dezzmont
dezzmont
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The most important way to handle tunneling is to understand WHY it happens: good killers will tunnel if they think no one is doing gens, because it punishes that behavior. Good killers won't (generally) tunnel if they suspect people are doing gens, because tunneling is very inefficient time wise as it minimizes global pressure.
This means you ABSOLUTELY must do your best to betray the fact your dedicated to a rescue, or trying to save someone from a chase. You must either ACTUALLY be on a gen, or ensure the killer has no idea where you are so they THINK your on a gen. Half the survivor team wants to be on a gen at all times to prevent the killer from just doing whatever he wants.
Think of being on a gen as 'damaging' the killer. If your in a more traditional game and not attacking someone at all, of course they are just going to super efficiently murder your entire team, your not doing anything to stop them. Gens is how you stop the killer. A killer who suddenly has 2, or worse, 3 gens, pop on them, knows their tunnel/camp strategy screwed up and that if they keep doing it odds are extremely good the survivors will just finish the rest of the gens before they down or kill the survivor they are focusing on. They HAVE to give it up, or lose.
Some bad killers will take the L to ensure one survivor also takes the L. Gotta take that in stride, you just 'won' the match overall, with 1 survivor 'losing' and the killer losing, allowing 3 other survivors to win. The team overall benefited from the tunnel and you can go into next match trying to ensure the survivor that got tunneled isn't first on hook again.
Overall, you need to force the killer to be afraid of you, to be anxious. If your not giving them anything else to think about, they aren't going to DO anything else. A killer isn't going to give up a kill out of the goodness of their hearts, and you can't steal the kill from them. You gotta MAKE them give it up.
Some more situational tips on avoiding tunneling:
Try to not be the first down, by not instantly gluing yourself to a gen until your aware of what other survivors are doing and if anyone is in a chase, if you are solo. In solo you have no control over if other survivors go for 'instarescues,' AKA hook farming, that do nothing but get them points and rapidly accelerate your death. If your off hook, you can be patient and do a gen, see if a rescue happens, and if it doesn't THEN rescue.
On top of that, be very careful not to go down super early. You really want people to have time to get a gen half done before anyone goes down at LEAST or else the killer can tunnel you out at the cost of maybe 3 half gens, which is an extremely good deal for them. Also, killers will consider you the weakest link and will try to eliminate you fast if you go down absurdly early, and other survivors are likewise less likely to want to help you if they think you are a weak player who will just go down again.
Don't rescue recklessly. The tiers are a LOT of time, and its generally better to rescue later in a tier than immediately, because its safer for a survivor. A bad rescue is WORSE than not rescuing the survivor, because you accelerate their death and allow the killer to pressure 2 survivors at once: You weren't on gens in order to rescue, paying time that got the team nothing, AND you gave the killer an extra odd 30 seconds because you took away an entire hook state. Failed rescues are the WORST THING you can do as a survivor in DBD, and the best thing that can happen to a killer. You absolutely cannot give them up, and can't expect a killer to not brutally capitalize on sloppy rescues.
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There isn't anything wrong with camping or tunneling. These strategies may or may not be optimal at any given moment, but they are strategies in your toolbox you should be willing to bust out if it looks like they will be optimal. The main reason survivors complain a lot about them is that these are strategies based around hooking dynamics, and the hook is by design a negative experience for survivors, so strategies to optimize the usage of the hook tend to make survivors feel bad. But tough cookies, a hook state is MEANT to make you feel bad and not want it to happen buds!
However, the power level of these strategies can be worth looking at. Even though we should always take complaints about a mechanic that by its nature MUST disempower the survivor team to function with a grain of salt, we should look at how the mechanic works to understand it for potential future designs.
Camping is about as weak as it can be before the game breaks. The devs have experimented a lot with trying to nerf it further and it just results in killer gameplay falling through because they suddenly can't play 'correctly' in response to survivor actions anymore: the killer needs to be empowered to notice that the survivors are behaving overly-altruistically (ex: Having two people both constantly trying to decoy the killer at the same time on opposite ends of the hook like some rookie survivors do) and punish that behavior. It results in a lot of slugging as a BEST case scenario. So nerfing camping is right out, if we want to discourage camping, the stick won't work anymore and the carrot for giving up a survivor without immediately starting another chase has to be better. This is especially rough because killers low key don't care as much as securing the kill on the hook as using the hook event to try to start something with ANOTHER survivor, so nerfs that prevent the hook kill are misaligned because they don't understand the motivation of camping anyway. Maybe, for example, a non-totem variant of Devour Hope with a less intense final reward makes sense. Maybe making the 'tier 1' effect of the speed boost on devour hope base kit makes sense: strongly encourage the killer to try to find an immediate extra chase to snowball if they think they can. Maybe the base effect of being hooked without being sacrificed could be made worse, like a permanent gen repair speed reduction that makes each hook state almost like killing a 'piece' of a survivor? Does Dying Light need to be buffed and reworked to tier up on unhooks? There is a lot of room to play with how a killer relates to hooks without making camping worse, and encourage more dynamic play, but there isn't a lot of room to make the killer view being near the hook as bad. So any future camping fixes need to come at this from a 'how do we make killers want to do something other than punish survivors going for a rescue' angle, rather than a 'how do we make killers not feel good about punishing survivors going for a rescue' angle.
Tunneling is a bit different and varies heavily both with perks and the nature of the survivor team. Often its ideal NOT to kill a weak survivor player too quickly if you think the other survivors will waste time on them. As a pig main, if I quickly down someone with a hat on already after getting a quick first down, I start slugging them instead of hooking them because I want them in the game, knowing they are unlikely to do gens but demand attention from other survivors to heal them. But if I am say... a Trapper or a Myers, I want someone out of the game ASAP to make my chase pressure better. In regards to tunneling, the survivor tools to counter it I would say are 'strong but fair' at this point, with DS and BT both being extremely strong ways to force killers to not instantly finish you, but at the same time having very obvious counter-play and still having 'costs' to the survivor team. There might be room to make tunneling worse, but because securing kills efficiently is a huge part of killer gameplay this is also a dangerous area to play with, and it may be we more should look at rewards for not tunneling (Pyramid Head is a great example of this), or more tools to allow survivors to stop their own tunnel (without making them stack so efficiently that the killer, again, can't eliminate a survivor they are consistently outplaying or dedicating a lot of resources towards removing).
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Yes. Make getting into a chase more scary.
Not even joking. DBD's game systems are all amazingly simple and mostly function as a game due to the emotional intensity of a match. If survivors ever feel too 'safe' then M1 actions stop feeling exciting because your not trying to anticipate the killer's moves, looking over your shoulder, or worried about how a gen's placement exposes you.
Weaker loops means more anxiety during M1. Anxiety in DBD is good. This is why during the 'vacuum pallet' era the number one concern of survivors was how boring gens were: If suddenly you could sprintburst to a pallet which created a massive 'reset' in effective chase distance, suddenly anticipating the killer and doing things like preemptively hiding or getting a head start don't matter. You didn't care. The pallet was strong enough that you didn't need to worry, so you didn't, and now all you were doing was a bad Mario party minigame.
This is why the addition of good terror radius reducing perks to the game was a great thing, and why vacuum pallets being removed spiced up survivor gameplay enough that I could tolerate playing it again. Loops are still arguably a bit too strong, but I now care if a Wraith or any killer with Tinkerer suddenly is on my booty because starting the chase with a lead is much more important, and badly positioned gens now actually matter and are dangerous to do.
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I don't see this being productive unless they also did something like turn off aura reading to see how much they could force the game to transition to being stealth based, because Bloodlust 1 being bloodlust 2 is uhhh... already something we can anticipate the outcome of, while Bloodlust 1 going away entirely, despite having a somewhat predictable outcome of making the game kinda suck, would vary in scale.
I don't think such a major test would be popular either. Maybe a 'labs' game mode, where a bunch of things are changed together to make it a 'fun new game mode' while trying to test various things.
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@gatsby said:
No 110% Killer should be looping without using their power. The reason 110 Killers have the slow movement speed is because their powers own Survivors in chase if you know what you’re doing.
This is true, but some looping power is necessary for most 110s because the 110 movespeed band is the 'Uses powers but doesn't totally ignore loops' band.
You need enough threat to force them to transition loops at a reasonable time. Huntress and Deathslinger literally can't hit over MANY common obstacles because part of their power set presumes some ability to loop.
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Here is the thing: Devs used to be blatantly survivor sided. Post-vacuum pallets were a... moment in the game's history, and Bloodlust are a big part of that history. Like 'Collective bargaining' was involved, it was a THING.
So in some ways bloodlust is a symbol of progress of the devs not totally dumpstering the killer experience by introducing core system changes to fix their problems like they were constantly doing for survivors at the time.
I think it is pretty reasonable for killers to be agro considering the 'metatext' of bloodlust, its symbolic importance to the relationship between killers and the devs. Because bloodlust was a bandaid patch, sure. But it also was like... a concession and recognition of humanity after a really nasty struggle where the game legit just almost freaking died due to systemic mistreatment of a portion of the playerbase that has less power over the game due to their smaller size and being less monetizable.
In addition there is a long history of negative 'base system' changes for killer. Swivelhook, camping penalties, vacuum pallets (which are a whole thing. 90% of the time any survivor says 'Devs pay attention to killers too!' they list a vacuum pallet bandaid fix that wasn't actually 'for' killers but an attempt to get them to tollerate that mess. None of those 'count' as killer buffs, they are a desperate attempt to keep vacuums in despite them clearly being a bad idea), mori nerfs, ect. Many of these were, in fact, good changes, but it was super noticeable that 'changes that were clearly good for the game' happened very fast for survivors, but extremely slowly for killers. Swivel was added basically as soon as it was thought of. Changing the hatch standoff mechanics in order to make endgame not an almost auto-lose for the killer took AAAAAAAGEEEES.
So that adds salt to the wound for the 'test' in that its a sudden system change on killers yet again when we were sorta... past that and were starting to get ACTUAL killer TLC. And its being done to a very symbolically important system (and one that doesn't... actually affect the game that much either way and just ensures infinite don't actually occur anymore). So I wouldn't say 'Devs are survivor sided again, its 2017 all over again! The dark times have returned!'
But I definitely can see why every killer is panicing out of their minds with almost 'Changelog PTSD.' To be honest I hate this test on many levels beyond the actual impact on the game for this reason. It is such a... step backwards for community management.
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@AggressiveFTW said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1766986#Comment_1766986
Wdym? Bloodlust tier 1 is the only one that doesn't reward bad playstyle by killer. Tier 2 and 3 are the ones that are called Bloodlust farming or whatever. Most of the killers that farm Bloodlust are in low ranks and not skilled.
Bloodlust also rewards high skill killers who achieve extremely good pressure. If your going to 2 or 3 every chase forever your obviously not that good, but having a mechanic that forces survivors to either clean end the chase or lose a hit if their team can't pressure the killer back isn't the worst thing.
I guess the best way to put it is 'If the killer is investing 45+ seconds into you, and your not popping 2 gens, is the killer REALLY bad for doing so, or did they just notice that no one is repairing?'
