at least 1 teammate who meets one of the following, no teachable perks, no tier 3 perks, less than 4 perk slots unlocked, or NO perks equipped at all.
I also mentioned in another post that I get a farming killer just doing a challenge or a AFK bot using a macro in a large percentage of my games. My escape rate is less than 20% in the last few months since almost every teammate I get is the standard "crouch in the corner and hide, wont do anything hurt, hear terror radius and creep away, crouch near hook and waste time, brand new player"
This is not an exaggeration. This game has been extremely broken for me for a long time. I used to have a set team but ever since they stopped playing I have almost never been paired in que with anyone who has more than roughly 50 hours played. And its not like an "a lot of the time" thing, its 12+ hours a day for the last year or so.
Just to give you a real idea, since launch me and my team netted 48K escapes. In the last year as a solo I have escaped less than 1K times. And its NOT because I was a carry case. Its because ALL the teams I am placed on are seemingly DbD babies.
Can you share a screenshot that shows you having 20k play-time on DbD? Just curious.
im on console. it shows days, not hours. i have 593 days as of now. if you can explain how to screenshot the xbox dashboard and post it here i can do it but the only function for screenshots on xbox i know of can be done is game. ill try to look it up in the meantime.
Most of them don't play pubs and if they do they probably don't play with their team since that would be boring for them, Hens and his friends stated that they only do the streak for a certain amount of games each times because it is just boring af.
If you don't have proof for that it is not more than your opinion. Since most of Nurses power is already in her basekit I would think that she still has a really good chance to win even in a scenario without perks addons or items.
On another point... How exactly do you have 20k hours in the game? That's an average of 7.8 hours every single day for 7 years... How do you even manage that if we have time for school/university/work or whatever and about 8 hours of sleep a day. And if we go with the 593 days we get around 5.5 h a day on average and this is still a ridiculous amount. (Also 593x24=14232, a little bit off of 20 k hours don't you think?) Most players with that many hours in the game either do it full time or are comp players and a lot younger then the rest of us.
Anyone who thinks Xeno is somehow worse than Nurse or Blight is insane. Xeno needs the tail attack tuned obviously but you're really going to sit here and say that a tail attack is somehow worse than literally teleporting through the entire map, breaking the entire game, or mad dashing from across the map in 4 seconds?