dezzmont
dezzmont
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You see it a LOT in red ranks vs 4 man survivor sweat squads burning offerings to go to Lampkin Lane.
It is the absolute best exhaustion perk in terms of raw distance gained, and its very controllable, but its super map dependent. The existence of a single map realm that allows you to essentially trigger it on demand is pretty intense.
If your going in solo and not using the fact you have control over the map as survivors aggressively, yeah Sprint Burst is better. It is way more generally useful, allows you to be really greedy at gens, and doesn't have the 'dud map' effect that Balanced has if your not utilizing the offering advantage of survivors.
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Killer is in a bad spot where regardless of its mechanical tuning, it has pretty much everything that can be stacked against it in the fun department lined up against it.
Your the defensive player. This means you can't proactively progress an objective with non-interaction, which is important and healthy for an offense-defense game. However, it also means you have ABSOLUTELY NO DOWNTIME which is NOT normal: Usually the 'defensive' team in games are in games with at least short term player elimination or waves or something so that you can take a god damn breath and chill out, refocus, re-evaluate, stretch your hand, take a drink, alt tab to check a message, whatever. Your never forced to be active for more than a few minutes outside of really explosive events, like say a final push.
This is, obviously, not at all ideal. But it gets worse. You also have very little margin of error on time. You are amazingly heavily punished for misplays on killer in DBD because if you say... "overcommit" to a chase and win it in 40 seconds (Which is AMAZINGLY FAST, and literally impossible unless the survivor makes a mistake because you get more than 40 seconds in a chase just by holding W and running in a straight line) you get 1 out of the 12 hookstates you need to win... while survivors complete arouuuund a gen and a half out of the 5 they need. So DBD's design is in a bit of a pickle: The killer *literally does not have enough time to defend gens.* They just don't. It isn't POSSIBLE if the survivors don't want it to be, outside of killers that can bypass chases like Nurse, the raw mathematics of the speedboost upon being hit and how long it takes to do a gen just... don't allow it?
So despite survivors crying endlessly about 'the killer isn't letting me play the game when they camp/slug/mori/exist' in reality survivors can just... deny the killer the ability to play DBD by sticking to gens and refusing to interact in chases via looping until they run all the way across the map with a speedboost. Most survivors don't like to do this as plan A, but if they think you have any chance of winning they absolutely will.
This is a core flaw of the interaction between survivors, killers, and chase time: Killers are fundementally not rewarded enough for winning chases and any time anything comes along that creates strong rewards for even temporarily removing survivors from play it gets nerfed (Undying, for example, created a strong reward for reducing the number of survivors on gens for even a bit and is gone now. It was too good, but ultimately... killers kinda need 'too good' stall tools right now). The solution isn't longer gens (That won't help unless gen times get actively stupid). Something else needs to happen that makes it so the killer isn't just screwed for daring to take an entire minute to win a chase without already having the entire survivor team injured, off gens, and one slugged.
Ultimately I think DBD should try to pivot off absolute balance and into actual playability issues. Killer's issue isn't that its too weak (The best killers will win basically any game if they make no mistakes on the top tier killers), its the fact that killer has this 'no downtime, also ######### you if you make a single mistake and don't play maximally sweaty.' Killer players would probably be more happy if killer's upper end power went down yet killer like... god less hectic and bullshit? Ultimately its way more a problem of 'Killer doesn't really feel good even when you end a chase quickly' than 'killer isn't strong enough.' More power isn't going to fix the problem that playing very well as a killer Does. Not. Feel. Good.
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One of my buds, who is a professional paramedic who regularly does Psych transports put it this way:
"This dude is the most realistic serial killer in the entire cast. Someone hit it out of the park with the design. He needs an idle animation where he is annoyed or irritated but once you start messing with his cosmetics to rotate him he perks up and starts posing. You neeeeeeed to pay attention to him. He has to be the focus, or he’ll die in his head. Without attention, he dies.
He’s the artist, he’s the star. The show does not exist without him. He is the show, the beginning and the end. He is the sun-king."
This guy doesn't play DBD, but he messaged me to ask if I had thoughts on Ji-Woon Hak (he called him by name) because he was so amped about the design, probably because it speaks to him on a very real level because he deals with real world psychos who look totally normal but will say they are going to murder you or bite themselves until they bleed sitting in the ambulance.
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Do people not understand the point of having a roster?
The appeal is having a DIVERSE array of characters.
No, Trickster doesn't have the same general aesthetic as the other killers, especially the early ones (which, low key, all look basically the same). However, he is also not visually discontinuous with the others: he still has the same general art style and colors, he just is clearly a very different 'type' of person. His color palette, despite containing very bright colors, isn't super vibrant and aside from his knives themselves is very desaturated and almost 'muddy.'
He fits the franchise.
He also makes sense as a killer. People talking about him not looking powerful are kinda silly considering this game contains killers like Hag, who look like someone's grandma went on a hunger strike for a year while camping out in a food dehydrator, and Blight, who is a hunchback little... thing with a melted face.
Now, the main thing people don't like is that he is pretty and doesn't look like a classic slasher...
There is a whole world of horrific fictional murderers outside of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th you uneducated knobheads!
Firstly, a HUGE PROBLEM with DBD's cast is that it basically had every single villain either be overtly hideous and deformed, or clearly not conventionally attractive. Like, sure, some people might be down to have some Snu Snu with Huntress or whatever, but don't tell me she looks like a model. Horror has a long history of equating ugylness or deformity with villainy, so getting away from that is neat.
More critically, there is no Norman Bates type, no Patrick Bateman, no Jack Torrance, no Peter and Paul. Nobody on the cast who represents the subtle horror of the fact that outside appearances mean jack ######### and in fact its very easy for good looking powerful trusted people to be absolute monsters who will revel in causing others pain.
Again, the point of a large roster is to create diversity. DBD has a few overt gaps in its roster that it has been trying to fill: Blight is an overt supernatural monster, for example. Trickster is a 'mundane psycho people otherwise would trust.' You don't have to think that is the most appealing killer (I personally think that his icon in the roster sums up his horrific elements personally: someone who's face has that spray of blood on it and yet who is still smiling, the dissonance there is chilling) but that doesn't make him unworthy of being a killer.
You don't need to try to universalize your opinion as fact. Saying "I personally am not in for that style of slasher villain" is fine, and works as a stand alone sentence. You don't have to 'prove' why you don't like something, preferences are valid. Saying 'Horror villains who look like normal, or even very attractive people, don't fit in horror" make you look like an goober who doesn't appreciate the history and diversity of the genre, and is invalid, and a transparent attempt to universalize your preferences.
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@FrenziedRoach said:
I'm so sick of the "Skilless" argument. Do you not understand that having low-skill floor mechanics and character is a very important part of multiplayer game design?
This.
As long as your low skill floor characters neither dominate nor get dominated consistently they are good for your game. There are many reasons for this sort of design, such as new players who want to learn 'aim based' characters and start out on Trickster as a good 'training wheels' 110 killer, players wanting to rest their brain after a very intense trapper match or wrists after an intense nurse match, or just wanting to have a bit of a more mindless fun experience that still works (That is part of why legion is popular! You can get VERY good at legion but at the same time its easy to play him as a mindless 'I just wanna stab people' killer).
Right now we have a huge gap in killer power based on unique skills, and while some of these unique skills are easy to learn (it isn't hard to get good at Spirit for example) they are still pretty exotic. Having a killer that you can just pick up and do ok with even vs decent survivors will be a good thing.
And because I am an amazing psychic and already can hear the argument: no survivors don't need a 'mindless perk' themselves because their role already comes with a lot of downtime, breathing room, and low energy moments. The need for a 'I am just gunna probably kill two survivors by putting in a reasonable amount of effort and not go significantly higher or lower than that unless I do REALLY well' killer is unique to killers, who basically have no downtime or rest points in their gameplay loop. Killers kinda... NEED a breather killer, and Trickster might be a good one to match Legion.
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Also, it isn't BAD that endgame has a lot of stakes for survivors now and something dramatic is likely to happen during it.
Like, yes, its very hard to not lose someone if the killer can quickly start a chase during endgame (I probably would run something like whispers with this build for example).
That is AWESOME. It does what NOED or Remember me WHISHES it did: Put one last gasp of air into the game to make it end with a bang, rather than fizzling out. The weakest survivor, or the one most exposed, is probably going down. You probably will go down rescuing them unless you set up for endgame. You can't immediately leave. The killer doesn't have as much reason to camp the hook. The game *actually continues a bit once gens are done.* It isn't some tedious 'Oh lets open the gate and wait for the killer to get a few more chase points' snorefest.
NOED is kinda bogus because its rare, you don't know about it until it triggers, and it just encourages the killer to get one more hook and camp it. This is a breath of fresh air because its so overtly powerful, so in your face, and so willing to dictate so much about the behavior of both sides to force the gameplay outcome it wants to force.
Its not screwing around: Endgame collapse is going to be an actual thing that matters now god damn it and you can't avoid it if the killer earned the right to make it a thing!
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@Toblerone007 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1985858#Comment_1985858
Up to 120 seconds.
120 seconds is enough for 3 survivors to collectively do 5 gens in theory. Realistically a bit less, but still. If you correctly respond to the facecamp by slamming gens (and, even better, removing potential trigens) then its a hard L. This is why even good killers will facecamp at exit powerup: It fundamentally changes the risk-reward structure as the killer suddenly has no other objectives to care about unless they think they can get other survivors, and the way endgame works means they... can't. So they have no reason to leave.
Do your part citizen! Never reward facecamping by joining the killer! Punish the behavior wherever you see it and relegate those people to green ranks! Either the facecamper is trying to test you for hook-bombing and will leave with a HUGE tempo loss with you getting the rescue later, or you will net yourself an easy win with 3/4ths of your squad pipping (meaning that overall as long as it isn't the same person getting caught every game everyone will pip) and that killer will eventually be pushed out of their rank.
You can't force the killer to not camp, but you sure as hell can make it a game losing choice.
