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@AssortedSorting said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3829607#Comment_3829607
This is more from the perspective of this post:
Were proxy-camping/camping made nearly impossible to perform, and tunneling much more reliant of hunting down a survivor, what would you want to see the act of Hooking itself do.
But as to your points on this post:Devour Hope itself is a perk, and while it does offer competitive advantages, and visual flourish with the Mori, it lacks BP gains some might be interested in. It’s also designed around being a hex (and a perk), rather than something baseline. It’s a cool perk though I agree.
Incentives and disincentives are needed, but you need some degree of mechanical inability for some things too, to cover those that do things just for spiteful reasons, or simply due to it being the most efficient method.
Making perks that promote spreading hooks competitive, even meta, can help the issue, but causes a lack of perk diversity and a feeling that you need certain perks to be competitive. And if they’re the same strength as non-spreading perks, the non-spreading perks mean you play with less need to micromanage hook states/multiple chases, therefore being the path of least resistance.
As far as needing to redesign every perk:meta perk to be dynamic regarding hook states, I am not fond of that idea. It becomes convoluted and annoying to learn, making it harder to onboard new players.
The same sentiment with incremental/minute changes to stats for the Killer at base. The powerups need to be simple, obvious, and noticeable at a a glance, otherwise it makes it harder to onboard new players/does not feel impactful.
And the same goes for survivor methods of fighting back against those things.
This is more from the perspective of this post:
I see. Those are interesting ideas for anti-slug/camp/tunnel mechanics, I could see something along those lines work out fairly well. What I unfortunately cannot see is BHVR ever actually doing something that radical, they just aren't comfortable changing anything too drastic about the core formula. For multiple reasons, but one likely one being that they are mortified by the idea of losing whatever mysterious emergent quality it is that makes DbD be so successful when their other original projects just aren't.
Either way, yes, of course, if they would implement better base means of combatting camping and tunnelling, killer buffs would be warranted.
Devour Hope itself is a perk, and while it does offer competitive advantages, and visual flourish with the Mori, it lacks BP gains some might be interested in. It’s also designed around being a hex (and a perk), rather than something baseline. It’s a cool perk though I agree.
Mhm, the Devour suggestion obviously is meant more so as a "this is what you can do currently to help yourself with the game as it is" than something to say that we already have incentive enough due to its existence. But it really is pretty great, one of the most well-designed perks in the game, I'd encourage any player to use it more often.
Incentives and disincentives are needed, but you need some degree of mechanical inability for some things too, to cover those that do things just for spiteful reasons, or simply due to it being the most efficient method.
Absolutely, we have long seen that the "carrot" alone does not deter players from going for the most reliably effective killing strategies that are camping and tunnelling; on top of more or less soft incentives there have to be hard mechanical changes that change how effective they are.
Making perks that promote spreading hooks competitive, even meta, can help the issue, but causes a lack of perk diversity and a feeling that you need certain perks to be competitive. And if they’re the same strength as non-spreading perks, the non-spreading perks mean you play with less need to micromanage hook states/multiple chases, therefore being the path of least resistance.
Again, the idea very much is that alongside such perk changes, moderate mechanical nerfs to camping and tunnelling would be applied, such that between those adjustments to these strategies and the strength of perks that discourage them, they wouldn't be the most clearly and easily effective route anymore. Mind you, I do think camping and tunnelling have their place in the game, they are integral even to its gameplay appeal in my opinion. But currently they are just too blatantly the most effective strategies while also simply being too effective, particularly against uncoordinated groups which constitute the overwhelming majority of the playerbase. Rebalancing is in order, and perk design could be part of that equation, not least because we know BHVR for better and worse like to use perks as bandaids for base balance concerns.
As far as needing to redesign every perk:meta perk to be dynamic regarding hook states, I am not fond of that idea. It becomes convoluted and annoying to learn, making it harder to onboard new players.
That's fair, these restrictions are very much something that is readily understood among experienced players (they know what "camping" and "tunnelling" is, why perks that benefit from not doing it would be good, and how to best use them), but isn't very intuitive for new players to build and play around. But I do think having at least some really strong perks that actively discourage camping/tunnelling is perfectly sensible and feasible, and the restrictions could also be as simple and clear as "this perk is disabled once any survivor dies", an idea BHVR had already picked up on with Ruin and that I think is one of the best ones as it not only discourages camping and tunnelling but also helps make the 3v1 gamestate be less skewed in the killer's favour in general.
The same sentiment with incremental/minute changes to stats for the Killer at base. The powerups need to be simple, obvious, and noticeable at a a glance, otherwise it makes it harder to onboard new players/does not feel impactful.
I agree that these things need to be simple, obvious and tangible precisely because they are meant to incentivize/disincentivize certain behaviours, and have to motivate players. That said, not only are there of course plenty of ideas that follow those lines and BHVR can also employ visual and sound notifications to more clearly communicate them, but to an extent these changes are also meant to simply make those behaviours be less beneficial. A player does not have to know how Bloodlust works to benefit from it, and conversely in the instance of using this mechanic as a means of rebalancing camping/tunnelling, a player does not have to know how exactly Bloodlust changes when they camp/tunnel to not benefit from it as much as they otherwise could. It will simply nerf Bloodlust for them if they do camp/tunnel and as a result make camping/tunnelling somewhat easier to deal with for survivors, and over time such adjustments would also permeate through the collective playerbase's "consciousness", and it would more widely become intuitively understood that you can benefit from not concentrating on individual survivors as much.
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I agree. Old Distortion was actually very much not fine: being able to block almost any and all killer aura perks/add-ons/abilities all match long by simply spending one perk slot was way overtuned. The activation requirement of needing to be in the killer's terror radius made sure you almost always had tokens, and it encouraged overly stealthy playstyles and trying to interact as little with the killer as possible. Not healthy in my opinion. The only instance where I thought Distortion was fine was against Nurses abusing Nowhere To Hide (and Darkness Revealed), particularly on indoor maps.
Distortion now encourages interaction, and like you point out has a more limited, targeted scope of when its effect can then be beneficial. It sort of was to aura-blocking perks (of which there admittedly are too few) what Ultimate Weapon originally was to tracking perks: it trumped them all, gratuitously so.
What I do think would be reasonable however is to have it start out with its 2 tokens already present.
In general I would encourage anyone that has trouble dealing with the - indeed plentiful and not always entirely unproblematic - aura-reading effects of killers to give Object Of Obsession a try. Not only will it also tell you which aura effects are in play, but sometimes seeing the killer's aura when they see yours will actually be more beneficial in playing around those aura reads than simply blocking them would. And interaction with the killer is ultimately more fun than trying to continually hide from them. You will also learn to get better at chases if you are actually more regularly engaged in them, which Object will also facilitate, ha.
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It really should. It should also be able to be used once per stage, not merely once per hook instance (you currently can't use Reassurance again if a survivor transitions stages on hook). I don't think it's a range issue, but if it is, increasing its range to 8 or even 10m such that it reaches into basement would be a perfectly adequate buff.
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I think even with Peanits' explanation as to why they've changed Inner Focus, the change is still ridiculous not only in and of itself but also with regards to how cautious and concerned they are with making sure really rather bad perks don't get to be "problematic", while only awfully rarely actually releasing good perks or making any of the countless subpar perks good.
Even in the vanishingly rare case where you would actually get an SWF group coordinating to abuse Inner Focus with Plot Twist, I really fail to see how this would be problematic rather than an interesting new "meme" tactic in the game, that also has ample of counterplay. You have to be in chase with a survivor that has Inner Focus equipped, and another survivor has to be injured and flopping down with Plot Twist over and over again, while yet another survivor keeps healing them up, ideally of course with something like We're Gonna Live Forever. So you basically have one survivor left to do gens, the survivor you are chasing still isn't invincible just because they have constant aura reads on you, and you as a killer can obviously also very easily tell what is going on, and simply chase someone else. If everybody has the perks equipped, they are forgoing many better perks they could be using instead, and they also always need someone to be injured in order to be able to do this at all, which the killer can also try and prevent from happening.
I would also point out that instead of restricting perks so much in their strength and having such a narrow design space for them due to the constant concern that SWF groups can stack and coordinate their usage, it would be much more beneficial to restrict SWF loadouts, only allowing them to have one copy of any perk (or item/add-on/offering) equipped between them. This would open up space to design stronger and more impactful perks (and items/add-ons/offerings), and also benefit solo survivors disproportionately who would of course still be able to end up using multiple copies of them.
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I mean, there's two ideas with this combo: If you want to tunnel, this combo should usually allow you to make it back to the hook before the unhooked survivor can possibly have been healed (then also making them somewhat easier to track due to the increased frequency of blood pools); If you don't want to tunnel, the survivors will spend a lot of time not on gens occupied with the heal instead, after which the unhooked survivor will also suffer a repair speed penalty. The time to heal the unhooked survivor if it's one other survivor healing them is: .8 * .5 = .4; 16 / .4 = 40 seconds. Since Leverage only lasts for 30 seconds though, you only have the .8 penalty after that. In those 30 seconds you will have healed 12 "heal charges", or 75%. The remaining 4 charges will take another 5 seconds. So in reality we are healing in 35 seconds, times two since it's two survivors. That's 70 survivor seconds not spent doing anything else.
It's not bad, but there are a few issues:
Gift Of Pain has been collaterally nerfed by the Mangled/Hemorrhage nerf to have it on a timer. Due to this, instead of immediately healing after getting unhooked, it is sometimes ideal to wait until Mangled/Hemorrhage have run out, then being able to heal more quickly and also to 99% your heal, not suffering any repair speed penalty but also not really suffering from any of the drawbacks of being injured as you can heal at will at a moment's notice. For this reason, I think Gift Of Pain has long deserved a compensatory buff, such as making the repair penalty apply immediately, until the survivor loses a health state again.