That said I wouldn't shed a tear for Tier 3, which actually IS a 'loops forcibly over' mechanic. Tier 2 has its moments for endgame/high pressure scenarios but you should be able to clear basically any loop with it very quickly unless its a safe and that is a super niche thing to need.
Tier 1 is just unambiguously good for the game IMO. Survivors shouldn't feel super comfortable sitting in the killer's LOS without a lot of stuff between them and Tier 1 helps prevent that. Looping is sorta an unintended feature of DBD overall and sadly is now the only real way to survive because survivors mover slower overall, but at least requiring survivors to try to run the killer through the map rather than on one really good building is an ideal outcome in this post-juke world.
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@TheClownIsKing said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767174#Comment_1767174
Probably not, but the speed at which the combo I mentioned allows one to heal themselves, and heal others can’t be understated.
Sometimes 1 quick self heal, and 1 or 2 quick heals of teammates can be exactly what turns the game around.
Sure. I mean I run self care. Again I am an old crusty and mistrust my teammates at all time because I am from a different age when 'If I suspect these people are potatoes I am just gunna do 2 gens and search for the hatch' was a meta way to play. We are talking 'pre-SWF' days.
Self Care is good if your REALLY in it for yourself. Most perks have some viable play state, especially outside of SWF. Its just if you want to be 'maximum sweaty' you wouldn't run it in a million bajillion years. But who wants to be max sweaty?
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@duhffee said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767028#Comment_1767028
There are plenty of issues on both sides, but it's really not fair to say the devs ignore killers. As someone who tends to play surv, I find it to be the opposite. So I'd say it's just the devs at this point not understanding proper balancing in this game still lol
This is complicated because while its true that NOW killers are getting more love than before, Its critical to remember a lot of the fixes in recent history are fixes not to things that just were part of the game, but fixes to a laundry list of problems capitulating to survivors to add vacuum pallets to the game, which... basically broke DBD for all of 2018 and a lot of 2019, and that ultimately killers DID recieve a lot of... active neglect from the BHVR.
So when a lot of killers say 'the devs don't care about killers' it isn't literally true, but there is definitely truth behind that feeling, and I think it is fair for killers to be SUPER MISTRUSTING of the devs as a result. Sure, we are at the point where Killers aren't just in 'damage control' mode but actually getting proactive love, there is such a long history of neglect that we should still like... actively be trying to earn back killer trust.
To put it another way? Its super messed up that the first major live game test was dumped on killers as a nerf to a system that was added in response to killers literally unionizing and resorting to collective bargaining tactics to fix super critical issues in the game, when there is a long history of core systems being changed willy-nilly and just annihilating killer gameplay. The unfair handling of the two sides of the community has a pretty long history with lots of instances of changes being very quickly forced on killers and not being reverted for a long time, while necessary killer changes are 'tested and itterated' indefinitely.
Bloodlust is a huge part of this history and represents a concession necessary to fix things that everyone agrees in hindsight were completely broken that had to be torn through a lot of rage and shouting out of BHVR's hands in a way that was actually completely pathetic and shameful.
So to a lot of killers, this sudden test being 'anti-killer' is a flashback to stuff like Swivelhook, or the endless reign of DS completely nuking the game for them. The fact that things are better now and we actually get cool things for killers like reworks and modernizations that fix longstanding issues that aren't just 'We are trying to avoid nerfing vacuum pallets and thus this isn't a killer buff but an attempt to keep survivors super broken' doesn't really... erase that history, and we aren't actually that far out from it.
So Devs really just... shouldn't foist super negative sweeping changes into the laps of killers willy nilly ever? It isn't an 'on balance' thing anymore, it has a lot to due with the economic incentives of asymmetric games encouraging devs to minimize with the 'few' side and overly-generous to the 'many' side. Its... I think fair to say pretty obvious the devs would never force a sudden nerf on survivors as a test, which is kinda screwed up, even if things have been actually on an upswing for killers recently.
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@ZaKzan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767180#Comment_1767180
You do know that if MMR takes account of the emblem system, chases are 25% of the emblems you can earn.
I also brought that up as one possibility among many. Bloodlust certainly affects kill rates as I have pointed out.
With bloodlust, you can secure your 3k and 4k much easier because you don't need to worry about gens being rushed, and if there's 2 survivors left you can make the conscious choice to guarantee a 3k instead of risking a 2k by utilizing bloodlust 3. So I got a 2k, and I can pad my stats by guaranteeing a 3k through bloodlust 3, does this make me a 3k killer in terms of MMR?
Lets say that the system weighs emblems more than kills. If I down all survivors at the start of a match and kill them all, am I a bad killer? According to the emblem system I am, even though I was so good, I decimated an entire team.
This game is not chess, and comparing it to chess is meaningless, since there is a clear win condition in chess.
"You do know that if MMR takes account of the emblem system, chases are 25% of the emblems you can earn."
Right, and?
"With bloodlust, you can secure your 3k and 4k much easier because you don't need to worry about gens being rushed, and if there's 2 survivors left you can make the conscious choice to guarantee a 3k instead of risking a 2k by utilizing bloodlust 3. So I got a 2k, and I can pad my stats by guaranteeing a 3k through bloodlust 3, does this make me a 3k killer in terms of MMR?"
Your calling "Achieving the only victory condition of the killer as "padding your stats."
Again, that is like saying, after you take most of your opponent's pieces in chess, that your going to 'pad your stats' by getting a checkmate.
An MMR system that assumes players playing intelligently are 'bad players' because you think a tool they are using to do it is unfair is the height of silliness and is absolutely not how MMR systems are designed because doing so results in MMR systems that 'lie' about how good players are.
If a killer plays exceptionally well to the point *the survivors cannot possibly escape them* which allows them to burn 30+ seconds of time on a single chase? That isn't 'padding stats' and trying to pretend that killer is 'bad' for focusing down survivors is downright silly. Your acting like the killer didn't 'earn' the last two kills when they absolutely clearly did, or that they shouldn't tunnel down survivors when the survivors aren't pressuring gens.
Again, pressure management is like... the foundational mechanic of all of killer play. Your imagining that a good killer is one who can close loops quickly but that absolutely isn't the case, which is why its ONLY 25% of the ranking system that deals directly with winning chases, and, again, that emblem deliberately was designed to not punish killers who couldn't fully down a survivor quickly because that is ultimately not a super critical killer skill in the grand scheme of killer gameplay.
"This game is not chess, and comparing it to chess is meaningless, since there is a clear win condition in chess."
There is a clear win condition in DBD!
Furthermore, the Chess ELO system is the basis for most ranking systems in the world for a reason: it doesn't CARE if its chess or not. It cares about win rates and loss rates (And you can do more to 'add onto' it, but its ALWAYS based on 'after the fact' information).
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@Freki said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767176#Comment_1767176
match making is NOT off. it is how it has been historically. if it takes a while to find a match the system widens the search for the match so you see larger +/- range
this is pure conspiracy theory and honestly is not backed up by anything. when someone claims NDA when asked for evidence 99.999% of the time there is none.
I have been under NDA with game companies. This dude is not under an NDA with BHVR because tossing out 'theories' related to information you have through NDA is a fantastic way to very visibly violate your NDA.
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I couldn't see this happening, a big part of how perks 'work,' especially for survivors, is that your 'missing' something. I could see some perks (ex: No mither) basically getting more benefits (No mither really should come with 100% grunt reduction), but I can't see a 5th perk slot.
That said, I COULD see killers getting a second offering slot. Survivors have way too much control over offerings compared to the killer which has lead to some bad outcomes regarding things like realm playrates.
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@ZaKzan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767123#Comment_1767123
Bloodlust alters both chase times and kills. This is especially true when there's 1-2 survivors, giving the killer much more killing efficiency than they should have and padding their stats, leading to weird matchmaking.
While it is true that bloodlusting will lose the killer the game, it is not true at lower skill levels, and it is also not true when the killer uses it to zone out survivors to guarantee a kill. We have no idea how MMR was calculated, but if it was calculated through chase times, this would lead to less chase time as the killer would have to ultimately spend more time downing the survivor chasing them normally instead of bloodlusting at a single tile, if it was calculated through kills, this would give a killer an unfair kill, which would skew their skill level.
Chasing down one survivor, bloodlusting them, then hooking them and camping them until they died is not skillful, but according to an MMR system based around chasing and killing, it would be. Bloodlust also affects certain killers differently, which also makes things much worse in terms of determining player skill. Trapper relies more heavily on bloodlust than nurse does, but a 3k trapper and a 3k nurse are the same in the MM's eyes. Remove bloodlust and that same trapper is now a 2k trapper and the nurse still a 3k nurse.
Please explain how bloodlust would not affect MMR.
We can be fairly sure that the MM system isn't looking 'inside the game' because that isn't how MM systems generally work.
ELO and other skill rating systems deliberately avoid looking 'inside' the games and making assumption about skill because these simple algorithms can't make judgement calls on when something was a good idea. For example, in GENERAL, taking powerful pieces early in Chess means your a stronger player, but there are so many situations where good players will willingly 'trade down' in order to get a better position that trying to evaluate how good a player is using that metric *at all* is a very bad one.
Instead, ELO systems and the like look at the end result and how consistently you can achieve it. If you can, by definition your a strong player, and you don't need to program an algorithm that can evaluate nuanced high level strategies of a complex game to do it.
In the case of DBD, ELO evaluating chase time or how often you win chases as a method of determining how good a killer you are would be bad because, again, it assumes an instrumental goal done in play is the goal that is being optimized. But killers aren't optimizing how often they win chases each match, they are trying to win the match overall via kills or the emblem system. So we can be fairly sure that is what the MMR system values. Otherwise you will get the MMR system saying things like 'This killer chased two survivors, and only downed one" or 'This killer chased a survivor and then broke off when they got to a jungle gym and realized they were being baited off the gens, losing the chase" which will result in it assuming highly skilled killers doing things like pressuring multiple survivors at once or maintaining pressure on gens at the expense of losing a chase are 'bad killers' when in reality these are high skill plays.
The game already has (helpfully numerical) scores to track how good you did as a killer that don't assume things about your playstyle: Emblems and, to a lesser extent, kills vs escape rates. We can assume the MMR system is valuing those two things. I can't say with 100% certainty the MMR system isn't looking at chase lengths or victories, but I will say that even for BHVR I am 99.999% certain that the MMR system doesn't give a fiddly dee about that because it would A; be way more work, and B; BHVR already clearly understands breaking off chases sometimes is good because they literally programmed that into the Chaser emblem.
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I am an old crusty who was playing back when Trapper was the only killer, so I have a huge soft spot for self care, but I do agree its probably not optimal.
Self care wastes a LOT of time, so if your playing stacked or at a high level with other survivors you can trust to not be air-heads, its probably not ideal to run it anymore. It isn't worthless, unlike Otz I wouldn't be mad seeing someone running it, but it is very solidly off-meta because there are much better ways to recover health. Healing with self care 4 times without a medkit requires 32 seconds, so if you do it twice you just wasted an entire minute of the game.
If you use charge addons, you can get 4 uses out of a medkit without self care or Botany. Are you really going to get hit 5 times in a game?
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@ZaKzan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1767123#Comment_1767123
Bloodlust alters both chase times and kills. This is especially true when there's 1-2 survivors, giving the killer much more killing efficiency than they should have and padding their stats, leading to weird matchmaking.