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@CLAUDETTEINABUSH said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1986388#Comment_1986388
Correct, but hexes were designed to be high risk high reward perks, with some minor exceptions like retribution and haunted. Devour hope is the best example, it was designed as a gamechanger, based on rng. Undying took the high risk and threw it off a window because you didn't have to worry about, most, of your hexes getting destroyed. New undying simply gives a second chance on the hexes, its more of a, medium risk exceptional reward
Well the issue I think is that undying revealed something is rotten in killerville.
Mainly, 'High risk, high reward perks' actually... don't make sense unless the reward is so overwhelming it basically wins you the game, and that killers aren't innately rewarded enough for winning chases.
I do think undying should be nerfed because it is just too critical and oppressive. But we should also look at WHY it was so in demand and what holes the killer base kit has, and re-evaluate the existence and purpose of hex perks when most are just too inconsistent to bother with despite the theoretically insanely high payoff.
Also, I don't agree that Keys vs Moris is a whataboutism. A whataboutism is when you point to an unrelated issue, but Keys and Moris are pretty linked both in the community mindset and in what they do to the game, in a way that say... DS vs NOED aren't (People like to pretend they are, but NOED is actually trying to do something very complicated and nuanced and fails at it pretty hard while DS was just a blunt tool that was VERY successful).
Specifically, both are alterations to the core objective of the game that cut it short in a way that so radically alters the win condition as to make the game almost unrecognizable. And, weirdly, keys are WORSE because while they don't help YOU win, they basically ensure the killer loses. And culturally taking a key was 'balanced' by the killers busting out moris for them. So saying 'Hey, these two things are pretty equivalently awful for the game, and the main reason to not do this awful thing was just removed, but you didn't remove the awful thing' is a valid argument to make.
The other thing I don't think is 'whataboutism' is trying to address fundemental ways the community can be treated differently. If killers want to say Undying SHOULDN'T be nerfed because of NOED, that is silly. But if killers want to say 'It is absolutely insane that Undying was nerfed basically one chapter after it was introduced while NOED has been broken for 3 years and the devs just do not care and tend to place MUCH less urgency on addressing any major killer QOL stuff" I would say... "Yep, I literally have done studies on the toxic development cycle of DBD, way to spot the problem!" People shoulda noticed this the second they 'tested a bloodlust removal' or removed moris without warning but left keys in so killers would see endless keys: Survivors get communication and rapid response, killers get bones thrown to them after its clear the population will die off if they don't get some appeasement.
That said I DO agree the 'whataboutism' is a huge problem overall, despite those caveats. Its actually pretty immature to say 'someone else got something, where is MY something?' Sometimes, changes occur based on need. You don't need to be 'given' jack ######### in order for a needed change to go through. Undying nerf, machinegun nerf, MoM nerf, whatever. All of those things were bad for the game and its completely legitimate to remove them without offering something in return. As a developer its SMART to try to offer token buffs when things are nerfed, and its really actually kinda silly BHVR will create entirely 'one sided' changelogs so constantly, but it isn't 'unjust' that Undying, a perk that basically could lock survivors out of the game, got nerfed.
That said this is a logical argument to an issue that has become emotional because, again, DBD has a pretty overtly toxic dev cycle, and people struggle to articulate that, so instead they go for the more easy argument about balance, rather than looking at large scale behavior patterns like styles of communication that people notice but don't have good language to address.
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There is some paradoxical truth to the fact NOED would be more fair and totems would be more balanced overall if uncleansed dull totems were bad even without a perk.
NOED has three negative aspects that are real, ignoring all the fake stuff like 'Its like a key!' (its not, Keys alter the fundamental win conditions of the game in a way that can make victory literally impossible and which remove tension because they actively punish the killer for trying to play, while NOED is a transformation of interactions without dictating an outcome outside of specific cases like hook camping) or 'If you need NOED to get a kill you don't deserve a kill!' (which raises the question of why have the gate phase at ALL if the killer shouldn't be a threat during it).
They are:
1: NOED is trying to make endgame more tense both with its potential existence, and its known existence, but in reality it just makes good survivors nope out.
2: While NOED has healthy counterplay and creates a reasonable side objective that would in theory slow the game and encourage more interaction rather than the killer having two gens pop the second they end their first chace, its such a rare perk that it actually fails to do this as survivors never feel pressured to get totems. Its so rare it feels unfair when it occurs because you really SHOULDN'T cleanse dull totems, its objectively a bad idea 99% of the time.
3: Trying to counterplay NOED feels bad because its so all or nothing: Find all of the totems. Miss even one? Congrats, you made it HARDER to clear NOED.
A fix to NOED, paradoxically, probably involves buffing it, buffing killers in endgame, and 'evening it out' so that totem cleansing but missing one doesn't trash the game. Because NOED would, objectively, feel more like a fair thing if it wasn't a perk but basekit. If you KNEW NOED was in the game, survivor behavior would change and you wouldn't go 'Its bullshit the killer got NOED' and instead you would go 'What idiot finished the last gen before we found the last totem?' The fact NOED is so rare is part of its unfairness, and if it was in 100% of games it wouldn't be any more unfair than knowing killer can say... break pallets.
Even a 'minor' surprise, like perma T3 Myers, doesn't feel bad if you can expect it, and because the event that causes it is something your aware of being bad anyway.
Often times people over-focus on a specific outcome (Ex: "I don't like being camped, make it so you can't camp at ALL") and ignore games are actually structures where you want to create complicated behaviors. Fixes to camping that are 'nerf camping' never work (And BHVR says as much) because camping is part of a larger series of behaviors relating to how the killer evaluates and prioritizes objectives and stops their completion, and trying to stop camping entirely leads to weird behavior like 'Killers never hook because they are too weak at the hook' or 'Survivors just send one survivor to sit by the hook and constantly goad a chase so the hook's time never advances as the killer defends it but they never can get value off the chase either, and if they leave the person gets off the hook free.' Like the ACTUAL behavior desired here is a more complicated 'The killer CAN defend the hook but should feel empowered not to do so and only want to do so if it is obviously being threatened, but not feel paralyzed into inaction if it IS being threatened.'
Likewise, NOED is trying to achieve something nuanced: Survivors clear totems, if they don't then endgame is way more scary, killer needs some threat in endgame for the game to retain any tension. Its just a very blunt binary tool that doesn't encourage nuanced behavior.
So what would a more nuanced NOED look like? That encourages a more complex interaction in the endgame that forces survivors to respect the killer more during it or earn the right to refuse to do so, without being an out of left field 'whammy' or making it so the killer just gets one extra hook off the perk making it, in most cases, bad?
Some perks amplify base kit. And base kit can be added to the game. Gen kicking wasn't a feature at launch, and when it was added you didn't need a perk to do it. But perks exist to make it better (Pop, Oppression, Overcharge, Surveillance, ect). You can also move effects of perks into basekit and make the perk amplify the basekit.
I think NOED should be made into a 'basekit enhancer' and the killer should be given some endgame threat based on remaining totems. Specifically: Making it easier for killers to win chases despite gates being opened by reducing the distance a survivor can get 'free' which is much less necessary endgame as survivors shouldn't be stalling but leaving and making it harder to get unhooks so the killer is forced to play far less defensively.
Something like X% movespeed per unlit totem remaining, Y% reduced hit cooldown per totem remaining, X% reduced speedboost on hit, and +1 second to unhook time per totem remaining would do a LOT to make totems much more worthwhile and to make the killer not a complete joke in endgame. In that scenario, missing a totem isn't 'Oh well you lose' but you also know if no one bothers with totems, you probably will lose someone before the game ends as the killer zooms from gate to gate and suddenly machineguns the first person they find down. It no longer is an unfair surprise to get rocked because you didn't clear totems, and your no longer punished for clearing easy to find totems. NOED could just enhance these bonuses, bit more speed per-unlit totem, and maybe even if you have enough unlit remaining getting hit results in a speed PENALTY so the killer can trivially down people who they catch.
In that reality, sure the killer is stronger and will win more games than they 'should' in this reality. But they are also more fair, because fair is highly contextual. In this case, the concept of fairness that is being supported is that what 'should' happen is happening more consistently, so the rewarded and punished behavior is more clear and you know what you 'should' do more often, and thus will correctly play around it even if the totem hunting now takes survivors off gens for a minute at some point during the game to give killers more time.
I would also make the first hex perk killers take add one totem to the game, in this scenario.
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@ukenicky said:
I'd rather something be done about camping and tunneling tbh.
Slugging is high risk high reward for killers and there's a lot of really good perks for dealing with slugging.
Slugging happens because the killer legitimately can't defend the hook correctly. The devs talked about this in a old stream, but basically slugging becomes common when killers don't feel hooks are 'worth it.'
Already its... absurdly hard to defend hooks. I think the new animation system made punishing BTless rescues harder, for example. So most killers don't even bother hooking right now unless they have an absurd tempo advantage.
So what we... kinda need is for unhooks to get weaker? Maybe not camping stronger (though in endgame it definitely needs to be), but less of a tempo loss for a quick unhook on the killer. Like right now a HUGE problem with the game is that getting a down can be forced to be a 2 minute minimum time investment just by holding W, and that is enough time for 3 survivors to repair 5 gens, as depip squads prove. So anything that makes the tempo gain of removing a survivor from play even temporarily worse, and prevents the killer from using that survivor they captured as a resource, is bad for the game.
The hooked survivor is a resource for the killer. That is the intended function of the hook. But its not working right now because survivors successfully reframed the debate as 'it isn't fun to be hooked' as if games are about you never encountering a situation that is bad for you ever. It isn't fun to be caught in a beartrap or downed or any other number of things, but they are important to the game's various playstates that ARE fun. The hook being a localized, negative experience where a survivor is powerless and the killer can freely do whatever they want is negative to that survivor in that moment, but HOLISTICALLY it makes the game more fun.
