Vigil number nerfs are a confusing misstep.
So, for those who haven't seen, Vigil is losing its status effect additionals to avoid a number of interactions with other perks, being restricted exclusively to its main draw of reducing exhaustion. In exchange, BHVR are luckily tuning its numbers…down another 10%? By Judgement that can't be right, I must be misreading! Hold on, let me go grab my glasses…and, nope, that still looks like a numbers nerf to me.
…Alright, being more serious I just do not understand this decision even remotely. If you wanted to change the perk to be more healthy in a broader design sense by making it just an enabler for exhaustion perks, fine, probably for the best even. But shouldn't the perk receive compensation by going back up to its original pre 10.1.0 nerf value if you're going to do that? Or at LEAST leave it at its post-10.1.0 numbers for a while and then decide instead of hitting it with a double tap immediately?
I genuinely do not know what the philosophy is supposed to be here. When I first saw this change I (wrongly) thought you were just changing the description to match its effective value rather than sticking with the weird way it operates in code, given they matched up pretty well, but this is just a raw numbers nerf on top of everything else, and I can't figure out why. I can't imagine any of your data was telling you that Vigil was 2~3 seconds of exhaustion too powerful.
Comments
I agree it should go back to 40%, but the current version in today's patch is bugged now (they didn't actually remove the other status effects from it) so that needs a fix. But yeah, the further reduction to 30% was not needed at all
What the devs could do is give vigil the ability to recover from exhaustion 40-50% faster and recover from other status effects 20-25% faster.
I think keeping it at 40% was a good middle ground, then again it is only a 4 second nerf.
Dont even try to question the changes of bhvr. There is no reason to be found. Just accept the dice roll. People gave plenty of feedback during ptb and none of it got through to them.
didn't they say they weren't actually changing it until a later patch?
The balance team of this game has no idea what it is doing 9 times out of 10. Nuff said.
Yeah, it all makes no sense. Either Vigil should apply to multiple status effects or it should only apply to Exhaustion, but with a bigger value (even more than 40%). IMO Exhaustion does not even matter that much, considering that it does not go down while running and it rarely happens that Killers abandon a chase.
But first nerfing it and then slapping another Double-Nerf on it… I really dont understand it. I get their reasoning that they dont want to have to keep Vigil in mind whenever they want to do something with Status Effects. I think this is reasonable, even tho I dont think that they will do the other aspect which comes with it and status effects have a lower duration (because if they made them longer to not have them be too weak against Vigil and then they remove Vigil, there is no justification to make them longer).
However, Vigil will be worse than on Release, since 20% on a few status effects (including Exhaustion) was better than 30% on just Exhaustion. (And obviously they buffed the Range, but I dont really count that since people bring Vigil mainly for themselves)
Its listed under the survivor perk changes in the hotfix that rolled out today, alongside a followup buff to Repressed Alliance that takes 15 seconds off its time to charge, which is quite nice and welcome.
The patch was today, they did lower the percentage to 30% but they didn't implement the other part of the change properly
oh, my bad, I didn't know one came out today
The classic BHVR double tap. Give a perk a small nerf that would have been fair but fine and then a 2nd nerf on top of it that completely puts the perk in the dirt. I don't understand why BHVR always does this?
If vigil is going to only affect exhausted, it needs to be as high as it was before the nerf at 66%. 40% was fair affecting every status.
BHVR completely dropped the ball on interpreting the feedback here. People had 1 problem with vigil in terms of the statuses it affected and it was that killer powers which were reliant on status effects like clown and freddy were affected.
No one cares that Forced Hesitation and Knock out are getting soft countered by this perk. They care that entire killers become significantly weaker. All they had to do to fix that was give these killers unique status effects similar to how ghost face doesn't apply exposed, he applies his mark, which then in turn applies exposed for its duration.
But first nerfing it and then slapping another Double-Nerf on it… I really dont understand it.It's really hard to look at what they're doing and have BHVR come off favorably.
Either it is was so overpowered and broken, thus necessitating the massive nerf, that they massively dropped the ball by not touching it for so long.
Or it wasn't that overpowered, in which case the level of nerf that it took just seems non-sensical.
