Why are we nuking the beginner friendly perks?
Looking at the new perk changes I'm looking forward to a big meta shakeup. But I'm not too impressed with the changes to windows and five moves ahead.
I may be biased since I still use windows as my crutch perk. But we didn't need to make the game even less accessible for new players. Windows was always the first perk I'd advise new players to get. Having it not show pallets anymore makes it kinda useless. And vice versa with five moves.
Survivor role is hard enough for new players, without nerfing these ones. So now to get the old windows effect you need 2 paywalled perks.
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Windows is literally buffed technically as it gives 10% vaulting speed.
Because Killers claimed that those are the problem Perks. You now, moving the goalpost, as usual.
I've always found that line absolutely insane. The best chase runners never used WOO. They always know the tiles and how to run them.
Windows just helps new players, or players who suck at chase atrimg a couple of tiles together so they can last more than 10 seconds in a chase.
At least now if you refuse to learn tiles you are forced to run 2 perks, I don't see the issue with it.
Because they clearly want killer queue times to break the 15-minute mark; apparently, the wait isn't long enough as it is.
They're not exactly beginner perks in my opinion. Yes, they're extremely useful information perks that make traversing the map during chase much less daunting even for experienced players. However, its a doesn't teach new players how to loop or manage resources. It encourages the opposite with no guidance. Its a crutch.
However, actual beginner perks were buffed quite a bit to actually help newer players. I think thats more important than focusing on two perks that require money to get that new players aren't guaranteed to get at all or even know about so their importance as beginner friendly perks isn't actually that important.
I mean they buffed all the universal perks so that’s something and some are very substantial for new players.
Its definitely an overreaction to say they're nuking beginner friendly perks because of 1 side grade (WoO) and one nerf (5MA). And now you can run both together for some actual synergy instead of just 5MA which was just better than WoO. The only reason to not use 5MA is if you didn’t have it yet.
They weren't beginner perks, or they wouldn't have consistently seen the highest usage at all skill levels for years. Weird how Technician and Spine Chill were never up there with the "beginner perk" Windows of Opportunity.
killers just wanna bully new players hence the Shoulder nerfs
I mean, good Survivors also used WoO. However, the reason why they were able to run Killers around was not WoO, but because they were good players. But since all Survivors are bad, they must be carried and handheld by Perks.
While in fact, you clearly see if someone is only a yellow aura gamer. And those will go down easily, despite WoO.
It teaches map layouts, which is a starting point for learning the rest of looping. There is no looping if you just run into an area with no resources and if you are not looping then you are not learning looping. What beginner perks were buffed? And if you are referring to the minor number tweaks on the lower tiers of the general perks those will do nothing for helping a player learn the game. When teaching people the game the build we usually give someone includes windows and deja vu because these perks show them where to find the primary elements you interact with in a match as a survivor.
Windows helps new players yes. But good survivors still ran the perk because truth be told, when you can see EVERY resource within a large area it does remove a lot of the guessing and variability of chases ending early because of that. It was still a strong perk for not having to earn it.
WoO was one of the best perks in the game used by all skill levels, anybody with half a brain can loop for ages with it. While yes it does help new players, I personally think 5MA will be better as new players are typically better at playing pallets from what I've seen. WoO will likely still be the dominant of the two though.
The claim of Windows being a beginner friendly perk falls flat when you see that it is one of the most used survivor perks. The perk gives a lot of value to veteran players who don't need to think about how to path and can see which areas are deadzones.
I would honestly say that the new version of Windows is more of a beginner perk, because window locations are something to learn as they never change within the tile. So the value veterans will get will be much less.
Ironically Windows is worse for newer players but stronger for vets. 10% vault speed is significant and if you're good you might be able to use it twice in a chase so I don't really see it as a nerf.
It's impossible for me not to believe that most nerfs are based on outrage and not data nowadays. Are ancient, baby-friendly perks like Windows and SB suddenly overperforming? Doubtful. More likely social media noise and CC influence just gotten too loud.
Are they actually though? That's the idea sure, and with so many maps with often confusing layouts, windows is definitely a massively useful perk. However, by itself it teaches new players to waste resources. They see pallets everywhere and will waste all of them in a single chase. I don't think beginniners should even have this perk until they understand resource management and basic looping.
Windows is one of the few things within the game itself that can teach you resource management and basic looping. The game doesn't really mention these things anywhere (maybe its somewhere in the showcase now, I've never gone through the whole thing). Veteran players in this game just cannot seem to fathom how long this can take or have forgotten how long it can take. As you noted, there are a ton of maps and each can spawn wildly differently match to match. Over time they will see that by dropping everything quickly they leave themself with fewer and fewer resources (and literally be able to see this with the perk). Unless this strategy leads to them winning matches (which it won't unless the killer is bad and just auto breaks everything they drop) they will begin trying other things.