Again, player elimination, 'being not allowed to play the game?' Game designers understand, at least in videogames that last around 15 minutes and not say... a 2 hour boardgame... is actually a relatively minor and acceptable penalty compared to some other negative gamestates. The biggest problem survivors have with the hook right now is having to mash space, otherwise the hook FAVORS survivors at interactions which is *actively ######### dumb.*
And I am not kidding that mashing space is a big problem. It is actively player hostile design that goes out of its way to amplify the negative feelings of losing by forcing you to participate in your loss actively through repetitive strain inducing motion that requires no skill or thought to distract you from the frustration you feel being stuck on the hook, leaving you alone with the negativity of the experience rather than giving you a mental break like most elimination/temporary out of play effects do to recompose and mentally 'cool off.' Like whoever insists that stays in the game needs a stern talking to because its... objectively an awful mechanic and a HUGE part of 'Hook angst.'
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@pseudechis said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1983577#Comment_1983577
One of the best dang overviews I've seen on this forum.
Kudos to you. 👍️
Even solo survivor has some form of social element to it. Trying to implement a social element to killer though is rife with logistical complications in the current game state.
Honestly I'd rather see more catering to a solo experience with the inclusion of AI opponents in a solo game mode. Its what keeps me coming back to battlefront. Not every game has to be a competitive online sweat and I can blast some bots for fun and not worry about being obnoxious or anyone else's game experience. I think that's a pipe dream though.
I doubt bots will ever ever happen. They just sorta don't make sense for the game with such an intense psychological aspect. How do you mindgame a bot? How do you break chase with a bot?
90% of DBD's game is about split second decision making and no survivor I think seriously wants bots both because the gameplay would be bad (You need to have a psychology to your opponent in DBD) and because, again, there is low key an element of cyberbullying as an appeal for DBD.
If BHVR could make bots that are remotely acceptably good at the game, they need to get out of the game business and start working in AI research because they invented a bot with a theory of mind which isn't just a billion dollar idea, it would literally change all of computing forever.
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The devs have talked about how they have no intention to add more mechanics that allow killers to negate lost chases in a new way/way that bypasses killer effort because it utterly breaks the game. They said as much in streams about ideas to make hook camping worse (When... low key hook defense needs to be stronger... killers literally can't defend the hook right now which is why we are in such a slug/instadown meta, which the devs themselves note is what happens when survivors can rescue despite the killer camping).
So what do I think? I think it would break the game. The killer is intended to A: Be able to incapacitate players, and B: be able to prevent those players from resuming play at the cost of map pressure. Trying to deny those realities by saying 'its not fun to be on the hook' kinda misses that games aren't designed to avoid negative events at all costs. In fact, games that do this kinda suck. You NEED gamestates that are negative experiences you want to avoid for games to function, you just want to limit how common they are, how unfair they are, and how intensely negative they are.
Mid-short dureation player elimination, which is what getting camped/killed on hook is, or being slugged is, is actually a fairly minor consequence in a game: It gives you a chance to take a breath, to recollect, mentally cool down. They only become supremely irritating if your forced to do a meaningless interaction that forces you to be 'present' in the moment like... Oh I dunno... being forced to mash space to not die, or hold M1 to heal...
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@Aneurysm said:
Noed "feels" better, if that's the right word, in situations when the killer has done
a pretty good job so faran alright job overall, at least having a few survivors on death hook anyway, against survivors who just hopped from gen to gen and ignoring any unlit totems.When a group of solos do all gens, 4 totems, and the killer just spends most of the match trying to catch one of them and ignoring all gens before getting everyone with noed, feels pretty bad.
I'm against removing noed atm bc after the dying of undying, noed, inner strength and... thrill of the hunt I guess are the only incentives to even go near a dull totem rather instead of just smashing gens.
If some other, possibly base punishment was there for ignoring totems (especially for cases where between 3-5 totems are left standing, which is less forgiveable than one well-hidden totem being overlooked) then I'd be happier with them reworking/nerfing noed into something else.
Perhaps a new alternative to NOED: Gain a meaty speedboost for each unlit totem still in the game, and a reduction to your swing speed.
If 3+ totems are still lit, your basically in permanent bloodlust 3 or better and swing so fast you are like oldschool machinegun build where you get effective instadowns. If its less you still get a nice powerup that makes it really hard to unhook in your face, if its 0 you got the benefit of survivors cleansing everything which took up a bit of time.
Or hell, make a basekit thing to a similar effect and then add a perk that amps up the benefits to this level. The killer NEEDS to be more dangerous on gate power up, they just do, but there are ways to do it that make more sense and aren't as all or nothing as NOED, which is the real problem of the perk. I think the killer basekit overall needs a bit of love because there are too many wonky aspects to it that muck with its power level in scenarios that allow survivors to 'overpower' the killer despite the survivors being uncharacteristically agro.
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I think one of the things that survivors REALLY need to internalize is that sometimes... your SUPPOSED TO LOSE.
Not in general, but certain gamestates need to be especially dangerous: If perfect play lets you win no matter what, you actually encourage sloppy bad play because you can just get yourself out of any situation. You know, E-Hondo is a bad character in Street Fighter overall, but if he gets you to the corner you LOSE. You don't have a rough match, you LOSE if he has any idea what he is doing. This creates tension because your trying to avoid a certain state.
I think enshrining 'If you go down while gates are powered or gates are powered while your down and don't have adrenaline, or your already on hook, your basically screwed' as a mechanic is a pretty... gosh darn fair loss state. Hook interactions in general should be states where you feel like 'Ok unless the killer screws up or my allies apply really good pressure I am done for.' That is what it felt like back in 2016: getting unhooked was a minor miracle, not a guarantee. Obviously we can't go back, but killers are so weak at defending hooks that in endgame they... well they shouldn't go afk, there is still stuff they can do... but they might as well go afk.
I think the thing that pisses survivors off about NOED is that its one of the ONLY times in all of DBD where the killer unambigously has an advantage you can't play around. Most scenarios are neutral (ex: loops where you trade time for hits, which low key favor survivors) or are overtly survivor sided (ex: Safe pallets which just do not allow killers outside of nurse and spirit to interact with them). "Gates open, someone on the hook" feels downright disempowering to killer, which is part of the entire problem with the endgame collapse system and the killer role in general, its MEANT to be able to perfectly defend but not have map presence, but so many tools exist to get past camping killers now that even at the times the killer SHOULD be able to block a rescue they can't unless they have NOED. So survivors just... assume rescues are guaranteed now, and NOED is a rude reminder that, no, sometimes you are supposed to lose, and because its so rare they don't internalize its an intended thing in MOST GAMES that there are scenarios that no matter how well you play you lose for even attempting them, because you need to reward macro level play as well as micro.
Honestly an endgame hook should be the equivalent of a survivor sitting on the other side of a god pallet: Sure with amazing mindgames and a mistake by your opponent you might win that interaction, but realistically its not a good idea and you should probably back off despite really not wanting to do so. Killers are VERY familiar with having to pick their fights and just... give up on doing something they want to do. Survivors are... not at all, and resent the idea they ever should have to do so.
Even the standard argument of 'oh getting suddenly eliminated for one mistake isn't fun' doesn't make sense in regards to NOED. Firstly, player elimination is an intrinsic part of how DBD works and framing the ultimate goal of the game design as avoiding the downswing of emotions being eliminated causes is deceptive because it completely removes all the tension from the hook and the entire point of the system to be guaranteed 3 changes, but secondly because THE GAME IS ALREADY OVER. Boo hoo your gunna not be able to play out 30 seconds of teabagging at the gate. Oh no you almost certainly pipped if you played well but you won't get the survivor points to double pip because you were careless or in a chase as the gates were opened and you directly won the game for your side! Endgame is basically a survivor victory lap to spite the killer right now you shouldn't feel entitled to just survive because you got the exit gates open because its so trivial to do so in 99% of cases and you have internalized that 'gates open=game over and its all just forcing the killer to afk for a minute or chase you knowing they lost.'
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NOED is neither strong, nor unfair.
NOED actually adds a LOT to the game. See, DBD, and most games, are games about tension. If one side gets out to a huge lead, or somehow has victory basically already secure, it gets BORING.
Take Mario Kart, a classic example of a 'unfun' mechanic actually making the game way better. The blue shell fixes a problem with the game: When your way out ahead of everyone nothing is happening and the game is boring. The blue shell punishes going out way ahead and makes it unlikely that you get a dramatic breakaway. Despite getting hit by the blue shell sucking and feeling REALLY bad, what it gives to the overall experience is good.
NOED is a problem, not in that its unfair, or too good, or toxic, but in that it doesn't actually accomplish ENOUGH. NOED is meant to make it so survivors can't act with total impunity when the exit gates are powered, make the end game a raising of the stakes where every individual survivor could escape but now late rescues are extremely dangerous. It utterly fails at this outside 'final boss' builds (Ex: Remember me, blood warden, NOED). But it, at the very least, makes it so the endgame isn't a boring bully fest where the survivors just walk over the killer.
Some of NOED, and I say this without a trace of irony, should be base kit. You should, once the gates are powered, REALLY just want to leave, really agonize over every choice to stay. You should be dramatically encouraged to end the game, rather than drag it out. NOED does a bad job at this because you still basically are forced to camp the hook of whoever you downed so it just kinda gets one more kill. End game hooks probably are what actually should be re-evaluated so that more legitimate interaction can happen.
But all these complaints about NOED really strike me as not survivors caring that its 'unfair' so much as survivors whining they can't get basically a guaranteed endgame rescue by bodyblocking the hook and that going down when the killer has literally nothing to lose is REALLY BAD. The killer... kinda desperately needs MORE end game power, not less, because the endgame... kinda sucks and is entirely one sided right now.
I wouldn't mind seeing NOED go away if endgame was reworked entirely, I don't think its a great design, but NOT because its unrealistic for survivors to get rid of it or rescue in spite of it. Its that it doesn't give enough of one last gasp of energy to the game because it generally gets you one extra hook and that is it as a killer, so you never run it.
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What was the most played map offering by each side?
How often did X side control the map vs Y side? For example, I strongly suspect Lampkin lane being so high means that survivors more often controlled map selection than killers.
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This is a long standing requested mode that would solve a lot of the problems with killer from a logistical standpoint: Killers are less likely to recruit other players, killers are less likely to care about the social aspect of the game and thus cosmetics, killers are more likely to get demoralized, killers lack anyone 'anchoring' them to the game via a playgroup.