Leverage just isn't impactful or reliable enough of a time waster, as the unhooking survivor may simply opt to not heal the unhooked survivor in the first place, who can also have various other means of healing including other survivors, and even if they do heal it's not like the extra ~16 seconds (15 seconds) will matter too much. That leaves its most reliable and impactful use-case that of supporting tunnelling, which is not a healthy way to be for any perk (looking at you, Forced Hesitation). To make this perk more impactful and reliable, one easy change would be to make it so that it simply applies to all survivors: everyone suffers a 50% healing speed penalty for 30 seconds after every unhook.
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Absolutely. While the basic chance to trigger a skill check (on a repair) is 8% and Deadline thus more than doubles it to 18%, skill checks are of course neutral at best and detrimental at worst to get, unless you hit great skill checks. Which is more difficult with Deadline, but even if it weren't, and even if you could reliably hit all great skill checks you get, the repair time reduction is simply not worth it.
With a chance of 8% per second to trigger a skill check, a 90-second gen (if you do it from 0-100% solo) will on average give you 7.2 skill checks. Since every great skill check grants 1% extra progression, that's 7.2% of 90 seconds, or 6.48 seconds. What has to be kept in mind is that with every great skill check, the repair interaction time is reduced from its 90 seconds, obviously then also decreasing the average number of skill checks you are expected to get. And there also appears to be a safety built into DbD that you cannot get another skill check for a brief time after a previous one, likely to prevent a skill check triggering while another one is already playing. Both meaning that the true average is even lower. We would on top of that have to round down the average when looking at repairs on an actual per-gen basis since you obviously can't get "partial" skill checks. But even if we for simplicity's sake look at this supposed average, Deadline even if you hit all greats only makes for a reduction of 14.58 seconds, minus the 6.48 that you usually get anyway - an 8.1-second reduction in generator repair time… on a solo 0-100% gen, if you hit all greats that are more difficult to hit with the perk (thereby also increasing the risk of missing a skill check and incurring a 10% regression and 3-second progress freeze, which more than nullifies any and all benefits Deadline will have given you), having to be injured for it, and ignoring that the real reduction will be even lower given the fact that the reduced repair time as well as the mechanic preventing consecutive skill checks lowers the average amount of checks you will get. That's beyond awful. Not to mention that it makes various perks (such as Oppression, Overcharge, Huntress Lullaby, Coulrophobia and Merciless Storm) more difficult to deal with, as well as Doctor altogether.
The only real use case for Deadline ever is alongside Hyperfocus or Autodidact. The latter is not a good perk unless you have a killer employing a hit-and-run strategy and using Mangled/Hemorrhage, in which case you can reliably get 5 tokens on a singular heal anyway by repeatedly starting it over. And the former is not popular because it is already too difficult for most players (including veterans) to consistently hit great skill checks under its effect, often blowing up gens because of it. Deadline makes this a lot more difficult still, so it's not a combo that is feasible for most of any player to truly get reliable value from.
Removing the injured stipulation is the least they could do. I would welcome if they were to also increase the triggering chances much more, hell, even to something like 40% (i. e. make it multiply chances by 5, like toolboxes do). Give the people that actually go for the challenge something for it. Getting that many skill checks would if anything only make it more challenging. Alternatively, keep it at a lower (but still increased) number but remove the "random location skill check" part. Which is the more boring route.
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You can in fact mindgame most survivors you encounter on most of any tile. Even in chases between very experienced and skilled players (such as on the DbD League 1v1 ladder) gyms get mindgamed, and most pub random survivors will be fairly easily outplayed even at these safe tiles. I can give you pointers if you want any.
Here are a few fundamental ones to start you off (edit: I think I should point out that the lines pointing away from "you" are supposed to signify your red stain/the direction you are facing towards, not torso and arms 😅):
On the short-wall gym, hide your red light here when rounding the pallet after the survivor has dropped or vaulted it. The survivor now does not know whether you have doubled-back and are cutting through or behind the gym, and most pub randoms will hesitate, allowing you to quickly round the corner and potentially get them. You can also stand still in that position for a few seconds, leading many survivors to panic and run back into you when you finally round the corner. Alternatively, you can obviously actually then cut through or behind the gym, to catch the survivor holding the spot at the window, hiding your red light like so:
To attempt to mindgame the window, hide your red light here:
Now the survivor again does not know whether you are cutting through or in front of the gym and will hesitate or panic. Round the corner with some delay, or actually cut through or in front of the gym, while hiding your red light:
Long-wall gyms are a little more complex so I will spare you further silly sketches.
Most killer abilities also make it very interactive to play around these safer tiles, whereas less safe tiles tend to be rather linear and boring against these chase abilities, and either lead to more or less guaranteed hits eventually, or 50/50s at best, at least if the survivor player isn't much better than the kiler player.
For killers that do not have potent chase abilities, the optimal play (if you want to win as reliably as possible that is - if you want to have more fun and engaging gameplay mindgaming is always cooler) on these safer tiles against competent survivors regularly simply is to force the pallet use and then break it. Breaking pallets is a completely sensible game action and part of the basic gameplay loop, not every tile has to reliably be outplayable. It's not a loss to break a pallet, the best killer players break pallets and win games against the best survivor players. You would also be well-advised to use perks like Bamboozle and Brutal Strength on those killers, brute-forcing these tiles without needing to get good at mindgaming or risking the survivor out-mindgaming you, and still not losing a lot of time in the process.
Basic logic on how to chase in these tiles to most efficiently force the window block/pallet drop can easily be found around the web, with YouTube videos obviously being a very easy-to-follow source. But I'll point you here, simply because I copied the gym sketch from there: https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/d6q8im/quick_rundown_of_how_to_run_some_generic_tiles.
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May I suggest using Devour Hope? It's a great perk precisely for the reason that it incentivizes leaving hooks and spreading out hooks, and yet still allowing you to win decisively, giving you that Mori ability.
On the chance however that this topic was created with the silly notion that "slugging is better than hooking" and needing incentives to hook altogether: tunnelling and camping are the strongest, most reliable killing strategies, there can be no greater incentive than that.
What is needed are incentives specifically to not camp and tunnel, as well as some moderate nerfs to those strategies. Perk-based incentives would already go a long way to change up the meta of playstyles. A lot of killer perks could be a lot stronger - as long as the killer isn't tunnelling much. Grim Embrace is a good example of a perk that encourages spreading out hooks, although it still doesn't go far enough as it doesn't actually punish tunnelling, granting the same effect even if you tunnel out one survivor and only then get the fresh hooks on the others. Changing it to something where the time it blocks gens for depends on the number of gens left at the time of each fresh hook would much more directly encourage spreading out hooks from the get-go, as well as punish players that go for the same survivors or stick around hooks, as more gens getting completed in the meantime obviously leads to further fresh hooks granting less blockage.
Similarly, Pain Resonance could regress its gen by a much heftier chunk of progress, but that amount being decreased if any survivor has reached struggle stage. Or it could have a somewhat heftier regression, but be disabled completely if any survivor dies. Pop Goes The Weasel could grant more regression on fresh hooks than consecutive hooks, or just more regression but being disabled once a survivor dies, or yet much more regression but only on the gen furthest from the hook that has progress (which it would highlight for the killer). BBQ could gain tokens again, granting a movement speed increase for every token, but any survivor hitting struggle stage removing a token. It would also be beneficial for it to show the auras of survivors without hook stages only (no distance requirement), until everyone has a hook stage, then as per usual showing all auras beyond 40m. Ruin could grant the 200% base regression again, but be disabled automatically again once a survivor dies, as well as perhaps reduced to 150% once any survivor hits struggle stage. Call Of Brine/Overcharge could increase regression rate by a lot more, scaling with how many survivors are still alive and/or haven't hit struggle. And so on.
There could also be base incentives though, of course. Base kick regression could be increased to half a charge per second, decreasing back to a quarter once any survivor hits struggle stage. Killers could get a permanent movement speed boost, stacking for every fresh hook, as long as no survivor has hit struggle. Or it could simply change the specifics of the Bloodlust mechanic, scaling with fresh hooks (e. g. after the second fresh hook, instead of 15/25/35s, Bloodlust kicks in after 10/20/30s; 5/15/25s on the third fresh hook; and after the fourth fresh hook, the killer constantly has Bloodlust I, Bloodlust II kicking in after 10 seconds, III 20s - once any survivor hits struggle stage, Bloodlust reverts to its normal behaviour; if any survivor dies, Bloodlust is disabled). Pallet-breaking speeds could be increased until a survivor hits struggle stage. There are countless possible ideas for both base and perk-based incentives against tunnelling/camping, that give killers significant power-ups and notable regression/slowdown effects, as long as survivors aren't hitting struggle stage or dying.
Moderate nerfs to camping and tunnelling could also come in many forms, from buffing survivors in those scenarios (showing the aura of the most-recently unhooked survivor to all other survivors, making unhook Endurance unhook invincibility, increasing repair speeds if the killer is around the hook/chasing the most-recently unhooked survivor, or if a survivor has been sacrificed (depending on how many hook stages happened before that point or how many gens got repaired), showing the anti-facecamp meter to all survivors, …) to nerfing killers' ease of employing these strategies, such as by removing the auras of hooks survivors are hanging on, removing the unhook explosion notification, not showing the hook life bar of the survivor to the killer - we just accept that these things are that way, but why are they? They directly encourage and support camping and tunnelling.
