dezzmont
dezzmont
About
- Username
- dezzmont
- Joined
- Visits
- 967
- Last Active
Comments
-
You know, the fact that people are complaining they aren't getting value from a perk they didn't even equip because there are no obsessions in lobbies anymore says a lot about how bonkers busted old DS was.
Like... the perk was so strong its mere existence effectively protected the entire team with it because of how violently and dramatically it altered killer behavior and disempowered them to punish really blatantly stupid plays.
-
A big design problem with main event is that if you fail to get a down with it, it generates extreme negative value as you can't throw knives. So unless main event takes a health state by itself, you actally are better off not hitting it.
This would be fine if you control it, it would give a big reward for outplaying the killer, but because its so random when you get it, you just never use it because hitting that button basically makes you auto-lose the chase unless the situation is perfect.
Hell, I can understand it not lasting forever to avoid hook camp scenarios. Just let it last until you do a pickup at LEAST.
-
The issue with MM is many fold:
1: Survivors are the more social side, and thus more likely to recruit other players.
2: Post game chat is, to put it mildly, the most toxic thing I have ever experienced in a videogame, and I played league ranked and dota ranked for years. It is downright shocking how awful it is.
3: Most of the killer cast is not viable in the sense they lose vs a team of equal skill, so if you identify strongly with a member of the cast that isn't a viable killer sucks to be you.
4: Killer is, outside of any balance consideration, the 'higher effort' role. I don't mean this to say survivors are no skill idiots. I mean purely in the sense of the amount of consistent effort and attention killers have to pay to the match, and how bad the gamefeel is for killers. Like sure, getting hooked sucks, but at least its DOWNTIME. Killers lack any downtime, besides micro-animations that are constantly played which take away their camera control. It just is physically and mentally way more demanding to play killer because of that constant uptime. Its also why streamers tend to favor killer, but it just really makes it hard for 'marathon' killer sessions for a casual player.
This combines to make the killer experience naturally sorta shorter, less attractive, and less likely to be populated. It would take an extreme amount of gameplay and balance changes to get anything resembling 1/5th the playerbase to play killer. Not just balance stuff (Though some balance stuff is badly needed, as 'sweat squads' just nuke any fun anyone can have in the game from orbit), but gamefeel stuff.
Part of why I think ruin-undying showed a problem with the game design was despite being OP it also like... gave the killer the ability to take literally any level of downtime and not throw the game. Downtime being baked into the killer role would do a lot to make it less absurdly stressful and help the killer population out a lot.
-
I find explosive knives help me at a lot of medium sized loops.
@WiiFitTrainer said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/239713/trickster-useless-add-ons-the-trick-pouch
All of his addons are bad because even the best ones require you to use knives, and using knives is actually a hinderance right now for him.
This is the real answer though.
-
The struggle mechanic has a lot of really serious issues that make it player hostile design. Button mashing as a mechanic hasn't been fun for ages and is basically extinct in games for a bunch of reasons.
1: Rough on the hands, rough on the hardware
2: Accessibility issues. This is obviously the most important problem.
3: It makes losing feel worse. Like, I suspect complaints about camping and tunneling would go down a LOT if you were not forced to mash. You are now forced to participate in your loss, making you 'more present' during camping scenarios, for example.
4: It hurts the 'emotional arc' of survivor a lot. Normally, survivor gets a chance to regroup mentally once they are downed and once they are hooked for a minute. Catch their breath, recompose, make a plan, check a text message, whatever. Mashing space kills that mental downtime.
The literal only 'benefit' to mashing is that it makes the second hook stage feel worse and encourages the survivor to give up. This may have been interesting in the pre-SWF days where there was a lot of psychology around the idea of hook rescues being rare and staying alive on the hook being an altruistic action done for your team rather than in hope of rescue, but now its just annoying and there are already plenty of mechanics that make the second hook stage feel uniquely awful and unsettling.
-
@MeltingPenguins said:
Whatever you might think about tunneling, camping and slugging, you have to admit that if DbD would be played officially competitive these approaches would probably get prohibited by the rules.
And that's the point. the devs seem currently out to make dbd e-sports ready, yet they say tunneling etc are legit tactics, make things more exciting and that frustration is fun.
Like... if they are aware these elements would get barred in actual big tournaments, why are they keeping them in the regular game?
(lbr we know the answer is because it caters to all the bloated ego brats who thing basement bubba is skill and will throw a tantrum when someone had kindred and they depip from it)
You are REALLY not familiar with competitive gaming if you think they would ban nebulous strategies like 'tunneling' and 'camping' and 'slugging' from a tournament.
It is extremely hard to ban strategies at the competitive level, its almost always massively unpopular, and it rarely works. It has to be something pretty extreme that is completely degenerate, adds no value to the game, and has a very clear cutoff point that can be measured mid play (ex: Wobbling from Melee). Otherwise, competitive play is literally a 'do your best' environment.
Like how do you define slugging, for example? Would you be required to INSTANTLY pick up survivors who are downed? Well then the meta just becomes flashlight saves all day every day. Ok so what if your allowed to search for a survivor going for that flashlight save? Well then you can claim 'oh well I thought I was going to get saved on.' If you find someone who doesn't have a flashlight can you hit them? What if someone is doing an objective right in your face? If you can't down them suddenly the killer literally can't mathematically win the game.
So slugging is never going to be banned. What about camping? Same deal. Are you required to run straight away? Then you never hook, you just slug, because the survivor will rescue instantly, and insta-rescues are a total tempo kill. What if your allowed to stick around if you see a survivor? The game still breaks, the survivor just hides. You can't ban camping at the high end. Some (bad) DBD tournaments tried and it always ends poorly. You cannot ban 'camping.'
This is because camping, tunneling, and slugging aren't mechanics. They are strategies, and they are words used to define strategies in a deliberately nebulous way so that basically anything survivors don't like can be thrown under them. There is no real clear definition, and more importantly you have to snowball to win as a killer, and you can only snowball by leaving people on the ground, eliminating a player early, or catching someone going for an unhook. That is it. Those are the only 3 ways you win in high level DBD. If your opponents aren't making mistakes and are coordinated doing gens, you literally don't have time to win 3 chases, let alone 12.
So this idea that these strategies are 'unfair' is something no high level DBD player takes seriously. Even streamers who don't do these things due to it not being exciting to watch will do them if they know they will get slammed otherwise, they tend to make content based around beating weaker players because DBD is at its most fun when the teams are unbalanced because survivors have so much insane basekit power its in their ability to deny all interaction.
And this is the real problem with DBD as a competitive game: It just isn't competitive because survivors are way too strong if their sole goal is to 'win.' Once your incentive becomes 'win a specific match at all costs' rather than 'have a good time' the game breaks utterly and even with slugging, camping, and tunneling only nurses and spirits can get anything done. And optimal play is not very exciting to watch on either side, which is the actual limit to DBD as an e-sport.
The game just isn't suited for it on many levels, but 'Camping, tunneling, and slugging aren't going to be tournament legal so why allow them in the normal game' is not one of them and betrays a COMICAL disconnect with the tournament scene in any game.
If Bayo was allowed in smash, tunneling is going to be allowed in comp DBD because tournaments that try to ban it won't be successful and will be overshadowed by ones that do.
-
Being allowed to progress objectives while having a perk that was deliberately overpowered to prevent a negative gameplay experience totally unrelated to progressing objectives was stupid.
-
@Devil_hit11 said:
Base regression is the way it is to prevent killers from taking the game hostage in 3 gen situations. Survivors should always be faster at progressing the objective than the killer is at regressing it as long as all of the team is alive.
Killers are suppose to gain pressure by downing survivors quickly. Not by regressing the objective indefinitely. The perks that regress generator by large amount have heavy restrictions such as Pop(11max total hooks) and Hex:ruin being a hex. Maybe they'll release a perk like pop goes weasel that works off hooks with functionality to increase base passive regression speed on the next gen(s) regressed but it should not be default.
far too much chance for holding game hostage otherwise.
I agree with all of this, but I still think the fundemental chase/gen math is off.
We REALLY don't want 'sustained' regression to be strong in the basekit, because then tri-gens would be comical, but I can't help but feel like maybe there should be a 'basekit pop' that can be banked up, with the perk upgrading it, to reward killers for winning chases more with anti-tempo.
-
I use spinechill, but I never replace my eyes with it. If you need spinechill to avoid getting grabbed off a gen by a stealth killer, your using it wrong. What it does best is less 'killer detection' and more 'get inside the killer's head.' There are plenty of situations where you know the killer is near but knowing if the killer is visually tracking you is helpful.