There are a few reasons why such an obvious path forward hasn't been done. First, and most obviously, balance issues. You would need to somehow prevent killers from just double teaming every survivor all the time, but if you can't ever cooperate in a chase what is the point of coop? Map size is also an issue, a lot of maps, even the largest, would just give killers too much coverage to lock down gens even in a say... 2v12 scenario. From a technical standpoint its totally possible (as double killer was a bug for quite a while), but there may be legal issues as well. It is fully possible the license holders said 'Hey you can have this character in the game but they may never appear in any way alongside other killers from rival IPs.' And there is the playlist issue: survivors would never Q into an alt mode that put them at a disadvantage, and map offerings 'fizzling' if two killers Q'd would be weird.
Finally, and most cynically, there is the very obvious fact that survivors are the golden boys and girls of DBD. This is just a reality that has broken every asymetric vs game that has a player count imbalance between teams before: One team is more economic to cater too and because of asymetric player counts there isn't that much cross pollination to create a cohesive community, ergo the devs have a pretty large financial incentive to try to cater to survivor desires, and part of the survivor mindset is, frankly, to be jerks who torment a player and enjoy making them feel weak or powerless and alone. Cyberbullying, as ugly as it is to say, is part of DBD's economic model, even if decisions aren't overtly being made to encourage it (and I actually suspect they are to SOME degree. BHVR is at the very least AWARE of this dimension based on their surveys, and its hard to argue the way end game collapse was implemented was not a 'we are doing everything in our power to allow survivors to continue to be toxic jerks while they win the game while doing the bare minimum to make the game function and prevent killers quitting en-mass' play) and it would be much harder to bully a duo killer than solo.
Personally, I think some of this could be fixed just by making a coop specific killer: It is weird for example that Legion or Twins didn't have coop functionality in some way. One could imagine a duo killer, for example, that has one 'active' and one 'passive' player, who can swap who is active and able to do standard M1 stuff while the other scouted and maybe had situational ways to down. But its something the devs just aren't interested in it seems.
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A perfect high tier killer will win 100% of games.
The issue is more like... that middle area where mortals play. The issue is less 'which side wins more, all things being equal' and 'which side has to try harder?' And the answer is infinitely killer. If your playing a middle tier killer, or you make a few mistakes, and the survivors play well but not perfectly, its still a blowout for survivors. But if your an ace nurse, huntress, Deathslinger, or some other killer able to just bypass chases, and you don't screw up, you win.
Which is... kinda a huge problem: The raw math of the game favors survivors a lot and it takes a truly ridiculous level of play to beat that, but if you can there isn't much the survivors can do to stop you. But the level of effort to get to that point is insane and the result of falling short of that is huge. More importantly, the way you lose if you don't play amazingly isn't fun at all, which is arguably more important.
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@Acroasis said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1980820#Comment_1980820
Are there really more survivors than killers? I would've thought way more people wanted to play as killer
The game is killer sided kiiiinda... if you play perfectly as a good killer you just win.
But if you don't you just get utterly blown out. Killers basically have no room to relax, make a mistake, or play 'nice' in a high end game, which results in massive killer burnout. The devs don't care about playability at ALL. Its purely balance, but the fact of the matter is I think most killers would gladly accept a lower winrate if it meant more time to relax.
The undying nerf is a good example of this. Yes, it was 'too good.' Like it objectively was one of the strongest perks in the game. It also solved a MASSIVE GOD DAMN PROBLEM WITH KILLERS in that it actually gave them time to breath in a match.
Right now the killer Q time is about 6 seconds, while survivors at high ranks are 30 minutes. This means that for every survivor lobby that finds a match, 300 killers find a match. As there are 4 survivors to a lobby, this means that we are looking at around...
1200 god damn survivors for every killer, at least at the top end. Its ridiculous. This is why the new survey focused on subdividing player types and then asking about motivations and why people take breaks and stuff. Its REALLY clear if DBD can't retain killers it is not going to survive, the current lunar callender event didn't come with a player bump which is really troubling (And is almost certainly why the event was extended, DBD depends heavily on surges of players around content cycles before them slowing down and this has NOT been happening for their last few major events or updates, which is terrifying for a single game outfit like BHVR).
It doesn't help that the DBD community is, frankly, one of the worst in all of gaming because BHVR basically markets their game as a bully sim at this point because the survivors are more monetizable (They are the more social side, they can see their own characters, and they are the more numerous side). They triedti to replicate that with Deathgarden, but without an installed userbase the game's bottom fell out: A lot of people are attached to DBD because good matches as killer are fun, but no one was attached to Deathgarden, AKA "How can we make flashlights even more infuriang?"
So BHVR sorta... doesn't WANT to fix the 'The game is miserable for killer' problem for economic reasons, but they need to maintain the bare minimum quality of life for the game. This is why nonsense like endgame collapse, a very round about surrender system with lots of limitations that was WAY HARDER TO IMPLEMENT THAN SIMPLY A 'I GIVE UP BUTTON' exists: Killers were quitting because they had no way to end the game if the survivors didn't want to leave without basically winning half a chase 4 times and the survivors each running out, but survivors like teabagging at the exit gates a little bit. Despite this having a very huge negative impact on the player experience for killers, the very minor benefit the experience had on toxic survivors meant they moved heaven and earth to keep that in the game, which really tells you a LOT about their priorities. Stuff like Blight being broken basically since his release with the need for pretty simple fixes, but the second survivors experience de-reg issues that gets patched right away.
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The problem wiht DS-unbreakable is identical to the problem of Balanced Landing and Sprintburst had back when they were individual cooldowns: Stacking similar effects has amplified effects.
The solution is the same: A new resource. Instead of Exhaustion something like... Heroism, for perks that let you 'self recover' in a general sense. You unbreakable without soulguard? You can't DS the same match. You DS? You can't unbreakable anymore. You can still run both perks, but you can't use both perks in the same match.
The DS nerf already solved a lot of problems with DS, its now more just the killer doesn't have a great option in the scenario where someone just goes down from DS. It isn't outright toxic like in your face gen repair or hook rescues were, but its an annoying blindspot for the game.
I don't think BT is too much of a problem at all. Its ANNOYING and it speaks more to a problem with bodyblocking at the hook (I think killers should get swivel-grab just like survivors have swivel-hook) but its core mechanics are actually pretty healthy and allow the survivors to pull plays in scenarios they should be able to do so (Healthy and in a group and willing to eat hits), without allowing stuff it shouldn't (If someone cheeky bodyblocks with BT you... kinda come out ahead as killer most of the time).
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Bloodlust does two critical things to the game, one agreed as objectively good, and the other good in my opinion:
1st: Infinites. Bloodlust fixes them.
2nd: It creates a theoretical maximum chase duration.
What bloodlust does NOT do: Meaningfully alter 'open' chases (AKA survivor just holds W) or the distance gained or lost going from one obstacle to another except over VERY large distances.
Now 2 is controversial, but I think it is good: A survivor should NOT be allowed to survive indefinitely if the killer wants to devote a minute to just eliminating them, because that helps games that are already over to end. If its down to 2 survivors, and there are a few gens left to do, without bloodlust a really good survivor could run a middling killer infinitely, but they can't win the game. It creates a stalemate. This is a problem, because we want this game to end, and even though this killer was meh they clearly did enough to 'win' and the really good looper didn't, so letting the looper stall the game indefinitely because the killer is struggling to close it out is bad game design. This wouldn't be an issue if DBD matches had natural time limits, but like most games that could last idefinitely DBD needs a mechanic that pushes it to close out.
A good example of a similar mechanic is how RTS games have resources dwindle from the map, as well as very 'dense' units that will trivially break through turtle strategies. While theoretically you can just trade trash units forever in say... Age of Empires once the map is barren your just gunna eventually shove down defenses that can't be rebuilt because there is no more stone or gold and the game naturally forces a conclusion. Likewise, in Starcraft 'dense' units that aren't resource efficient but are very supply efficient do something similar: You probably won't win a game rushing carriers without being a good defensive player but if your opponent is just turtling and not messing with you at all you can FORCE the win just by rushing them or battlecruisers or whatever, even if your micro wasn't that great, simply because you noticed this stall or otherwise won positionally. It also bears resemblence to 'closer' mechanics, like Spies in Age of Empires, which does almost nothing in regular gameplay but prevents you from having cheeky hidden workers constantly building new bases so the game drags on forever by letting a player in the lead permanently see all your villagers: Normally they are just in your bases which you know, just like how normally a survivor just wants to get a chase to last 2 minutes anyway as a 'best outcome' so like bloodlust it doesn't do anything, but if you get really ahead and kill the enemy base it lets you just force the game to end rather than letting someone drag it out.
Bloodlust is similar: it forces games to conclude when you risk a stalemate: the killer WILL catch you if you just try to loop them forever and not progress the game as survivor by breaking off the chase. At the really high end dropping chases is hard, but at the really high end the killer doesn't have the luxury of bloodlusting people down anyway even 2v1 so like... whatever. The costs and benefits of BL are mostly at the 'mid tier' of the game. And while bloodlust CAN be used to force a kill even outside of an endgame state, it will almost always come at the cost of the killer losing vs a compitent team: If your dumping a full 2 minutes 30 seconds into a chase by bloodlusting it out twice and the survivor just W'ing away you are gunna lose unless your pressure game is really good: The equivalent of good defensive play in an RTS allowing you to get luxury units early: if you as a killer can finagle survivors off gens for a full minute and a half (because gen timings are tight enough that to get 2 bloodlust 2/3 hits is enough time for 3 survivors to do all the gens AND open a gate if you crunch those numbers AND assume the down is instant once you hit 3) they kinda... deserve the ability to be terrifying to the survivor near them?
Basically bloodlust serves to both close out games and reward good killer play more than bad like many people think, because knowing WHEN to bloodlust adds to the tactical landscape of DBD and knowing when you ARE being bloodlusted and need to break chase for even a second is a survivor skill.
TL;DR: Its a win more mechanic. Good games have mechanics and gamestates that help the winning player close out the game when it really is just going to devolve to a grindy drag to help games not drag out.