While it is true that bloodlusting will lose the killer the game, it is not true at lower skill levels, and it is also not true when the killer uses it to zone out survivors to guarantee a kill. We have no idea how MMR was calculated, but if it was calculated through chase times, this would lead to less chase time as the killer would have to ultimately spend more time downing the survivor chasing them normally instead of bloodlusting at a single tile, if it was calculated through kills, this would give a killer an unfair kill, which would skew their skill level.
Chasing down one survivor, bloodlusting them, then hooking them and camping them until they died is not skillful, but according to an MMR system based around chasing and killing, it would be. Bloodlust also affects certain killers differently, which also makes things much worse in terms of determining player skill. Trapper relies more heavily on bloodlust than nurse does, but a 3k trapper and a 3k nurse are the same in the MM's eyes. Remove bloodlust and that same trapper is now a 2k trapper and the nurse still a 3k nurse.
Please explain how bloodlust would not affect MMR.
"We have no idea how MMR is calculated."
Almost certainly not through chase duration. That would be a completely asinine metric to base an MMR system on.
" Chasing down one survivor, bloodlusting them, then hooking them and camping them until they died is not skillful"
It depends on context. Bloodlust is actually not that an impactful mechanic at rank 1 (you need to start a chase from over 100 meters away for Rank 1 to give you a SECOND on the survivor over open ground), and at rank 3 your probably not getting a lot of kills because, you know, you lose the match. But bloodlusting in a 2v1 with 4 gens active is not only not 'low skill' because you needed to play extremely well to get that benefit, but your also using your time effectively as a killer devoting a large chase time to closing out the kill. An MMR system that is based on chase time would be utterly broken because not every chase a killer is in is about getting a swift down, and it would result in killers who are extremely effective at survivor pressure being rated as 'low MMR.'
The idea of MMR being based off 'snapshot events' in the game goes against how ELO systems are traditionally designed, which is why I can almost guarantee you this is not why the Bloodlust test occurred.
The system is almost certainly looking at emblem rates and kill rates, not how fast chases are, because there are a lot of fantastic reasons for a chase to last a really long time even for a good killer. We don't know EXACTLY how it does this or what it values, but an MMR system that highly valued fast chases (outside what the chaser emblem gives you, but bloodlust wouldn't 'mess with the stats' there at all because using bloodlust to get downs is antithetical to good emblem performance overall and thus would not mess up an MMR ranking system that valued good performance on emblems) would inevitably be cripplingly flawed because it values something other than what the player is trying to optimize.
It would be like trying to calculate Chess ELO based on how fast a player took the opponent's queen.
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@ZaKzan said:
Bloodlust was removed and a MMR system was stealthily put in. The devs are trying to figure out an MMR system and bloodlust was likely messing with stats.
This isn't how MMR works.
@WishIcouldmain said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1766107#Comment_1766107
To show who and who doesn't rely on bloodlust. And which survivors die to bloodlust. In theory.
This REALLY isn't how MMR works.
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Now I am not one for 'X is too strong for killer it has to go' arguments, because most of those are bad faith arguments at worst, and at best misunderstand that killers should be allowed to do things that force you to not mindlessly challenge them just because you got decent at loops.
But Iri hatchets are dumb. There are plenty of other EXTREMELY strong addons that are fine as big nasty 'screw you' surprises the killer can bust out that make them almost a 'boss fight' killer. Good examples include Freddy's, Doc's, Trapper's, and Plague's. None give you such a huge effect that you get the tempo of an insta-down just by using the basic functionality of your power, despite the fact they are clearly much more powerful than an additional addon.
The huntress Iri really shows its age as most future Iris, while still amazingly powerful, have counterplay or don't give guarenteed value like Huntress's iri head does. The 'downside' isn't super relevant with the belt, because your actually only losing .5 downs per-hatchet, and in reality you tend to refill after each down anyway.
This isn't to say Iris should be things survivors can just 'deal with' trivially. Most iris are designed to have their counterplay still put survivors in bad positions. For example, Trapper's bloody coil is 'countered' by just staying injured while doing chain disarms... so now trapper is moving rapidly towards you while your injured.... Docs Queen is fully countered by never getting close to each other... even to unhook, but you obviously will need to do so sometimes, ect. It would be pretty easy to give huntress a similar style of Iri: No charge reduction, but now it has a relatively short minimum range, like not full 'snipe' range but not 'basically on the loop with you' either.
That creates an uncomfortable situation where survivors kinda want to keep Huntress close if they suspect they are going to be hit, without making Huntress just insta-you if you dare to jump a window remotely close to her.
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To pile on the positivity with a bit of self care advice for playing killers:
Don't worry about playing him just because he is good if you legitimately don't like the playstyle!
I took the time to get good with nurse, and she ended up just being really frustrating and not fun to play even when I was doing very well. She just wasn't the killer for me, and that is heckin valid too.
If you love the idea of 'doing the math' to really get some weird downs I suspect Blight will be really fun for you! If not, it is fine to drop him once you realize this fact, there are plenty of awesome killers out there and all of them are viable at high ranks!
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@Felnex said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1763489#Comment_1763489
There's a difference between playing the game in a way that benefits you (that's the main reason why you do it, hurting them isn't your motivation, it's so you can feel good) it work for you but hurts the other player (for example, for one player to win the other MUST lose) but that doesn't mean the loser must be miserable. What you just pointed out were game mechanics, ways the game was meant to be played. I define "making their game miserable" not by playing the game normally, but by going out of your way to humiliate the other player (teabagging, facecamping, toxic chat)
You can define things anyway you want. However, game designers actively use emotional peaks and valleys (in fact they literally draw graphs of them in more linear games!) in order to make the experience work. Sometimes that includes things that are in the moment extremely negative. You try to create a healthy curve of tension that doesn't swing about too much and creates a nice thrill, rather than super huge spikes or it remaining the same all the time. This is why the glut of overly tutorialized games in the late 2000's early 2010s all feel samey and bad: They sand off the edges so much and never have any peaks and valleys, and part of why Darksouls became such a smash hit is because it was this big high budget released that re-introduced good emotional pacing back into the game industry. Heck, actually anyone who designs or writes media uses them! Its integral to how a 3 act structure works in film!
Having a game that tries to make you never feel negative is like having a roller coaster that never goes up. It isn't possible, if you literally don't have an aversion to any outcome the game can't motivate you emotionally in any real way. This is the key to how games engage you, and its why games without hard game-overs or consequences for failure other than checkpoints or a swift respawn like CoD tend to not leave much of an emotional impact through gameplay: It just... doesn't matter what you do.
Now, I agree you shouldn't make someone unhappy for its own sake, and being classy is important (which is why Teabagging is somewhat poor form but is tollerated in basically every competitive scene as a valid tactic, and toxic chat SHOULD just get you flat out banned), but facecamping is absolutely part of the mental strategy of the game. The only way the killer can win at all is to make the survivors uncomfortable, feel unsafe, panic, angry, ect. That is just... how killer is played. Being defensive at the hook to encourage a misplay through anxiety or frustration is as valid a way to force a misplay as forcing the killer to misplay by getting a good flashslight save and trying to keep them in a rage chase after for the rest of the game.
The devs talked about this design a lot leading up to the game's launch. They wanted hook rescues to be this thing that could happen but were a bad idea most of the time, and for good survivors to be really ruthless about if they wanted to hook rescue or not. Before SWF was added, they wanted survivors to evaluate if cooperation was worthwhile or if they should just try to unlock the requirements for the hatch to spawn and be in it for themselves, with most games having a bit of a mix. They added a lot of tools to punish 'over-alturism.' Its part of the game's design, deep in its DNA, just as the killer panicking due to time pressure or over-tunneling and blowing the game for themselves is. It is literally the main way to reach loss condition of survivors, and removing that pressure which helps killers reach a point where no one is working on gens... breaks DBD because it forces killers to, again, slug, which is LITERALLY WHAT HAPPENED any time they tried to make camping worse than it is now.
I can't stress this enough, defending the hook is super vital to DBD working, and attempting to make it worse is a very selfish thing to advocate for. Your SPECIFIC displeasure at being hooked being removed is not worth sacrificing the GENERAL tension of DBD and turning the game into an M1 simulator again. We JUST got out of M1 simulator territory after over a year of a change based around breaking all tension in the game to avoid letting the survivors have an even minorly negative experience at any point in time, lets not go back.
The game will only feel good if your allowed to get WRECKED, and the killer has that power to WRECK you, because that makes your power to stop it and your ability to do so actually feel good! Every chase with the killer needs to feel like it COULD be the one that ends the game if you misplay it and do something like get hooked near a critical gen, or lead the killer to someone else right as you go down, or all sorts of things. You need to CARE about the consequences of going down, and that means you can't be entitled to get back up. And, indirectly, the killer needs to use that negativity generated by a survivor going down to pressure the other players.
AGAIN, if it was not intentional for the killer to utilize their knowledge of the survivor's location and ability to stop unhooks against the other survivors to pressure them, we would just have Pyramid Head's cage system on every killer. But we don't. There is a reason for that. Its because killers are supposed to be able to exploit the survivors altruism if they notice it, and there are already SO MANY tools to punish killers for sloppy defenses. The mechanic is designed to get you emotional and sloppy, its doing its job and advocating for that aspect to go away is hurting the core gameplay loop of DBD.
And obviously the game isn't at a place anymore where the survivors having NO tools to rescue when the hook is being defended works. SWF, despite warping the design a lot, was a good idea, and Borrowed Time (post nerf) is a really good design. But hook camping is at the weakest it can be before we go to slugmania. And at a certain point, its on the survivors to accept they literally CANNOT achieve things if the killer refuses to allow it and will sacrifice literally everything else to ensure it. Hook camping not being possible basically renders the killer entirely powerless and destroys their agency, turning them into almost a toy for the survivors rather than a player making choices in their own right, because it removes one of the ways killers can punish survivors if they correctly anticipate their behavior.
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@RedAuraOfOni said:
The better option overall is just to completely rework BL or replace it with something else that is similar in terms of how it would activate but what effects it would give you.
Because BL has been VERY outdated since 2018 or 2017 and that baffles me to why BHVR didn't look at it until now.
Even then, now there is too many other problems that factors into this "test" to really determine what needs to happen to BL because less then 1/4 of this game has been rework or changed in a way, so if anything, this test is gonna have incomplete data in the end.
Why do you think BL is outdated? A lot of people saying this seem to think BL is some sort of magic free advantage that seriously impacts normal chases rather than putting a time limit on how long you can loop at one object.
I personally think BL is fine. If the killer is willing and able to invest 45 seconds into a loop, and your in a position where you can't break LOS, guess what? Your not actually doing something very skilled as a survivor. Learning to do a loop isn't trivial, but it isn't 'hard' and it is entirely rote to do an optimal loop, especially around objects that don't block LOS and thus don't have real mindgame potential. So saying 'The killer is just brute forcing it' is stupid... doing a loop is the SURVIVOR brute forcing it, creating a scenario out of the geometry of their relatively hitboxes to extend out time with actually nothing the killer can do about it besides running the loop.