Like WoO has been either the most used or the top three used perk on survivor side for years. Like anyone who claims that its a perk that only new players use with that data are just clearly wrong. Like clearly Behavior has studied the data and found that out themselves too. WoO has been the most powerful information perk in the survivor side for years and official and unofficial numbers just prove that.
Its a good change and makes sense making both WoO and Five Moves Ahead to be unique and not just little bit different versions of eachother.
Of course. Other stuff just got nerfed earlier, now the next bunch of Perks are done. But hey, at least Survivors get thrown a bone by making unplayable Perks a bit less unplayable while nerfing the Meta Perks.
Weird, I dont see any changes to the most picked Killer Perks. If this is a criteria, there should be Nerfs. (It should not be a criteria. But if that is your argument…)
Nowhere to Hide was nerfed just recently and Dead Man's Switch also got nerfed just in the PTB.
Not one of the most used Perks. Neither of them. Nowhere to Hide also did not get nerfed in this PTB.
Nerfing WoO and claiming it is because of the pickrate is the same level of nonsense like saying that BBQ deserved to be nerfed when it still granted Bonus BPs, since it was the most used Killer Perk. The Perk does nothing unhealthy and yet is on the chopping block because of outcry.
I said recently and both of those are top 10 used perks by unofficial sources.
So for the first time they decided to study the data on this old perk? It's just suddenly a problem now? You know what they did before when they found a perk was used by everyone? They made BT basekit. Now? They nerf.
Funny how lopsided it is. Killer gets mostly buffs, survivor meta and basekit nerfed, and it's in a long line of recent nerfs like medkit add-ons, Fast Track, and Cross Examination. Surviviors get some gimmick reworks, but where are the killer meta nerfs in the quantity of the recent survivor ones?
And recently we had a Nerf to Sprint Burst, which made the Perk disappear from Builds, a Nerf to Vigil which completely obliterated the Perk and made it worse than Release-Vigil and a Nerf to Deliverance, which had a Downside AND activation requirement. Plus removal of the one Anti-Tunnel measurement they implemented a year ago.
But yeah, Nowhere to Hide got nerfed. Equal treatment.
I never ran Windows of Opportunity, so when Five Moves Ahead released, I thought it was a joke.
Now there is actually an identity to each perk, so I could see myself running either one.
Yeah, exactly. I dont see myself running any of the buffed Survivor Perks. I thought Spine Chill getting the vault speed back was interesting, but having the vault speed only for 12 seconds after the Killer looked at you from 40m away means that you might not even have it anymore once you are in a chase. And then it is on Cooldown.
On Killer however I think a bunch of Perks are now interesting to run. Monstrous Shrine for example or Help Wanted. Those are good Perks IMO.
I dont know, the game is currently quite frustrating. Survivor gets ######### on and Killer has way too long queuetimes to enjoy it, because Survivor becomes less and less playable and there is a Solo Killer Release, followed by a strong Killer Release, followed by 2v8…
The only positive change I see for Survivor is that Slippery Meat does not allow to try to unhook yourself anymore. IMO Luck should be removed anyway, since it is only used nowadays to allow people to go next, since Luck Builds are dead with Diminishing Returns.
You mean recently? Dracula got nerfed. Trickster got nerfed. Ghoul got nerfed. Blight got nerfed. If you mean Killer perks, DMS no longer combines with Pain Res. Dissolution now no longer synergies with killers who can damage survivors with an M2, no longer allowing combos like Ghoul or Krasue getting easy hits. Thrill of the Hunt is reworked, no longer allowing for the infamous totem builds that caused cleansing to take forever.
Thats the funniest thing I've seen today. :D
If just enough outcry from one side was enough to force changes from the Devs, gens would probably regress at 500% even while survivors are working on it, killers would have to play and win a match of meet your maker at the start of every match before they are allowed to move and if u camped or tunneled, ur PC would explode and ur personal information would be mailed to the FBI.
Jokes aside BHV has shown and made clear in the past that they nerf and buff perks and killers according to numbers and not outcry or feedback. So claiming that survivor perks are dead now cause killers threw a fit is basically just instigating another us vs them situation. Same with killers claiming their perks are dead now cause survivors threw a fit.
I just find it super funny that many players apparently think that the Devs go to work in the mornin, open the DBD forums, see the top post titled for example "nerf pig by survivormain111" and are like: okay let me get right on that.
I don't think WoO has been a beginner perk for a very long time, it's just been the meta perk. Splitting it between itself and Five Moves is probably the best outcome and a whole bunch of generic perks also got some really nice buffs now so that's always great. But personally I'd rather more beginners run de ja vu than windows because the formers teaches them not to three gen which is arguably the more important knowledge to have first.