So bloodlust shouldn't go away even if they DO fix the maps. Its doing a LOT more to the design than infinites, which is why the survivor Q got so heavily rocked by the bloodlust experiment and only recovered once they broke survivor hit registration so bad the game is borderline unplayable: It shows a critical lack of an understanding of how DBD actually flows as a game to just say 'Well it lets you get kills even if you can't counter the loop' because like... if the survivors don't do gens they should eventually go down as an inevitable fact, regardless of how bad the killer is. It encourages more interactive play and games ending swiftly as a 'win more' mechanic, which are important.
Bloodlust should only go away if they have a systematic way to end infinites (And they don't. Honestly it wouldn't be hard to create a formula that 'proves' something is potentially an infinite, so its silly they 'tested' if there still were any without BL. So having an anti-infinite mechanic rather than just trusting the map design is good practice. Most games have anti-infinite mechanics after all because it allows more complex scenarios as you would rather have more freedom and an 'emergency out' than to design everything painstakingly around infinite avoidance), AND they create a more robust 'Get on with it' mechanic. Like making matches have a capped time limit and after the end the killer just wins, because they are the 'defensive' side. If both were true it MIGHT be a good idea for bloodlust to go away. As is we aren't even close.
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This new UI fiasco is honestly very interesting to the point that I plan to use it as an exemplar of 'Graphic Designer UI' for interface design courses.
Basically, its very visually flashy in a way that screams "I am a flashy UI," which is why you see this sort of thing a lot in fiction. Think how Ironman's helmet shots tend to have screens all over the place, it doesn't exist because that would be convenient for Tony Stark, it exists to tell you, the viewer, "Ironman is taking in a lot of information!'"
In real life however, good UI design is intended to be invisible and compact until you need it, at which point you can quickly see it and absorb the information from it. It takes up as much space as it needs to in order to be readable. Sometimes you want your UI to quickly update players so you have elements jutting into the 'main area' but usually this is done through color. This isn't really an 'opinion' or 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder' thing: UI design has been a science for like 60 years at this point with ######### like Bell Labs or the US Airforce doing rigorous scientific experiments with both user fatigue and information retention/absorption, because as it turns out when we were making airplanes having stuff be quickly readable was important, and when we were making early phones misdials sucked. So we got really good at it real quick.
Lets take an example your likely looking at right now if your on windows, a very basic bit of UI you interact with so much you might forget its UI: The Taskbar! The taskbar is located very centrally on your screen SOMEWHERE, but you can choose where it is! Its most likely at the bottom, but some of you renegades like it at the sides or top. Doesn't matter, its ONLY in one place. It doesn't wrap around, because the point of the taskbar is to let you quickly glance down to see if any of your icons are lit up to say they need your attention, and to see what you have open. Icons are, on most screens, about the size of a fingernail these days, and most graphic designers for apps understand how to make a readable icon: Non-realistic stylized imagery usually with 3-4 colors and geometric shapes: You don't get any photos, you get a dark blue gradient circle with a white line going through it at that breaks at an angle for the steam logo, or an orange square with a semicircle in the center for your PDF reader. So I can mostly tell what I have open through shape and color. Less relevant information, like if a pinned thing is open or not, are smaller bits of information that are still visible but take up less space. For example, I can access my volume any time from my toolbar, which is a much smaller section of the screen because its rare I need to mess with sound settings compared to switching windows on apps I am using. It de-emphasizes redundant information too: I probably am aware I am connected to the internet in this day and age so that icon barely takes up any space and uses color more than its shape to denote a problem. There is a reason no one talks about windows 8: Centralized UIs that focus on readable iconography based on color and abstract shapes do so much better even microsoft couldn't force this one on anyone.
DBD does almost the opposite of good practice in every way. A good example is the perks and items: A LOT of screen real-estate is taken up by unimportant information like your own perks, which you shouldn't really need reminding about too often. Its also the information located at the least busy and most clearly read part of your screen in DBD: The bottom. There is a reason a LOT of UI designs focus action at the top or bottom rather than the sides, it intrudes on the 'focus' of your screen way less. Having ironman style ######### popping out from the corners of your eyes is a cool scifi visual but there is a reason basically no one does that and why popups from the 1990's were annoying as hell things no one liked for appearing there. It isn't bad the perks are there (especially as it is a cooldown timer) but its so weird they are dramatically larger than the information used to track gamestate that contains info you can ONLY get through the UI. Items fare little better. I get the item should be larger than its addons, but its SO much larger despite the item being visible on your character, when the addons aren't. And the fact that both items and perks are so much more vibrant, centralized, and in a more valuable part of the screen real estate than gamestate tracking is weird.
It also does stuff like using detailed photo (or CG, in this case) graphics that are harder to read than simple iconography, it de-emphasizes critical information like your borrowed time/deep wound timers, and it doesn't give you enough face to focus on important things like your peripheral vision in a game where seeing stuff in the corner of your screen is kinda HUGELY important. And in a videogame having UI low is also good because it makes it less likely its going to be floating over a rapidly changing background while your moving: sure it won't always be over a featureless ground but you get less jarring change that way. A lot of the information is conveyed through more muted colors which fit the game's aethestetic more in some ways but are a readability nightmare, and stuff like a circular bloodsplatter that can fade into muddy backgrounds is a lot less useful than a more stylized visible shape based alteration.
And then there is the basic stuff, like the items and perks not being correctly aligned. Its like... such a badly designed UI that if it wasn't real I would say it looks like an unrealistic textbook example. I get I care about this way more than other people because like... its my career and most people won't think of it this in depth, but the reason people tend to do things the same way in terms of usability design like UI is because those ways tend to not be ass for your consumer. People are talking about getting motion sick and that could certainly be true (Having some of the more immediately critical information in the top left where your likely going to get a lot of transitions over complicated backgrounds like tree branches, roofs, ruins, ect is going to definitely make some people woozy) it is far more likely the overly busy UI is just over-stimulating people. The average person doesn't have nuanced language to express why this UI sucks, but they know it sucks, and it stinks in a way that doesn't just make the product worse, but makes it physically unpleasant. If your UI is so bad that it is physically upsetting to use, people aren't going to use it.
And, 100%, people would complain about this UI if it was perfect. ANY time you make a change to your interface its going to piss people off: Reddit UI change, Google chrome, whatever, you actually DO need to let people sit with it because the reaction will ALWAYS be negative at first. But holy crap this is so bad that, again, I literally plan to print this out as a handout for how not to do a UI.
Just open any interface design textbook they are different than graphic design ones pleaaaaaaaaaase this is NOT a place you flex creativity. You flex creativity in stuff like the perk icons, which are beautiful and iconic, not in where stuff is on your screen.
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What is really weird is that anyone with any familiarity with gamedev or coding knows that the statement that they CANT go back is...
A complete boldfaced lie?
Its either a lie or BHVR is basically flirting with completely torpedoing their company if they ever commit a patch that has a bug they can't find that makes the game unplayable. You keep copies of old revisions, the idea of not doing that is actually crazy both because you might want to do a revert and because having the old patches is critical for bugfixing and troubleshooting.
They might not WANT to. They may really like the changes they made to the back end and want to keep working with those and would rather fix the current UI to be better than revert it. But they absolutely can go back.
And like... Scott pointed this out and I know I thought of it immediately: The actual visuals of the UI and where the stuff is located has nothing to do with the back end of the UI? Like you could, using the new backend, just recreate the old UI. UI design isn't some crazy thing where if you alter it it breaks the game, your literally just referencing assets that can be changed and telling the UI to put it somewhere.
I get it, UI changes are always radicially unpopular and spart outrage. This coulda been the best UI ever and it would still be a controversial issue because change bad. But it... looks so bad in an already bad situation to like... tell a really obvious lie about why it won't go back. I get Not Queen was in a bad position because the real answer is 'We want to see if this is actually people being change averse or actually is a bad UI so we were going to ignore you no matter what' (And, to be extremely fair, that is what you NEED to do with these changes. Again, there was a 0% chance this would not be a controversial change even if done well, you HAVE to ignore complaints about UI updates for the most part) but... cmon. Your not gambling your project on every patch being perfect and never needing to compare it to previous revisions to find the sources of errors, I refuse to believe it.
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I can understand being skeptical of negative feedback of new UI stuff, it is ALWAYS unpopular.
The issue is they also like... ignored every rule of good UI design? This isn't rocket science or some Avant-garde artform: UI design best practices were being established in the god damn 50's with ######### like Bell labs and the US Airforce.
Condense information, make it not intrusive but also easy to access. Focus on readability over fancy graphics in UI and go for minimalist styles.
Did the UI need a bit of a change people would inevitably complain about? Sure! I think 2D art of every character in black and white would be a rad idea.
But the info is all spread out. Its in hard to read fonts with thin lines. Its 3D color art that makes it hard to get info. Its both really busy, really decentralized, and really unclear.
Look at any other game, you know what they do? They centralize all your information at the bottom of the screen: Mobas have your abilities, health, and items at the bottom. Shooters have your health, ammo, and any abilities at the bottom. MMOs? Sometimes they put stuff at the top, but usually that stuff is relevant to choices you make looking at the screen like health bars: When you want to gauge the more tactical situation, you look at your health, mana, and cooldowns at the bottom!
The new UI is totally fixable: Just go for simplified art of each of the characters on a solid background much like the perks (though a different color/shape so its clear your not looking at a perk, maybe squares for items, diamonds for perks, circles for survivors?), and move the gen count and character tracker to the bottom, so if you want to get a read of your overall situation, you just look down, like EVERY OTHER GAME EVER.
Its so clear you didn't hire someone with a background in UI design, you hired someone with a background in graphic design, the kind of people who make UIs in scifi comics or shows where there is just information and doodads everywhere because that is visually flashy for STORYTELLING but is not actually how good UI's work: UIs should be invisible until you need them and then crystal clear until you don't, ideally also allowing you to subconsciously soak in the info or notice changes.
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I think a duo killer Q would be great. DBD clearly can handle it on a technical level considering there was a bug for a long time that both allowed 10 survivor matches REALLY early in the game's history (which were fun as hell even as a solo killer, you just go into this insane downing frenzy) and the duo killer bug more recently.