There is this meme that Bloodlust is 'low skill' but in reality what it does is forcibly make it so you can't get a 'safe zone' with a pallet outside of super extreme 'megasafe' scenarios. I think that is fine, in normal play scenarios 90% of the time the killer farming up to BL3 is the wrong move, and survivors can just... not allow it to happen by abandoning the loop and resetting BL and absolutely screwing the killer. In that 10% of scenarios it serves to force the survivor to respect the killer.
Complaining about Bloodlust strikes me as complaining about old pallets pre-vacuum but worse. Once vacuum was added, all tension left the survivor side because now there were massive safe zones the killer couldn't hurt you all around the map that made extending chases indefinitely trivial, which made doing gens and actually plotting out your movement over the map very boring because you always felt like you could last indefinitely. Bloodlust lets survivors waste time (Quite a lot of it in fact) while still saying 'Ok but you can't JUST loop everywhere all the time anymore.' DBD is just NOT FUN when survivors can treat any pallet+window combination as an indefinite or even just long term tool to keep a chase going, and we know that pretty solidly. I think that means BL is in fact, not outdated.
After all, the geometry problem it exists to solve has NOTHING to do with vacuum pallets, so saying 'vacuum is gone so its outdated' is kinda... dumb? It existed to solve problems with entirely non-pallet based 'loops' where the amount of turns on a wall made it so the killer was slower than the survivor, meaning perfect survivor play made that area an infinite. Vacuum pallets going away doesn't change that, so the conditions that made Bloodlust required are... still here.
Its also a pretty narrow and well tuned mechanic. Bloodlust 1 happens pretty much automatically for being in a chase, you can't NOT get BL1 after getting a hit unless the survivor makes a mistake, and they are such minor movespeed increases that you won't notice them even when they are happening that much until you get to 3, they just let you turn those corners slightly faster to ensure that weird things like 'a hook spawned next to this wall' doesn't make a loop an infinite, and, again, getting to 3 means either Killer or Survivor made a huge mistake.
TL;DR: You shouldn't NEED to be able to run one loop for more than 45 seconds. Also, literally nothing about why bloodlust was need was changed, so this test is actively kinda stupid?
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@gibblywibblywoo said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1765042#Comment_1765042
If you're chasing outside of your trap nest as Trapper you're playing him wrong. He's area control. If you've effectively set up and don't get baited out of your nest BL shouldn't even be able to proc as the survivor should have stepped in a trap by then.
Trapper is literally one of the most bloodlust reliant killers because he HAS to be able to threaten with M1 to force survivors onto more and more geometry in order to hope to drive them into your nest. If your opponent can just loop you indefinitely on a car his power is functionally worthless because they will never go to your nest.
In addition, your nest is extremely low value in high ranks due to the simple fact that it takes a survivor a shorter amount of time to disarm your trap than for you to move it into position and set it up, and there are four survivors. If the survivors are remotely coordinated your traps on the ground will routinely be disarmed if they are in important locations, and if you try to punish this well... your now looping in a very safe zone without bloodlust or traps as trapper. If you try to set up the trap, they just leave and end the chase, you wasted that time, a gen popped, and if you leave they just come back and pop the trap.
At high ranks, trapper is far more 'lockdown' than 'anti-loop' and is basically a worse version of hag as a result. He has all of the downsides of hag, but worse because he needs to move his traps around and because survivors can pressure your traps, in exchange for the ability to play as a standard M1 killer and for the ability for his traps to 'instadown' in theory.
If most of your kills as trapper are coming from traps, your purple rank at best. If your LITERALLY NEVER letting a chase run for 15 seconds, that means your probably at green or even tan. 15 seconds of chase is literally FORCED to happen if you ever M1 a survivor while they are healthy, because survivors 'reset' to 16 meters away, and then you gain .6 meters per second vs a survivor, meaning that gap takes 20 seconds to close over open ground. Are you seriously saying as trapper you NEVER M1 a healthy survivor, and then finish them while they are injured without a trap? I literally don't believe you, at least SOME of the time if survivors are that bad they are going to run away in a straight line.
Obviously that straightaway run isn't a run where bloodlust is useful at all because it doesn't even end the chase .1 seconds sooner, but it seriously sounds like your imagining some fantasy land where survivors aren't going to disarm your traps or keep track of your nest and just not loop there. When I R1 trapper, its a 'good' game I feel like I will almost certainly win when I can get 2 downs with a trap.
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It depends on if they bring back Bloodlust 1 in this hypothetical where they 'remove' bloodlust. Without 1, I would say Trapper, Pig, Myers, and Preemptively the Twins are in serious trouble, as they lack real tools to handle good survivors tracking them, clearing the pseudo infinite and infinite spots ahead of time, and just refusing to participate in chases outside of those areas while uninjured. Demo and Blight might suffer a bit too. Weirdly Hillbilly probably goes away too, he isn't actually an anti-looper per-say and his power is useless in the scenarios BL1 prevents
With 1, we would still have ever killer being pretty viable, but the lack of Bloodlust 2 would make closing out chases once the game is winnowing down and your willing to hard commit to safe loops suck. Still, I don't think there are any literal BL1 infinites in the game.
Weirdly, a lot of currently 'low tier' killers probably would be ok? Legion, for example can preemptively injure in ways that make some loops not work as well and can start chases very fast in ways that may prevent people from reaching the loop. Wraith for a similar reason (though its a 50/50 on him).
@Ghouled_Mojo said:
Trapper doesn’t need bloodlust. If he does then he’s not being played efficiently.
I’m going to struggle with a couple of killers. I will either adapt or not play them.
Every killer besides Nurse, Huntress, and Spirit needs bloodlust 1 to be played efficiently. A trapper who can't get to 1 can be infinite or pseudo infinited if you didn't pre-trap the loop. If you did, they can disarm it before the chase starts, and if you try to reset it or place it during the chase they can just peel off to another loop.
Trapper is absolutely not an anti-loop killer at high ranks, which is sort of the core problem with his identity at the moment and why he is so low tier (and I say this as someone who loves playing him at R1). The counterplay to his traps as a loop-breaking tool are too extreme, and that is why he needs to be played as sort of an M1+weird zoner/detection hybrid.
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1: Yeah. As expected it makes high rank games a nightmare. Bloodlust was a super rare mechanic designed in DBD to fix a problem at HIGH ranks, mainly how the killer hitbox makes them move effectively slower than the survivor by quite a wide margin when moving around corners.
2: No. I actually thought it might be possible for Bloodlust to go away if they severely nerfed chain windows, but its clear the killer hitbox still makes a lot of very normal map geometry infinite.
3: They would have to do something like count all windows within X meters of each other as 'one' window (which would be weird for multi floor buildings) for the purposes of anti-infinite blocking, increase killer vault speed, and shrink the killer hitbox to prevent stuff like the Elementary car infinite. These would be changes FAR more radical and anti-survivor than just 'killers can get a bit of extra movespeed to force you to throw that car pallet at a reasonable point in time.' Ultimately the 'advantage' BL1 (the only real relevant BL for this) on open ground chases is extremely minor, while losing the ability to force a killer to BL2 to deal with a back to back jungle gym spawn would be a much bigger 'freebie reward' to killers. If you are a dyed in the wool survivor main, you want Bloodlust over them nuking windows from orbit, if your doing a straightaway run vs a killer, bloodlust is giving the killer an extra 2 seconds maybe, compared to that double stacked jungle gym buying you well over a minute currently.
4: Pretty ok all things considered.
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@DemonDaddy said:
Don't forget the ones exclusive to the slower killers.
Saloon is a pseudo infinite vs 110s now. Car on Elementary may be an infinite for full speed killers, DEFINITELY is an infinite for slower ones.
@danielmaster87 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1764531#Comment_1764531
Which is just wrong for a game like this. A survivor that's a strong looper that you haven't even hooked yet and it's near the end of the game, of course you will go somewhere. But having to *retreat* from that area as killer against anyone near the beginning or middle of the match is ridiculous and is a testament to that loop's power level.
This is my problem as well.
In 90% of situations as a killer, amping up bloodlust past 1 meant you made a mistake. If someone is looping in the shack, let them because it just isn't time efficient and that survivor needs to leave the shack corner of the map to actually do anything to threaten you.
In 10% of scenarios, it was vital to prevent the game from degenerating into utter nonsense because an area was so strong you couldn't lose out the chase in any reasonable timeframe and it was effectively a 'safe zone.' You got a kill, or a slug, and a survivor is just looping to kill time and the difference between closing that loop taking 1 minute and 3 is actually a real difference to the outcome of the game and there is nothing you can do to stop every survivor going to that loop.
The existence of Bloodlust and the removal of vacuum are pretty critical to making survivors never actually safe, which is important to the design: if the killer is willing to pay the time cost to get to Bloodlust 3, you SHOULD go down if you refuse to do a hard LOS break, and should be massively rewarded for making that break by getting that time 'free' and resetting the killer back to square 0. And then Bloodlust 1 just 'fixes' the game in a lot of ways outside of just loops (like rewarding a killer for chain chases which generally are high skill play).
A common misconception is that among equally skilled killers, bloodlust is an unfair advantage. But in reality Bloodlust is a pretty nuanced mechanic with a lot of use cases and which disproportionately affects matches with extremely skilled survivors. The assumption that low rank/skill killers will be affected hard kinda misses the problem with nerfing Bloodlust: Until you get to like... rank 5, odds are extremely good there are multiple survivors in your game that have no idea how to loop and thus you will often never hit Bloodlust 1 in normal chase because you either get the down fast or don't get it at all as they hard break LOS on you. Like a rank 10 killer up against a Claudette running in a straight line dropping every pallet immediately upon reaching it isn't going to need bloodlust. Those survivors already just get squashed or do silly things like run in to do a hook save eating a hit like a champ, just like they saw on stream, without BT or DH.
Bloodlust existed to solve major problems created by extremely skilled survivor play oriented around wasting as much time of the killer as possible and using the math of the killer's tempo oriented gameplay against them. As a rank 1 pig main when playing killer side it isn't unplayable per-say, but the loss of rank 1 bloodlust is VERY noticeable and makes every single chase way less rewarding, and the loss of 2 and 3 makes the 2v1 endgame kinda a huge pain in the ass.
I honestly wouldn't mind if this trial resulted in a general nerf to chain windows, which are the real core cause of this issue. Certain common tiles like L+T when they spawn next to each other are way too strong. Windows grow exponentially in power the more windows are near each other, especially when there are long walls on both sides of the window, and I think Bloodlust could go away if the anti-infinite window blocking was just 'smarter' and did things like count certain windows as 'the same window' so that multiple windows still have mindgame strength but aren't essentially different windows for the purpose of a loop resource. That still would let the killer 'force' the chase over a similar length of time to bloodlust ticking up, but removes the speed aspect of Bloodlust. That would still probably require shrinking the killer hitbox down to match the survivor though for the purpose of terrain collision for certain loops still.
@Withered8 said:
To say killer shack is an infinite is just nonsense. It's not hard to mindgame the shack and it's one of the only stronger loops left in teh game these days.
Authaven fun bus is getting nerfed, have u not seen how much smaller it is on the new reworked maps?
Pretty much any infinite that you find (a proper infinite) will be removed with the map reworks, apart from maybe the badham house of pain which i do agree i think should go.
