BHVR sure does know how to demoralize players. Why nerf these perks?
The most noticeable things here: STB already had so many arbitrary limitations making it mid. Now it’s just straight buns. Why nerf Windows and FMA? Those are like two of the most balanced perks in the game. Windows is what taught me basic tile knowledge. It’s one of the best perks in the game for beginners. I guess BHVR is giving the middle finger to new players. Just “git gud” while being tunneled out of 90% of your games.
Comments
Changing Shoulder the Burden from Expose to Broken is a good change. Expose duration was short and plenty of killers don't really get value from expose. Plus a survivor becoming broken is noticeable so the killer can actually know the perk was used to play around it. The deactivating the perk for all survivors is very questionable and I'm not a fan of it.
Windows is literally the most used perk in the game and hardly just a beginner perk that people like to claim that it is. The fact that you would see P100 survivors running it meant that it was giving value far past what a beginner survivor needs. Simply put it gave too much information for free with no downside. It also didn't help that Five Moves Ahead struggled to be it's own perk with the existence of Windows. Now both have their own identity and Windows is made weaker so survivors have a reason to run other perks.
Its a function of usage. Windows is kinda dumb when paired with how many pallets we have these days, you just run from pallet to pallet to pallet dropping them without really any kind of counterplay. Also WOO is one of the most used survivor perks and part of a meta shakeup is doing something about that.
STB is one of the strongest perks in the game for survivors, so its nerf makes tons of sense. The deactivation requirement is interesting because it starts to lean toward the devs realizing that when 1 perk is in play, its totally fine, but its a big problem when all 4 survivors run it. I think its healthy to do it this way, but then what i'd like to see as part of it is showing what perks your teammates are running, and/or it maybe getting some kind of secondary benefit if it get deactivated by someone else, like you unhook faster or something. That way it isn't just a completely dead slot.
I feel like Shoulder only needed one of it's changes instead of destroying the perk entirely. It was game changing sure but I also barely ever saw it and it was legitimately good anti tunnel.
I don't mind the fma windows changes cuz they overlapped a little too much but windows probably needs a small secondary effect cuz learning vault locations is a lot easier that knowing exactly where pallets spawned.
good nerfs finally a shake up in the meta. Perks like Windows and Five Steps are bad design. Game doing the work for you.
Why do people keep acting like killer perks would be the only perks getting nerfed in the perk shake-up? Everyone is gonna get nerfs and adjustments. This is quite literally what we've been asking for.
If you wanna shake up the meta then Pain Res and DMS should be at the top of the nerf list. Somehow I don’t think this about shaking up the meta. BHVR pulled a BHVR and only listened to those crying about how strong four STB players is in comp.
Why do you assume they are not? we already know they are changing like 50+ perks and they only released info on, what 6 of them?
StB is one of the strongest perks in the game especially in swf and very strong in comp, it's even banned.
It's Windows of opportunity, not pallets of opportunity. Like FMA and WoO need to have a separate identity and they are definitely not "balanced", a balanced perk wouldn't be the most used perk in the game as there would be better perks to use.
Nerfing the Google Maps perks is great and long overdue. They aren't just "training wheels" perks when they're extremely common even with experienced players.
Shoulder was already difficult to get value from and now its borderline useless. Sad to see the net total of the promised anti-tunnel changes from the "year of health" has been 10 seconds of Elusive, nerfing AFC, and nukes to Off the Record and Shoulder the Burden. Why are we buffing tunneling AGAIN if this is supposed to "shake up the meta"?
Who said that? Nobody said that. I play both sides. It’s just lately survivors have been getting the short end of the stick lately, so I’m complaining from that perspective. What is this like five meta perks nerfed the last two patches? Imagine if killers were being nerfed that badly. Yes, I’d still be complaining.
They’ve nerfed so many good survivor perks in the last months, but hey, at least they buffed repressed alliance. I’m sure that will fill the place of all the nerfed meta perks.
StB change should have a passive, or come with an alert that another player in the lobby has it equipped, or we should be able to see load outs in the lobby. It feels bad that you could have a perk 100% turned off from solo queue with multiple survivors running it and you wouldn't know until it's too late. Making it do at least something passively or giving people heads up before the game starts in some form feels a little more fair.
I didn't say anyone said that, I said 'Why do people keep acting like'. It wasn't a 'you said X' statement.
My insinuation is that, yes, Killers are likely going to see a few meta perk nerfs as well. We already know Thrill is being changed again since its most recent nerf - though time will tell if this change is nerf or buff. We know Dissolution, Dead Man's Switch, and Blood Favor will all see nerfs. These are all popular perks on the killer side.
This hasn't even hit PTB yet and people are already upset. It's bizarre to me. This kind of knee-jerk behavior is the same thing that got the anti-tunnel updates scrapped in full. Let's give it a second to see how things come out in the wash, eh?
Though I would argue against FMA and WoO being 'two of the most balanced perks in the game.' Nothing that gives you that much constant information is that easy to call balanced. It's not as though people can't run them together if they really want that information, either.
Shoulder deserved this for a while. A 40 second expose that M1's could still barely capitalize on due to pallet density was not it. For the price of the exposed and sharing of one of your hook states you prevented a kill earlier than you would like. In a lot of people's eyes that is a MAJOR upside compared to the downside and it still does that with the nerf to the perk. They just made the punishment harsher and not so "just rip off hook at no sign of a terorr radius and pre-run shift W and you can ignore the downside"
There's two aspects to survivor perk balance:
1: How it stacks up against other survivor perks
2: How it stacks up against the killer
The second version should be the primary concern, but it seems that we're going by the first now.