Identity V has a lot of mechanics changes to make duo killer work. I think DBD could do similar, and have a very limited altered map pool for duo killer.
I think the biggest thing is that it probably should be 12 v 2, the survivors can't Q as a 12 stack, and you want to sorta balance the mode as a very fast paced one so that elimination isn't as big a deal: It should low key be impossible to wipe the survivors, and more of a 'party' mode.
That or you could do something as simple as 'Killers have limited parts of the map where they can both be active' or 'limited windows where they can both participate in the same chase at the same time' so they can cooperate but it isn't like the killers just tag team you the entire game: If you can only both be 'corporeal' within 20 meters of each other for 1 minute every 5, your not going to be constantly just duo-downing survivors ignoring loops. So your trying to run survivors into each other, or using your powers to 'remotely' help, like having Legion injure everyone before nurse cleans up, or Trapper getting things set up while the other killer actually pressures.
I think DBD really should have this mode because killer play being inherently anti-social is bad for the community, and having a mode where a 4 stack only makes up 50% or 33% of the survivors is neat, but any speculation on it is sorta... pie in the sky thinking in the end, because the specifics of such a mode are completely up in the air. I also wouldn't be shocked if at least one license holder said something to the effect of 'You can't have our character on screen at the same time as any other killer.'
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Anyone saying the OoO nerf hurts Solo is kinda silly because the perk was already bottom tier solo. The perk has a bad survival rate because it already was useless as a solo or even a duo. No nerf could negatively affect the perk for solo because the perk as a solo already was purely negative. While its true this is even worse for solo now (You can't choose not to use it) that doesn't... super matter.
The DS nerf doesn't affect solos as much as SWF because the hyper-aggressive DS play was a hallmark of SWF groups doing things like coordinating an assault on a gen using an immune player, more than rando players doing it. If you run from the killer while DS is up, DS's change won't do anything outside of a VERY specific addon interaction with styptic agent and syringe.
There are plenty of very real issues with the solo experience that need addressing. But lets not use BS smokescreens of the solo experience to try to defend DS as 'necessary' when the changes basically don't affect solo at all, forget about OoO which is probably the least used solo perk in the game.
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Matchmaking is bad because of an extreme disparity between killer and survivor players: The mori change happening without the key change lead to a pretty severe die off to the killer playerbase.
While its nice that the devs are trying to address problems for both sides, the sloppy way it was rolled out predictably lead to killers facing key game after key game after key game, and if you think getting mori'd feels bad remember keys are worse in many ways because unlike moris you have to KEEP PLAYING after they force your loss. The game might be overall killer sided, but its hard to argue that change being handled the way it was wasn't a massive 'screw you' to the killer population that really showed how little the devs actually think about the ramifications of how they roll things out: Mori change was good, but holy ######### it should have waited till the key change was done and it basically made killer unplayable for a few weeks after as people dumped their key stockpiles anticipating a nerf to keys.
So MM is never going to get fixed, because its not a MM problem. Its a "Survivor Qs are 20 minutes at peak hours at certain ranks and eventually the game has to just toss you into a match because your more likely to quit over never finding a game than having a badly balanced one" problem.
So how is that fixed? I dunno, killer players may come back after they cool off, but structurally there are problems with encouraging good Q times that could also be fixed. For example: changing the daily reward system from a 'play a character you never play' system to a 'Player in Need' system so the game tells you both that your Q time will be shorter and gives bonus BP for playing the role needed at your rank.
Also, changing balance updates to be less 'First we address killer needs, then we address survivor needs' alternating patch by patch which tends to really hit the survivor Q hard any time a big killer nerf goes through would help. Obviously a given patch may be better or worse for one side any given patch, but there is a reason most modern live service games work really hard to give a token buff to stuff any time a big tool for a character or side is nerfed, so that you still have reasons to be excited to play it that patch. Looks like they are doing this with the Undying Nerf-DS nerf this upcoming patch, so there is definitely hope on this front.
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@Madman_Abraham23 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1925209#Comment_1925209
That's just a single issue, he quite literally doesn't fit in the game. He's too tall and too powerful. And the suggestion to shorten him is idiotic. He wouldn't even need to injure survivors to pick them up. Not to mention that he does have any abilities that can be adapted into an in game power.
He is physically just a really strong dude. If Claire can survive the dude giving her a solid punch, so can Dwight. I think your dramatically overestimating the preformance of 'base' tyrants.
He DEFINITELY isn't too tall. He is literally just 7 foot tall, which makes him shorter than a lot of killers. He would be about doctor sized.
As for powers there are plenty. His charge is a good example of one, but he also has the faceshield which may address your 'but pallets and flashlights though' bit by giving him the ability to 'no-sell' them if expecting them. There is also his most famous aspect: Mr. X would be a prime candidate for a detection power, because that is what he is most famous for. If we were to take from the dubiously canon and doomed Resistance, this aspect was represented as a 'scan' ability that both let him find the survivors easier in that game and do MUCH more damage to them. So perhaps he could be a stalker who doesn't need LOS and is 'assigned' targets? Would be a neat way to make a killer who is legitimately rewarded for trying to go for a 12 hook.
Like, again, as a mega RE fan who literally modded his PS2 for the Japanese region when Outbreak US went down and who played Gaiden, you... don't seem to understand the capabilities of the BOWs that well. Also, DBD gets to be wonky with that anyway: Freddy and the Demo don't behave like their canon counterparts at ALL.
As for 'Pennywise is defeated by emotion' making It (heh) unsuitable: Uhhh... do you know where we are right now? ALL the killers in DBD are essentially defeated by the emotional whims of the entity. Pennywise is probably one of the most suited IPs for DBD because the entire conceit is the killer is restrained from killing the survivors until they kill their hope.
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Doctor is annoying as hell and DOES get some belly-aching, but he distrupts the game a bit less than Freddy and Spirit, and it is hard to argue he is 'unfair' so you get less salt. The killer getting free detection on you is bad, but you still can play ultimately the same way its just stealth tricks don't work as well and clean breaks from chases are much harder.
Spirit is hated because they disrupt looping and don't really pay too much for their power, and it doesn't have a ton of interaction. Other killers that prevent looping require a bit more skill or have more interaction, but any killer that makes looping a non-option is always going to be super controversial because the game drifts more and more to that being the only mode of play over time.
Freddy is different. Freddy isn't actually that annoying vs SWF, his power is useful but not absurd, he is like... a good version of clown basically in some ways. The problem is with how insanely oppressive he is vs Solos because his power is so much better if your team doesn't have the 5th perk of SWF in the form of comms, and aren't coordinating doing gens. So he is a rare example of something being too oppressive on the casual level, the '2015 Akali' if you will, of DBD.
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Also if we get a RE survivor and don't get a Tofu skin that makes hiding completely impossible I will RIOT.
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@Madman_Abraham23 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1924494#Comment_1924494
I thought about that too and I like that you mentioned it, but it takes literal grenades and serious firepower to stun those guys. Pallets do not equal heavy ordinance.
A subway worker wildly swinging a lead pipe can stun Thanatos, who is basically a roided out Mr. X.
You can also do it with pistol rounds to the head, knives, ect. I mean you basically HAVE to get good at doing this to beat Tofu survivor. The BOWs are insanely tough, but they still feel pain, and generally are 'surprised' by it before getting mad and becoming immune to it for a short time, rather than just being terminator grade immune to everything.
Mr. X specifically is probably the best BOW for the task in DBD in terms of the survivor stun tools affecting him. His flashlight blind could have maybe a special animation of him doing is funny 'hand in front of face' thing where he seems mystified that light (this time from a flashlight rather than a flashbang) can affect him, and he is fragile enough that the initial shock of a 9mm round to the head stuns him. So presumably a pallet might as well.
Generally BOWs are hard to kill, easy to stun, because a key feature of the RE games is that enemies are bullet sponges but you can use your rounds tactically to just get past them at a much lower 'cost.' The biggies are no exception, unless they are doing their mega attacks. So I could see X, thanatos, Nemesis, ect having abilities that allow them to insta-smash through pallets, but I don't think it would break my suspension of disbelief as a RE fan of such caliber that I casually reference outbreak like its a game people have played to see Mr X go "Wuh, pain exists?" against a pallet.
The main issue with Mr. X is that he would probably basically be very similar to Oni: He is known for huge charges and sweeping attacks that just floor people, and resistance to him starting easy but getting harder and harder as he isn't really hurt by anything, so much as initially shocked by it. Maybe an Oni who gets rage by staying in chases and getting slapped by pallets or blinded, which eventually lets him just ignore survivor tools like blinds and slams, rather than getting their super-mode by collecting blood? But that would be a weird gameplay loop.
Nemesis would probably not work too great because his main gimmick as one of the big BOWs is like... crazy guns and giant monster forms. Thanatos is not super well known and would just kinda be like... an alt Hillbilly? And Tyrant likewise would be like a weird alt blight or something.
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A huge gameplay mechanic of RE is that you can, in fact, stun massive BOWs. I mean I could literally imagine Nemesis, Thanatos, or Tyrant getting thwapped with a pallet and doing their 'small stun' animations, which tend to be them just standing still, not even flinching, and looking very slightly dazed.
Like... Nyx might not work in DBD (though it would be a hilarious change of pace to have the killer be this giant mobile blob of goo that shoots aoe tentacles everywhere) but Tyrant variants go 'Ooof that smarts...' plenty of times.
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Dead Hard is a mixed bag. It is the weakest exhaustion perk unless you use it to bypass a swing that you couldn't with sprint burst, in which case its the strongest besides maybe balanced landing on very specific maps. Really ace survivors use sprint burst to bait swings, and even if they don't its generally stronger, but you may find your good at using it to extend loops. If your not extending loops with it, it probably means SB is a better pick for ya.
WGLF is for points. Pickups with it don't make a ton of sense, you should be letting the survivor on the ground get that 95% anyway. If you want to farm points, its fine, just be aware that is what your doing with it.