Pseudoinfinites are as bad as infinite infinites. An 'infinite' doesn't actually need to hold up for any length of time. If a loop can sustain a survivor by itself for over a minute, it is functionally an infinite. The problem with these locations is they tend to allow the survivor to buy a disproportionate amount of chase time without spending resources (Pallets, blocked windows, ects) and killer play is extremely tempo oriented. This isn't terrible, strong areas of the map the killer is encouraged to just let the survivor loop in to go pressure other survivors are fine, the issue is when these strong loops become too common (again, a good example is side to side L+T spawns giving survivors easy access to 2 pallets and 4 windows) and centralized in a manner that makes it not realistic to end chases outside of these loops.
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@Felnex said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1763414#Comment_1763414
That's not what the word "miserable" means. Challenging someone is not the same as making them miserable. You are misusing the word and that's why I'm confused by you.
Miserable: (of a person) wretchedly unhappy or uncomfortable.
If you feel that word is accurately describing your emotions when you're stymied/challenged in DBD, that's probably not what most people feel. "Making their game difficult" as you said is a much better way of putting it. "Making their life miserable" means you're being toxic.
Actually a huge part of good PVP gameplay is a struggle to engineer gamestates that benefit you and are bad for your opponent, both in order to draw the game to a close, and to try to make opponents make mistakes. This often manifests as gamestates that are uncomfortable.
A classic example in fighting games is being cornered vs a 50/50 combo: That is a super uncomfortable position and your opponent engineered it specifically to try to get you to make a mistake due to the pressure they are applying. In the starcraft example early raids are generally done to create discomfort and force people to invest in early fighting units they might not want to use.
Flashbangs and Decoys in shooters encourage players to move in ways they shouldn't because being blinded is disoriented, and chokepoint design is a KEY feature of shooters based around how unsettling it is to rush out of cover despite the fact you have to do so in order to avoid creating a funnel situation where your opponents can just shoot in one direction.
Discomfort, or 'grief mechanics' are an absolutely vital part of game design, and attempting to 'sand the edges' off your game is a great way to make it god damn awful. It certainly is miserable in MTG to have your strong creatures blown up or counterspelled without interaction, but if those mechanics didn't exist the game would devolve to people beating each other in the face with big creatures over and over and wouldn't be very fun.
Good game designers ACTIVELY use misery/negativity in their game to give context to other moments. Its why people love Darksouls and why Call of Duty phases through people who play games a lot: Darksouls is very willing to make you unhappy at times in order to make you avoiding unhappyness mean something, CoD is not and so you just sorta grind through it, MP or Singleplayer.
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@CustomerService said:
Now that you mentioned some kind of buff for the survivors, it would be interesting if there was a punishing mechanic as such :
If you remain within X meters of the hooked survivor after X seconds, survivors gain a "bloodlust" that make them repair/heal faster. So for example if you just hook camp somebody, after 20 seconds survivors would repair a 20% faster.
This has zero negative effects if you don't camp.
Anything that punishes the killer for camping is highly abusable by having one survivor 'force' the killer to camp and is acutally a great example of reasonable choices leading to horrible perverse incentives: suddenly your extremely rewarded not even just for an overt hook rescue, but for overtly threatening it without doing it in a way that gives the survivors who are repairing an 40% speed buff overall to the gen repair rate. This would be crusbing and break the entire game.
The punishment for 'overcamping' is already as high as it can be. The devs have tested multople hook proximity penalties and going further than the slowed death rate and chase points penalty just gives survivors way too much power and turns hooks into arguably a bad thing for the killer. Any further and the optimal way to kill would be omni slug.
We seriously are at the point where survivors just have to deal with the killer having power over them when they are hooked. The hook, low key, is already a situation where survivors have more power than the killer, but this 'emotional magic trick' conceals it. The killer needs pretty broad discursion to defend the hook, and a core concept of DBD is that the killer is able to prevent objectives from being done in a area around them, but lacks map coverage. Any mechanic that prevents the killer from defending an objective efficiently despite being there is a bad one, which is why pretty much every 'power dynamic reversal' mechanic that allows survivors to act extremely crassly in front of the killer has been nerfed.
When they test things of this nature, the game just falls apart. This is why killer mains can be so salty. It isn't actually super unbalanced against them at the moment but killer gameplay is RIDICULOUSLY tempo based and even threats to their ability to pace the game's tempo are pretty... not well received.
And, finally, your super not obligated to get off the hook after getting hooked. If you were, again, we would be using Pyramid Head's cages for all hooks. A huge part of the hook's design is you lose all power over the game and thus 'tactically getting hooked' to do something like save a critical pallet or after a long chase where you eventually run out of resources is important. Every hook needs the potential to be your last one to make hiding and subtle play a valid playstyle and to prevent 'I am just gunna loop a M1 killer for 10 minutes' from being a guaranteed pip. And these 'emotional mechanisms' being a bit obscure is important because survivors and killers alike should not be acting 100% rationally around the hook.
You want (need even) the best players to sometimes mess up interactions, and the current hook does this for both sides of the game. If an interaction is too safe it kinda becomes a rote mechanical interaction that isn't determined by player skill at all, which kinda sucks. But hooks are an amazing skill testing tool and literally are one of the mechanics in DBD. They are a great place to start learning about game design because there is so much right about them. They are a example of how a negative event in the game feeling bad can be vital to how a game functions, they are a good example of how to make good players feel amazing with how satisfying a slick hook rescue is for survivors, the relationship between the free survivors, killer, and hooked survivor are SUPREMELY interesting, ect. Hooks are probably the last thing that needs to be messed with in DBD.
Its sorta like how once vacuum pallets were added, because people didn't like how pallets didn't protect them, suddenly all the emotion in the rest of the game died because it was so safe to start a chase late you weren't on edge or anticipating your next chase at all because it was too trivial to 'reset' chases, so survivor gameplay became 'M1 at gen' simulator. Sometimes an aspect of the game feeling bad and being something you avoid actually makes the rest of the game better. Like how getting cornered in a fighting game sucks but is extremely important to give stakes to positioning overall and its actually extremely fair that some characters can take out half your health if your in the corner even if it doesn't feel great in the moment. Removing the negativity of being hooked flattens out the spikes of positive emotion in the game of getting out of a nasty chase or the killer walking right by you when you hide because it makes the thing your excited to avoid sorta... not matter, and ultimately DBD is, low key, not a great game without the emotional intensity aspect, which isn't a dig against it so much as a complement for how much excitement they managed to wring out of relatively simple and uninteresting mechanics like 'running around in circles' simply by framing it well and making the consequences of actions matter a lot.
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I think getting clear rewards that show the survivor that enduring being camped may be a good way to make being camped feel better and in most games would be fantastic game design to make something that seems negative convey that something good is happening...
...Which is why I don't think it should happen...
Part of the psychology of the hook, why it exists the way it does, is to cause player distress. Positive distress mind. It is supposed to be an ultra-negative experience that makes you want to go above and beyond to avoid it, making mistakes or playing more defensively than you might otherwise. Likewise, its meant to put mental pressure on the survivors, making them want to rescue even if they know its a bad idea.
Sorta like how the killer doesn't get points for bad chases where the survivor successfully wastes a lot of time by goading them on a chase through a gym with lots of resources, survivors shouldn't be rewarded for falling for the psychological battle of camping.
Camping is a purely survivor sided problem. In theory, survivors who want to play optimally will just do gens during the camp, win, and have 3 survivors pip, 1 depip, and the killer depip. If your all equally good survivors, whoever gets camped will be 'random' and because 3 people pip and 1 person doesn't, you will all pip extremely fast using this method.
But you don't WANT to do that. You WANT to rescue. And the killer knows this. The entire reason the hook is a hook is to let the killer mess with you emotionally. If they didn't want being hooked to feel bad, to affect behavior, they would just have everyone hook you like Pyramid Head, which virtually guarantees you get free and that he can't really camp you... but they didn't. Good killers will get reads on your team, determine if how badly you want that unhook, and how coy they need to be about camping it for you to make a mistake. Bad killers just mindlessly facecamp... but they also just mindlessly run from the hook as well. It isn't about defending the hook from them, its about good chase conversion: The easiest and most efficient way to start a chase is the survivor coming to you, ideally eating a hit to rescue, in an area devoid of resources where you just won a chase. As a survivor, you CANNOT be mad at the killer for having a theory of your mind and using it to win, they aren't your friend and unlike something like a Mori they also can't really control this interaction: if you play into camping, your also creating a scenario where the killer NOT camping is a horribly bad choice that actively hurts themselves extremely badly. A killer not converting a hook to another chase cleanly if the unhook is swift is an absolute nightmare scenario that often loses games entirely at high ranks. They cannot AFFORD to pretend to not notice your crappy sloppy rescue you made because you got emotional.
Camping is actually an intentional mechanic. And its intended to mess with you. The system obfuscating both how camping helps your team AND how it can hurt the killer (Because the hook ALSO is messing with the killer's mind and may trap them into a defensive loss adverse posture they shouldn't have, so it not clearly showing the killer things like the 'camp circle' or the fact that chases near the hook don't count as camping, or making the hook timer change color to show its slower) is an intentional, and brilliant, bit of design.
That said showing people that trying to unhook themselves is VERY BAD I feel is important, as is showing people that unsafe rescues are bad. I don't think they did a good enough job with self unhooking, and unsafe rescues don't really have good negative feedback at all. There is a lot of room to add these elements while keeping the hook psychologically distressing, and playing into how it (rightfully) feels cruel.
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Certain addons are extremely powerful, and distort the game a lot and are very much a sometimes food.
Furthermore, survivors can bring 8 addons to the killer's 2. This not only meant that killers auto-lose their addons and thus can run powerful addons less often (worse because addons are more important for killers), but survivors had more ability to push a lot of power into games constantly.
Especially at high ranks, it was super common to see full iri+purple/green addons on every survivor, which was just a bit much and distorted what addons and items were supposed to be. So survivor items and addons generally got a bit of a nerf overall to account for the fact that survivors get a lot more control over the trial itself with offerings.
Honestly I just think the killer should have gotten 2 offering slots and maybe a 3rd addon slot (which would allow a lot more interesting builds), because there are still a lot of problems with the imbalance between how many offerings and items the survivors can take (BNP is... better but still not ideal, for example, and killers have almost no control over the map they are playing on), but it really is an improvement at rank 1 on both sides in my opinion for not every game to contain a ridiculous 5 second heal medkits, an insta-sabo box (back when that mattered), a fully kitted rainbow map, and a key. You generally can run greens and yellows whenever you want if your good as a survivor, but purples and especially iris are meant to be hard to bust out constantly.
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A big issue isn't the number of kills. A game where you get 2 kills can still feel like a victory, while one where you get 3 feels like a failure.
A lot of it comes down to the fact that, especially for more 'controlly, passive' killers, you never actually get into a groove where you feel remotely in control of the match. A big reason why killers really hate SWF is that the ability to communicate your in a chase and the killer's activity makes chases very negative for the killer in terms of match control, because they take a long time and unless you get a kill or good hook off them they don't create much pressure.