If you find it is a must-run perk, I suggest you learn to play without it. Once your good without it, try running it. It does wonders at LOS blocked loops and stuff like fade aways and oldschool jukes to know if they worked or if you need to start running again.
-
@alaenyia said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2072284#Comment_2072284
If behavior doesn't get feedback things will never change.
BHVR has been aware of how much mediocre players being camped and tunneled and have been asking you to shut up about it since 2016 because its such an integral part of the game that removing it would be like removing flashbangs and smokes from CS:GO or the wall from Street Fighter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr1i_zXOlxw&ab_channel=%E1%85%9A%E1%85%9ALike this was basically addressed in EVERY Dev diary.
However, just because you lose to something, or you don't like it, or don't feel good about it, doesn't mean its unfair, or needs to leave the game. That is what we in the gaming world call a scrub:
So far you have learned only obvious and mundane things. I know that taking the first step can be the hardest part of the journey, so I wanted to coddle you a little just to get you going. The coddling stops here. You must now understand the cold, hard truth of competition. This is the difficult parBasically, by trying to create artificial rules on the game enviroment that limit intricate, dynamic, and interesting behaviors (and yes, tunneling and camping DOES lead to lots of interesting game states, again, its SUPER interesting for the 4 other players in the game and low key interesting for you, the WORST era in the game's history for survivor enjoyment was arguably the slug meta brought about by old Borrowed Time that made defending the hook legitimately impossible, the game became super boring and the playerbase dropped off pretty hard, like the peak playerbase dipped under 18,000 because the game was SO FREAKING BORING), you are A: Making yourself much worse at the game because your convincing yourself that it isn't on you to learn to beat these strategies, and B: Making it so you understand the game less, because you refuse to engage with the logic of these strategies and why they are (sometimes) optimal and exist in the game.
If you pretend killers only camp and tunnel because they are big meanies, you are, in fact, a scrub. Likewise if you refuse to recognize what tunneling and camping add to the game, even if you don't think it is worth it, and the potential costs for removing them, you are a scrub. That isn't me trying to insult you, that is me trying to rescue you from the scrub mindset. You are refusing to understand the game and your opponent, and that is limiting how deeply you can engage with the game, and thus enjoy it.
Because the best part is that tunneling and camping is HIGHLY counterable. It is EXTREMELY punishable behavior. It exists as a PSYCHOLOGICAL strategy. The fact it infuriates you is the 'point' and if you turn it around on the killer and THEY lose THEIR cool, listening to them 'throw a tantrum' is... divine.
-
@OopsAllHexes said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2061236#Comment_2061236
If you look at the reasons why all of the asym competition has died, it's either extremely bad luck (Last Year on Discord and Discord closing the store randomly... and what ACTUALLY ended their game for good: Covid), legal trouble (Friday the 13th) or a unfun "rock paper scissors" formula (Resistance)...
It's not always because the games were bad.
As someone who has played both last Year and Friday the 13th I can gaurentee you they didn't die to bad luck.
Last Year was the killer bully sim of Deathgarden up to 11. You were so impotent as a killer and the devs just didn't care because they wanted to stuff the game with cosmetic buying survivors. It was just miserable, a coordinated survivor team didn't just always win, but the killer was spending more of the game dead than alive. It was a 4v1 game with combat where the 4 were overtly stronger than the 1. Not even using asymetry to mask it, it was a fairly symetrical game inside the combat where the killer was weaker, it was stupid. Like one of the killers was just 'Smoker from L4D but alone.' Imagine how well that would go.
Friday the 13th just wasn't a very good game and its playerbase was dead LONG before the announcement that they were ceasing development. There just wasn't a lot to do in the game and the interactions were fairly uninteresting. It lacked the fun of launch DBD's hide and seek/juke energy, or the fun of modern DBD's looping and mindgames, because Jason's tracking potential was infinitely strong and it was more about just running out of endurance than actually using obstacles or powers.
-
NOED is attempting a very noble design goal: Ensuring the game doesn't putter out and remains dynamic and competitive to the last second.
It UTTERLY fails at this. It is purely frustrating for survivors and pretty worthless for killers.
Ultimately the entire end game system kinda sucks and I would say it and NOED should be reworked so killer is by default way stronger once gens are done to ensure a more explosive finish to the game, but its more predictable so NOED doesn't feel like an out of left field whammy.
Something like 'The killer gets a speed boost for each dull totem end game and a reduction to swing speed' which NOED amplifies, so that the killer can machine gun people and generally win chases with if they spot you, and failing to unhook as survivor or camping as killer no longer negatively affects your emblem status' would ensure survivors sweat at end game rather than taking it as a victory lap to BM and teabag.
No more instant downs but at the same time your not going to 3 man rush to unhook anymore because the killer can attack fast enough to down you before you actually unhook. Gates being open no longer completely kills all threat of the killer. You can still trivially escape if you just walk out but now you really don't want to stick around.
-
@ukenicky said:
My main issue with it is that a killer can still slug you and wait out the timer if they really want to tunnel you out of the match and they most certainly will if they're passionate.
You basically have to force a grab so, if you're being hard tunneled off hook find a locker asap pretty much.
Idk I just wish that you could at least heal yourself up so that you don't have to worry about being downed and slugged while they wait out the DS timer. I'm okay with every other survivor action that progresses the games objective to disable it but healing kind of goes hand in hand with trying to prevent the killer from taking you down and out (Unless it's a OHKO killer).
Literally my only complaint, otherwise I think DS is good now because it doesn't allow survivors to abuse it.
If a killer is willing to wait a minute for DS they just gave you an entire extra hook stage they camped.
That means 3 gens get done. Its literally worse to slug out DS than to eat it, and eating it already is generally a loss.
Can't stress enough no perk should make you immune to things. DS already does most of its work by threatening the killer, rather than actually being landed, because MOST killers will change their behavior based on it.
-
@alaenyia said:
I submit reports all the time about this and am convinced no one read them. So it is probably just for my own peace of mind. But yea, Camping and Tunneling are a real problem in this game. There should be real consequences to a killer who insists on ruining people's games with these cheap and lazy tactics. I think BT should be base kit for all survivors to discourage tunnels. I find camping to be a problem to a slightly lesser degree because this at least has some counter to it in the form of doing gens and objectives while the killer dinks around with one person on a hook. It is sad for the person who didn't get to play and depipped because the killer decided he didn't really want to bother playing and would rather stand next to the hooked guy. But the rest of the team
Reporting someone for camping or tunneling is abuse of the report system, as they are explicitly allowed.
-
I think there definitely is an issue with killer and survivor perk balance (Survivor perks are often more impactful AND the survivors get four of them), and with hexes, but I don't think that adding a 5th perk slot makes sense. Adding a second offering slot? Absolutely, 5th perk slot? Nah.
Hexes really need the following to make sense as a design:
- Reworked spawns so they are never in plain LOS of a generator OR an approach to a generator OR common loop objects
- They should never be 'active' until the first instance you gain value. It should be impossible to cleanse DH until you get a hook, impossible to cleans ruin until a gen regresses even for a bit, impossible to cleanse seal until you hit someone, ect. Haunting Grounds and undying can light up based on either your other totem condition if you have one, or after 1 minute if you don't.
- Survivors should be encouraged to cleanse unlit totems so that if you run a hex its more likely your hex totem is 'out of the way.' Like making some sort of end game mega-buff for the killer based on remaining totems makes sense to help even out game times: if you rush gens the killer is so deadly in endgame that they probably can secure a down or two, if you cleanse totems the killer has more time to try to get early pressure.
You do all that and hexes are coherent. They are still perks that can be removed from the killer, but they aren't nearly as often a 'dead perk' because survivors can't just see a glowing hex totem on a hill and remove it before you even get your first chase.
-
"If the killer still wants to tunnel you they can"
This is such a dumb argument, because it presupposes there is literally no scenario the killer should be allowed to just take you out of the game really fast or punish you for such a horrible misplay they have no choice but to 'tunnel' you.
Like... no single perk should just give you complete immunity to the killer, because there are many situations where you deserve to get tunneled. For example, you are the last survivor. It would be insane for the perk to literally prevent you from dying.
DS is still an anti-tunnel perk, even though it doesn't literally stop them from tunneling ever, for the same reason Undying is a totem defense perk despite it not literally preventing you from clensing totems. "Anti-X" doesn't mean "X doesn't work ever." It means "X is worse in a way that you generally won't want to X outside of extreme situations."
How extreme are we talking about? Well, DS stuns the killer for 5 seconds. Survivors move 4 meters a second. They take 1 second to get off. That puts them at around 16 meters out from the killer just holding W. Killer and survivor's speed differential over open ground is very low, killers only 'gain' .6 meters a second on them. This means the MINIMUM time the game is extended per DS is 31 seconds, because of the 5 second stun, and then the 28 second chase, without ANY looping.