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I'm not sure people are aware what its recent "bug fix" actually did:
Fixed an issue that caused the Moment of Glory perk to lose its charges when entering the dying state
This not only means that contrary to what @Caiman claimed you don't lose any charges on being downed, but more crucially, it instantly starts healing you again once you are back on your feet. So if you have Glory ready, get downed but then healed up again by a fellow teammate or Unbreakable or the like, you instantly become Broken again, and the 60-second timer starts anew. This also carries over to being hooked, then becoming Broken and healed within 60s after the unhook. As well as escaping the killer's grasp, be it by wiggling, stun or blind rescues, or Decisive Strike.
While this has notably improved the perk and made it have more consistent value, the risk that getting downed would render the investment to activate the perk naught wasn't something that held the perk back from being "great" or anything, it was more so something that pushed it into "you'd be pretty crazy to use this, unless you actively want to bring detrimental perks in order to have fun" territory. So with that issue fixed, it's not like Glory is a meta-contender now. Fairly far from; it's still hard to argue it's anything above high C, at most low B tier.
The investment to activate it is just too steep. Running around searching for and looting two chests takes ages, and sometimes isn't possible altogether because it's too risky to go for a chest with the killer around (especially the basement chest of course), let alone while injured. The items you find are regularly nowhere near worth that time investment either, particularly of course considering that you can only carry one item at a time, and that ideally you would want to bring an item into the round to begin with. There are only 3 chests on the map, so at most you can activate the perk one time, and only if nobody else has looted 2 chests themselves. Sure, you can bring perks and offerings to change some of these things (Shiny Coin, Plunderer's Instinct, Appraisal, Ace In The Hole, …), but then you are spending even more precious slots on things that in and of themselves are really suboptimal choices, forgoing good stuff, and the issue that you can only hold one item at a time and that that item ideally is one you brought into the trial from the get-go doesn't disappear.
And then beyond the activation investment, the effect is not that crazy either: Surviving 60 seconds in a chase while injured is not easy for a lot of players, and against an even just competent killer player it isn't easy for anyone, particularly of course if they are playing one of the numerous killers with potent chase abilities. Not to mention that instadown abilities/add-ons/perks completely circumvent this. Healing passively if the killer leaves you after hitting you or after you get unhooked or healed up off the ground is neat because it saves some time, but in the latter two scenarios there is another survivor there that could have simply healed you instead without it taking too much time. It is nice that you can go and hide after getting unhooked and passively heal, but then if the killer is far enough away such that you aren't immediately caught up in a chase, you'd regularly be better off using Inner Strength and hiding in a locker after that unhook, which is a more reliable means of healing in general as well. And if you are getting tunnelled, you might just end up getting put into Deep Wound, where all Glory will then do is mend you.
Given all that, I do think Glory deserves a buff or another. What would instantly make it much more relevant I think is if they were to reduce its activation condition to 1 loot/rummage interaction. Now you aren't forced to bring a Shiny Coin and/or Appraisal to be able to activate the perk multiple times, multiple survivors using the perk aren't as extremely at odds with each other, and the time to activate it is technically halved. Only having to loot one chest per activation also means you aren't always forced to leave an item behind. And if you do bring Shiny Coin or Appraisal, it even gets to be a fairly reliable means of healing. If they were to reduce the time-to-heal to 45 seconds on top of that, we would probably start seeing a lot more looting. They could also simply cut the timer down to 30 seconds, keeping the current activation condition.
I would also want for the Broken status to be removed such that you can heal by other means if you want to, saving your Glory for when you really need it, as well as making it more surreptitious in chase as opposed to immediately telling the killer that you will be healthy again if they can't down you.
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Absolutely. I hope this will be part of the activity HUD improvements to come next month, as per the roadmap. Currently the anti-facecamp mechanic really doesn't do anything but deter facecamping, which is neat but more a quality-of-life change than anything else, as players can still hardcamp from a distance that allows the killers facecamping was still problematic on to begin with after the removal of hook grabs to still deny unhooks (e. g. Leatherface, Trickster, Iri Huntress, Pinkie Clown, etc.).
With every survivor being able to see the AFC bar, they can not only play around it more effectively (if the survivor is close to getting it, they can then know to keep their distance, or not to finish the last gen), but also infer things about what's going on around the hook: if the meter is building, the killer is obviously around the hook; if it isn't, either the killer isn't around the hook, or someone else is there with them. While far from perfect information, this can improve the decision-making in these crucial scenarios and act as a sort of Kindred-lite. It would end up making the AFC a worthwhile implementation, and most of all so for solo survivors. Currently the AFC if anything is just another aspect in the big divide between solo and SWF, the latter being able to play around and make use of it infinitely more effectively.
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Reverted The Skull Merchant's movement speed when Inspecting her Radar to 4.6 m/s.
This is whatever. Probably for the better.
The Skull Merchant sees scan lines from her Drones at all times. (NEW)
The Skull Merchant sees the aura of scan lines when Inspecting her Radar within 32 meters of the
Drone(s). (NEW)I don't get what seeing scan lines at all times entails if it's not seeing them through walls as well. Were there instances where Merchant did not see scan lines?
Machine Learning:
Decreased the duration of the effect once activated to 35/40/45 seconds. (was 40/50/60 seconds)Didn't need the nerf.
Predator:
Decreased the duration of the aura reveal to 4 seconds. (was 6 seconds)I'm not convinced this needed a nerf. It's a good perk sure, but it's only really broken on Nurse, who herself needs nerfs instead.
Zanshin Tactics:
Decreased the duration of the aura reveal to 3/4/5 seconds. (was 6/7/8 seconds)I do think this perk is a little cheap, but I also think perks like this need to be strong in order to justify spending slots on them over one of the various good slowdown perks. So I don't think this nerf is warranted either.
Distortion:
Decreased the requirement to regain a token to 15 seconds in chase. (was 30 seconds)An alright compensation for the 2-token nerf, as well as the fact that survivors now cannot just stealth indefinitely but need killer interaction to gain tokens.
Inner Focus:
Now only triggers from health state loss caused by the Killer.Silly they'd even spend time nerfing awful perks like this when they seemingly don't have time to buff the numerous other ones.
We're Gonna Live Forever:
Revert the heal speed increase to 100%. (was 150%)150% was definitely overtuned, especially since it stacks with med-kits. This is alright.
Fixed an issue that caused Killers to be able to unleash a Captured Haunt and perform a basic attack in quick succession.
A bit ridiculous that this was possible in the first place. Getting close to someone and instantly downing them is one thing, but it could also be used to instantly down an unhooked survivor again.
Fixed an issue that caused the Dark Lord's Hellfire charge SFX to be too low.
This might make it a tad more possible to play around. I hope the "general optimization pass to fix issues that caused multiple SFX to be missing" also pertains stuff such as Huntress, Wesker, Nemesis, hell, at times even Leatherface to not play the audio of readying their abilities.
Fixed an issue that caused the Wraith to be unable to move or attack after doing certain interactions when using the Serpent - Soot add-on.
This is nice.
The post uncloak movement speed is missing when destroying a Breakable Wall or Pallet, or damaging a Generator with The Wraith's "The Serpent - soot" addon
…This isn't nice. It hasn't worked properly in a long time. As an avid Wraith player and enjoyer of his diverse add-ons, this has long been a grievance of mine. To now address it as a known issue but not fix it is only rubbing salt into the wound.
Added Hooks spawners on the second floor of the Father Campbell's Chapel
I think generally BHVR should be much more concerned with the "reverse basement" that elevated hooks can constitute than… Boil Over working one time in a hundred matches? I'm not sure what drives them to have hooks in buildings like this. The one on Thompson House is particularly problematic.
Tentatively fixed the issue where players would face desync if they played the game on Low settings.
Good to hear. Now to see whether it actually is fixed…
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Reveal myself and go for a chase. More fun.
But if you want to try your hardest to escape, obviously try to sneak away so as to go for hatch or the other gate. But chances are that if the killer is only guarding one gate, they already have some info on you being there, so sneaking away will regularly be tough. Could also have Whispers or Spies.
In general for these 1v1 gate game scenarios a good tip is that you can open the gate partially without it causing a red light to activate, hide and wait out the killer's patrol, and then go and finish the rest of the process. This will increase your chances to be able to open the gate in time. The threshold for the first red light is at 25%, but if your game is in English you can simply open until the progress bar sits between the C and A of "OPEN ESCAPE".
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I rarely play Spirit, but if I do some of the builds I like using revolve around Hubris with Uchiwa and/or Kintsugi Teacup. With that you'd obviously want to use Enduring, potentially Spirit Fury. Really fun to get Hubris value, and Spirit can easily get it.
Another fun build uses Unrelenting and Save The Best For Last with a mix of charge and recharge add-ons as well as Tsuba and relentlessly going for short phases and swinging for everything. Enduring and Hubris/Fury also work with that. Rapid Brutality isn't awful either if you combine it with STBFL and charge/recharge/speed add-ons.
Iron Will is viable again so Stridor or Genetic Limits are neat to have.
Devour Hope is good fun, and also one of the best perks you can be using. Some mix of Undying/Haunted/NOED/Blood Favor/Crowd Control/Thrill/Penti/Dominance with that. Spirit is one of the few top-tier killers that can use Exposed perks, so those are really potent on her.
I've never tried it but you could maybe make some build around Make Your Choice and Wakizashi work, where you keep phasing away from hook into MYC range and then reappear instantly, hoping someone will unhook during your phase. Either phase duration or recharge with that.