Aftercare is you declaring you think you will be the last one hooked, or at least hooked late. You need to be good at hook rescues but if you are its a better bond. If your not, just run bond. My tip is to ensure there is gen pressure before going for rescues.
DS is fine to run. Its annoying for killers, and if you were advocating it SHOULDN'T change I would think your a dink. But you shouldn't hold back, that is scrub mentality. There is a difference between recognizing a tool is a problem and talking about it openly as such, and artificially holding yourself back. Play to win here. Especially as you seem to be a 'in your face rescue' build, you kinda gotta do it sometimes.
Some thoughts:
Are you going to use aura reading to track the killer and keep yourself safe with that information? If not, and you plan to be 'agro' you may not want to bother.
Consider swapping WGLF for BT because your basically building a hook rescuer and this lets you be way more agro about it.
Iron will is really good, and is another good candidate. It basically lets you get away with not bothering to heal which saves a LOT of time.
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I think the rework is great. The main problem with old OOO is that the killer had no real ability to counterplay it, and it was too controllable by SWF to just constantly get info on killers.
The new OOO still lets someone 'shotcall' for SWF, but its less stable and the killer can time it too, so they can actively play around it now, which is awesome: You can try to do things like bluff chases or commits or double back to place a trap after walking past the spot you were going to put it.
The main issue is that the levels have a Discordance style inverse scaling: In many ways level 1 is stronger than level 3 if you want it just to read auras when killers read your aura. As such, I think the leveling should change to something else and the frequency be a flat 30 seconds. Perhaps "You read their aura for an additional 0-1-2 seconds" so you get a little more information than the killer during the pulses.
I also think all future evaluation for this, and any other 'controllable information' perk, should be done with almost exclusively SWF, as the power of info gathering perks that affect the killer are MUCH stronger in that environment and are an extreme risk to game health due to information perks effectively applying to all survivors in a SWF group.
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I think the redesign is good. The main change I would make is the levels making the read happening more often is kinda a mixed bag and has the Discordance problem where L1 is low key better than L3.
I would much rather it change so that you get a 'lingering' aura read for 0-1-2 seconds longer than the killer's or something and have it sit flat at 30 seconds.
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Also, as to the real reason for the belly aching:
This IS a core change to DS. Survivors never really needed an anti-tunneling perk that does anything besides stop slugs, which BT already does. Tunneling is already a self-defeating strategy if the survivors make any attempt to counter it (A survivor can do 2.6 gens during a camped hook kill, so the killer WILL lose if they camp and don't snowball off it due to survivor error), so that was never why DS was popular.
DS was popular because survivors like having the ability to do the one thing survivors shouldn't be allowed to do: Ignore the killer's presence as an obstacle. As an anti-camping tool it is completely superfluous. But as a method of forcing progress into the game it is more akin to say... an extra brand new part, or a free medkit syringe, which obviously is really powerful when you think of it that way: It allows you to basically ignore the killer for one activity in a game where the killer's time is so tight that messing up say... twice... makes a game unwinnable if the survivors play well.
So that is the real reason for the belly aching. It isn't even just that people recognize the core perk isn't being nerfed, its that the core appeal of DS and why it was a meta-perk was because that was never the core appeal in the first place.
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@Mileena_Kahn said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1920788#Comment_1920788
Just like how killers got upset when their crutch perk undying got gutted? Hmm. Goes both ways. (:
Yes! Exactly! You get it!
I will say undying was 'better' for the game than DS was, as undying didn't invert a core feature of Killer-survivor interaction, but both were over-preforming and did weird things to the game and its power level, and weren't very fun to be used aggressively and constantly, so both got changed, and in both cases people got salty over it!
I have more sympathy towards killers over undying (It was unilaterally nerfed in the way it was meant to be used) than survivors over DS (It was nerfed in a way that doesn't affect the nominal appeal survivors pretend it has of anti-tunnel) but ultimately neither are necessary for either side to have so big belly aching about it is weird. I also can see the 'meta' complaint of killers as the Devs... well they don't favor the survivors per-say (the game is killer sided actually) the way they interact with the community biases VERY hard towards survivors, so the undying nerf being on the first 'meta' perk killers got in a while that changed the game and made it less hectic (I think ruin-undying proved killers need more base regression even if not THAT powerful) definitely makes the salt extra salty.
So its the same, but the survivor salt is extra unjustified. Not that it matters, people are gunna be salty over EVERYTHING. Survivors were salty about hatch standoffs going away for crying out loud, and killers were salty about losing the Machine Gun build. What matters more than belly-aching is 'How good is this for the core gameplay loop of DBD?' And DS was clearly... very much not.
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@Johnny_XMan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1920383#Comment_1920383
They have attempted something before but gave up on it. So my guess is they know it needs to change. Or why would they bother even attempting it?
Their attempt specifically confirmed that the game breaks if the killer can't tunnel and camp, and that tools specifically exist to stop it. Mainly, gen pressure.
If the killer is unable to defend objectives, killer gameplay breaks, because ALL THE KILLER CAN DO IS DEFEND OBJECTIVES. That is killer gameplay! The survivors have broad map presence but weak power, the killer has narrow map presence and strong power.
If you wanna unhook, you gotta earn it. If you have 3 survivors just running around the hook and no gens are getting done, GG EZ get WRECKED. If you got 1 person waiting by the hook and 2 people power doing gens the killer either has to commit to the chase with you to prog the game further or lose, and either way the survivor 'collective' wins there.
If you unhook and immediately hide? Or don't bodyblock? Congrats, your a terrible teammate! The killer isn't a machine, they have a right to play to win and not go out of their way to lose to you, and its DELIBERATELY EASIER to kill injured survivors due to the noise and the trail, so if you don't protect them they WILL die.
Like they said flat out after doing this experiment they are never going to do more to stop camping and tunneling for this reason. So don't twist this around to 'something will clearly come.'
Play at red ranks for even a day and you will see survivors who are very good at forcing the killer not to camp. And some who aren't, because ranks are a joke and its easy to climb. But its where you start seeing survivors who can actually play the game well and do things to punish killer behavior, and it makes it so clear that camping and tunneling isn't a problem for good survivors, because they know how to earn those second chances. You get in a chase with some red rank survivors that lasts for 1 minute and your already down to 2 gens, and you think the killer is going to after that sit at the hook for another 3? No way!
So its on you to force them to not have time to do that: It takes 2 minutes for a survivor to die on first hook. That is enough time for 3 survivors to *end the game.* So threaten that. You have so much spare time there you can do it with TWO survivors: 2 survivors can repair 5.2 gens in 2 minutes, so you can even have one lurking near hook waiting for the killer to get spooked and leave to unhook.
If your not having success with this method, it likely means your going for the rescue too fast (Territorial killers will often double back once or twice unless they really are panicking to test for survivors and look for scratch marks) or too overtly (Its not often the survivors should walk, but if the killer sees scratches near the hook you screwed up big), or your not like... good enough at skillchecks yet and have more fundamental problems than DS getting nerfed.
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"If the killer has two people hooked in basemenet and is defending it and catches you unhooking, what are you supposed to do?"
You are supposed to lose.
I say this sincerely, not in a 'git good' sense, but a 'core gameplay interaction' sense.
The idea that survivors 'need' a way to get cheeky in your face hook rescues from basement is framed as a 'well if I don't have this how am I going to play in this situation' manner, but its really describing the core problem with DS: it allowed survivors to power through loss conditions they had no right to power through.
Basement is MEANT to be dangerous. Killers hooking two survivors close together is MEANT to be game endingly powerful without BT. If you do ANYTHING in front of the killer without concern for their ability to reach you, you are MEANT to lose.
So if you get into the situation OP is describing? It meant not only do you 'deserve' to lose. It means the only fair possible outcome is you losing. You HAVE to lose, for the game to make sense.
The killer's entire mechanical interaction with the survivors is 'Can't be directly opposed, but can't be everywhere at once.' If the survivors ever have tools that allow them to progress the game 'in their face' the game is broken, because the only function of the killer is to block progression locally.
That means that if you get basement hooked in a bad spot? GG. Sometimes your SUPPOSED to die on first hook. It HAPPENS. Its a possibility for a reason! Because sometimes you make such a big mistake you lose your other 'lives.' You made a series of mistakes to allow that to happen that NEED to end the game for you. If you didn't loop by the basement, or sit near a gen there, or run there when it was a deadzone, you wouldn't be down there. If you had more gen pressure the killer couldn't safely defend it. So its on you.
NO TOOL should exist to do what OP wants to do. And the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the DS rework is to punish survivors who do dumb ######### like unhook in the killer's face just because they have DS. If your unhooking in basement? Your not getting tunneled, your doing an objective instead of choosing to run and reset yourself to 'neutral' and the killer MUST be allowed to stop you.
The purpose of DS is to allow you time to reset yourself to neutral (Uninjured, in an area the killer doesn't know where you are) after at least one unhook, or to give the killer a big time and effort penalty for failing to let that happen, NOT to allow you to turn the game around.
Saying "DS now no longer lets me unhook in the killer's face in the basement after getting hooked myself by someone sloppily rescuing me in their face" is akin to saying "Power Struggle doesn't let me get out after being the last survivor in a deadzone with no pre-built wiggle time or hook spreading offerings during the end game collapse when the hatch is closed." Like... yeah, sure doesn't. Good. Your in a loss condition, you don't always have the right to get back into the game, that is why its called a 'loss condition' and not a 'whatever condition.'
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For one most of the people playing killers are the highly competitive type because of how grindy the game has gotten for killers. So someone suiciding on hook kinda sucks the fun out of it and puts you in a position to play out a lame game where you look like even more of the badguy. Last night I had two games with 2 DCs who quit when I won my first chase against them in the first 2 minutes of the match and I decided to just finish the game fast so I could play a real game and got so much hate post game.
The other thing is that hooks are an opening for the killer to snowball, especially late game. So someone suiciding on hook can suck the wind out of your sails, though its a valid tactic if gates are open or to get the hatch open, or otherwise to protect your teammates.
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I think that DS EITHER needed to disable on lockers OR have a timer in addition to the deactivation. So it still allowing lockers is fine, it gives some counterplay to slugging but doesn't really break killer's stride like old DS did. If DS didn't have a timer and was just 'turn off once you do an objective of some sort' I would agree lockers would be too much.
