The Anti Tunnel update V2
For those of you who remember the Krasue anti-tunnel update, which went above and beyond, adding way too much and going way too far in trying to prevent tunnelling, slugging and other issues. From hiding when survivors get unhooked, built in 90 seconds unbreakable, etc.
This post is to suggest a new anti-tunnelling update that is aimed to make tunnelling way less appealing
BEFORE NOTE:
Before we get into that, I acknowledge that currently, tunnelling is in fact the de-facto balance for competitive play, and a proper removal of tunnelling would have to come with compensations for the killer and high level play to compensate. However, for the purpose of this post, we will not go into details about that compensation, but keep it in the back of your mind.
HISTORY:
Historically, to prevent tunnelling, many things have been suggested. 1 is giving survivors more gen speed when there are only 3 people alive, which would help, but it would also help survivors when the killer doesn't tunnel. More possible solutions have been introduced in the Krasue anti-tunnel update, which have been overbearing and awful.
So could it be that we have a perfect solution laying around somewhere that is already integrated with how the game works? The answer is yes!
THE ELEGANT SOLUTION TO TUNNELLING:
One of the problems with tunnelling is the "Death-Efficiency issue", which is the phenomenon where total team gen progress dramatically plummets per death of a survivor. Even at already 3 survivors alive, that team's efficiency can often drop to a total of 0% gen progress. The reason is because you will often be in the scenario where 1 survivor is hooked, 1 survivor is being chased, and the last other survivor alive has to spend their time unhooking (and potentially healing), ending up in a cycle of 0 gen progress.
So what is the solution? It is in fact a game mechanic that has always awkwardly existed within dead by daylight;
Self Unhooking!
- After 1 survivor dies, every survivor unlocks the ability to unhook themselves during the 1st hook stage.
So why is this genius? Because not only does it make tunnelling less effective as a strategy and allowing survivors still a functional game even after 1 survivor dies; it even addresses the degree of tunnelling.
If a killer has hooked all survivors before they take the first survivor out of the game, they aren't affected by this update. But for every degree that they resorted to tunnelling a survivor out of the match, the other team has extra tempo in which they can still progress the main objective at a somewhat similar rate to a 4 man team.
Remember the problem with a 3 surv team? It's that all the survs are occupied with something; being chases, being hooked and unhooking. This change makes it so that the 3rd survivor no longer has to occupy themselves with unhooking to the degree that tunnelling happened. Where if 1 survivor was fully tunnelled out of the hook, the survivor team will have 3 self unhooks available, giving them the tempo to reasonably put up a fight, even after the first survivor has died.
This simply change dynamically solves so many of the tunnelling problems, yet doesn't create much unnecessary and unintuitive complexity that doesn't make sense, like randomly increased gen speeds and other things.
The real solution to tunnelling has always stared is in the face, and we already had the game mechanics to fix them!
END NOTE:
This anti-tunnel update removes tunnelling as an equally effective strategy, but of course still allows a killer to physically tunnel out a survivor from the match from a fun perspective. To counteract such a thing, of course the only true way to solve that would be to allow survivors who are unhooking to choose whether they want to unhook the survivor at the current location or send them somewhere else where they then fall off the hook at an unknown location to the killer. If you are interested in this line of solving tunnelling, you can read more about it here: New DBD event (THE TRUE BALANCE EXPERIMENT) — BHVR
I hope you all enjoyed this post and I hope it helped inspire you with ideas of how elegantly we can solve tunnelling ❤️
Comments
You are correct in why tunneling is so effective, when it's 4 survivors, 1 is always free to do gens, when it's 3, 0 are always free to do gens, on paper.
But your solution has a clear flaw. I mean, just imagining if it was implemented, it's obviously predictable what's gonna happen. 1 guy gets tunneled out, boom, other 3 are now getting slugged to death, because hooking isn't a good idea due to passive deliverance.
There are no easy ways out of tunneling, all of them will have flaws of their own. If a system is created which would make playing 1v4 for killers more tempting than 1v3, it's gonna be a complex one
I like the idea, as on paper this wouldn't affect someone who spreads hooks but also removes pressure from hooking after a tunnel. It makes sense, but at the current time something like this can't be implemented without many killers moving onto slugging after a tunnel as that would be the only way to gain pressure with a down. I think that something like this could be implemented but it would have to be after slugging is addressed in a way that causes that strategy to be less potent.