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@crogers271 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3825151#Comment_3825151
Rarity as a balancing mechanism for add-ons might yet linger in their approach to them, and for that I would likewise say that it probably even make sense from a "global average" perspective and through most of the MMR range, but breaks down at the edge of the spectrum where you have someone like Numinous using LoPro and getting 1300+ wins in a row (although in this case, to my surprise, they did actually nerf LoPro despite it not being a popularly used add-on yet a highly problematic outlier - I suspect this might've had to do with their consultants).This is true, but not what I was talking about. I mean like the rarity level of the addons (Iri, Purple, etc.).
Take old BNPs. I don't believe there is anyway anyone thought they were 'balanced' to autocomplete a gen. The 'balancing' factor was that they were rare. So maybe one in five or one in ten games you have this big, massive advantage.
I think a common misunderstanding about BHVR's approach is they don't care if every match is balanced (unlike other games), but whether a player has had a balanced experience over ten (or even a hundred) matches. Maybe some times you get the map and perk setup that gives you a huge advantages, maybe some times it swings the other way. I think they might even be okay with the unbalanced nature as it leads to more game variety.
As a game design, parts of it I like, parts of it I loathe. But back to the addons - I think what lingers is the idea / necessity given the blood web/grind that some addons are just better. By the way BHVR has designed the game Iri addons are meant to be broken (which has become silly as people have giant stockpiles of them). So going back to your original post on the data BHVR has, I don't think if they see these addons over performing that they would actually see it as a problem unless there was a massive difference.
Then we run into additional issues that would make it hard to spot in the data, such as MMR cleaning it up for a good portion of the player base and many players self selecting not to run overly broken builds even when it is incredibly evident how powerful they are.
Oh no, I understood that you meant their rarity as per their scarcer appearance in the bloodwebs. And that that probably works for the average playerbase because they don't play enough to where they have these stockpiles of the strongest add-ons to feel comfortable using them in most matches. But then there's very dedicated players that have thousands of those add-ons, and can use them every single time, even for thousands of matches in a row. So that balancing mechanism, while it may still work for the global average playerbase to an extent, breaks at those levels.
I'm also all too well aware of the fact that BHVR to some extent embraces the "chaos" of their game, in the matchmaking and balancing alike. And there are arguments for it, for instance as you point to the diversity of the playing experience. They have commented on this at multiple points themselves as well. Although they have throughout the years more and more embraced the competitiveness of their game, and concerned themselves with making it more "competitively" viable, sorting out some of the most outlandish pieces of game design (such as old BNPs, or Moris) and implementing MMR, aiming for much more consistent playing experiences that at least don't quite swing from heaven to hell. They have even strived to make solo survivor less "chaotic" of an experience, with the activity indicators (that are apparently also getting some further improvements in the coming months).
There aren't that many blatantly busted add-ons left either, they have done a lot of ironing-out in that regard too, iri add-ons of new releases in fact often having been somewhat lackluster because rather than direct, significant power-ups, they seem more intended these days to mix up the gameplay of a killer.
But yeah, again, my concern is mostly with the upper end of the skilled and experienced playerbase, as there the only thing that is consistent is how laughably imbalanced in their favour the game experience is (mostly as killer, but also in 4-SWFs), it being possible to win most matches (and pretty decisively at that) even without any perks or add-ons altogether, and an actually challenging match maybe happening one time in a hundred or thousand matches if you are on a good build. They should make the matchmaking more strict at the upper end or create a separate pool or even queue for these types of players, as well as look at which killers/perks/add-ons/etc. are problematic in that space (for SWFs I believe more than anything else it's being able to stack all of those things; without the ability to do so I think we'd already arrive at a reasonably balanced (or balanced-enough) state for SWFs even at a high level), because for players at that level many of their current matchmaking and balancing philosophies break down. And these things wouldn't affect most players much.
Of course, while I do know players and of players that have stopped playing or would have stopped playing without the comp scene, I don't actually know just how much of a player retention/investment problem it actually poses that good players stomp all over this game. I have speculated before that given that BHVR has made the matchmaking more and more lax, they have simply concluded that even among the upper end of experience and skill, most players actually enjoy winning more than having a challenge, and that the people they stomp on don't stop playing in droves because of it either. Or at least that most players in that realm would rather have short queues and relatively boring matches, than longer queues and engaging matches. I don't know for a fact of course, my view is based on my own experience and that of the players I surround myself with. But I do believe they have enough levers to make things at least somewhat more strict and iron out at least some of the most egregious of balance concerns for that level without it posing any risks of alienating or losing players. I can't imagine doing something against players being able to go on winstreaks of hundreds and thousands of matches would have non-positive consequences in a popular PVP game.
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@crogers271 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3824938#Comment_3824938
Zarr, your post fit on my computer screen without me having to scroll, I'm worried you've taken ill :).
I would hope BHVR at least internally actually make use of their ability to look at stats in much more detail, such as killers (and their add-ons) that are most represented in the "players with 70-80+% killrate" pool, or survivor players (and their perks) that manage comparable escape rates, to identify some of the most problematic killers/add-ons and perks stacked in SWF. It unfortunately doesn't appear they really do however, as most of their balance changes seem aimed at making killers coalesce around that 60% global average target, not really addressing blatant issues that anyone experienced at the game would be familiar withI think part of the issue here is that BHVR approaches balance issues in a way that seems (and potentially is) counter intuitive. I think BHVR heavily relies on the idea of MMR balancing things out. If a player wants to sweat and bring the best possible things it turns them from say a 7 out of 10 into an 8 out of 10 player, well if MMR works then its going to balance out though they'll need to keep running those things or face a harsh losing streak.
The above could possibly even be defended on the idea that it creates gameplay variety. I know in my matches as survivor if I'm easily looping the killer, I'm expecting to see double iris at end game. If the survivors are getting slaughtered, it's usually a couple of junk addons.
On the other hand, it doesn't feel right, and it breaks down at the edges of the spectrum.
On top of that, the addon system was originally designed with 'rarity' as a limiting factor. So something could be broken, but this was 'balanced' by it being rare (I have always loathed this design element). I think vestiges of this idea still linger in the design philosophy
Killrates are just such a tired topic where many of the same misconceptions regarding them are repeated most of any time they're brought up, I don't feel all too enthused to get into it. : - p BHVR sharing more detailed stats or even dumping their raw data for the community even just once would certainly re-enliven some of that enthusiasm, though!
It definitely comes apart at the fringes, and that's the experience that is most relevant to me and likely therefore what I am most concerned with. But the issues should be hard to ignore for any developer of a popular PVP game, as the winrates and streaks and the ease with which they are achieved risk boring your experienced and skilled players and frustrating anyone they go up against. The tournament scene is full of players that grew tired and bored of what pub DbD has to offer, and there are many more players of course that instead of finding their way into that scene simply stopped playing or playing nearly as much.
While BHVR is surely concerned with that issue to some extent (otherwise they wouldn't have worked to implement MMR to begin with, lax as they have gradually decided for it to become), I do think they see that these extremes at the upper spectrum constitute such a small percentage of the playerbase that they don't really care. Although they may neglect that precisely because it's such a relatively small portion, making things more exclusive and strict for those players and balancing for that realm wouldn't affect all that many players all that much. And they neglect that there's constantly new people entering into that range where they are barely challenged in pubs anymore, and so even though the "active" pool of such players at any time may be relatively small, there's a stream of players this affects and that as a result may play less. I for one would welcome a separate "competitive"/"ranked" queue with much stricter matchmaking and even distinct balance adjustments. Most popular PVP games have them these days. But creating more nuanced upper MMR brackets and having the matchmaker actually match people among those more exclusive pools more frequently would probably suffice, along with some general balance changes for the most egregious of offenders.
Rarity as a balancing mechanism for add-ons might yet linger in their approach to them, and for that I would likewise say that it probably even make sense from a "global average" perspective and through most of the MMR range, but breaks down at the edge of the spectrum where you have someone like Numinous using LoPro and getting 1300+ wins in a row (although in this case, to my surprise, they did actually nerf LoPro despite it not being a popularly used add-on yet a highly problematic outlier - I suspect this might've had to do with their consultants).
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Slugging has always been a potent tool in the killer's arsenal, but if by slugging you mean some ludicrous sentiment of "you can't win if you hook", no, that is not "meta", or a thing altogether. Not only can you win most of any match even if you never slug, but hooking is generally better than slugging. And most killers hook and most killers win. Including in tournaments. A killer actually trying to get all 4 survivors slugged is incredibly rare, and it rarely works out.
What you should definitely be looking to do at times if you want to win consistently is opportunistically slug, such as when you have a survivor hooked, down another survivor, and leave them on the floor to instantly be able to go back and intercept unhook attempts or be there to tunnel the unhooked survivor. Slugging is a tool to create pressure, at times you will benefit from that pressure and can even snowball it into a win, but generally you are giving up on actually progressing your win condition and getting survivors closer to their eventual sacrifice. Most of the time you will in fact find slugging to be most beneficial whenever used to more quickly advance the game to the first sacrifice, using that pressure to better be able to get the hook stages needed for that. Hooking is necessary to consistently win against 4 even just competent survivors, you will only rarely be able to 4-slug them unless you are Blight, Billy or Nurse, and even then you could win more reliably and decisively by hooking and getting into that 3v1 that is heavily skewed in your favour, and where slugging then also becomes all the more potent a tool.