3 survivors working on a single gen, which is very inefficient, will repair a generator in about 38 seconds. The likelyhood you will get a hook right next to the survivor's down spot is tiny, and the gen is going to be at least 1 second away from that hook, and hooking takes about 4 seconds to pick up then place. Which means that the total time before you can pressure gens as a killer if you eat a DS to tunnel is 36 seconds in a total miracle situation. You literally just do not have time to stop survivors slamming gens inefficiently, forget about if they split up or have perks like prove thyself to do gens more efficiently.
Therefore, to understand how insanely impactful it is to eat a DS unless the survivor team isn't pressuring you at all, you need to internalize that landing a DS basically lets your team finish a Gen minimum. You hitting that single skill check on DS... finishes a gen. So no, it can't literally stop the killer from tunneling you, but outside of scenarios the killer knows no gen pressure is occuring them deciding to tunnel you loses them the game because they gave up a free gen even BEFORE you start looping them again.
That is about the harshest punishment an anti-tunnel perk could give without making it literally impossible for them to down you for a full minute. It could not be stronger without being an actual immunity perk.
-
Saying the killer facecamping or tunneling is a problem requires you to essentially dehumanize the killer player and imagine them as a 'fun dispenser,' at least if you then go on to suggest negative reinforcement to 'fix' facecamping.
There are lots of ways to make facecamping and tunneling less necessary to the killer experience, but ultimately the way chase math works, it is literally required for the killer to try to snowball on the survivor team in SOME way, and getting multiple downs near a hook or eliminating a player early are both good ways to do that. To win a game going for 12 hooks vs a team that just holds W to run away and full heals after every unhook, without even trying to loop, would require each gen to take an average of 12 minutes.
So it isn't even really that gen times are a problem, buffing gens to the point killers can win with minimum low optimization chase times and no snowballing would require nerfing gen repair a truly insane amount. Its more that killers don't get any real reward for NOT camping or tunneling, and they aren't powerful enough in basekit to try to win without snowballing at all.
More critically, snowballing is important to the emotive experience for survivor. Back in the day BT was broken and hook rescues were always free, the survivor community actually hated the game because it was "m1 gen simulator." There was nothing really in the game to do because you got unhooks way too easily. Now that trying to unhook risks a killer snowball the game is more interesting for both sides. So that one person on the hook is creating a very interesting experience for 4 other people, the killer and the 3 other survivors.
Games are not designed to let every single person playing them have fun and feel empowered at all time. That is an incoherent design goal. You NEED some gamestates to feel bad. Killers need highpoints where they have an absurd amount of power on you, and survivors need lowpoints where they have no power and are at high risk to be subject to player elimination, a totally normal mechanic a ton of games have. Demonizing killers for 'not letting someone play' is like demonizing someone for shooting someone else in CS:GO and taking them out of the round. You don't 'get to play' most competitive games if you refuse to play them well.
Of course that doesn't mean that nothing can be improved. For example, mashing spacebar (or holding a key or mouse button to heal on the ground, for that matter) are really dumb mechanics that just make being temporarily incapacitated annoying. The first hook is actually a really good design, its a moment of downtime where the survivor can collect their thoughts, cool off, make a plan. The second one is just really annoying and if the killer is camping it just feels awful. Spacebar mashing serves no real purpose besides making the game feel worse, so that definitely should go.
But ultimately you can't address camping without giving killers some massive buff to give them a reward for not defending the hook at all, after all tempo wise killers literally lose time hooking you compared to just slugging, so if you wanted to disincentivize camping you would have to do some pretty wild stuff to make it better. If you just nerfed it more, killers will slug instead of hook which is even WORSE. And this is exactly what happened when BHVR tested anti-camping mechanics internally, and when BT was so strong. If BHVR's internal testing finds a mechanic is abusable, its ABUSABLE.
The way hooks are designed makes it really clear defensive play around them is intended, if it wasn't, all hooks would be like pyramid head's cages and just teleport the survivor to some random part of the map and require someone to unhook.
-
@Marigoria said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2069002#Comment_2069002
I have an issue with that though.
What if I'm on the hook and have DS, team mate hook bombs without BT, killer downs me, then downs my team mate and hooks them. I have no DS anymore because someone farmed me from the hook.
Then the killer is rewarded for your team's trashy play, as intended, by getting a free slug (though NOT removing your DS, it still gives you value by merely existing as a threat!).
Sucks in the moment, and your likely not going to win that game, but that is true for any team game with MM. The game can't be balanced around giving survivors with bad teammates maximum empowerment because the game breaks utterly in cases where the survivor team isn't bad.
Focus on climbing, adopt the 'Elo Hell doesn't exist' mentality and eventually teammates like that won't be around.
If you never want to expose yourself to the whims of matchmaking, find 3 friends!
-
To understand why DS needs to disable on ANY event that the killer needs to be able to block, you need to understand how devastating DS is to killer.
DS is a 5 second stun. That is the longest enforced inaction on the killer in the game. During that 5 second stun, the survivor can run from the killer. The movespeed differential between the survivor and killer is very low compared to both of their movespeeds, only about 8% of their total movespeeds.
This matters a LOT in loops, but not at all over long linear stretches. This means it takes a very long time for the killer to catch up. 24 seconds in fact. During 24 seconds, the survivors can collectively finish a gen. This is the minimum time to CATCH UP. Not get a hit, the survivor can loop after the killer reaches them. Just the minimum time to hit.
So, to understand the impact of DS, you need to imagine it as a 'If I land this skill check a GEN IS COMPLETED perk.
So, the killer basically auto-loses if they eat a DS and don't already have an absurd tempo lead. But DS also hurts their tempo a lot because, you know, they can't tunnel. So far so good.
The problem is the killer's.... ENTIRE GAMEPLAY is blocking the survivors from doing things, and the combo between DS and undying is super bad. It is completely healthy gameplay to block a rescue, or punish a heal, or attack someone on a gen, because that is what the killer does. But if you were just unhooked the killer only has the option of slugging you, which means you will just pick yourself back up and keep going unless they throw the game to watch you, or eating the DS, which, again, basically does a gen by itself if your team is repairing while you run.
If the killer is punished by losing a gen from stopping the survivor from doing something they effectively can't stop the survivor. That means the mechanic becomes uninteractive and DS becomes a conditional immunity that locks the killer out of the game entirely. But if DS is deactivated, then the killer knows the survivor is blocking THEMSELVES until they think they are safe, and killer can function normally again.
In essence, it does not matter how much you want to heal, or rescue, or whatever. If its something the killer needs to be able to block, you should lose your DS.
But obviously there is a potential negative outcome, a player might not heal you to keep their DS or whatever! So there is a negative outcome for the killer with old DS, and a negative outcome for survivor with new. Who do we prioritize?
Well, you want to ensure the outcome that creates negativity isn't the one the game encourages. And if that is the case, we absolutely bias towards the killer's needs here, for MANY reasons.
For one, winning a chase, downing, and hooking someone is meant to be a big tempo swing for the killer. Yes, you don't LIKE being tunneled, but mechanically it is important that you getting hooked weakens the survivor team, rather than strengthens it. The tempo loss of being hooked isn't just the pitiful amount of time it takes to unhook you, its also you delaying going back on an objective to recover, to ensure your out of the killer's sight, ect. DS being strong hurts that tempo aspect of the hook, if you can go right back to repairing the killer's gameplay falls apart.
More importantly, however, is the fact the negative behavior of the selfish survivor is sub-optimal and localized to a small part of the match, while the negative behavior of a survivor 'offensively' using DS completely destroys the killer role and is highly optimal play. In essence, selfish survivors will self correct, losing more often than they win (unless you legit suck so bad healing you or rescuing you is a bad idea, in which case you got bigger problems than selfish DS holders bud) both overall and in terms of comparison to their teammates, meaning they de-rank. De-ranking means they get pooled with other survivors who are bad and losing lots, and if your legit good you won't see them forever. Offensive survivors will NOT self correct, they will permeate every rank besides the 20's area, and their behavior has more 'impact' because it will be more frequent as well as increased in intensity.
So from both a mechanical balance perspective, and a game feel perspective? ######### old DS. It was awful, and the fact sometimes a survivor in your game might be a bit selfish is a cost EASY to pay in comparison to the killer role overall having its entire gameplay essentially ruined by one perk allowing you to repair a gen at 85% in their face, or unhook knowing you can't grab them so you can't stop the unhook.