It doesn't help that the given reasoning - that it interferes with too many other game elements, makes sense for part of the nerf, but doesn't in anyway explain why the other part was also nerfed.
This alone would not have fixed the problems with Vigil. The degree to which it did affect several perks/addons was also an issue and heavily discouraged an entire genre of build variety. This was just as much of a problem with the perk as the killer power hindered issue was. I'm not entirely sold that Exhausted-only is the right solution, but it definitely couldn't remain the way it was
The intention for this to make the perk completely useless.
Its struggle to find survivor perks that has consistent value nowadays. Its all conditional for mediocre effects
it definitely could’ve stayed the way it was because it was that way for YEARS. vigil only started gaining hate and controversy because it got wildly overbuffed to 66% (which it wasn’t even supposed to be at since 8.5.0 patch notes said it was supposed to be 40% at tier 3). so instead of the devs going back and putting the right number, they let an overtuned perk run rampant for almost 2 years only to gut it.
the 40% we had for the past week was actually really balanced imo. it gave a nice boost in recovery for the status effects but not completely countering it and pretty much bypassing it like how it was at 66%.
Honestly I actually strongly agree with the direction of wanting to avoid some of the more problematic interactions with other perks on both sides. It means they can more cleanly balance the strength of perks like Make Your Choice, Ravenous, Scared To Death etc. for killers, and avoid Vigil coming into play when discussing the balance of survivor perks with downsides like Shoulder, FTP, Deliverance etc., I just also think it should be a strong exhaustion option after that change.
Realistically the move from 1.40/s recovery to 1.30/s isn't even going to be that much of a difference on a practical level, only changing it by 2~3 seconds on a 40 second timer baseline if my maths are correct, but its adding on to its earlier numbers adjustment in a way that feels…poorly timed and unnecessary, even if its hardly the end of the world.
I just wish we had more of an understanding of what exactly the balance target for vigil is meant to be. Just focusing on exhaustion, there don't seem to be any immediately noticeable break points they'd need to hit (the way the Thrill nerfs did very competently by making it so a single token loss stopped Face The Darkness from auto defending, for an example) so its all a bit nebulous what this particular numbers adjustment is for exactly, though theres always the chance I'm being dim and missing something obvious.
What really angers me is we have no alternative now for dealing with debuffs even if its a specific perk tailored to specific debuffs.
Bake faster status effect cleansing into Circle of Healing or something, like wth, why murder a supportive playstyle in cold blood with ZERO alternatives. I can understand the reason of it deals with too much, but do something or communicate your plans instead of just ripping it from us and going silent.
irritating.
I think a better alternative would be to make a new perk entirely and give it some kind of condition and pay off. Like you meet some kind of requirement and interacting with a fellow survivor "cleanses" them of their negative statuses. I wouldn't tie the effect to a boon because it just runs the risk of being like Vigil again where it just passively affects you with very little interaction in the game.
In modern dbd survivor perk design:
If you cleansed a totem and stunned the killer and opened chest and unhooked a survivor, then this perk activates for the next 30 seconds you can remove a debuff from a teammate. If removed a debuff you become broken and your aura revealed to killer for 60 seconds. If you arent downed remove broken.
After this the perk deactivated for reminder of the trial. The perk also deactivates once gens are powered regardless.
god that sounds awful
Yeah thats joke this is how most survivor perks designed since years.
If you think about it since Cage there was barely anything that provides consistent value , there is five moves ahead which can be alternative to windows of opportunity some argue might be better at high level. And there is shoulder the burden an exclusively SWF perk in SoloQ too situational. And maybe Finesse i suppose that had few uses in Soloq. Rest are cost more to activate than pay off or simply too situational to be any use
they should buff vigil to 40% only for exhaustion
And buff ghost notes to 15-25%
So now you get the option of, better exhaustion recovery and affects teammates in a range, or a slightly more aggressive stealth option with a slightly weaker solo exhaust recovery.
And because of diminishing returns you dont run into the stacking problem.
Vigil now isn’t dead in a ditch and ghost notes can actually compete with it.