As opposed to a lot of people, I think proactively slugging is actually an enjoyable and exciting playstyle that players too rarely go for. Slugged survivors have more agency than hooked survivors, and the "whack-a-mole" gameplay loop of the killer trying to keep survivors down and them continually trying to get back up is actually good fun for both sides, that doesn't lead to foregone conclusions of matches but situations that much more regularly go back and forth and are able to flip around at much of any moment. Even after 10 minutes of this both sides can still be capable of winning out, it is more rare for there to be situations where you can already tell one side is most likely going to win, such as when a survivor has been tunnelled out early. There's also less camping or other "defensive" tactics at play, the game is more dynamic and chase-centric, with less downtime and "going through the motions", more crazy clutch situations that turn the tides momentarily.
I wish that the proactive type of slugging that is not only done opportunistically to support a general tunnel/camp strategy (or of course the "slugging for the 4k with 2 survivors left" type) would actually be more common. I'd encourage anyone to try builds including Infectious Fright and Knock Out or Third Seal and - as a general rule - then only hooking survivors if you don't get an Infectious scream. You'll be surprised by how far this play pattern alone takes you, and how fun it is. You can also use whatever perks you like and simply never hook survivors - mind you, you will lose fairly often on most killers when you do so, but you'll still have an engaging experience, with low downtime and a lot of chases.
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@[Deleted User] said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3824708#Comment_3824708
It's an interesting site, but it has problems from a sampling perspective.
- Self-reporting- Wins and losses can have an affect on whether someone chooses to report the result. There's no automatic data ingest.
- I don't see any language options on the site. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. But if it's English only, you're naturally going to over-sample Western countries.
- It's going to heavily over-sample PC platforms i.e. Steam/Epic via the method in which they ingest data. They take the data via screenshots through the Web UI or desktop app. It's not impossible for a console player to upload, but they'd have to jump through hoops.
It's a cool site and it can be fun to look at, but the data has problems.
On top of this, there is also the issue that they exclusively use survivor-reported data for killrate stats, so there is both the bias of the kind of matches survivor players are more likely to be reporting, as well as that of the kind of players that would more likely be reporting on the site to begin with, skewing significantly toward more experienced players (given that they are interested in tracking their performance, aware of the site, and go through the trouble of submitting), that would also be more likely to play SWF than just any random average player. So you have stats that depict results from survivor players on the more experienced side, with a likely correlating overrepresentation of SWF, against random killers. Far from a random sample.
Given all that, it's honestly surprising how close they tend to get to BHVR's stats. But there are still notable differences. It's unfortunate that we can't look at nightlight's stats in much more detail either, it would be interesting to see the rates of all reports combined, to filter by killer-reported, by SWF, killer by map, killer by perk(s), killer by add-on(s), look at disconnect rates, at how many 3/4k matches had one survivor player score significantly lower than the rest of their group, and so on.
For the larger topic of killrates, it's definitely lame that they are only releasing any once in a blue moon. While I don't think too much will have changed since last time, there are some killers that would be interesting to see after their changes. Getting "high MMR" stats again would also be neat, as well as killrates on the respective maps and most commonly used perks, also for separate MMR brackets. At least we have recently gotten one new statistical insight: Contrary to common claims, people killing themselves on hook is far from a relevant factor in the killrates, as even for Skull Merchant it barely made a difference.
More than look at global average killrates however, I would hope BHVR at least internally actually make use of their ability to look at stats in much more detail, such as killers (and their add-ons) that are most represented in the "players with 70-80+% killrate" pool, or survivor players (and their perks) that manage comparable escape rates, to identify some of the most problematic killers/add-ons and perks stacked in SWF. It unfortunately doesn't appear they really do however, as most of their balance changes seem aimed at making killers coalesce around that 60% global average target, not really addressing blatant issues that anyone experienced at the game would be familiar with (in both directions: some killers having things that are problematically strong, others weak, despite not having concerningly low or high global average rates). They seemingly don't even put too much stock in "high MMR" stats, and that bracket is also still much too broad to see some of the most egregious, extreme issues, that enable players to dominate and win most if not all of the time. Granted, the primary issue is obviously the matchmaking that creates these much too broad player pools, but that if anything only makes it all the more compelling to address extreme outlier issues, as things are already easy enough in the vast majority of matches as a good killer player or a good survivor player in an SWF group with other good survivor players. The respective problematic killer characters/add-ons and stacked survivor perks enable these players then to have ridiculous winrates, basically never losing. Those things are simply not needed. You can win the vast majority of your killer matches as perkless Legion if you are good enough at the game - you don't need Nurse with good add-ons, she can get nerfed; and you can win the vast majority of your survivor matches if you are good enough and in a good-enough SWF - you don't need to be able to stack 4 BNP, 4 SB, 4 DS, and whatnot.
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It's a pretty bad perk in its current form as it only affects one survivor and only once. The issue if they were to make it activate again on any gen completion is that it would basically never be worth the time to cleanse it, given that it will activate again if you do - you would be spending vastly more time running around the map searching and cleansing Hexes than the additional repair time it would cause were you to simply stick to gens instead. It would be a "noob trap", and also another perk that disproportionally affects solo survivors as they can't coordinate to leave it up.
A better alternative would be to make it so it activates on any gen completion (even if another Hex associated with Wretched Fate is already active, but of course only if there's a dull totem available), curses a random survivor that is not already cursed, but only causes a 20% repair speed debuff.
While a really strong perk, I think it would be balanced due to the activation condition of gens having to be completed. For one thing that means it would only have come into full effect in matches where at least 4 gens had actually been completed. And for another, in the time it takes survivors to repair any gen to completion, other gens will usually of course also have gotten progress put into them, unaffected by Wretched.
(Only the combo with Pentimento could then really be cause for concern, and might warrant an adjustment or another.)
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Can you present examples of "validation hits" at windows? Those would be instances of your client thinking you should have hit someone (and making that clear by playing the according animations) but the server disagreeing and overruling the client, negating the hit and correcting the animations. This only ever happens on pallet stuns or Dead Hard (if the killer has a significantly higher ping than the survivor, that is), it does not happen at windows or out in the open because there is no general hit validation in this game (well, at least not up until ludicrous killer pings of around 300-400+ms, but even then it does not function reliably at all).
Auto-aim causing killers to hit objects instead of survivors is definitely an issue though, rare an occurrence as it may be, and it's really curious BHVR has never managed to get a handle on this. Years and years ago on one of their regular dev streams back then they rather comically clarified on this saying it's technically not "auto-aim" but "aim-dressing", meaning that if your client registers that you are going to hit a survivor, it simply adjusts your camera to make that hit seem more visually sensible. While I doubt that's all it does (hurtbox and hitbox are fairly large so even things that don't seem like they would be aligned for a hit can hit, but it basically makes you turn 180° if the survivor is anywhere within that cone, which seems excessive and leads to silly things such as Nurse players being able to just swing out of blinks without even really looking at or altogether seeing the survivor and letting the "aim-dressing" gods take the wheel), that of course does not change the fact that this issue exists and seems like it should be remediable - if anything the fact that it's supposedly not auto-aim but merely "auto-adjust" should make this issue even easier to remedy, as with the client already having recognized that the hit should connect, some random object then coming between the killer and survivor in the camera-adjustment process should not be difficult to simply ignore. I'm not sure what would be so difficult about implementing a rule in the code that essentially says "if the 'aim-dressing' mechanic is called, the hit happens no matter what". Obviously however with hit validation checking whether it was only the killer's ping that made their client deem the hit possible in the first place.
It would be really interesting to see DbD be played sometime with the "aim-dressing" code simply disabled. I wonder what it would actually do to the ease of getting hits on survivors that you barely or actually can't even really see on your screen, as well as whether it would even really look or feel that weird to get those hits without the camera adjusting to them.
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One reason why I like Hyperfocus is that it makes repairing gens more engaging, an actual minigame. They could implement a rudimentary version of that to make things at least a little more rewarding, such as by having consecutive great skill checks return a greater bonus progression. E. g.: First great skill check is 1%, and then a stacking +0.5% from there for every great you land in a row. This could also go along with making rotation-changing skill checks basekit, i. e. some skill checks playing clockwise and others counter-clockwise.
While that would obviously constitute a buff to repairing speed for players that can consistently hit great skill checks, I think overall it would actually balance itself out as more and more players trying harder and harder to hit great checks (whose rotation direction also randomly changes) will lead to many more missed skill checks, which will regularly all but or even more than nullify any extra bonus progression this system would grant. But they could also have it start at 0.5% or even 0% instead of the current 1%, introducing thereby a base nerf to repair speeds.
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It's pretty crazy this has not only not been fixed yet after more than a week and a bug fix patch and with a major event starting, but they haven't even officially addressed the issue. It's a game-ruining issue affecting every single match, inducing what feels like 100-150ms of base latency that renders hits consistently ridiculous because latency obviously favours killers completely one-sidedly on hits. I can only imagine the outrage if there were an issue consistently causing killers to be unable to hit survivors if they aren't considerably closer to them than they need to be, and BHVR wouldn't even comment on it.
I don't know what the hold-up is, clearly this issue was introduced with the mid-chapter update, and it's also an issue we've had happen at least two times already in the past. The solution should be readily available?
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SC + Botany is great. It's the most reliable means of healing yourself, as you can do so anywhere at any time and however many times you need to. It is also time-efficient, given that another survivor healing you takes 16 seconds of 2 survivors' time, so roughly the same amount of raw survivor time spent on the heal - and then there's also the additional time consideration of finding another survivor, the other survivor having to run to you or you to them, potentially finding a safe reset spot together, and getting back to where you want to be. Not to mention of course that it often just isn't possible to find another survivor or to get to them, for a multitude of reasons. Or to get them to notice or heal you, for that matter.