I think that their original idea was good, the one where:
After being unhook you:
→ gain elusive
→ see killer's aura
→ lose collision (I'd say we can even add the invincibility instead of endurance - this would prevent two-tapping by bubba, huntress or moris of hook such as from Jason, Vecna…)
→ killer is not notify by loud noise indicator about unhooking
In exchange killers:
→ gain 15 % damage on most progressed gen per fresh hook (if any survivor dies in 4 hooks this is deactivated per rest of the game) note: this system would not interrupt survivor of gen so not supporting dms
→ see auras of any survivor with less hook stages than currently hooked survivor who are at least 20m away (this is deactivated if any survivor dies in 4 hooks)
In addition to that I'd like to see changes to currently unhooking tied perks:
→ Babysitter currently gives 5 % extra haste due to diminished and 30s of elusive (apart from aura) make it 10 % additive haste
→ Off the record gives 40s of all the benefits that unhook protections offer (simple reason solo q where teammates can't or don't want to heal you)
→ Come and get me - longer duration, works on survivors with one and more hook stages so it's used as antitunnel tool rather than give elusive to people in chase
→ Resurgence rework: After being unhooked you gain 100 % self heal speed for 60s
→ Borrower time rework: pretty much what they offered - unhooked survivor gets option to self recover at 100 % speed for 60s after being unhooked - should be deactivated upon being fully healed, in endgame and on conspicious actions
So survivors can now even more than now ignore the hook and tunnel gens? ( I say tunnel instead of genrush because the forum community throws a fit if you call it genrush if they dont dedicate a build to it. )
I dont think that this whole "3 people are weaker than 4" problem actually needs to be solved. Survivors start the strongest and have dwindling resources.
Its like wanting to add respawning to non-deathmatch battles in counter strike.
In my opinion, a way to incentivise NOT tunneling is to reward killers for fresh hooks. The rewards can’t be too little otherwise its useless and just not worth it and yes perks will have to be changed if this gets considered/added. This gives killers choice whether to go for the same unhooked survivor or go for a new one and get rewarded.
NOTE: Things can be added, subtracted, changed, etc. You are free to agree or disagree with whatever it is. THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL
For Fresh hooks (hooking a survivor for the first time):
The bonuses for fresh hooks ends if a survivor dies
Obviously S tiers will receive less of these rewards (5% haste and 10% gen kick) while trapper/ghostface etc will receive more of these benefits.
Now this guy gets it, especially with the system disabling when 1 survivor dies. A system with design like that to encourage spreading hooks is my preferred way of addressing tunneling as first step, not nerfing tunneling itself
I think the same strategy for slugging would suffice as well. Allow survivors to recover themselves when on the ground after, say 70 seconds, after 1 person dies.
That would mean that the entire tunnelling and slugging fix would require no more complexity than:
- After 1 survivor dies, survivors gain the ability to unhook themselves during the first hook stage
- Survivors gain the ability to self recover on the ground after 70 seconds after the first survivor dies, and after 40 seconds after the second survivor dies.
This simple ruleset would solve both tunnelling and slugging for a big part as well as the infamous 2 survivor 1 slugged 4k strategy and keep the game playable even after 1 survivor dies, even at that stage
Lets face it the tunneling and slugging is out of control at this point and something needs to done at this point. To many bad killers are getting wins they didn't earn or deserve because of this I have 0 tactics so im going to abuse and exploit a situational mechanic. This idea of yours would be a good step in the right direction and would be a cool idea for sure. However i think they need to add a one thing to deter tunneling with this. If the killer still decides to tunnel it would work like this, for every survivor not hooked the first survivor gains 1 extra hook state.Basically if you decide to tunnel 1 person the first person would gain 3 hook states extra that can be removed by freshly hooking another survivor which will essentially force them to target someone new. I also think the unhook notifications need to be removed and possibly scratch marks and blood trails disabled for like 5-10 seconds. The extra endurance was a bit to much.The showing the aura for 5 seconds of the furthest survivor with the least amount of hook states could be another good incentive. Your gen idea i like but it should be for the first kick only and the more op movement speed your killer is the less of a bonus. Ghoul, Henry, blight, billy would only gain the 10% as the are the speed hack killers, where trapper, skull merchant bubba etc would gain the bigger gen bonus as they are slower killers. Keep the bonus bp and the haste for x amount of time for the killer.
Okay now that's just going too far. A change like that absolutely must come with something in return, if you wanna nerf how killers can play so severely, there must be an alternative in exchange, and just as good as the nerfed one.
Its nerfing unfair game play as it is, he even mentioned positives and incentive for the killer which they dont deserve just for playing the game fair and not griefing survivors. There needs to be more negatives for the killers to stop that griefing, just because your mad at the world doesnt mean you should take it out on others and get them to feel like crap like you do. Thats all tunneling and slugging is about, making others feel as crappy as you do so you choose to grief other players.
Discard the belief that tunneling is griefing, this is the objective of the killer, to kill survivors and prevent them from escaping. Or do you consider doing gens griefing too?
You want less tunneling, bring more strats for the killer to use, like there used to be, before bhvr nerfed them for some reason, like hit and run, which was existing purely due to sloppy butcher, but was obliterated with sloppy butcher nerf
Correct, as the post clarifies. There are multiple things the killer deserves. Some of which i have discussed in older posts.
One of which is a built in killer instinct on the survivor spawn locations. Currently, killers can, due to random luck, start of an entire match at a half-a-gen to a full gen disadvantage purely because of the luck of spawnpoints that create a massive disparity in the balance of matches without even involving any type of interactive gameplay between killers and survivors.
And that is just to name an example
The k1ller doesnt deserve or need anything else they have way to much as it is. They should remove the gen auras from the killer as well to be fair. If survivors have to fins it so should the killer. However killers are not checking and kicking gens all they do is tunnel and ignore everything else. Then cry rushing is the issue.
The sloppy butcher nerf was nothing and barely noticeable so its fine as is.