With your idea I dont see any reason to bring Vigil over Ghost Notes. I mean, both are not great and would not be considered for many Survivors (including myself), but I would rather have less Exhaustion Recovery and instead the scratchmarks disappearing a bit quicker.
Simply because Vigil for Exhaustion only does not matter. There are only rare instances where the Killer leaves a Chase and then you can recover Exhaustion. Aside from that, this will just not happen, since when you are downed (and hooked), your Exhaustion will be gone anyway.
How many modern perks are actually designed like that, though?
Obviously this is hyperbole so I'm not taking it literally, but the core of "multiple hoops for a meagre effect with heavy restrictions" is what I'm looking at here. Of the last like, eight survivor releases the only one I can think of that's even remotely like this is Road Life, for the most part if a new perk is bad it's just because the effect isn't good, not because of activation requirements or restrictions.
Maybe Rick's Come And Get Me making you crouch counts? But that's more quality of life than anything.
Anyway, to OP's wider point - I don't think it's too difficult to understand, clearly the devs thought it affected Exhaustion too much on that PTB. I'd disagree, and personally I'd like to see Vigil get back Oblivious and Blindness for thematic reasons, but the chain of logic is pretty intuitive there imo. I just don't agree with it.
Vigil makes it hard to balance exhaustion perks and is unique in its weird property to fck over specific low tier killers like clown.
It's as healthy as original tinkerer.
this is the repeated justification people are using but if that was really the case they could just remove hindered from the debuffs Vigil interacts with. It's also not a good justification anyway since RNG is a defining factor of this game, I have used The Plague as an example a lot because she totally destroys an entire quarter of survivor gameplay, if you bring a medkit and a healing build against the plague you're just perkless and that's somehow fine but Vigil VS Clown and Freddy isn't?
No? You are talking about two separate issues that are both a problem, but are not connected to each other in any way.
Vigil could be fixed by removing hindred from it's effects. It could also be fixed by excluding killer powers and addons from interacting with vigil.
Or the third and best option, in my opinion, is just reworking the perk, because it messes with exhaustion balancing, some killers powers, weak killer perks that get even weaker because of it and even currently needs to be looked at for every new killer release that bases on some sort of status effect influenced by it.
It's really not that hard to see, that vigil is not a healthy perk for both sides. It may even played into the decision to nerf sprintburst.
They are directly relevant, not because they affect each other but because it points out an inconsistency in the reasoning for game balance
Nerfing Vigil "Because it disproportionately affects a few killers" but not doing the same to the plague who disproportionately affects all survivors with altruism builds.
Yet also not too far from the truth. Compared to modern killer which is just like. Hook a survivor then look vaguely towards a generator to blow it up.
I would rather it just not affect exhaustion, exposed or hindered at all tbh. Sure keep mangled, hemorrhage, blindness, oblivious at a 30-40% rate but we should not have a perk that actively buffs exhaustion while reducing the downsides of other powerful perks like Shoulder the Burden.
This is literally all I want, something that helps others with debuffs that often lead to an team mates early sacrifice (I'd say tunneling but it's not necessarily the right term).
I never said it had to be an overly high cost, it could just be something relatively simple like just performing a heal to get a stack or something like that. You have to keep in mind with survivor perk balancing you always have to take cost into consideration because four survivors in the game so more powerful effects should naturally have higher costs associated with them.
that's just irritating design that doesn't feel good to use, usually the perk is dead if it requires a time or resource commitment thats not just earned passively if history of the game is anything to go by.
The Vigil nerf just makes gameplay even more predictable and brainless from the killer side. No longer is there a chance that a survivor has recovered from an Exposed or broken effect that catches you off guard or gives them a slight edge. Now survivors have to wait a full 90 seconds every time they get hit with Sloppy Butcher, already one of the most used and effective perks in the game (even more slugging potential now). A little benefit from a nearby teammate or vice versa is no longer.
And let's be honest, Clown was not suffering because of Vigil, they omega buffed him and never looked back.
I still wish they would have made it not affect exposed and into a boon with either a 0 or 4 second lingering effect after leaving the area, which is standard for boons. It would have weakened the perk but made it more interesting.
Instead they do what they usually do, they nuked it from orbit. Twice.
I would like to hear this reasoning on how clown was "omega buffed" compared to his state before.