Of course another option might be making it so the killer M1ing you while you heal, repair, or unhook insta-downs, which would make the inability to grab you more fair, but that has knock on effects through the design of the game. That said, with how dedicated servers are it may just make sense.
As for 'Well after I DS they can just tunnel me...'
Yeah? Ok. See, getting DSed is infinitely worse than being allowed to tunnel once? Again, its A FINISHED GEN. A smart killer WILL just slug you rather than eat the DS because it takes up more of your time, frees up their time, and if you don't use undying actually requires another survivor to come help you much like a hook. If you land the DS you just ate up so much of the killer's time they... lose?
No mechanic can force the killer to not tunnel that doesn't break DBD utterly. Both because they are passive systems vulnerable to dynamic attacks attempting to exploit them, and because like... Low key killer is supposed to tunnel you? Like its an intended feature that the killer wants to snowball either by downing lots of people at once and forcing everyone off gens to constantly rescue and heal, or to eliminate someone to reach a critical mass of momentum the survivors can't repair past. Both of these things are their win condition, and like win conditions in 99% of games they require you to experience some negativity as the person subject to them.
You will never ever escape that, and you need to make your peace with the fact the killer will sometimes camp you, tunnel you, slug you, whatever. That is just going to have to happen. That isn't me arguing to the status quo, that is me saying 'Unless they make the gen repair time 12 minutes long the killer literally needs to somehow get more value out of a won chase than one hook state as an inevitable mathematical fact.' That is literally how long it would take to win 12 chases 'clean' without ever tunneling, letting people heal, ect, before 5 gens are done, it would be ridiculous.
So survivors REALLY need to get out of the 'stop tunneling and camping at any cost' mentality. Its never going to happen. Tools to make camping and tunneling REALLY weak already exist. Right now it happens because the killer struggles to snowball through more 'honest' play, which is why stuff like BBQ basekit or a speedboost from the hook or some innate pop effect make a lot of sense to explore ways to make killers less thirsty at the hook.
Negative reinforcement is already as strong as it can be without breaking the game. Its time to explore positive reinforcement, while also accepting camping and tunneling are 'forever.' We can try to make them less bad (removing spacebar mashing on phase 2 would probably help a LOT in making getting camped feel less bad), and less necessary, but they always need to be options because the game becomes incoherent if they aren't.
-
While I disagree with other people that gen tapping shouldn't exist (It would make 3 gens way too strong even if survivors try to counter) DS needs to turn off ANY time you alter the gamestate to be fair.
-
Myers.
Myers is blocked by the filter.
MYERS IS BLOCKED BY THE FILTER.
MYERS, THE KILLER IN THIS GAME, IS BLOCKED BY THE FILTER.
-
Trickster definitely is the most realistic killer in the game.
Not just in the sense that he is a normal dude that kills people. In the sense that he is the actual personality type for a real life successful serial killer: They are clearly a psychopathic narcissist who is pretty and talented so people trust him and thus he can get away with his crimes.
One of my buds is an EMT, regularly deals with psych patients, and thought the trickster was the most interesting character on the cast for this reason.
So it stands to reason that, yeah, he is going to be one of the more 'triggering' killers. No one really has had trauma involving a jacked up dude in rubber overalls slashing them with a machette and placing beartraps around wearing a skull mask.
It doesn't help that he is the most vocal. He is very clearly excited by pain. He is manic. He is manic in a way real ass people are manic.
-
It is hilarious how bad the spread and recoil is. Its like they learned nothing from how awful the guns felt in Deathgarden.
You can be point blank in a chase aiming dead on and still miss, its stupid.
-
The word filter censors Myers...
-
@Crowman said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2059717#Comment_2059717
You can get a few knife hits if they go for a vault, but it won't be enough for an health state. Then laceration heals over time if you are unable to get more knife follow ups.
I really just don't get why laceration decays at any point given how it doesn't do anything besides act as a counter for knife hits.
You generally can get a full state off a vault.
Again though, I agree that its insane it decays, considering Plague's does the opposite and goes UP over time.
The utility of being able to get the second down off of the ranged attack (by default even, plague can do it too with a resource) is not higher than:
Basic killer movespeed (which means you can use every mechanic that requires M1ing effective), survivors spreading the injured state to each other, the ability to track survivors better by infecting objects, the plague meter going UP instead of DOWN over time, never having to reload, a more accurate spread pattern, and the infinitely superior addons.
It is just wild when you compare him to plague how bad he is. And plague isn't even that good!
-
@Crowman said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2059677#Comment_2059677
The problem with making him 115 without any other changes is why would you play him over Plague?
Laceration doesn't do anything and heals over time. At least the trade off to survivors healing with fountains is giving Plague her Corrupt Purge which is strong. Main Event isn't even stronger than just throwing knives.
Plague needs to eventually M1, unless they get their super mode, trickster doesn't.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that even 115% move speed wouldn't be enough, which shows just how bonkers weak this killer is, plague does all sorts of other things like spread the cognation and have tracking potential, but vs vaults and stuff it does have utility over plague because you can get the second hit in animation locks, not just the first.
-
No. Killers using TR alteration to play defensively on the hook is an intended feature.
Even with BT you shouldn't feel safe unhooking in a killer's face. If they REALLY don't want to let you get someone of the hook you shouldn't be able to do it, because the killer defending any objective means they are giving up all map pressure. Ergo, the survivors should never be able to 'overpower' the killer.
Also, BT itself actually causes camping behavior, it doesn't stop it. Ghostfaces, Pigs, ect play less defensively at hooks knowing they can drop TR if they see someone going for it to bypass BT. Killers hard camp rather than doing more interesting things because they know they literally can't stop an unhook unless they are 5 feet away. You want killers to feel like they can safely leave without losing all tempo.
What we honestly need is a nerf to insta-unhooks, not a nerf to camping, so killers don't get punished so bad for leaving the hook and instantly having a BT rescue without getting the free down on the rescuer or being in a new chase by the time it happens, which basically loses you the game at red ranks. If the killer KNEW you CAN'T rescue for 20 seconds, suddenly defensive play would be less necessary but also less rewarded and killers would be far more likely to try to do new chases.
That sounds extreme, but slugging someone basically guarantees the same thing right now: you actually 'heal the survivor' by picking them up and hooking them for the survivor team and lose 20 seconds of incapacitation on the ground if you hook. And it is a BIG reason why killers who don't slug often play very 'campy:' You NEED to make up those 20 seconds you gave to the survivor to make the hook 'worth it.'
-
One of the 3 'scum strats' of Tunneling, hardcore slugging, and camping are required to win. The killer just cannot win patroling gens, its literally mathetmatically impossible for them to do so.
The only way to make it so we can BEGIN to think about nerfing camping (something the devs themselves said they can't do anymore because it will break the game) is to nerf survivors pretty heavily in some way so the killer can at their leisure just down, hook, repeat over and over again over the course of 16 minutes, which is the minimum time the survivors can FORCE the game to last assuming they just use W meta, always heal when injured, and start running when the killer is 12 meters away on their first health state.
How big a buff would that need to be? In order to let killers just M1 down every survivor 12 times without ever camping, tunneling, or slugging, each gen the survivors do would need to last 12 minutes each.
That is, obviously, insane. No matter what you did it would be super onerous. Which is why defending the hook is always going to be in the game, it is literally better than the alternative. If you just nerf defending the hook without making it so the killer has some strategy to win other than snowballing, and slugging is as bad as it is, killers will just.... stop playing because they literally can't get a single kill vs all but the worst teams?
Now if you try to nerf camping in a way that isn't activated if a survivor is near the hook, survivors exploit it. BHVR are pretty notorious for not understanding their own game that well and them playing at a pretty 'immersed' level, but the exploits to abuse a system of 'camping detection' are such insanely basic strategies that would be discovered so quickly that even they found them near instantly when they tested them. Which makes sense, humans are dynamic, any system designed to stop hardcore defense of the hook is passive and static, so players can find the bounds of it instantly and its either going to be so overly generous it does nothing or just restrictive enough that survivors can basically utilize it as a 'force the killer to lose no matter what mechanic.'
Also, camping is good for the game emotionally. As a survivor, it adds tension: if you KNOW you will ALWAYS get 3 hooks to die then losing the first chase means nothing, its bullshit and there is a reason the survivors complained the game was mega boring M1 gensim before the BT nerf. As a killer, it offers a mental break they desperately need, as killers normally have 100% uptime and getting small moments of quiet are nice. Yes, it isn't fun to be camped, but a LOT of things exist in games that aren't fun but exist for the emotional 'arc' of a game, if a game just gives you literally what you want at all times it kinda sucks.