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@Nossy said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1916309#Comment_1916309
I like this idea but I'll add this : not working if you're the last survivor or if you take a protect hit, cause it will be abuse unless.
Sfw will dedicate a bodyblocker surv for the whole game and lot of solos will stop playing the game and wait for hatch knowing they have a free pass (will be bad for survivors teamplay).
Having a dedicated bodyblocker the entire game is a bad plan because your extending chases by one hit or, worse, the killer just taking a few extra seconds to walk around you, in exchange for 'killing' that survivor.
Not being allowed to work on gens, unhook, heal, ect, means that if a survivor wants to 'hold' DS for tactical reasons they are trading an entire survivor, essentially making it at 3v1, for whatever advantage they get. Any killer knows how good it is to be down to a 3v1 in even a 2 gen situation, so I doubt survivors would ever choose to hold DS unless they were very sure the killer was actually tunneling. It might lead to BLUFFS that you were on a gen, but honestly that sounds like good gameplay.
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I think the better fix is 'infinite duration until you do anything to progress the game.' So you can't game it with chase mechanics, and slugging doesn't affect it.
This seems really strong, but it actually isn't. If the killer slugs you and 'can't pick you up' they still have a lot of momentum from that slug and someone having to get you, and if you just try to 'bait' the DS by never repairing the killer wins because its a survivor 'killed' before even their second hook.
So survivors can 100% know they won't lose their next hook state without doing something like healing someone, starting the unhooking animation, cleansing, repairing, or entering a locker, but killers 100% know that it won't hit them if they leave that survivor alone unless the survivor does so much nonsense DS doesn't gain them time. This allows it to be hard anti-tunnel but also in a way that rewards the killer for excellent play rather than punish them for it.
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@ASpazNamedSteve said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1916228#Comment_1916228
That's a ridiculously specific example for what is really a very simple request.
And again, the simplicity of your request would matter at all if I was talking about 'difficulty to implement' and not 'effect on the map pool.'
Yes, adding a map would be a trivial effort. I don't think it SHOULD happen. It absolutely CAN happen. BL is meant to be a risky map dependent perk. Sometimes it coming up a dud is important because other times it absolutely trashes, and on most maps it does something.
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When I get to red ranks in a reset I will make an effort to use a map or ward every game. I can generally win even on nightmare scenario maps, but it isn't fun, and seeing a bunch of people who built around a map find themselves on like... Game or either Estate is very funny.
As survivor I ensure my stack uses an offering every match, of course. Survivors have so much power in offerings and its absurd not to use it.
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@Shirokinukatsukami said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1916228#Comment_1916228
I have literally never seen a 4 stack BL group in this game ever since the nerf. BL used to be everywhere but today you see one once in a blue moon. The perk is not that good.
I have gone up against 2 BL squads at rank 1 today due to Lampkin. Its still solidly A tier, it just requires you to feel confident in the map pool your going to, which is part of why Lampkin is such a huge problem and why single realm maps overall create a big issue due to survivors having map control. So anything that makes balanced more risky to run even if you run an offering is good in my book.
BL is the best exhaustion perk if you KNOW a loop has a drop, especially a window drop, due to how those multiply the distance you get. Its so absurdly frustrating for the killer, which, again, matters way more than if its actually good. Because balanced landing has the least interaction of any of the exhaustions, you just get a metric crapton of free distance.
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The main thing killer needs IMO is a lot of QOL love.
The game is killer sided. Killers are the stronger role. A good killer playing perfectly should win every time.
But killer is also the more frustrating, busy, and hampered role. Basically everything about killer is designed to be as infuriating as possible. Stuff like constant camera locks, the ability to be blinded while you lack control over your camera, loops as the main game mechanic over stuff like hiding or break aways (and to be clear survivors need loops, juke based gameplay died with the survivor speed waaaay back when), and lots of other mechanics that allow a survivor to openly 'brute force' past you or otherwise have power in a situation they shouldn't.
DS+UB is actually really important to consider, because while is meta and strong, it isn't so strong killers can't win if they play well, it changes basically nothing about the 'ideal' win condition of snowballing save adding an extra step. But it is so ABSURDLY INFURIATING to killers because it creates a scenario where despite the survivor not even trying to escape you they have more power than you.
Other problems include stuff like lacking a real way to concede (End game collapse actually upsets me because it was downright OPTIMIZED to let survivors bully killers), a refusal to buff killers to be interesting or impactful, and nerfing tools killers have that make the game smoother and less frustrating. For example, ruin undying was too strong, but it also solved a problem where good killer play moment to moment wasn't rewarding at all unless you were playing amazingly the entire time. It gave you a concrete reward for correctly pressuring gens and allowed you to meaningfully extend the game for good tracking. Did it need a nerf? Sure. But its no wonder killers are furious because their tools are constantly nerfed in ways that remove the positives of them while survivor tools get nerfed in meaningful ways that maintain the intense negatives for the killer.
Killer is also physically exhausting. The camera locks are some of the best in gaming so it isn't physically nauseous save for nurse, but it still makes killer gameplay fatiguing. And killers have no downtime, they have to be constantly doing things all the time, so every little bit adds up and causes killers to quit.
And to be clear, its obviously why most of this stuff is in the game, mechanically it mostly works fine: Camera locks allow survivors to try to do more jukes and evasion based strategies which are cool. Its just that it all adds up in a really negative way for the killer experience which makes winning a killer game not feel good unless its a total blowout, and losing a killer game a nightmare as your forced to continually actively participate in your loss to do dumb stuff like run people out.
So what do I think killer needs?
1: More punishment for 'longer' bodyblocks such as it auto-damaging you after 2 seconds or something of uninterrupted contact with you not moving away. Pinning the killer to the wall should be an insane strategy, you should be trying to eat a hit or buy a few seconds not physically halt the killer entirely.
2: Get rid of camera lock blinds. Yes, this makes flashlights even worse, but as we learned from Deathgarden maybe having a major interaction component be '######### with a player's vision' is not fun and contributes to a lot of burnout.
3: A real surrender system. Killers should be able to end the game with a 'GG you win' rather than have survivors run around them and teabag until they start chasing again despite the gates being 99'd.
4: More base regression in kit. Killers seriously need this, like I think killers should get a 'mini pop' base kit so that killers feel way more rewarded for winning a chase. Bonus points: It teaches killers not to camp without a very good reason.
For meta changes that I think are more critical, because I think the killer die-off was way more 'Ok this game doesn't treat us well' rather than 'the game has a lack of balance':
5: Actual consideration to the EMOTIONAL impact of changes for killers, like they do for survivors, rather than just making it purely for the survivor's emotional needs. The devs treat killers and survivors EXTREMELY differently, and the mori nerf is a prime example of, frankly, scummy behavior. Its so telling they didn't warn the killers about the mori change because it would make survivors feel bad to have a week or two of killers using their moris, but killers have to just deal with keys for an indefinite period still as survivors burn through em as fast as they can. Like holy ######### that was just awful and its no wonder survivor Qs are 20 minutes now you treat killers like garbage, that was the kinda stuff that lead to the killer strike but now killers don't even want to talk to the devs anymore because its so clear its all appeasement.
6: Get off the stats based balancing holy crap. OoO needed to go a year ago how the hell is it still in the game? Actually think about what things do to the gameplay loop when it negatively affects killers, rather than just what it does mechanically. The idea that OoO or Keys weren't a problem because their win rate wasn't high is so amazingly dumb and ignores why people hate these mechanics. Its way more critical for the game to feel good to play than the game having a balanced win rate: this is why its ok that NOED is bad for example, because emotionally its a powerful perk that does good things for the game. This is why its bad that Adrenaline is so good: It feels awful for adrenaline plays to happen for the killer and while this high point is great for survivors that is ultimately what most killers feel is the only consideration here and it combos awfully with DS-Unbreakable.
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@WishIcouldmain said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1916202#Comment_1916202
I don't think it'd be hard to put in one hill. Not like I'm asking for a whole rework
Right but that is an incoherent response because my argument wasn't 'it would be too hard to rework.' It is 'It should NOT be reworked.'
I like a map that exists to tell a 4 stack balanced landing group who got black warded after trying to send me to Lampkin Lane to go to hell, personally.
Killers have to deal with their perks and, worse, powers, potentially not being helpful map to map. Survivors have more control over the map, arguably the consequences of not getting a good map should be worse. And that map pool generally has some pretty good drop options, so having a 'dud' in the pool for a BL strategy feels important to prevent it from people rolling it after Lampkin hopefully gets obliterated.
The map definitely could use a bit more because the pool isn't so strong that it needs a 'You might just lose sending killer here' like say... Farm does, but I think it being very flat helps keep the pool balanced.
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Survivors have so much control over the map though that it honestly is fine for each map pool to have maps that disfavor them or make certain perks situational.
Like we can look at ensuring balanced landing is good on every map once we fix totem spawns and make Huntress better on indoor maps. And I don't mean that as a 'whataboutism.' I mean that in a sincere 'The maps are intentionally asymetric and we absolutely shouldn't prioritize making Balanced landing safer when the asymmetry already heavily disfavors killers and making maps more globally survivor positive actually will hurt the game' sense.
Balanced is an EXTREMELY strong exhaustion perk on certain maps, better than any other, and you not taking any map based risk for using it is a bad thing, especially because its not just strong, its worse, its FRUSTRATING for the killer. And the reason survivor Q times are 20 minutes long despite killer being the stronger role is survivors keep bullying through changes that make killer more and more frustrating despite the fact a good killer should almost always 4k.
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Sprint burst is MUCH stronger because the reward for baiting the wiff is way larger, and you can if you know what you are doing 99 it and basically have it on demand much like DH.
DH is better in some niche situations vs some powers. It is also better 'in loop' than sprintburst, which extends the initial chase, but much weaker in the initial chase. However, extending 'mid loop' is much less strong than being able to sprintburst after baiting a swing and making it out of a deadzone and basically running to anywhere you want on the map before you even have to run your first loop.