I'm talking about recent perks but three of the killers you listed are still the top 10 if not top 5 strongest killers in the game. And the last thing to happen to Dracula was Warg's Fang becoming outrageously strong. Good Trickster players who hit their shots don't seem to consider the Trickster changes a nerf and the decay takes forever now.
Don't know if I would call Dissolution meta. Blood Favor is debatable too. DMS just lost a synergy. It still does the same thing. Nowhere to Hide is probably the only meta one to get a proper nerf. SB, Vigil, Deli, Windows, Five Moves were all hard meta. Vigil is dead and SB has almost disappeared from my matches. Windows is cooked. Killers also haven't lost anything basekit, unlike survivors.
Thrill doesn't look like a nerf to me at all. The rework will block totems from being cleansed repeatedly. It's a side grade if anything. It just isn't free value anymore. It's also technically a niche build perk. Did Pain Res, Pop, Grim, TBtC, Corrupt, Lethal or BBQ get nerfed? Nope. Nurse's is meta ans it got buffed for some reason.
Three gen doesn't matter if one of your teammates gets killed with 3+ gens up. I agree that gen efficiency is fundamental to winning on survivor but it doesn't matter if you go down fast. I was always recommending both windows and deja vu for beginners.
But thats the thing, those Perks exist for a very long time. Like, Sprint Burst has been Meta for 10 years before it got nerfed. And then suddenly it is a problematic Perk? Nothing got changed which made Sprint Burst even better (aside from Vigil, but this got nuked as well).
This is what I mean with "moving the goalpost". Perks which are no problem are not complained about and suddenly, after other Perks get nerfed, those Perks become the next best thing to complain about.
And we will see new Threads coming up in a few weeks which then claim other Perks to be too good and the reasons why Killers lose games.
What would you want those nerfs to do? Throw Blight from S to C tier? He became 4.4m/s, loses tokens on breaking pallets, two hugely requested changes that greatly reduce his power have been added. Drac still got nerfs to not only wolf form, but moving slowly when having his pillar ready which was never given a proper explanation on why it was nerfed. And it literally doesn't matter if someone still likes the Trickster or not? He went from being 4.6m/s and being able to get main event in 6-10 hits to being 4.4m/s and needing to work more for main event, that's just an objective nerf, no one's opinion is going to change that.
Dissolution was infamous for the killers that worked and a consistent pick on them, Ghoul and Krasue specifically who were at their strongest at the time. And this wasn't DMS's only nerf, it was reworked, nerfed, and now nerfed again. And Thrill is definitely a big change compared to before, totem cleansing with Thrill took too long and plenty of killers could abuse the extra time it took, now if a survivor is looping a killer correctly, the teammate cleansing no longer needs to spend such a long time doing it.
There were nerfs, but not every killer perk got nerfed just like every other survivor perk didn't get nerf. Lithe, Deja Vu, DS and DH are still very popular and untouched. Shoulder was the biggest case of gutting because the very existence of that perk was a mistake. Some employee in BHVR saw Otzdarva's video about tunneling suggestions, added into the game without any of the downsides and called it a day because they were too creatively bankrupt to think of a third perk for Taurie.
WoO is not “unhealthy” but is it extremely strong and useful, even more so for experienced survivors. I have almost 3,000 and I still use it most of the time. Experienced streamers also use it frequently. It is very much a meta perk, and if we’re trying to shake up the meta, then it deserves a nerf.
However, I do think that nerfing it overly punishes new players who rely heavily on it while they are learning. I would propose giving new players free WoO effect without using a perk slot for the first xx hours of game play. Maybe 500 hours or so? Then the nerf doesn’t punish new players while they are learning, and the perks isn’t too strong for experienced players like it has been for years. I think that’s a very fair trade.
To be fair, that's not moving the goalposts so much as it is continuing to talk about balance opinions. Just because one problematic tool - whether it's Sprint Burst, or something else you'd personally agree is a problem - got fixed doesn't mean there's no remaining problems.
It cuts both ways; I've talked about DMS being a problem before, but I'm not going to refrain from talking about Lightborn, Pain Res, or the concept of stacking quad slowdown because of it. I'm not moving the goalposts by doing so, those are just the relevant problems left.
Similarly, Sprint Burst and Vigil being nerfed doesn't mean toolboxes aren't a problem, or that Lithe isn't really good for what it asks of you, or that unhookable build shenanigans aren't a problem.
It also goes in another direction entirely- this patch is buffing Better Than New and Solidarity but I still think those perks need different changes so I'll probably talk about that in the future.
It's not like one perk being addressed means there has to be a moment of silence about other perks.