Hard camping is also counterable. Pressure gens, if the killer still hard defends they lose and rank up and so you don't see many policy campers at good ranks. If someone policy camps you appreciate its either a temporary problem or your at a rank you shouldn't complain about balance in at any time. The reason it works is because defending the hook very closely is a tool of psychological pressure, the killer is trying to to goad you into a mistake, which isn't just a valid technique, its super interesting because now there is a staredown. It also is more likely to happen if you make the killer feel hopeless, so as a survivor it creates an incentive to do things that deceive the killer about the gamestate rather than just slamming gens done as fast as you can.
Oh and again its an intended system. If camping and defensive play was never intended, every killer would just hook people like pyramid head. It would be amazingly trivial to make hooks just port away like his ability as well (though because the only value of a hook outside of advancing the game is you can defend it a bit more easily than a slug, it would make hooking, already much worse than slugging tempo wise, basically insane to do), they just choose not to do that because camping is so integral to how DBD functions, the killer MUST be able to snowball somehow, and camping is a major snowball tool, if the most risky one.
So camping has all this nuanced outcomes and behavior associated with it that make any reasonable player go 'ok we probably shouldn't remove it.' And the word camping generally is a scrub term, and the worst one, a 'salt' term that is trying to demonize totally normal expected behavior because they refuse to adapt to it. Like how people complain about 'campers' who are merely holding angles and the person fighting them keeps dying because they literally can't use any strategy besides running forward into their bullets. I really don't like the term camping for this reason, it legitimately is just 'the killer defending' and camping complaints would come across as ridiculously unreasonable if people said 'We should make the killer lose 2 pips for defending.'
Oh, and I don't want to hear 'think about the person on the hook's feelings.' That is super bullshit because that logic requires you to dehumanize the killer so ridiculously hard that you think they are a bad person for not throwing the game by letting YOU do something that feels terrible for THEM. It always emotionally sucks to lose, but trying to flip stuff around so that other people are responsible for your negative feelings because they are playing their best and you don't like how them trying to win makes you feel is really REALLY stunted when you signed up for a game where the killer winning REQUIRES them to ensure 3 people aren't playing for a significant length of the game.
-
Solo Q forces you to be more independent. If you are consistently succesful in Solo Q, you get very strong at a lot of basic elements of the game because if you mess up that is probably it, but you also almost certainly embrace some more anti-social strategies.
SWF may be vulnerable to getting a bit 'flabby' but they get to practice the best strategies in the game. W meta can be practiced solo, for example, but it really gets vicious if you can be coordinated about it, something a solo never can practice. You get really strong at specific strategies.
As for new players, all games have a sort of 'mentor effect' where information can be learned more quickly with help. A new player is unlikely to independently discover, for example, BT bodyblocking, or the idea of not hiding after a rescue because hook states are a team resource, without being told, especially because in solo this isn't always a good idea. Even if your getting carried as a solo your probably doing better just because you are emulating players better than you, even if at first you will be crazy shaky.
I would say SWF players tend to be stronger overall, because a lot of the 'benefits' of solo can be obtained in SWF. A good solo who is consistently succesful is going to be very strong because they MUST, but nothing is inherently guaranteeing that solo WILL be consistently succesful, if they don't actively practice they won't get strong, and it honestly can be harder to do that if your getting eliminated, so even though second chances from teammates are in theory making it easier and thus you may depend on them, in reality getting a second chance to try a loop with what you learned right away will reinforce things better if your actively trying to get good at looping or whatever and not just stall time for a teammate because your winning by boring SWF play by numbers mathy gameplay.
-
The perk's purpose is no more to get downs than wiggling is meant to actually get you out of the killer's grab. Wiggling is to prevent every hook from being a basement hook, Startstruck is there to prevent every hook rescue from being an instarescue.
What it does is massively change survivor behavior in order to make early aggression against the hook very bad. In a way, its similar to Make your Choice more than Mad Grit in that it makes it easier for a killer to leave the hook confidently, but unlike Make Your Choice which rewards you if the unhook happens later, Startstruck makes it very unlikely someone will rush a rescue because its so easy to down them if your remotely close.
It won't reward camping, like Mad Grit campers WANT people to go for it, but it instead makes it so people aren't going to unhook the second they know you can't hit them before they finish the animation, as now they will instantly go down and the animation will fail. That is a BIG deal, especially if you hook near a tri-gen and thus will be nearby anyway. A huge problem with how hooks work is the killer will incapacitate a survivor for a shorter period of time hooking them than slugging them. This evens it out a lot more. Most of the value here is going to be obtained without you ever actually landing the attack.
Of course, on some killers its very realistic to use this aggressively. Nurse and Spirit are obviously very good at ending chases fast. Wraith could do a lot with it as well.
-
@swager21 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2040267#Comment_2040267
maybe they could make it so you keep the addons if you deplete the item but everyone would 99 it then
This was literally how it used to work and it was annoying and sucked. See my first response.
-
@AsherFrost said:
I don't think it needs an aura reveal, maybe like a 10% chance of being exposed or injured to make it a bit of a gamble and also fit the realistic effects of hitting something you think will give way a lot easier than it does.
@Zarr0ch said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2038510#Comment_2038510
Why no 85% chance of being injured + loud noise notification. The reason I'm making it such a high % or risk is....that a survivor does not NEED to break a wall, it's a choice. With that choice, you have a big risk
Don't add a random chance to something that is intended to be a map feature, especially one with a huge result like injury.
It should consistently do a thing, rather than 15% of the time the killer just has no idea the wall is down because they got no information about it and suddenly they lose a major chase because of it.
-
@Nergigante said:
The devs desperately need to fix the pacing of this game.
It's too snowbally on both sides.
This is the correct observation, rather than dithering about trying to say 'We gotta repair gens this is a stupid post."
Like... yeah you do, and actually doing gens fast IS a counter to camping because if you ignore the hook everyone pips save the killer and person on it. So the killer is FORCED to leave if you do em fast.
But structurally, the killer needs to TRY to force a snowball and if they fail they may just give up and retreat to secure a kill. And a big problem with DBD is very few things in the game exist to try to 'bound' outcomes.
Like, a lot of people rag on bloodlust, but bloodlust is an anti-infinite AND bounding mechanic. We need MORE of those that still allow players to display skill but not get literally infinite value out of certain interactions.
Also so many discussions on how the game should be break down as people interpret it as an indictment of how people play. In reality, its a prisoner's dilemma problem: go hard because being nice never improves your personal situation. No one can judge you for that. But out of the game we should be able to say 'W meta is a problem' or 'repair times are a problem' or 'killers camp too much' and not have it be about judgement of the players, but instead trying to understand why these things happen and how to fix them structurally rather than all constantly fighting like animals and bullying each other while BHVR laughs because us taking it out on each other means they don't need to balance the game.
-
It used to work this way and was heavily unbalanced because Survivor isn't really balanced around everyone having stacked items all the time.
Without addons they can balance items around a more 'baseline' and you are less likely to see 4 stacked medkits that make sticking damage impossible for example. Imagine if killers every time they ended a match got to keep their addons if they got 3 kills, you would see a ridiculous amount of Iri and Purple addons.
-
It is completely fair, because Pyramid Head completely gives up the ability to snowball on hooks if he does this and guarentees that you will be insta-unrescued.
The entire point of these perks is to prevent killers snowballing on you, by definition PH is not tunneling you if you get hit after being rescued half way across the map from him. Especially because if he IS in the area the cage will teleport out so if he comes in to interrupt your rescue you can just leave and wait a few seconds to get a better opportunity.
-
Also, while we are at it, Pig change from a Rank 1:
Pig's movement speed while crouched increased to 4.4.
Pig's terror radius reduced back to 28 meters.
Charge time for ambush cut in half. Roar no longer plays until .5 seconds from the end, to make the ambush no longer self defeating but also still allow mindgames.
Pig's trap boxes now alert her half way through searching them with a special noise and overlay distinct from gen explosions.
Pig's traps now have their timer 'regress' while survivors are slugged.
Normalized the RNG on pig boxes, akin to trapper traps. Box alteration addons also alter 'expected' boxes.
Jigsaw's sketch made green.
Annotated Map is now yellow.
Interlocking Razor made purple. Now causes survivors who stop
Amanda's Secret loses its 'downside.'
Interlocking Razor is now purple, and now causes a survivor to take an injury state if they stop searching the box. This cannot down them.
Rusty attachment now also causes Haemorrhage.
Razor Wire is now brown, and also increases the difficulty of skill checks.
Last Will is now Green.
Combat Straps are now green, and Moderately reduce crouch and uncrouch activation time, and increase the time it takes for your terror radius to 'unspool' by 1 second.
Workshop Grease now moderately increases the chance for Jigsaw Box skill checks.