Having SC also allows you to 99% your heal, which can come in handy in countless scenarios. Make use of Resilience without many of the risks of being injured. Play around Bloody Coil or Gift Of Pain. Bait an M1 from a killer, be it to try and trick them into not using their ability on you that might instantly down you otherwise, or to bait a hit around a hook the killer would otherwise not have gone for, allowing for an unhook. Trick Legion into chasing you with M1 instead of M2, essentially handing you a free hit. Bait killers into chasing you, or otherwise make them think a situation is more precarious for you than it is, potentially leading to them making suboptimal decisions (e. g. everyone is injured so the killer is led to think camping is beneficial because nobody can unhook with them around, but you can quickly finish your heal and trade last second; or yet you being injured creating a sense of security for the killer that you can't contest the hook, making them more confident to venture out a bit further, then quickly healing and getting the unhook potentially without having to trade for it). Stay injured during Blood Fury to have access to Dead Hard, finishing the heal once Fury is over so as to not bleed orbs. And many more scenarios. Botany allowing you to heal others faster is of course also neat.
Comparing it to other means of healing yourself, I don't think any of them can compete with just how reliable SC is:
Strength In Shadows only works if the killer is nowhere around basement or anywhere that they could intercept you on your way there. It also takes additional time to get to and back away from basement, regularly such that it's not even faster than SC alone. And then there's the risk of being found healing in basement, due to aura perks or because the killer hears you or whatever. It's just a lot more situational and risky, while SC allows you to heal in places the killer would rarely find you or that are safe even if they do, as well as potentially finish your heal mid-chase should you get interrupted.
Inner Healing requires you to find totems and cleanse them, which can take a lot of time (and doesn't have any inherent value if they're not Hexes). Sure you can bring a map or perk to at least find totems more easily, but then you're spending additional things on this, whereas not having to bring a med-kit so as to be able to use a flashlight or whatever is often the precise reason someone might opt for perk-based means of healing to begin with. On top of the time-to-heal often again potentially ending up being more than even SC alone, there is also the issue of not always being able to get to a totem safely or at all. As well as issues with other survivors blessing or cleansing totems, or the killer having Pentimento. I do think Inner Healing has a place in special tactical builds such as alongside Lucky Break, Quick & Quiet or Head On, and the Overzealous synergy is neat. There's also something to be said about the fact that it allows you to "buffer" your heal, preparing the perk in downtime so as to be able to heal quickly in more precarious situations (such as after getting unhooked). But SC + Botany is much better when just looking at a macro means of resetting yourself.
Moment Of Glory is actually pretty interesting because its recent buff makes it so that you will always get healed as long as you can keep from going down for 60 seconds at some point. That said, the investment for it is way too steep, having to either find and loot two chests (taking ages and sometimes not being possible altogether due to various reasons), or needing to invest more perk slots into finding chests (Plunderer's Instinct) and/or being able to rummage (Appraisal) so as to only have to find one chest. The total time-to-heal will always be much more than SC however, and you won't regularly benefit much from the items you find, not least because you can only carry one at a time of course. And since you ideally want to bring an item to begin with the looting part is even less attractive. MOG is interesting because it can heal you passively mid-chase, or after being unhooked, but as a simple means of resetting it is also much worse than SC.
Second Wind isn't comparable at all. Not only does the activation condition render it far from reliable, but it's also just not a consistent means of healing, as you only get it after being unhooked. There are tons of situations where you want to heal in a match, Second Wind is more of an anti-tunnelling perk than it is a healing perk, especially when considering that if the killer isn't tunnelling, the unhooking survivor could simply heal you instead.
Plot Twist can actually be mentioned here. It has a lot of interesting use cases, and makes for a fairly good anti-tunnelling tool. But in a pinch, it can simply be used to reset yourself once per match, and a second time in endgame. But that's of course not comparable to SC either, much less consistent and reliable (since you can't always afford to just flop down, either because it's too risky or even just because it obviously communicates to the killer that you will be out for the count for the next 30+ seconds, and that you will be healthy thereafter, something they can therefore much better include in their decision-making).
The only thing that can compete with SC + Botany is med-kit + Built To Last. Med-kits obviously enable you to do anything SC does but do so much more quickly, as well as heal others faster, and with BTL, you can get 6 heals out of a 2-heal med-kit. Of course, there is the additional time taken to recharge the med-kit, and you do have to bring one to begin with. But unless you really want to bring a different item, this combo makes for the best basic means of healing. Even if you get a hit-and-run killer 6 heals should regularly be enough, not least because at times you will of course be able to reset with other survivors instead. And your heals being much faster can obviously also contribute to the round being over earlier, thus needing fewer resets.
Honorable mention for Circle Of Healing, which, while unfortunately a shadow of its former self and not a reliable and obviously not a self-sufficient means of healing, can significantly increase the overall "reset power" of a group, and encourage resetting in general. It also serves as a mechanical counter to Pentimento.
In conclusion: If you want to consistently be able to reset bring a med-kit with Built To Last. If you want to use a different item, use SC + Botany. To note: If you're in a decent SWF group, you will rarely even need that many resets, and can also coordinate with your team to do so, so in those cases even just a 2-heal med-kit alone should be sufficient means of resetting yourself in most matches.
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Nowhere To Hide + Predator is now a more or less guaranteed, mindless win on Nurse for everyone that has played her more than a handful of matches. NTH gives you the first free hit, Predator the second right after that.
And I and lots of people saw this coming the second they had announced the Predator change in the dev update. Their vehement refusal to nerf Nurse even just a slight bit is perplexing. Blindness during blinks (or already when charging blinks), blink tokens only recharging after fatigue, being able to stun her (pallet/Head On) during fatigue, blink tokens only recharging after the stun animation has played out, stunning her out of blinks causing her to go through the stun and then fatigue animation, decreasing her lunge range out of blinks, … - those are completely sensible nerfs some fashion of which they have already implemented for a variety of other killers that aren't as strong as her, and yet still, after all these years, nothing. And these are akin to "quality of life" changes that make Nurse somewhat less silly to play against, it's not even going into things they could do to actually bring Nurse's ridiculous power level notably down. Only thing they do however is buff her considerably for the 2v8 mode, enabling players to 8-slug 100 matches in a row, how fun!
They say they don't only look at their published killrates to determine balance changes, but Nurse really seems to be proof to the contrary. There are obvious reasons why she doesn't have the highest killrate on a global average (harder to play for new and intermediate players than any other killer, harder to play on controller than many other killers, easier to play against than play as at an average level), if they were to look at the players with the highest killrates however, most of them would be Nurses. But since the global average doesn't show her with a problematically high killrate and even a relatively tame one, she goes unaddressed for years and years, again not even remedying some of the blatant flaws she has that are akin to bugs.
…Anyway, on most other killers, Predator isn't that crazy. It is still fairly good on ranged killers such as Huntress, and it can be beneficial on most of any killer since you can deliberately lose chase state on tiles where line of sight is broken and use it to "mindgame", but I don't think we'll see it become as popular a perk as Nowhere To Hide. I quite welcome its introduction even, from a killer perspective, because I don't enjoy losing people in chase. That said, it is a bit lame that it counters stealth-juking for free. Imagine using one of the many (often rather lackluster) perks BHVR has been busy releasing that are intended to give the survivor a chance to lose the killer in chase, such as Dance With Me, and actually being successful for once, only for the killer to be told right where you are. This is of course even worse if you are using something like Inner Strength and/or Head On and hide in a locker once you have lost the killer.
How they came up with both this and the PTB version of Zanshin Tactics and nerfed Distortion at the same time is puzzling. But yeah, while these and other aura perks can be a bit "mindless" in how they can win chases for the killer or counter stealth aspects of the game "for free", I don't think they're all that concerningly problematic, not least because we always have to consider their perk slot investment: a player using one or multiple of these is forgoing really impactful slowdown perks. It's really only Nurse these perks tend to be downright broken on. Lethal Purser + Predator + Nowhere To Hide Nurse is playing DbD in baby mode (Rat Poison Chucky and Compound 21 Blight also deserve mention, for two more particularly egregious cases of aura-reading abilities making hits mindlessly easy to get).
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@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3814105#Comment_3814105
Keys for hatch were obviously a bullshit mechanic in the past, but not only does 2 survivors escaping not constitute a loss either, but here again I personally never felt that bad - both me and the survivor players knew that they had cheesed out a "free" escape, I didn't feel like they had "won" or let alone outplayed me, so even if they were gloating about it or whatever I had no issue moving on not wasting another word or thought on it. Again, might just be me, but it obviously doesn't matter anymore anyway as they have since thankfully reworked keys and hatch.
that is the whole problem. in a well designed end-game, 2 survivor can escape and beat the killer as come-back. that is exactly what happen to my doctor games years ago where i was losing repetitively to keys. this was also before they added offerings to spawn hatch. the people using keys memorized hatch spawns on every map and would just get 2 man free escapes. when you get a loss by key once, it felt unearned but when you get a loss 6 times in a row by same mechanic, than that is form of frustration. an experience like that will entirely change your perception of hatch in general. you will adamantly dislike hatch as killer.
the summary is that come-back mechanics aren't fun for killer in a game like this which is why BVHR hasn't changed anything anything towards end game for long time. Hatch losses are like….. out of your control if you ignore said mechanic. in those 6 games, i did not slug for a 4k. I would hook people until 2 people die and on 2nd hook of the person dying, you'd just see escape symbol either right away or like 30 seconds after 2nd kill. The way BVHR gives you control over the hatch post-key nerf is by slugging 3rd person to deny exit gate rng and hatch rng. Survivor hate this mechanic. they do not like being slugged in first place. Having 4 minute game-extensions in the end game is not fun for survivor. so here we have these two problems where killer losing to a key item is unfun and survivor being slugged for 4 minutes because killer is aiming for a 4k to what they see as hatch being unfair mechanic. The keys and hatch may be nerfed but the whole mechanic and end-game interaction is still there. it went from survivor sided to killer sided.