It's hilarious that Do No Harm and Knock Out were given as "previews" of the changes. Do No Harm - you get some more skill checks. Knock Out - 400% buff AFTER Vigil was removed.
It's becoming kind of obvious what it is, any survivor perks that have a real impact, like a tangibly helpful effect outside of stats or situational effects is being systematically gutted, I went over this with vigil with several people: Vigil did not "do too much" it was generalized on purpose, and It should have remained generalized "omg VIgil affects so many different things that's just too much" but in reality it didn't because no killer was causing nearly all of these effects in a game, it was a general option to help relieve status effects. a proper nerf would to be simply reduce the percentage, but no, zero effect to negative status effects and a flat 30% effect to exhaustion" abysmal.
Its even more insane that they dumpstered Vigil and then also dumpstered sprint burst immediately after… unreasonable nerf too 1/3 of its effectiveness gone. that means if you accidentally collide with the extremely janky terrain for a brief moment, or fall from a small height you will get almost zero distance at all, it's actually a joke to bring SB against any killer who has any kind of movement ability now.
Perks SHOULD have an effect, that's why people run them, and apparently it's inconceivable to BHVR that a survivor perk should actually consistently benefit a survivor.
StB? Noticeable effect, has to go right now
and the Windows / 5 Moves being split up is just a setup, people have already been talking about the fact Lithe is a very likely nerf in the future, I would place a bet that before long "Lithe + WoO is too strong! the extra Vault boost should be a different perk because the survivors get too much value!"
Meanwhile killers are being powercreeped… and at the same time the older less powercreeped killers are being used as excuses for why survivor perks need to be nerfed (like Clown and Freddy kept being brought up for Vigil) or the classic "what about the poor M1 Killers!!!" I don't even have a personal problem with the Judgement but she totally negates dozens of survivor perks… like okay… not to mention the fact that Killers have single perks that remove entire facets of survivor counterplay and its totally fine but man if there's a chance a survivor perk is able to really inconvenience a killer it's a travesty…
There was genuinely no reason to even change BT but ofc they went ahead and did it, and they killed Self Preservation too, kind of unbelievable IMO
there are so many aura reading perks in the game right now and limited options for survivors to effectively counter them… largely because Distortion was totally gutted because… it had an effect on games (oh no!)
Plus the styptic and syringe nerfs
lithe will get nerfed soon
Let's be honest. Nobody of you care about new players, you're just angry because a perk which let you play in autopilot mode has been nerfed. The pick rate of WoO was very high, it was picked by a lot of people (newbies and veteras), and it had the potential of becoming a bad looper into a decent looper. Now you must learn the tiles and explore the map a bit. When the perk was buffed in the past I refused to use it because I knew it wouldn't let me improve as a looper and would be nerfed eventally (in fact the nerf came too late imo).
You answered yourself. New WoO is better than current one btw.
Also because, unless you buy the relevant dlc or are on the Switch, Kate isn't basekit so beginners won't necessarily have access to her or her perks.
In that respect maps are more beginner friendly since they do the same thing and are basekit.
DMS is a minor nerf. It still does the same thing. Any survivor with two brain cells would let go of a gen if Pain Res/DMS was in play, and if they had three they'd pop it on a random one. Nowhere to Hide is the only really meta perk that got a decent nerf.
Do you think that not every single survivor perk getting nerfed this month is a good argument? It's a fact that survivor meta is getting gutted and killer is going mostly untouched. Lithe is next because killer mains are running out of worthwhile perks to complain about. They won't be happy until they're all equally mediocre.
So Blight went from S tier to....S tier. What a monumental change. Meanwhile every new killer is also A tier with Judgment being arguably S. Perks that are a problem on certain killers aren't the issue—it's the killers. But nerfs to survivor are different. They effect all survivors. I don't use any of the meta perks getting nerfed but my teammates do, and if they become worse, the matches become worse. And the basekit nerf effects everyone. That's super sad the three Krasue mains can't cheese with Bam/Dis anymore but I'll still be 4king at 5 gens with Henry because all my perks were untouched (aside from a buff) and survivor is much weaker than it was.
"beginner friendly" but its the most used survior perk after several years and allows you to auto pilot to yellow. (I think pain res should be nerfed for the exact same reason as I would point to most of the killer popular perks)
Five moves ahead is technically a buff, because pallets are stronger than windows and windows are also more predictable, people also gonna unironically run windows and fma.
Also, maps still exist, they show you both pallets and windows
It honestly is always funny how people start using other people, that they probably don't even care about, as protection shields, just for their own benefits, it is the same as with shoulder, I doubt many care about the solo q part, they just don't want their toys to get nerfed and use weaker people as an excuse