Which means any survivor perk with a pickrate gets marched straight to the guillotine.
Okay, I see people saying Windows should be nerfed because it has a high pick rate (does that logic also work for pain res and Ghoul or…?). But have you considered people use Windows because there’s nothing else. Anything that’s halfway strong will be nerfed into the ground or is extremely situational. I know I just play it safe and bring information perks because you consistently get value. Deja Vu ain’t that strong but you still see tons of people using it because there’s nothing else and the information is consistent.
Shoulder exists so friends can introduce new people to the game and not quit because killers will only tunnel new players. doesn't matter if it's at 5 gens.
"i have 5 hooks and no kills! this is so oppressive and unfair!" they say as all those hooks were on one survivor.
Deactivating a perk for everyone is extremely problematic. It makes the perk completely unusable in soloq.
I'd be fine with both ghoul and pain res being nerfed due to pick rate, yes.
And saying 'there's nothing else' is just disingenuous. But if there's 'nothing else' then I'm happy to inform you that for two perk slots you can get the same effect by running both FMA and WoO. Since there is 'nothing else' good for those slots, that's not a problem, right?
People keep asking for the meta to be shaken up and then we get complaints when it finally gets shaken up. I will say that if some of the top killer perks don’t also get nerfed then you have a valid reason to complain.
This. Very much this.
From what we know blood favor, dissolution, and thrill are all being swapped up so I'm not all that concerned. Seems like both sides are gonna take fire.
nah windows change should not go through. I don’t even use the perk and know this is a dumb change.
So can you point me to a dev saying that's the intent behind the perk or no? I'm going to assume no and it's just your personal assumption. Either way its effect was stupidly powerful for next to no downside. You can still keep that new player in the game longer but it shouldn't be as powerful as it was especially in a more coordinated swf. Balancing a perk THAT strong around new players was not healthy for the game.
I think you are misunderstanding the point of my statement, I don't those aspects are what affects perk balance the most.
High pick rate = strong perk, windows if opportunity has the highest pick rate and it's used in high MMR (so it's not just a perk for survivors to learn location of pallets and windows). Lithe will definitely won't get nerfed as it was literally a worst version of Sprint burst.
Bhvr is trying to shake up the meta and that's instantly a problem, strong killer perks are getting nerfed as well. Bhvr only recently started nerfing best survivor perks and people are already complaining (5 perks of bets survivor perks got changed) and there will be buffs to other perks.
Pain res has the highest pick rate on killer side as it's the strongest perk on the killer side and it did get nerfed multiple times but it's still used as it's the only remote slowdown basically, personally I think it's very overrated, you can fully counter it with repressed alliance now as well.
I don’t want the meta shaken up by means of nerfing the top perks into irrelevance. That’s lazy. I want them to buff existing perks and introduce new perks that are actually good.
Ok that’s an option too, but will you apply that to both killer and survivor side then?
If it was for tunneling, it would require the other survivor to actually have been tunneled to use it. It's just for keeping a survivor from dying no matter what, anything other than intentionally 8 hooking gets punished by the perk. I would prefer for it to be balanced around being an actual anti tunnel perk, but otherwise it kind of needs to have downsides like this to not be hilariously OP.
No, you're the one who doesn't understand it, because this is decidedly not true.
Take the nerf to Sprint Burst for an immediate showcase of why and how this is not true. With SB taking a nerf, Lithe's pickrate is going to go up. Does this mean Lithe got stronger? Obviously not, since it went unchanged.
That's why I mentioned that there's two aspects of survivor perk balance, and these nerfs are only focused on one of the two. The perks that are on the chopping block are by no means overpowered, but they are highly picked because survivor perks are generally so garbage-tier that anything that's remotely usable quickly starts to stand out.
Not by your own logic, because now it's definitely a 'strong perk', with its pickrate inevitably rising now that its competition is dead in the water.
They've been on a nerfing spree for ages now, and the supply of usable survivor perks keeps shrinking further.
I also want to point out that this has gone so far down the line by now that the devs have legitimately lost sight of perk balance on the survivor side, which is how we wound up with the initial incarnations/drafts of Invocations and Steadfast.
Firstly, that doesn't matter. High pick rate = strong perk, right? That means Pain Res is overpowered and needs to be nerfed further.
Secondly: Surge, Deadlock, Eruption, Turn Back the Clock, Dead man's Switch…
Killers have been getting new toys to play with. The top most-picked killer perks is a jumble from across the game's history.
Meanwhile, 8/10 of the most picked survivor perks on Nightlight are from the first three years of the game's release, with six of them being from year 1, IIRC. The only newcomers that breached the meta being Finesse and Five Moves Ahead. The latter of which is slated for nerfs already.
Of course, part of this is that killers are very varied and thus new perks more easily find a place into some killer's build, but it's also definitely true that new shoots in the survivor scene get ripped out at an alarming pace. Just look at what happened to fog vials…
I just saw that Stake Out doesn't work with Hyperfocus anymore. What the heck. Is there any point to playing survivor anymore? They might as well load us into the game on hook.