When they buffed the add-ons, decreased reload time and increased speed while reloading, they became super speed clown.
You mean when they nerfed clowns base hinder, hinder linger, flask of bleach, ether 15% and cigar box at the cost of making yellows slightly stronger and a 0.5 second faster reload? He's still a side grade compared to before when they tried to gut pinks. And even then, he's still at best mid B tier in the current state of the game.
All I know is that they buffed him and he was not suffering badly from Vigil. However I agree that Vigil shouldn't counter those base killer powers - it sounds like that would have been too complicated so they just basically removed Vigil from the game. It's a shame but given the way things are going there is not much hope for an improved survivor experience outside the more casual events.
STBFL's buffs and the new obsession perks really help him out rn tbh
I did outline one of those conditions could just a heal which in your words would count as being earned passively in the game. I'm not asking to tie it to chests or something silly like that, a heal is a more than acceptable condition.
Sorry I'm generalising tbf I just don't trust them with the likes of road life etc when it comes to support perks.
It's not about nerfing vigil. It's about reworking it.
And you've only made a comparison, you didn't adress any of the concerns or solutions i've presented.
well my thoughts are vigil would better for more team play since it still has the AoE and linger, freeing up more perk slots for teammates
And ghost notes is better for a more selfish (polite) build.
I agree ghost notes would be better personally, but I think offering the choice is important, it’s lame when perks are just straight upgrades of other perks cough cough 5 moves ahead.
The reality is that Vigil was nerfed, though. it wasn't reworked, it just straight up lost 80% of the perks value. that is again, why I brought up the inconsistency of game design.
I Don't really have a reason to address your concerns or solutions because I don't really have an issue with them, the entire reason I initially replied was not related to your solutions for the perk, it was just to point out exactly what I already have.
IF we're nerfing things because they "affect too many things" then the plague had better be next, and then the Judgement right afterwards since they void so many builds and perks just by existing.
I don't think those things should be nerfed or gutted btw, I am using them as an example to show how poor the justification for nerfing Vigil was. I do not like the idea that survivors aren't supposed to have generalized perks but the killers are, especially when the killers are at the end of the day facing four of the same thing (save for perk slots) and survivors are facing 40+ killers all with different playstyles and builds.
this exactly. Vigil could have just had its percentages nerfed and otherwise stayed the same. just removing hindered would have been a rather big nerf on its own.
Vigil didn't do "too much" it did something against a number of negative status effects, rarely more than two of which were ever present in a single game.
there are way too many perks in DBD that are conditional and the conditions in question are entirely dependent on what the killer (or even the map sometimes) is, but those are unknowns.
Totally agree. 66% faster recovery was very high and I'm fine with them toning it down to 40%. Reasonable nerf, even if the biggest problem was Exhaustion with Sprint Burst. Technically, they could have used different values for different status effects but fair enough if they want to keep it simple. At 40% it's still viable. Spring Burst was justifiably nerfed in the same patch so Vigil should be in healthy spot, right?
Then they nerf it to 30%, which is a little overkill. Already by doing this it's going to be way, way more niche and less useful and powerful. At least it still reduces status effects which is unique and cool.
But then on top of that they remove every status effect it decreases except Exhaustion? Why on earth would they do that? Vigil reducing status effects is literally it's entire identity besides reducing exhaustion. No other perk does this like Vigil does and we're removing it because people are using it with Sprint Burst which has already nerfed, on top of the perk now only being 30%? Not only does this kill the perks identity and uniqueness completely, it reducing those status effects wasn't even complained about by anyone!
The only problematic status effect that Vigil reduced in my opinion was Hindered. This disproportionately screwed over weaker M1 killers that rely in Hindered in their main power, like Skull Merchant and Freddy, Clown to an extent, Nemesis with Licker tongue. Removing Hindered would be fair toward those killers, you don't have to remove every status effect it reduces, that's overkill and totally misguided and makes the perk yet another unusable forgotten perk to add to the ever growing pile.
I really hope they bring it back to 40% and let it reduce all the status effects again except Hindered. Vigil didn't even get a single week to settle into the meta or even fall off before gutting it. Disappointing.