In essence, you feel like your constantly on the back foot, rather than like a predator chasing people down. Chases where someone slips away 5 seconds into them feel way better than chases that last a minute where I get the down and a kill because the guy was just looping a safe bunch of pallets and I chose trapper because he is fun when he works.
A lot of the issue comes around waxing about how 'unfun' it is for the survivor to 'not get to play.' But in game design, often player elimination is a mercy. A survivor run out of the game lost through not being good enough to evade detection and capture, and is in theory free to just watch or play another game. A Killer who is just getting run about and who falls behind on Gen pressure is in a worse spot because they are obligated to keep playing. You are stuck in a game you know you aren't going to win, you can't even do side objectives because your ONLY objective is player interaction. Survivors sometimes complain they don't have anything to do besides repair for their objective but that is a total joke, killers HAVE to interact with survivors and that interaction is often defined by extreme frustration.
This is part of why Killers would like a surrender feature. They WANT to be able to lose matches with dignity because despite being the 'power role' killers have very little control over the game's tempo if they don't IMMEDIATELY start neutralizing players.
This is why, even for a killer who DOESN'T care about wins but just cares about emblems or having a good time, they will often tunnel out one survivor if they detect weakness. If you get rid of a survivor before 2 gens pop, your 'ahead of curve' and have the freedom to do more stall oriented play. If the survivors ever manage to get the number of remaining gens below their own player count suddenly you just don't have time and are rushing about like a headless chicken in a very unfun way.
I think the IDEAL DBD balance point is that, on average, 2.5 players lose, including the killer, and the game de-emphasizes cooperation among the survivors. It was like this when the game came out, cooperative play such as looping legitimately didn't work and for survivors to rank they had to play selfishly, viewing other survivors and evaluating them on how much time they took off gens vs how much of the killer's time they ate up. But a big issue with SWF is that it makes it so that EVERY survivor is super emotionally invested in ANY survivor dying, which is a problem when the killer's main interaction with the survivor's that is positive for them is killing one. SWF also hurts the virtue of player elimination: Solo survivors who get eliminated borderline don't give a ######### because they just Q up for a new game. SWF survivors need to wait for the game to end, and are in a similar (though still better) position of that 'hostage killer.'
It is not remotely an accident that the push to punish killers for trying to efficiently eliminate players despite it being a KEYSTONE of how the game is balanced came about after SWF came out.
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@Mochan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/743908#Comment_743908
Bleedout and Sacrifice aren't equivalent to gen time, though.
Completing a gen doesn't kill the killer.
Bleeding out or getting Sacrificed ends the game for the Survivor.
Correct, but remember that the game is essentially a time equation where both sides are using snippets of time to try to make progress towards an objective or stop it.
While sacrificing ends the game for the survivor, its integral to the game's design that survivors can experience very permanent negative consequences towards their ability to act, while killers can't, because the timing math of a match starts out inherently favoring survivors quite heavily.
The killer NEEDS to be able to efficiently eliminate players for the entire concept of the game to work. It is an inherent part of the role you take as a survivor to be eliminated, and not being ok with that is like saying you want to play fighting games but you don't ever want to be hit by a corner combo, despite picking a zoner character who's weakness is getting locked down in a corner.
Like this is a round about way of saying 'Its the killer's job to kill, hur' but like... it is critical to internalize that the ONLY effect the killer can have on the match is to either actively eliminate players, or use the threat of eliminating players to influence their behavior. The game 100% can't shy away from letting killers do this, and saying 'it isn't fun to be eliminated' is essentially like saying 'the game isn't fun when I am losing!'
"It ends the game for the survivor" isn't a rational way to argue against something negative for the survivor. Ending the game for the survivor isn't just THEMATICALLY what the game is about, but is one of the games only two real mechanics, and the only one the killer really has any control over.
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Appologies for the WALL OF TEXT. Gradschool is kicking in and I got a lot of nervous writing energy, and thinking about chase math is fun.
My theory on medkits is that Instas will stay in but get a serious downside or something.
Getting a 50% 'insta' doesn't make sense as an upgrade for a medkit unless it can be used multiple times. Even then its still really weird because the function of a medkit is ALREADY to give you a big heal.
Like "Insta, but now your broken for the rest of the match" probably would be the 'ideal' for insta-heals: Your still artifically extending a chase to be a 3 hit chase, which is HUGE, but if the killer forces you to pop it suddenly all your future chases are 1 hit chases. So your 'frontloading' your health and are essentially trying to use that extra hit to fully ditch the killer, rather than using it to compound the sorta boring invisible mathematical power Survivors have in terms of how time favors them, which is what things like Instas are used for currently.
Like no one uses Instas to 'heal' or 'escape.' They just use them to artifiically force an minute onto the chase. Due to how killer movespeeds and survivor speedboosts on hit work, it takes a killer a minimum of 16 seconds, assuming the survivor runs in a straight line, to catch the survivor, including the 12 free meters the survivor gets while the killer blood wipes and the roughly 1.7 meters the killer needs to be within for a lunge to hit a fleeing survivor. But in reality using things like pallets and windows dramatically increases the 'time cost' of every hit quite substantially, even when done 'sub-optimally.' So if 4 survivors use a first aid kit with an insta and run poorly, lets say only doubling the 16 minimum seconds a single extra hit costs the killer, your still looking at (Assuming the survivor starts 12 meters away from the killer when they are detected and the killer always takes about double the 'perfect' possible time it takes to win a chase at 12 meters) at 192 seconds to down and hook two survivors ONCE. While, yes, hooking a survivor gives the killer a small tempo advantage (As they take two people of generators, a rescuer and the hooked survivor), assuming it takes the killers 2 won chases to kill a survivor, that is 384 seconds, or 6 minutes, for the killer to close out those 2 chases.
Even if those two survivors are in chases 100% of the time or are prepping for a chase, the killer INSTANTLY gets into another chase after downing the survivor right in front of a hook, and only two survivors repair gens, that gives the 2 survivors 180 'leeway' seconds for travel times and hiding to repair 5 gens, even without repair speed increases, in that time. A 32 second chase is pretty near perfect play for killers who aren't nurse or spirit if your opponent is using terrain to defend themselves. Removing the Insta removes 128 chase seconds from the match.
That still gives the survivors 54 'flex' seconds. Again, there is a reason the game on a fundemental mathematical level favors survivors unless the killer can 'bypass' a chase. its why any time a killer is forced to play out an entire chase as part of their kit they are called an M1 killer and instantly can't rise above mid tier: They literally can't win vs optimal play by survivors who play tactically rather than emotionally and attempt to collectively win more often than they lose, taking sacrifices in stride, which is common at higher ranks, as opposed to low ranks where often survivors can't emotionally handle leaving a survivor behind with the understanding on average everyone will rise in rank at a relatively equal clip if they do so. However, 54 'flex' seconds is WAY less than 128: We are talking about the difference between also having time to just casually open a gate vs hardly having enough time to travel between gens, or things like slow down perks like Ruin negatively affecting you, or patrols actually putting the time advantage on the killer's side. While the game 'defaults' to a survivor aggregate win (as in, 3/4 survivors pipping on average), insta heals push it to a point where it is... really unreasonable to expect the killer to win without a very big skill gap.
If, however, you got broken after using an insta, your 'neutral' on time if you can't actually escape that first chase, and go time NEGATIVE if it ends up taking 3 hooks to kill you. This is still a good upgrade (escaping a chase without getting hooked is a HUGE time win and worth pretty significant repair cost: Like if you can choose between getting someone to slip out of a chase without the killer entering a new chase, and repairing 2 gens, it is generally better to save the person from the chase!), but no longer 'defaults' to time positive, which is the real problem with instas, DS, basically anything that adds 10 seconds minimum to the killer's chase or 10 seconds off every repair. The fact that the survivor 'undoes' the killer's victory in a chase (because the killer is designed so that getting hits is the ONLY progress they can make in a match, imagine if the killer could just undo a generator to get a sense of how much it sucks to lose out on a down you earned) is a very big NPE, but its made worse by the fact that the optimal survivor play when using medkits is to engage in extreme NPE that has little counterplay besides Franklin's Demise. Like sometimes a NPE being optimal is ok, but generally that NPE should come about because someone engineered that advantage (Ex: Hook camping, or sabotage rescues, both INTENSELY unfun for the victim but are the result of longer interactions that are ultimately avoidable by good play that is fun to engage in). In essence, first aid insta heals are both a massive advantage to survivors time wise AND an 'un-earned' gutpunch for the killer.
This is also why the design of toolkits and their upgrades is very problematic. There is an obvious desire to specialize as an 'objective' focused player, but DBD is, essentially, a game about time. The core mechanics all revolve around time assuming you don't care about stealth at all and are just going to 'brute force' things (Which is why no one uses stealth play. Stealth play only makes sense if the time equation defaults to the killer winning on good chases). And the margins here are so small that something like reducing the time to repair a gen by 10 seconds seriously impacts the viability of the killer role at high end play, forget about BNP suddenly getting you around 60 seconds off the match!
Also, obviously chase math is more complex than that napkin math, after all as more gens are done it becomes harder to repair them without the killer pressuring you. Gen kicks change things, as do killer powers, but the math was insanely favorable for the survivors because I assumed 0 travel time or patrol time. While in reality it is hard to play a perfectly optimal game even non-optimal games are still affected by the fact that, all things being equal, repair time is faster than downing time.
TL;DR: Insta heals are bad not because they are instant heals (Which is unfun but whatever), but because they add a minimum time to down all 4 survivors of 64 seconds without the survivor even TRYING to do anything besides run directly away. It is more a math problem than anything else.
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@SleepyWillo said:
I'm okay with insta heals being changed. HOWEVER - if they touch instas without even looking at eboni moris first I'll be pissed.
Eboni Moris are a very different mechanic than insta-heals, though they don't look it at first.
Moris majorly change the dynamic of your SECOND lost chase, and the ideal is that losing 2 chases probably results in your death anyway with the 3rd potential chase being a 'bonus.' Its a really intense power swing to not have to wait out the extra hook stage or win a 3rd chase, but the killer still has to dump a lot of time into eliminating you as a player, the reward is less intense for the killer than you may think and your not really losing as much as you think.
Insta-medkits mess with the dynamic of chases in a super intense and invasive way that bleeds into all chase dynamics by giving you a full instant-recovery and extra move boost. While it seems like its just an inverse, its not, because it is extending the MINIMUM time for a chase to end by 33%, and due to how things like loops work and bodyblocking and trade-outs in chases and just the capacity to loses the killer works, it can be much longer.
Basically? In general an assumed rule of DBD is that if you get hit, you are one more mistake away from dying. And if you go down, your ability to participate is entirely out of your hands at that point, and instead is going to be based on what is going on with the killer and other survivors: your basically not guarenteed to get to keep playing and have no ability to influence if you will, because your influence was in the earlier chase. Moris don't transgress on this basic dynamic, while insta-heals very much do. This is also why stuff like self-care with high end medkits was nerfed, when its possible for survivors to legitimately heal mid-chase despite the killer being aware of them and still pressuring them, the game kinda... doesn't work?
Like the game works with the survivors losing 1 extra chance on a down because going down is how you die anyway. The game does not work when you allow survivors to ignore the consequence of getting hit mid chase, because that is like... literally the only threat killers have. The only real interaction killers have with survivors is the ability to attack them.