I agree, and have suggested more and less ambitious models for reworking these flawed endgame scenarios various times throughout the years, including similar "1v1 endgame chase" concepts. More recently here, for instance: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/412836/2v1-and-1v1-endgame-scenarios. What we have to unfortunately accept however is that more sophisticated or otherwise ambitious reworks of these things are just not realistic, as the example of how long it took them to "work" on this finishing mori "system" and what it ended up being also shows. For that reason, I am proposing very simple solutions that would already go a long way to improve the gameplay experience in these endgame scenarios.
i would not say that end-game rework are not realistic. they may be more realistic now. it is simply question for what should be changed to resolve issue. The finisher mori mechanic is insight mechanic for what BVHR thinks about end game. To me, it seems like their vision for end game is that that if 3-4 survivors are alive, they want the game to be survivor sided. that is why we have like end-game base-kit BT for example. Sure there is some killer that are excellent hook defenders but in general, more killers when 3-4 survivor are alive will not be able to defend hooks outside of specific perks like STBFL. Most of the time, if both sides are equally skilled, end game is 4 man escape or 3 man escape with correct bodyblocking.
When a killer slugs all 4 survivors, the killer automatically wins. They reinforced this idea in the finisher mori system. The only problem is that in this same system for some reason, they also made it impossible to slug because unlimited 45 second unbreakable makes slugging a dead strategy.
these two ideas are what their current opinion is for end game. this is not something that they have explicit said. it is what they have explicit showed and done. There is saying, action speak louder then words and these are actions they've taken or wanted to take.
so here we have these two problems where killer losing to a key item is unfun and survivor being slugged for 4 minutes because killer is aiming for a 4k to what they see as hatch being unfair mechanic. The keys and hatch may be nerfed but the whole mechanic and end-game interaction is still there. it went from survivor sided to killer sided.
Keys were not a "comeback" mechanic where the remaining survivors had a fighting chance to beat the killer and escape. They were a completely unearned, free escape. Of course killer players did not feel great about that. There are other ways however to actually give the remaining survivor(s) a bit of a fighting chance that still yield actual interactive gameplay, some of which are outlined in the thread of mine that I linked as well (but various other ideas are also possible).
That unfortunately is something beyond the scope of what we can realistically expect from BHVR though - again, they spent years on this Finishing Mori "system" that was intended to alleviate some of these lategame/endgame issues as well, and it ended up being as laughably little as "Cypress Mori is now basekit!", even exacerbating some of the very issues they had sought to address with it. And that's just a recent, relevant example. Another recent such case would be Twins, their rework of which was deeply flawed in certain aspects and then they went back on almost all of it, in the end just slightly buffing and improving various things about this killer that was in a good spot strength-wise as it was, not doing anything about the issues they had wanted to rework them for to begin with (most of all the incessant slugging).
So again, I'm not even talking about comeback mechanics or anything ambitious to make the 2v1 lategame/1v1 endgame more engaging and less foregone of a conclusion here, this thread is concerned only with simple steps to actually end the game when it is over, forcing the endgame by forcing the killer to kill the second-to-last survivor in a timely manner or giving that survivor the option to end it themselves. The last survivor then having a chance to get hatch is not a "comeback" or "loss", and the hatch endgame is still tilted in the killer's favour anyway. Achievements or challenges that depend on 4ks can be adjusted for that reality as well.
Most of the time, if both sides are equally skilled, end game is 4 man escape or 3 man escape with correct bodyblocking.
I really don't think so. That would only be true against an ability-less M1 killer, and even then only if the hook is fairly close to the gate. The killer can simply hit the first survivor attempting to unhook, and then go after them. There is nothing the other survivors will usually be able to do for them since they can't catch up, and so if that survivor cannot reach the gate, they end up on a hook themselves. Of course it can work out, especially with 4 survivors left, but then not only do various perks and killer abilities/add-ons change the scenario entirely, but it's just not something I think is indicative of their "vision" for endgame design either way. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that being able to secure a kill in the endgame even in otherwise badly lost matches is a killer-sided design intention in the game BHVR has continually fostered, such as with disabling anti-tunnelling perks in the endgame.
And I also don't think winning when you have everyone slugged is some vision BHVR has. The fact that that aspect of the original Finishing Mori system actually could encourage killers to try and slug all remaining survivors was major reason why they didn't go through with it, from what I understood. What they really wanted to address with that change was the issue of killers slugging the remaining survivors for minutes on end, be it just out of spite or to prevent the last survivor from being able to escape through hatch. They wanted to force the killer to pick up and actually kill people, or to force the game to an end if they still refused to. That is also why they came up with basekit Unbreakable. BHVR has long recognized that slugging is an issue - if not necessarily a huge issue from a game balance perspective, certainly from a game experience perspective - and they are not a big fan of it even outside of the particular late/endgame scenarios where it frequently happens (where I personally actually am). They are implementing basekit Unbreakable for the 2v8 mode for instance, likely after having seen the players that 8-slugged survivors for some 80 or so matches in a row. The last thing BHVR wants is killers to continually slug everyone and win by doing so. Them buffing We're Gonna Live Forever in the same patch they are bringing what is left of the Finisher Mori system I'm pretty sure is also a concession (however weak) to their original intention with said system to combat slugging.
Anyway, I'm not sure what their "visions" for the late- and endgame design really are, I more so think they not only don't have a great vision, but they don't even care enough/think enough/are confident enough in their design ideas to change anything and even just fix the blatant flaws that exist currently (and have existed for years) for which there are simple, obvious solutions. Again, for just one very cut-and-dry example of this, they had already set out to fix the "hatch standoff" years ago, which was a comically flawed design issue of course - only they have since neglected the fact that a form of the hatch standoff still exists, and I don't know what compels them to not implement a simple solution to that issue such as "hatch closes itself automatically after X minutes", if not for a lack of care/thought/confidence to change anything about the current "formula". That would also fix issues of having to look for the hatch for minutes if you want to give it to the last remaining survivor, or if you want to close it so that they can leave through a gate because they are clearly just hiding and scared to look for it. As well as issues where survivors can stand on hatch to taunt the killer, refusing to leave until you eventually find and force them out. Couldn't be more obviously beneficial of a change.
Or another just as obvious example, the fact that survivors get "sacrificed" after an hour when the session ends, instead of the game simply saying "server closed" and not telling players they've killed or escaped or the like. There couldn't be an easier change that obviously benefits the game, not encouraging killers to hold the game hostage if they can because they won't feel likey they've "won" in the end if the survivors aren't being shown as "sacrificed". Would have maybe taken them an hour of work to change on any day during the years since the implementation of the 1-hour playtime limit (or they could have originally already thought about this), and it could have and would still prevent at least some instances of killers being fine with delaying the inevitable indefinitely. I'm willing to bet there's at least a handful Hostage Merchant players that would have not done what they did had they not essentially been told "you won! the survivors died!" at the end of such a "match".
So yeah, no shortage of blatantly obvious issues with incredibly simple solutions that they're not concerning themselves with, so it wouldn't really matter even if they have some "vision" for these late-/endgame scenarios.
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@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/429079/finishing-mori-system
i am pretty sure that finisher mori is meant to be a reward for getting 4k. you don't need to aim for 4k. you simply get a cool animation for succeeding naturally. it is not incentive's you to slug for 4k anymore then current system does.
slugging for 4k and 2 survivors alive is fundamental problem with dbd gameplay breaking down. from killer point of view, the killer spend a large portion of the game working hard to get the 2 players, so for them to lose at this point feels like robbery. a mechanic that did that was keys ahd the hatch. it didn't feel good to lose to a random item that had very little counter or no counter at all. i remember playing doctor one night, for like 10 matches during the time before keys got reworked and i am joking that for 6 matches in a row, 2 survivors escaped with a key. so i'd win every single round only to lose to an end game key.
from survivor point of view, the survivor believes that they don't have an opportunity to win when only 2 survivors are alive and 2 or more gens are incomplete. the result is that survivor is either forced to suicide to give another hatch or you get this extremely long stalemate game where killer can't find either survivor because they're not doing objective.
my thought is that tru3ta1ent is somewhat right in this instance that the dbd game needs different gameplay loop as this gameplay problem is not interesting. he suggested that all pallet respawn and that killer can see remaining survivor with killer instinct with new item called pocket watch that increase or reduces the time for killer to win the match. if he fails, the exit gates open and the remaining survivors can escape.
an adaptation that could be an idea is using Halloween teleporting mechanic where a survivor must survive in specific world for certain amount of time to escape. sometimes should change about end game however no one has concluded what should be changed about the end game of dbd to make more fun for survivor and killer to play end game. the problems are clear but solution is not.
i am pretty sure that finisher mori is meant to be a reward for getting 4k. you don't need to aim for 4k. you simply get a cool animation for succeeding naturally. it is not incentive's you to slug for 4k anymore then current system does.
Sure, it's unlikely BHVR want to encourage slugging for the 4k (and again, originally this "system" was designed in part precisely to rid us of that very flaw), it's more likely they want to make mori kills part of the base gameplay loop so as to sell custom moris more easily. But the effect this will have simply is that a lot of people will be more inclined to play hard to get that final mori kill, which encourages slugging for the 4k/standing on hatch.
from killer point of view, the killer spend a large portion of the game working hard to get the 2 players, so for them to lose at this point feels like robbery.