Lots of buffs to her addons to allow more diverse playstyles. The big one is to make her more of a stealth killer, and to move power from her 'slug/lockout' potential which doesn't feel very fun. She still slows herself, but no longer to insane degrees and its harder for her to get a 'last box' scenario where one survivor just is out of the game, while at the same time she is unlikely to lose a trap to the first box searched.
This is a legit attempt to sidegrade her to a healther space more focused on lunge to break loops and stealth, but because so much of Pig's power is wrapped up in her slugging/grindy gameplay it seriously risks knocking the wind out of her sails despite the general buffs. Careful Monitoring (and perhaps abusing) is needed. They ideally will try to play like a 4.4 killer at loops by using the much more powerful ambush to try to set up 50/50s on loops, but because this is still weak at a LOT of loops they can abort to playing normally as just a M1 killer if needed.
-
@StibbityStabbity said:
Took a break, gimme a bit to update...Also, just saying, the point of the thread was, like, the opposite of what is going on here.
That's life, though, I'll roll with it.
Its almost like the community consensus is NOT that killer is too strong (as a whole. Freddy is toxic even if he isn't OP, and spirit and nurse are really good in ways that aren't ideal for the game), and in fact there is actually a lobby crisis over the issue :P
-
@Withered8 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2035414#Comment_2035414
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2034850#Comment_2034850
I don't think you guys have actually seen a good blight then. What does spirit actually have over blight? The ability to occasionally down survivors faster than blight? Even then if the survivor plays well the spirit with have to phase at LEAST twice to down them which with a 15 second recovery + phasing time and over time wasters can stack up tremendously. Blight downs survivors way faster in a lot to circumstances, gets a lot more free hits, has 1000 times better mobility and map pressure.
There's a reason at comp level a lot of ppl swap out spirit for blight.
Blight still has to respect most loops. For example they do literally nothing vs a L T wall.
Spirit dumpsters L T walls, which are common ruins that most maps have and which take an extreme amount of time to loop through due to being essentially unmindgameable if the survivor plays it correctly.
Blight gets rid of the W meta problem, he is stronger than spirit over open ground. But spirit is still strong over open ground, and is strong in loops too. Clear no contest between the two, even if Spirit had counterplay and was merely really good inside loops she would be better simply because she has more tools overall. But in her current state, Spirit isn't just stronger, she is MUCH stronger.
-
@Jejune said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2036233#Comment_2036233
So 2 hits is literally 2 hits. Stood still for both of them and he went off to tunnel the unhooked person... Didnt even hook me.
Yeah. Again, that is A REALLY BAD DISTRACTION.
If you give the killer two totally free hits that means you just let the killer slug you at no tempo loss and they are free to go for the other person knowing your not going to be affecting the game.
It honestly sounds like you... just don't understand killer gameplay at all? The killer's true goal is to keep 3 people off gens at all times and not over-invest in chases. If your giving them not just a free hit (which is already not ideal) but free won chases, they are going to go "nice, this guy is really dumb and now I can chase this dude, down him, someone has to come rescue this idiot, and that means 3 people aren't on a gen cuz I am chasing someone and am about to down them again."
So in that scenario hooking you actively hurts their gamestate. You gotta thread the needle here my man, there is a middle ground between 'throw the game actively to try to bait the killer into hooking you' and 'go immersed after a hook rescue." Finesse it a bit, lure them in for a swing and then burst away for example and watch if they commit to you or not, and if they don't throw up some decoy tracks and then get back on a gen safe in the knowledge you bought the rescuee like 50 meters of distance and time to lose their tracks, it really isn't rocket science.
-
I know you said no new mechanics, but I think moving power out of slugging and into hooks would be a good change, especially because if hooks were more secure 'by default' and had a minimum time the survivor was going to be on them like slugged survivors did, you could actually create a camping punishment mechanic which you just can't do right now.
Like, if you can't rescue for 20 seconds period, but survivors only take 15 seconds to get rescue ready on the ground, suddenly the 5 seconds it takes to carry the survivor to a hook is 'worth it' and your not as panicked at the idea of an insta-rescue so you have less reason to linger. You could then make a mechanic that punishes a survivor for being within X meters of the hook if a survivor isn't X+10 meters nearby or whatever by the time its over.
A big issue is the killer has a lot of power to make things unfun for the survivors, but they have little power to play fair without opening themselves up to be whammied. Mechanics that 'even out' the experience are what is really needed, rather than more negative reinforcements for undesired behaviors. Killers are already REALLY on the defensive trying to avoid negative events and have little mental energy or time to actually try to engage in more proactive gameplay.
Basically, lowering the 'stakes' of things so defensive play was less rewarded AND less necessary might do a lot to free people up.
-
@Jejune said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2036174#Comment_2036174
Dude I can sometimes give the killer 2 free hits and they still tunnel the other dude.
So 2 free hits is
A: Like 20 meters of movement worth of time from animations alone, forget about if you make the killer work for those hits even a little bit, meaning you should be long gone with the killer having no idea where you are, meaning they can't just go back to tunnel you
B: A REALLY bad way to encourage the killer to change targets.
Its like being a drugdealer: First hit is free, second hit is gunna cost you. Ideally you get them to commit to you before even the first hit and the rescue is clear.
If the rescue can't get clear in 10 seconds, they are so weak that as a survivor I generally just leave them to die second hook. Like they actually aren't worth the effort and if the killer camps the hook for 1 minute that is a greater contribution to the team than whatever they were doing.
-
At red ranks I know for a fact that if I am rescuing someone and I don't take the chase for them, they are going down, because the killer wants to win. Don't be a selfish twat and rescue then hide, your just feeding hook states to the killer, be a grown up and protect your buddy and let THEM get to safety while you use your full health and full hookstates to loop em.
At red ranks, I know for a fact that if I don't do my absolute best to pressure the survivors and threaten them as much as possible with a terrible time, I will lose VERY badly. 1 chase is 3 gens at red ranks unless you are keeping multiple survivors off gens. I do not have TIME to let you 'have fun.' The game is tuned so that killers need to do SOMETHING to keep 3 survivors off gens at all times. That usually means slugging, tunneling someone out early, and generally making things rough for weak survivors.
Or, put it another way: Tunneling is the DEFAULT. It is what is going to happen every game unless you do something. If you aren't doing anything to protect the teammate who is hurt, to get the killer's attention, or otherwise convince them that the fastest way to stop gens from getting done is to do something other than take out the person who is the weak link, who only takes one more hit to down? They aren't going to do something else.
And because this is so vital to winning, saying 'Bluh bluh bluh not fun for the person being tunneled' is selfish and asinine. Know what isn't fun? Throwing the game for yourself because the opponents are bad and aren't protecting each other. The killer's fun is not less valuable than the tunneled survivor's fun, but the tunneled survivor lost the right to complain about what happened to them when they messed up and the killer earned the right to stay in the game, and their team when they refuse to take the chases for em.
-
As someone who has played from beta, I think that Borrowed Time has had an insidious negative effect on the game in terms of making it so killers either basically have to be ready to do a grab or a double hit to down to get any defensive play on a hook, meaning being absurdly close, or just give up on defending at all.
This means that, despite BT being an anti-camping perk, it weirdly... encourages camping?
Probably doesn't need to be removed, but I think it should be reworked. The idea of a perk that makes it so the person you unhook is significantly less likely to instantly go down is neat, but it just warps how the killer views rescue attempts too much. It should be for risky rescues, not 'I am literally doing this in front of you' rescues.
Other than that, OoO and DS are getting the nerfs they need. Undying is a bit of a problem but not too severely. It is sorta the survivor NOED in the sense that its purpose is to keep the game dynamic and introduce a last gasp of air into it, and the problem it creates for slugging way more has to do with how weak killers are at defending hooks and thus their NEED to slug to get tempo than the actual ability to get up itself. If BT got reworked, I am not sure Undying would be a huge problem at all, as suddenly you would WANT to hook people again, rather than do it reluctantly to advance the gamestate at a big tempo risk.
Survivor perks are overall in a pretty decent place. I think items could use a looky-loo (Survivors get way too much value from them overall and it contributes heavily to the SWF disparity that coordinating items to negate a huge swath of killer tools and strategies is so good), but perks are pretty fine. Maybe make small game not detect traps because holy crap Trapper doesn't need the perk specific counters? But gotta say perks are in an ok spot.
-
I would say two changes need to happen:
1: Keys only need to let one survivor out and then disable the hatch (even if its 1v1) unless the gates are powered or someone uses a key again. That way it isn't a mega insane alteration to the victory condition but you being super selfish and making it near certain everyone else dies.