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The debate of no-addon viability is often misguided.
Should addons be required for optimal play? 100%. Going without them should definitely be a disadvantage.
The problem is some killers require ad-ons to get their power to basically function AS a power (Legion and Trapper, for example) while others have powers that 'work' from the get-go but can gain utility, like Plague, Wraith (I can't believe Wraith is being compared positively to anything but the reworks actually did end up making him not a joke even if he isn't good) or to a small extent Myers (who depends heavily on having SOMETHING to interact with stalking, but not specific things like Trapper needing a way to get out traps faster to have his power be worth using. He can go detection, build rate, power duration, or sneaky sneaky, pretty much 100% of his ad-ons are either good or are ultra-rare meme builds done for fone), and Pig (Who basically has a pseudo-wraith cloak and some minor stall that can be tuned in different ways by ad-ons).
Billy and Nurse strike me as violating the opposite of this rule: Their utility isn't really increased that much via addons. Spirit to a lesser extent also doesn't care that much, nor does Cannibal.
So like... the sweet spot is stuff like Plague or Wraith in that their power is a functional kit, and ad-ons are legitimately ad-ons that give an actual gameplay advantage worth getting. I do think some of the Nurse changes helped with this (Such as moving the 'training wheels' down to common so that its easier to learn nurse) but there are 3 things to look out for: Ad-ons being too impactful, ad-ons not being impactful enough, and the base power lacking something that really should be moved from an ad-on to the base power.
Ad-ons should be customizing the experience, and letting a killer player play to strengths or make up for weaknesses, but should not generally decide the game in cases of serious skill gaps. They are a 'tech' tool. If the idea of a killer working without any ad-ons is ridiculous if the match is remotely close, the killer needs to be re-worked.
Trapper is a great example: If the survivors have a remote idea of what they are doing and trapper doesn't have roll-out ad-ons then trapper just loses the game regardless of the skill gap. Their roll-out ad-ons need to be made part of their 'base kit' (or more likely, they should start with 100% of their traps in inventory and shouldn't be able to pick up traps until they empty it, which would solve Trapper's core problem as a killer).
I don't think, and I can't believe I am defending a killer nerf because the killer community deserves nothing but love and support for all the bullshit they have put up with over the years, seems to move the nurse closer to where their ad-ons should be. Not VITAL (A blink is a blink and if you know how to use it your going to land smackaroos with it), but something that lets you customize your experience with multiple viable options to make the character more useful.
Maybe it pushes the nurse's power level down too far. I dunno. I think it might, but if they do that it would be reverted quickly because nurse is the 'Bastion' for 100% dedicated killers and if nurse gets touched too hard the killer population at high ranks would plumet and there would be some pretty extreme corrections to save the game from that reverberating through the entire player-base (like with how they did some major needed survivor nerfs after the first nurse nerf). But the actual CONCEPT of making the power less 'complete' is fine as long as the power still has clear utility and can win games where your better than your opponents by itself.
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@SurgDexil said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/423241#Comment_423241
Respect for being a Rank 1 Trapper. I don't see many in my games.
I also do somewhat agree with you, but it won't be the same. Is like... let's say Trapper gets a rework, and the rework is him throwing the traps. That changes the dinamic of playing Trapper by a lot.
Same with this new Legion Rework. His power while they can still confirm a hit, that hit is now going to be harder to hit, since his power will deplete when he misses, plus he won't be able to use it again until he gets it fully like Spirit.
If everythingnis correct then he becomes kinda like a weaker plague in a way. Because like Plague, they can confirm a hit with their powers, but is the downing part that is the challenge.
It just proves I have damage. Don't respect me for that.
I agree this is going to change how Legion feels a lot to the point he probably won't feel like the same character, and I think the worst part of this change is that it totally disrespects the 'fantasy' of being legion (Basically being allowed to move like a survivor and having a visceral, terrible stabbing fit to finish them) in order to solve a survivor NPE.
While that survivor NPE NEEDED to go away (Legion was sorta kinda a tiny bit bad for the game, and I say this while firmly believing Nurse is GOOD for the game), it really stinks that survivor NPEs are consistently prioritized and killers get very consistent radio silence.
But specificity and accuracy in feedback is important. There is a lot of unfocused anger at this because there IS something wrong with it and the whole situation, but unfocused agitation and anxiety is really easy to dismiss, redirect, and ignore. The fundamental issue is balance changes for survivors and killers are treated radically different, with survivors getting fast responses, clearer communication, nerfs that redistribute power rather than removing it, and changes made to their benefit made borderline permanent, while killer balance changes have unclear communication, no real timeframe to the point there are jokes that BHVR forgot about them, and are frequently reverted.
So if you are going to be mad about this change, be mad about that, rather than saying 'deleted' or 'worse than Freddy' because despite that accurately capturing the intensity of your feelings the statements just are not factually true and make animosity towards the devs for legitimately bad things they do easier to dismiss.
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@SpaceCoconut said:
Deep Wound is a formality mechanic, it's not as threatening as it was before. I would compare it to the Pig's trap now. It's too easy to remove and the only way it will down a survivor now is if the survivor wants to go down.
Legion is now a Wraith without invisibility and an M1 speed burst after using their power.
Formality Mechanic is actually a good term for what it is, but you are implying the concept of a mechanic that will almost never actually trigger its worst event is universally bad. While I think Deep Wounds are going to become so non-threatening that they are essentially only a time speed bump, I do want to point out that the concept of a trivial to avoid punishment that is disproportionately deadly compared to how trivial it is to avoid isn't a bad mechanic inherently.
What it does is allow a player to have a fluid amount of time to address the problem the mechanic presents. The Pig's head traps are a perfect example of this: You WILL have time to get it off... but it is forcing you to (eventually) bother with it in a way that meaningfully affects your player behavior.
I think the issue with deep wounds and the head trap are more that too little actually interacts with them, so they end up purely being player timesinks rather than a temporarily changed game-state: There is no real difference between removing mending now or later, as long as you mend. The point of these 'easily disarmed timebomb' mechanics is to drive some form of player behavior but because the threat is SO non-existent and trivial you don't actually need to change behavior that much. That doesn't mean players need to potentially die to these even if they try to avoid them, but it means these mechanics need more oomph in some way.
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@SurgDexil said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/422524#Comment_422524
You know that infinite question we killer mains ask if the killer is good or not? We ask the question "Does his power help with the chase?"
If is a yes then they end up being top tier, if is a form of yes, then they become mid tier, if is a no then they become bottom tier.
This "Rework" will make his power relatively useless. Is not the same. Sure the old legion was frustrating to go against, but not impossible. But this rework is going too far.
But then again, we won't 100% know until it's lie, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I am a tri-prestige trapper who consistently sits at rank 1. Trust me, I know how to evaluate a killer power, and it is more complex than "does this power have the ability to directly confirm hits/down" which is what you are conflating with "Does this power help in a chase?" Trapper for example can't really win a chase realistically with his traps at the moment unless the survivors are bad anyway, it mostly exists to pre-close loops in a way that very indirectly reduces total chase time if you have setup. Is it stronger or weaker than the old power? Probably stronger in really up there ranks, but I dunno, we will have to wait and see.
But he definitely wasn't *deleted.* An instant injury confirm is pretty powerful, it would be broken in the pre-vacuum era we (hopefully) are returning to. At the low end, it is probably going to feel a lot weaker than the old power, but in higher end games it is going to probably be stronger than Trapper because getting a free hit is stronger than making loops slightly longer in terms of time efficiency, especially as Legion doesn't have any setup time.
Again, I can't stress enough how it is totally valid that the SPIRIT of this killer was essentially ruined. and to be upset this is the devs capitulated AGAIN to survivors complaining about a NPE while pretty much totally ignoring years old killer NPEs. But a Wraith this ain't. It is a chase relevant power. It certainly doesn't make him worse than Freddy, Freddy would literally be stronger if he didn't have ANY power.
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It isn't a nerf, being a M1 killer with a legitimately free hit and stall potential is basically what Pig and M&A Myers are. If you play a lot of trapper/Pig, you know that the difference between being injured and uninjured vs a M1 killer is super significant.
It does, however, turn them into a M1+ killer, which I think is more frustrating. They probably will actually be overall better, but will be generic as hell because the devs can't find a balance point for a steroid free hit as strong as the legion, and people obviously *want* to use their super awesome legion leapy stabs to down but no longer can.
Also, it is important to remember that if they literally removed Legion's power entirely and just gave them base movespeed, if legion literally did not have a power, they would be stronger than Freddy. Until Freddy gets a rework so that he isn't literally pure downside he will always be the worst killer. The meta of the game doesn't reward any of his upsides which makes his power just a head start for your opponent and a delay in you landing an attack, Freddy is legitimately worse than an M1 killer with no power, and Legion's power IS relevant to how DBD is played.
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Deep wounds now seem like a totally incidental part of the power: A threat to force healing and stall, rather than the main goal.
Overall, it is a buff. Frenzy forces a free hit, and being injured makes stealth play significantly harder, and looping while injured is pretty dangerous if you are good at being an M1 killer.
This makes Legion more generic, which I think is what is bumming folks out the most. Their power IS a power, it is threatening something because M1 killers become extremely deadly vs injured survivors, but it no longer can down people and folks enjoy 'downer' powers. And that is super legitimate! I hope they consider finagling their addons so that you can try to emulate old legion, sorta like how Iri-Myers can totally swap his playstyle.
They may become much stronger if the alleged mid patch loop changes are significant rather than placebos.
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@The_Crusader said:
>
Lmao wraith has to wait to uncloak, this gives the survivor time to get to a pallet.
Its not comparable to frenzy at all.
It is entirely comparable actually. Both killers have high counterplay powers that are designed essentially to get the wounded state easier. On some maps when addons are in play Wraith is actually significantly better at it.
If you need a different killer with a similar threat, Monitor Myers can also essentially get a free wounding and is still 115%.
Getting one injury easier has never been justification for a lower movespeed, because then the power wouldn't actually help you get the down.
I don't think a MS buff is the solution mind, I think the idea of deep wounds REQUIRING other survivors healing you, even with self care, would make the legion's play loop actually work great and is a novel way to make his deep wounds actually interesting, but the point stands that it is absurd to think getting an easy injury but not an easy down is justification for 110% speed.
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People who say 115% speed would be OP don't understand killer design.
Legion would not be OP with default movespeed because his primary method of downing a survivor is M1ing. If you can't land a down with your power, you defacto need to be M1.
"But you could use his power to get the initial hit!"
You can do that with Wraith as well. No one is accusing Wraith of being good. Getting a free initial hit is not worth a slower move-speed.
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It is a fun build for Myers rather than a serious competitive item.
If you want a competitive mori addon on Myers, the toombstone fragment is your game. Toombstone itself is more like a fun spoopy variant mode, and fairly so. It wouldn't be fun for an item that so dramatically alters the killer to such insane levels to be in a usable state, and I say this as a 'buff killers' guy.
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Hillbilly actually probably has the best designed power, along with Myers, in that they serve as cohesive toolkits that give them an absurd amount of threat.