2: Killers need to care WAY less about hatch escapes points and pip wise. This is actually a really negative aspect of the game overall that has other ramifications (end game slugging, for example) because the killer's objective is all survivor based, and someone escaping can legitimately take you from a pip to below even a black pip just because of devout and malicious losses. If the killer got to treat you like you were hooked an extra time (max three) and left injured that would do a LOT to make them sweat it less: now its NICE to get the last survivor, its not NECESSARY, and the key is not as dramatic an alteration to the killer's win condition that makes victory near impossible. You should be like 'shucks' and not 'I need to make dramatic alterations to the way I play to ensure this does not happen.' Same as Moris.
-
@Investigator said:
My question is to contribute to the discussion of killers more viable for higher tiers: how do we buff low tier killers in consideration of high tier survivors without further hurting your sole queue or low rank survivors?
Like, the only killers we find typically in high ranks is Spirit and Nurse so presumably we would want killers at that level, maybe less as they are quite powerful. But how do we do that without trashing anyone except the high tier survivors? Sounds like someone loses no matter what to me.
That isn't really how game balance works.
There are various ways to buff. One way is to increase skill ceiling. That naturally often does raise the skill floor a bit, but that is ok, you really care about preserving the middle, and killers already totally trash bad survivors anyway.
Basically not every buff actually hurts mid tier vs mid tier's balance. For example, in the middle tier of like... rank 10, survivors aren't using W meta anyway so a nerf that targets that (Say.... again... 'reverse bloodlust') isn't going to be felt by them much at all: They already go straight for the nearest loop spot and don't use that boost. So that boost being made less impactful doesn't matter, it only matters for the people at red ranks and purple ranks who are actively utilizing that boost in a manner above and beyond just getting to the next loop spot.
Other fixes that are sorely needed for high end play WOULD hurt the mid tier. Stronger hooks for example. However, its less likely to do so if you make these changes in a way that instead of just making the killer stronger reduces the survivor's ability to force the best result in these cases.
For example, insta-hook rescues with BT and the like are common at red ranks and are severely devistating. However, at mid ranks generally a hook is actually as good as a slug because survivors aren't great at insta-rescues, especially if they aren't SWF. So making all rescues 'resemble' slugs and mid ranked delayed rescues evens things out. This does reduce survivor skill cap a bit, but frankly survivor skill cap is too high in most cases and the survivor just has too much room to be 'better' than the killer. You still are rewarded for good rescues no matter what, but now it isn't 'oh ok the killer lost because you undid a minute of work in a few seconds and 1 minute in red ranks is 3 gens done so they literally don't have time to win another chase.'
Tapping down the max payoff of things is a VERY common game design tool and could do a lot of work in DBD.
Finally, and this is the most important thing: You could declare that those mid rank players who are currently winning due to systems you can't avoid nerfing, and need to negatively impact, 'boosted.' This is, in fact, how 99% of games handle it. If something is OP or not functioning well, and you nerf it or buff it and then people start losing now that its at the level it 'should be' that is GOOD.
If mid tier killers get buffed heavily and survivors start losing, it means those survivors weren't very good.
Anyone at rank 10 who is only there because killers are underpowered deranking because they are put at an appropriate power level isn't 'unfairly' losing rank, anymore than anyone is 'unfairly' losing rank if their main in a game gets nerfed because they are op.
Preserving survivor ranks is not a goal of balance changes. It is, in reality, kinda the opposite.
Part of the goal here is to, low key, make survivor harder because survivor is so bonkers busted, and to 'unfurl' the ranks a bit so there are more people in the mid ranks. If your a purple survivor struggling to pip and you go down to green because of a general killer buff... whatever. You are still as good as you were, its just the game now is recognizing your skill is legitimately different than someone else at purple who is hovering at purple despite those killer buffs. You are framing this as 'survivors will be negatively affected by buffs' when in reality it just means survivors will be placed at more accurate ranks which is not a negative occurrence, it just means future matches of theirs will be closer.
-
@Chchchcheryl said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2035002#Comment_2035002
Yes the game needs balancing but that doesn't mean weaker killers can't operate at a higher level!
Correct, in most games you see things other than the top tiers at the top level.
But not DBD. A big, existential problem to DBD's existence is top tier and viable are the same. In most games there is a gentle transition and the line between 'comp viable' and 'just mid tier but still if your great you are good.' DBD has a VERY sharp divide and its basically based entirely around killers that ignore every chase mechanic.
Ignore distance mechanics but not loops, like Blight or Huntress? Congrats, you get trashed at loops.
Ignore loops, but not distance mechanics like Clown or Trapper? Congrats, you get trashed cuz of W meta.
Most of the killers just literally do not have the tools to excel in this game no matter how good you are. You can push Trapper to their absolute limit and play them technically flawlessly but even middlingly optimized play beats that because their toolkit has what is called a 'Skill Ceiling:' the limit of what the option can accomplish due to lacking tools to go further. Trapper is very good at shutting down loops but takes so much time to set up and has no mobility options to handle people cheekily just tapping gens and running away, if your opponent does that and does it well they can't win. Not 'You aren't good enough to win, play around it.' There is no playing around, you auto win.
This is because, at its core, DBD is a very 'mathy' game. You can mindgame loops and shave a TON of time off chases, but at the end of the day its all about the time to catch up alongside animation durations vs the time to complete gens.
Like you can literally boil a DBD match to a math equation: C and R. Is R> C? Congrats, killer wins. Is R<C? Survivor wins. Sure, its more complicated than that, but that is the underlying concept of all interactions: Does this move my C down or the survivors R up for killers, and vice versa for survivors.
And right now? The killers outside of Spirit and Nurse just do not have the tools to make a dent in R, or affect C meaningfully. Some of these non-viable killers actually HURT their own stats on average, like Trapper.
So if your not playing at this 'raw numbers boring level' it seems silly, because everyone is viable at a dumb regional tournament after all, forget playing randos in matchmaking. But once you actually take the game seriously, like MMR would force you to do so, the game's just... transparently broken.
A killer will only be viable if they can meaningfully affect C and R in a way survivors can't just say 'no' too, and that is... spirit and nurse, basically. So get used to seeing those two all the time unless they buff other killers or, more ideally, dramatically alter how killer works on the base level so that the killer role as a whole has more control over that equation.
-
@Dizzy1096 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2034728#Comment_2034728
The problem has always been the base mechanics but a lot of survivors don’t want tk admit this because it hurts their egos.
In a fighting game for example you both immediately and throughout the match have the chance to do damage to each other at any point.
In DBD once a trial starts survivors can jump on their objective immediately and start putting charges into the generators. For killers you see a survivor, you chase for a hit and...pallet stun, safe pallet so break and continue chase, go for a hit, pallet stun and break the pallet. You switch to a new target go for the hit and pallet stun, safe pallet so need to break, and rinse and repeat.
At the highest level you see survivors stop being greedy at pallets and actually play them safer. The pallets keep a good chunk of the killers at bay while the team hits away at the gens. Sure the game gets easier for killer once resources have been worn down a bit but by then you’re playing catch up. This isnt even factoring in how strong some windows can be.
Then you look at tournaments, Hexy’s being a good example.
Nurse - goes through pallets
Spirit - Goes around pallets
Hag - teleports on top of survivors
Pyramid - shoots through pallets
It’s no wonder these were the 4 most used killers in the tournament whereas almost nobody wanted to play any of the other killers and in the finals/semi-finals only 1 person chose to play Freddy despite survivors insisting he’s extremely OP.
This post isn’t meant to rag on survivors, I play survivor too, but beating a lot of killers isnt a huge feat. The pallets are designed to protect you, the chases are designed that the killer has to wait for you to make a mistake before they can get a hit. Whether you win or lose just depends on what the other survivors do while you’re in a chase. When their on gens you see how quickly 3 will pop in first chase. The problem with the games balance is that many people don’t do gens when they play survivor they just waste so much time doing anything but gens.
>In a fighting game for example you both immediately and throughout the match have the chance to do damage to each other at any point.
You actually don't, and I think this is one of the key problems.
In fighting games advantage vs disadvantage states are a huge thing. In a fighting game it doesn't matter how well you play, if your in mid combo or are going up against a 50/50 how good you are doesn't matter, you got put in a position before that has you at your opponent's mercy and your just trying to mitigate damage at this point.
In DBD, such a absurdly huge goal of the game is to ensure the survivors never feel powerless. So you never get a situation where the survivor can't try something to get out of a bad situation, up until you lose the entire interaction anyway. Sometimes it takes a LOT of skill to pull this off, so at the mid game level DBD functions, but at high end the game breaks down because one side NEVER loses agency, and this is a critical game design flaw, because it means survivors never lose control over the game.
But that is just one part of this whole issue. The other core issue is that survivor base kit is just way stronger than killer base kit, and its stronger in ways you... sorta want but its not good once exploited. Case in point is "W meta." It sounds stupid because at the mid level it would be INSANE for survivors not to be able to get distance to start a chase with, but the issue is the math of gen time means once your really coordinated you can just... make it so killers literally can't win in a majority of maps and killer cases. The ones that ignore this tend to be so strong mobility wise chases don't even resemble anything like the base game.
In a fighting example here, imagine if 95% of the cast can't use throws or overheads, so if you crouchblock they never can open you up ever and the game is just inevitably going to go to timeout against them and as long as you jab them a tiny bit you always win. And then for that 5% of the cast they get to not only throw, but have a full screen projectile you can't jump over that requires you to perfect parry at a random point during the animation and which pierces blocks.
Loops might be a little too strong right now, but at least you can mindgame them. In the context of a loop and this 'blocking in a fighting game' example, most of the cast are what we would call 'honest' characters: They CAN open you up, its just hard and so they struggle but can still do absolutely fine at the top end. Its problematic in how it compounds with the killer basekit weakness overall, and how killers aren't rewarded enough for winning chases and how W is just so strong, but loops themselves are actually in a pretty ok spot.
The big issues I see facing DBD and general killer viability are:
Dropping chases/stealth isn't even a goal ever anymore, its just maximum time wasting using non-interactive systems.
Killers aren't rewarded for winning chases enough: Unhooks are too 'powerful' not in the sense they are too easy, but killer gets jack all if there is an unhook and they don't snowball, leading to a campy/sluggy meta.
Gen times can't get longer without the game getting VERY boring but killers just can't... spend time on anything without gens popping too fast. A killer winning a chase extremely fast at 45 seconds still probably loses because winning that chase doesn't stop 3 gens from popping.
The fixes here that would allow you to lower the power level of S tiers and make gameplay more diverse in general would be weird and controversial. Something like 'reverse bloodlust' where your faster OUT of chases so that you can still loop the killer and mindgame with em fine but if you just run over open ground they catch up to you absurdly fast, basekit 'Mini-pop', some way to block gens if your defending them, something that rewards the killer for hooks that don't result in kills or further downs, and something that slows the game down globally if the killer is playing well even if some gen jockey is just slamming gens would allow a lot of power to be moved OUT of killer in ways players often find annoying.
Like, if landing a hook is REALLY GOOD intrinsically, like say... permanently slowing that survivor's repair speed, suddenly you CAN do things like make the hook timer slow down if the killer is near and not in a chase, because the killer no longer NEEDS to either secure that kill or get a second down off that first hook, they already meaningfully got a tempo advantage off the hook. You now can meaningfully punish camping more than it already is. But in the current space the game is at you can't, and in fact all these anti-camping tools like BT actually force you to camp more because you need to be like 2 inches away from the hook to block a BT rescue or get something like a down out of it and you can't get NOTHING out of a hook because you gave up 3 gens for it.
Ultimately the killer needs more room to breath and 'slack' so that more killers are viable and super sweaty killer play not only isn't required, but no longer as rewarded. But in a reality where the survivors always have control and the killer only is rewarded with keeping people off gens now and forever, with no intermediate goals in the game, there is no room to do anything but sweat every chase, every down, every hook, every unhook.
And I get it, this all sounds crazy if your playing outside of a sweat squad and your a survivor main and never have seen one in action. I get it, the killer doesn't feel weak cuz when they win they REALLY WIN. This is a lot of abstract math nonsense as opposed to the in game experience where sometimes you do just get out played and blown out.
But that mathy nonsense matters a lot an affects the game a lot. For example, its BONKERS how much better slugging is tempo wise than hooks. Tempo wise your goal with hooking or slugging is to get survivors off hooks, but slugging is so insanely better at it: The time it takes to unhook a survivor is just the travel time to the hook, which means 2 survivors are 'incapacitated' and not doing gens for just that amount of time. Meanwhile it takes you time to not only go to the hook with the survivor, but pick em up and place them, so you lose time as a killer doing this to pressure others. If you slug, you don't lose any time, and it takes the survivor 30 seconds to get to the point they can instantly be picked up. So if you slug, you can pressure another survivor right away, one survivor isn't on gens for 30 seconds plus the time it takes for the third to reach them, and the third is off gens in the time it takes to reach them.
That is asinine, slugging should be a short term choice to instantly start another chase, but the fact its not just better but ridiculously superior to slug unless you think you can use the hook to gain tempo via camping/patrolling/whatever by sometimes over *two minutes* of survivor gen repair time is absurd. That is the kinda deep at the bedrock issue no one really thinks about that causes a lot of negativity for the killer and a lot of unfun killer strategies trying to mitigate this weakness of the hook for survivors.
-
@CornHub said:
Any killer can be S tier if you put your mind to it.
That isn't how tiers work. At all.
Even if you think every killer can be viable in high end play (spoilers, they can't) that doesn't mean every character is the same tier. Tiers are there to show you the relative power discrepancy between options and how they generally fare on the competitive level, how much control you as a player have over the game.
Tiers are in some ways over-simplifications, but they aren't 'incorrect' just because its possible to get good at a low tier. And sometimes it ISN'T possible to get good at a low tier. Its quite common in fighting games for example for some parts of the roster to just... not work and no matter how much you practice em they never can do well.
Generally what makes a high tier a high tier and separates it from the mid tier is their tools are versatile and consistent. What separates a mid tier from a low tier is that mid tiers are generally competitively viable and will see success with a good player, and what separates a low tier from a bottom tier is that they are functional.
DBD has a problem where its viable character list is exclusively at its high tier, and worse, they also completely break the game. This indicates its less a problem with 'we need more high tier killers' and more 'Holy ######### the game's base mechanics need a rework because 95% of the cast can't DO anything using the base mechanics and so the only viable characters completely ignore them."
So ideally we don't get more high tiers and Spirit and Nurse are nerfed... after the base game is reworked so killers don't default lose pretty much every interaction that is based on core gameplay. There are some deep structural flaws in how DBD plays as a game that are fairly subtle and pernicious that are really worming their way into the spotlight as more and more people get good at the game and are more aware of them and utilize them. DBD is kinda low key 'balancing through obscurity' and now that the ways you can force a win trivially as a survivor are becoming more known by even the casual playerbase its just... all you see.
-
@onemind said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/235813/why-not-make-more-s-tier-characters
If mmr works very well we won't need that
No literally the opposite.
MMR will create a system where the top tier players are only playing nurse all day. They quit, then the next tier of player plays vs nurse. So on, so on.
The severe gap in killer power level is an existential problem for DBD's survival if they want to do skill based matchmaking. Good players won't want to play endlessly against the same killers.
-
The idea of a distant only 'mega-bloodlust' is probably one of the best solutions to the 'Oh hey it turns out as players get better at the game more people understanding the math of chases makes a lot of interactions really uninteractive.'
It makes the speed boost a way to get to a series of obstacles, not to generate 40 seconds of chase, and fixes the 'duo gen assault' which is fairly map agnostic (Ironically Midwitch is one of the maps you CAN'T easily do this because its a huge endless corridor).
The main problem is detection of chases. And, as you noted @profezia there are a LOT of ways for solutions to backfire.
One other hypothetical solution is 'out of chase' movement speed buff in general for M1 killers. A lot of DBD's problematic interactions come down to lots of killers seriously lacking map mobility, and the killers that people tend to find healthy or enjoyable on both sides either have powers that don't demand a ton of mobility (ex: Huntress), or have a lot of mobility to allow them to be very dynamic (Blight, Billy, Nurse, Wraith, and Oni) and interact very frequently. There is a reason Billy doesn't camp a lot despite being able to instadown rescuers, for example, and that is because he pressures the map well, and the W problem or the 'tag team gen' problem aren't problems for them not just because of the instadown but because of how they relate to open ground. Not ever killer needs to be as extreme as that, but it may be that some sort of 'reverse bloodlust' makes sense. DBD is the most fun for both sides when there is interaction and it isn't ideal from a game design perspective how easy it is for survivors to go a whole game without ever being near the killer on larger maps. Minimizing downtime where the killer isn't chasing anyone might be the best place to 'get back' the time killers lose on open ground chases, more than touching the chase itself.
But it is, again, not easy because its a really subtle problem deeply baked into the game's core systems and unpicking it is super hard. Again, its not bad at all the survivor is running away, its just linear motion over open terrain being an optimal strategy is really silly but being able to get a lot of distance in order to get to the first obstacle is also kinda important and the current movespeed differential is fair inside the interactions the actual game exists in.