Billy isn't unfair. His power is a power. An advantage. Something that makes him unilaterally stronger and deadlier. He isn't like Clown or Hag or Pig, who's powers are deigned entirely from the perspective of making them not alter the core game, to allow survivors to do what they always did. His power threatens you. It has many uses, and while it has weaknesses, none of those weaknesses are designed to make it so you generally can't get value out of it, they are just limitations on its use that create a new meta for survivors to counter.
The worst thing you could do for the game is nerf Billy. Billy is literally the ideal balance point: He is able to utterly destroy survivors who disrespect him, his power doesn't have arbitrary weaknesses like cooldowns or weird counterplay it doesn't need, and it self limits in a healthy way.
A good power isn't about how strong it actually is, it is about the level of menace it grants the killer, the amount it lets them screw with what the survivors expect and break out of loop meta. Myers, despite having multiple killers higher tier than him, is akin to Billy in that he is designed around this legitimate threat and menace that forces survivors to change their behavior or get dumpstered. A killers power should feel terrifying and unfair and if you don't respect it you should just lose... but even if you respect it it should still often make you lose.
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Killers only real way to progress the match is to secure eliminations.
It is what they do. It is their only objective.
The hook was, from the game's conception, intended to be a fair survivor negative experience. When playing a game, there will be scenarios you don't consider fun. That is necessary for a game to work. In game design terms, it is described thusly: if there is no negotiated consequence (IE: Some bad result that can happen to you) then it is literally definitionally not a game, it is a toy, simulation, or tool. You can't lose at blocks, or dolls, or a physics simulator. You can, however, lose in poker, chutes and ladders, or chess.
Not only that, incremental advantages or disadvantages need to be part of a game. Losing all at once makes a bad game because it results in a lack of many player interactions, so states where you are at a severe disadvantage are generally preferable precursors to a loss. For example, in a fighting game, being at low health, in a corner, at low meter, while waking up from being knocked down is a common state to enter if an opponent does well that dramatically limits your options, increases your opponent's options, and makes it extremely likely for you to lose.
This is fair. This is common in every game design. You did not end up on the hook by some magical random chance: You made mistakes, you got outplayed, and now you are down your queen and two rooks. You are cornered with no meter. You are out of cash to buy anything but pistols going up against AWPs. You fed 5 kills to your lane opponent and they now have 2 items on you. You had to mortage baltic avenue to avoid going bankrupt. Ect, ect, ect.
In team games, it gets more interesting, because the design allows you to create scenarios where the entire team is disadvantaged at different levels but as a whole is made weaker. In team games, you need to view the entire team as a player. In DBD, the person on the hook is significantly more disadvantaged than the person free to run. However, it is the same scenario. Despite ONE player being unable to do anything to escape a loss state, the entire team is able to continue and win, with or without that player.
The trick is to make sure the single player is not put in that loss state instantly. Because losing without having any recourse isn't fun.
Luckily... DEAD BY DAYLIGHT OBVIOUSLY DOES THIS. You, in fact, have earned your soft lost state once your on the hook. You had to be seen, meaning you F###ed up hiding! You needed to then lose a chase, which requires over a minimum of 30 seconds of time to extend your own life you F###ed up messing up the killer's visual tracking, F###ed up getting to a loop or other safe spot, F###ed up exiting the chase, and F###ed up jukes... TWICE.
You had to screw all of this up twice.
Good survivors don't go on the hook basically ever. Like its so trivially easy to avoid, even at high ranks. I literally can't remember the last time I was hooked, it has been so darn long, and any time it happens I feel embarrassed because it was my game to lose.
At that point, the game's design dictates you exist to advantage the killer's game state. IE: you are bait. You MIGHT get back into the game, but it isn't an assurance. It wasn't even likely at the dawn of the game, saves were considered comically unlikely. You now exist to advance the killer's tempo, with the possibility of parole.
Hooks are kinda screwed up though. Not in that they are unfair to survivors, but to killers. The tempo advantage they are meant to represent sort of is all screwed up because hooking is actually a massive time sink and hooks are generally 'not worth it' unless you can get another chase off the hook either via camping or just someone being reckless thinking your camping.
Furthermore, they are screwed up in that the decision to camp or not camp biases comically towards camping. This is not due to any potential downside of camping not being strong enough, but the downsides of leaving the hook being comically huge. If you leave the hook, any time you invested in that stage of the hook is wasted, and because hooking takes such a big time investment vs good survivors, its rare for it to end well for the killer if they can't get multiple stages out of one hooking (Either by instant rehooking or blocking unhooks) a few times per game.
You want to fix camping? You need to dramatically increase the tempo gain a hook grants even on an unhook. Something like a permanent massive repair speed decrease per hook stage lost. As is, the hook is already comically fair for survivors, and actually biases towards them as a mechanic.
The killer, at high ranks, would literally be better off if the survivors each had 3 lives and took 30 seconds to respawn once they were downed because then they would at least not have to invest time in the hook. You are literally better off as a survivor for the hook existing and forcing the killer to invest time into defending it. Don't ask for killers to be punished for doing what the design literally forces them to.
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From a pure design standpoint I really like Spine Chill, at least in the pre-vacuum meta before looping became a thing. It at first seems like a newbie crutch, but it actually gives you information that was highly relevant in the old chases where hard escapes were the only way to live, which was mainly "Is the killer still visually tracking me?" Because trying to exploit a LOS break has distance costs, if a killer tracks you through a LOS break trying to transition that into a hard escape you are merely guaranteeing you eat a hit. So spine chill actually had a significant effect on your ability to consistently do hard escapes mid chase, despite it seeming like it mostly just helped you if you were blind and deaf and couldn't realize the killer was coming for you on a gen.
Of course, new meta, new problems, and because survivors slowed down a lot to compensate for the fact they have safe bases all over the map those old juke games aren't as fun. In current meta I would say Stake Out is the most interesting perk, as it encourages you to be near the killer outside the context of a chase which is a very interesting dynamic compared to the boring trash that is looper meta where you want to be close to the killer mid chase, though it unfortunately isn't very strong.
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It is actually really critical that survivors get as few mechanics that prevent a hit even if the killer is in attack range as possible. That is what the vacuum pallet change did, and it essentially broke the game's balance because it creates a scenario where survivors have extremely potent safezones where the killer is unable to hit them despite the survivor not attempting to progress the chase to an escape. It rewards inactivity and just utilizing an absolute defense, which is very boring for both sides unless you are a survivor who gets off on bullying rather than actually good gameplay.
Your goal is meant to be gaining distance in order to enable a hard LOS break and escape, NOT to block hits. Back in the old days, pallets didn't even block hits at all, even if you threw first, which despite being hellishly unintuitive for new survivors was still not enough to give killers the advantage in high end play, and that was mostly changed to make the game easier to understand, not more fair.
Windows being something you can still be hit through is entirely intuitive and thus doesn't even have that excuse. Clearly someone smacking at you through totally empty space while you are within reach will hurt you even if there is a little ledge stopping them from walking forward.
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I would either make the time it lasts longer but not infinite and add the aura read, or just make it infinite but not add aura read.
Either way, yes, this is basically the direction the perk needs to go.
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While I agree ruin is badly designed, it is literally for the opposite reason you state OP. The killer needs way better tools to slow the game down that involve actual player interaction, like the hook percentage=repair rate reduction idea.
The fact they can slow things down a bit is kinda... insanely needed right now.
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As others have said exposed isn't likely the answer here. While survivors need to incur a LOT more risk for interacting with the killer than they do now, that likely has to come from the killer being more able to permanently affect them than by making it easier for them to go down.
I mean think about it, even if someone goes down BY a hook, it is rather hard for a killer to really capitalize on that on most maps. They can trade a hook for a hook, which is an ok outcome, but they risk being flashlighted or slammed because its very likely other survivors will be ready for a rescue. They can try to defend the hook and the guy down, but that is difficult if they are smart or crawl away. And it is unlikely this will result in downs as the time it takes a killer to hook allows for an extreme amount of safe positioning. A killer who tries to hit the exposed target ultimately is going to just have to go through another chase and likely won't be able to land the hit unless the survivor is so bad the down was free anyway.
I think the issue with survivor over-aggression more comes from the fact it is zero cost if the killer can't afford to dedicate time to hook you, as the only real things a killer can do to affect a survivor is to incapacitate them or kill them.
A potential redesign could be to cause the scream to demoralize the survivors and slow down their run speed, so if they try to do that 2 man bait strategy where two survivors constantly in turn agress the hook while never getting close enough to allow a hit, or if they are bodyblocking at the hook or otherwise threatening it even as you are point blank, they basically auto lose the chase. It solves the issue with the current design where exposed really only works on survivors who are bad anyway, by limiting the survivor's options to engage with the hook safely, because suddenly if the killer uses this perk and you were too aggressive you basically auto lose the chase.
It still likely wouldn't be good, because it doesn't solve the fundamental issue that survivor hook aggression isn't really punishable enough and the killer doesn't get enough for hooking a survivor, but at least it wouldn't be a dead perk in most scenarios.
However I do like the idea of more killer perks that allow a killer to punish disrespect. Staying near the hook for a hook inherently is risky and aggressive, and it is totally fair for a perk to exist that punishes that without telegraphing. I also like how this perk has a very clear trigger event, much like BBQ, that also has clear strong counterplay, because it allows the perk to have a really extreme effect like 'win the chase basically automatically' without it actually being unfair. Just by not trying to bodyblock the hook but instead waiting in the band between BBQ's aura read and this exposing or slowing you, you can trivially shut down this perk, meaning that as long as you respect this perk the killer is only a 3 perk build, or 2 if you also counter BBQ! But at the same time the perk existing is good because it suddenly creates a metagame where survivors may be respecting a perk that doesn't exist, and even if the killer has the perk they get a lesser benefit in that the survivors don't want to go agro the hook too early.
There are really good design elements here, it is just exposed is weird and both feels unfair for the survivors while strictly speaking not being very good at countering what actually tends to happen near the hook.
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@jiminie said:
picking survivors up at the speed of lightI know that this is clearly a survivor overreaction to being nerfed, which is ironic because the game balance was nearly gutted to make pallets more intuitive for new players, but if your counting "faster pickups" as a major negative of the patch you likely are the kind of player the devs are trying to disempower with these patches.
Long anim locks on killers for things they HAVE to do which allow no counterplay punishes are bad game design and shortening the time allows killers who lack Franklin's Demise to either fake out rescuers for a hit because they need to be closer for the rescue or drive them off, which makes the game better.
Nothing about auto flashlight saves on the anim lock was good, and it is one of those things that was truly indefensible. So by trying to defend it you kinda out yourself as someone who shouldn't have an opinion. It was up there with those old infinite jungle gyms they had in terms of being toxic gameplay that shouldn't exist, because when used well there was no counterplay and it just means the killer literally can't progress the game.
I get not LIKING being nerfed, but if your argument is that it is unfair that you can't get a no-skill flashlight rescue automatically on the killer because they are literally forced to become incapable of moving their camera for a long enough period of time that you can move from the closest hiding spot to them without having to expose yourself at all or risk any serious consequence yourself for trying, you are either a bad player who thinks that all survivors legitimately need that because they are so bad they don't realize they are bad, or you are arguing in bad faith and know it isn't fair but want it anyway and are trying to re-contextualize it as necessary for you to be able to do this.