One of the survivors getting a hatch escape in that scenario does not make it a loss for the killer, and I personally have never felt "robbed" of anything if I just took the 3k and gave the last survivor a chance for a hatch escape (or gate escape by closing hatch). If anything the hunt for the hatch (or the gameplay for the gates) is much more exciting than slugging the second-to-last survivor and stupidly searching for the last survivor standing for minutes on end. But that's just me, I do know all too well that for others, getting that last kill too can be more important than the type of gameplay trying to get it yields, and they wouldn't even mind stalling the game for an hour for it, if they have to. It's just bad game design and can relatively easily be remedied.
a mechanic that did that was keys ahd the hatch. it didn't feel good to lose to a random item that had very little counter or no counter at all. i remember playing doctor one night, for like 10 matches during the time before keys got reworked and i am joking that for 6 matches in a row, 2 survivors escaped with a key. so i'd win every single round only to lose to an end game key.
Keys for hatch were obviously a bullshit mechanic in the past, but not only does 2 survivors escaping not constitute a loss either, but here again I personally never felt that bad - both me and the survivor players knew that they had cheesed out a "free" escape, I didn't feel like they had "won" or let alone outplayed me, so even if they were gloating about it or whatever I had no issue moving on not wasting another word or thought on it. Again, might just be me, but it obviously doesn't matter anymore anyway as they have since thankfully reworked keys and hatch.
my thought is that tru3ta1ent is somewhat right in this instance that the dbd game needs different gameplay loop as this gameplay problem is not interesting. he suggested that all pallet respawn and that killer can see remaining survivor with killer instinct with new item called pocket watch that increase or reduces the time for killer to win the match. if he fails, the exit gates open and the remaining survivors can escape.
an adaptation that could be an idea is using Halloween teleporting mechanic where a survivor must survive in specific world for certain amount of time to escape. sometimes should change about end game however no one has concluded what should be changed about the end game of dbd to make more fun for survivor and killer to play end game. the problems are clear but solution is not.
I agree, and have suggested more and less ambitious models for reworking these flawed endgame scenarios various times throughout the years, including similar "1v1 endgame chase" concepts. More recently here, for instance: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/412836/2v1-and-1v1-endgame-scenarios. What we have to unfortunately accept however is that more sophisticated or otherwise ambitious reworks of these things are just not realistic, as the example of how long it took them to "work" on this finishing mori "system" and what it ended up being also shows. For that reason, I am proposing very simple solutions that would already go a long way to improve the gameplay experience in these endgame scenarios.
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In a recent interview MCote said one of the reasons why they regularly forgo creating maps these days (apart from obvious things to do with effort and money) is that the more maps they release, the more they dilute the map pool such that it will become increasingly more rare to end up on a specific map you like, and without map offerings you could in fact go weeks or months without ever seeing some map(s). This is especially true for players that don't spend many hours on the game regularly of course. And it would be especially unfortunate with the release of new maps, where even if they increase the chance of getting them for a week or two after release, you just wouldn't really end up playing on it much if at all.
Personally I don't have a huge problem with map offerings, only few maps are really egregiously one-sided, and it's interesting that killers and survivors can include maps in their preconceived strategies - it enriches the diversity of the gameplay experience because you would almost never see certain builds or strategies (such as Mirror Myers or Overcome + Lucky Break on indoor) without map offerings. Instead of removing map offerings, they should simply address those egregious outliers (such as Haddonfield and Springwood).
Another thing that would help is to make the map repetition prevention (is that actually still working at all by the way?) also apply through map offerings. Meaning that if even only 1 player in a lobby has previously played a map, map offerings for that map are either ignored or at least weighted only by 50% (or if there are multiple maps in the offering's realm, those specific maps instead are either ignored or less likely, of course). This would prevent players from being able to continually send themselves to the same map as well. Hell, they could also build that system to function on a 24-hour basis (or even a "last 50 maps played" basis), keeping track of the maps a player has played and adjusting the chances for maps to appear accordingly, again ignoring map offerings or weighting them differently. Mediating this between 5 players in a given lobby would of course get more complicated, but not prohibitively complicated either.
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@AhoyWolf said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3813868#Comment_3813868
Wait you mean that it doesn't recharge the top tier items?
If that's the case that's quite dumb, why would they tie it to the item changing rarity instead of just adding the recharge on stun????
That actually makes the perk much worse than I thought haha.
Yes, if you are already holding the highest rarity version of the item at the time of the stun, you don't get any charges.
And yeah, the perk was already "bad" in my mind even when I like you naturally assumed that at least the 25% recharge could be sort of neat sometimes to recharge your item passively mid-chase. Turns out that only works once or at most twice, and only if you aren't bringing a good item to begin with.
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Exultation is a pretty terrible perk. Did you know that the 25% recharge effect only applies if you actually also tier up the rarity of your item on the stun? Meaning it is useless if your item has reached its highest rarity, and useless altogether to bring with such items.
Exultation is a useless perk if you already have items of a higher rarity, because instead of bringing a lower-rarity item and spending a perk slot and gambling on getting a pallet stun to upgrade it at some point (pallet stuns are fairly rare in general and downright impossible or at least suicidal against a fair few killers), you could just bring the item you actually want to use to begin with. Not even the recharge aspect is worth it, as very few items even benefit much from a mere 25%: flashlights rarely run out of charges to begin with if you aren't being awfully wasteful with them; 25% on med-kits and toolboxes do next to nothing; maps also should not regularly run out of charges, and 25% is also not a lot of charges for them to have; the only key where running out of charges is relevant is the wallhack key, but for that 25% of charges are also not enough. You are infinitely better off bringing Built To Last in that slot instead if you are actually expecting to run out of charges on whatever item it is you want to use beyond its base charges. And not even BTL is a very popular perk.
They should either make it so that the recharge is 100%, then however still only applying if you actually tier up the item on the stun. Or make it 50% on any stun, regardless of whether the rarity is upgraded or not.
And yes, the cooldown is just laughable on top of all of this. It's just another of countless instances where perks have cooldowns, restrictions, conditions and stipulations despite the fact that they wouldn't even be great perks (usually far from) without all of those. The fact that they originally wanted for the upgraded item rarity to not even be kept after the trial… I never have fully figured out why BHVR loves to design crap for some 90% of its perk releases, though I have various speculations.
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@[Deleted User] said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3812316#Comment_3812316
Appreciate the comment!
I wouldn't say it requires much effort as killer to use effectively. It's an incredibly quick interaction, and you usually don't need to go too far out of your way to find a cleansed hex totem in a Pentiment + Plaything build. Pentimento + Plaything very, very frequently turns into multiple minutes of slowdown cleansing and multiple minutes of 30% repair speed debuff in exchange for limited time investment and limited skill on the killer's part. Survivors are almost certainly going to need to waste a lot more time (even weighted 4:1) to deal with Pentimento than the killer will trying to keep it up. If that isn't the case, the killer is likely misplaying, as they're clearly defending the totem with the expectation that it will provide more value than spreading pressure. You could push this "time investment" logic to argue they should never run any hex perk ever on account of the time they might waste defending the totem, but I don't think that's an argument either of us would make, and in this case they have up to four mulligans if it gets cleansed!
NOED (9th highest pick rate), Ruin (13), Devour Hope (26), and Undying (32) all get a lot of play, and I'd wager most of that is outside Pentimento (34) builds, given they're used more than it, and that Plaything (21) is the usual complement for Pentimento. The aforementioned perks have long been popular, so I don't think Pentimento is needed to push people to use hexes at all. If it were necessary, that would be a signal to buff other hexes, not a signal that Pentimento is fine.
I play a lot of solo queue, and solos regularly get wrecked by Pentimento as they're unable to coordinate countering it, especially because they don't even know it's active until it's too late to effectively do so. Even in a SWF, you need to know what you're doing to counter it. A lot of people play this game casually and won't even know what the debuff icon means, never mind what to do about it, so newer and lower skill players are also likely getting destroyed by this perk. Given how little effort is required to get disturbing value when people just cleanse hex totems (something that is the right play against almost every other hex build), it seems to me that Pentimento is absolutely a problem and something that needs to be reworked.
Penti + Plaything is a particular complication of the issue (certainly for solos), as I've admitted. There is still something to be said about Plaything being a particularly slow enabler of Penti, needing to first get hooks, for people to then cleanse the totem that is also blocked for others for some time, and then rekindling that. But I did mention concessions I would consider precisely for this reason, like sharing info on status effects so that survivors can readily deduce things such as Plaything being in play. I would also agree with the change for Plaything to make it so that it can be cleansed by anyone at any time. But yeah, generally I don't think Penti is a huge issue, not big enough to warrant what I understand as its deletion from relevance in moving the repair debuff to second or third totem.
The global stats on Hex usage might be less insightful for this than high MMR stats, where I do these days see Hex perks alongside Penti much more commonly than in the past, which I suspect is both due to nerfs to other slowdown perks and a trickling effect from tournament DbD where Penti has been growing in popularity as well. Either way, I'm not saying Hexes aren't at all worthwhile or only used alongside Penti (or that they shouldn't indeed be buffed themselves instead if that were to be the case (which it is for some of them that I personally do want buffed)), just that Penti makes them more attractive or less "daunting" to use, which I for one welcome because as the stats also more than anything else showcase, Hexes altogether are far from common, even now after their surge in popularity.
But we do have rather different perspectives on the game, and mine definitely is skewed and removed fairly far from the average experience by not only playing in full SWFs most of the time, but doing so alongside good players where some of the issues that can appear insurmountable in solo then not seldom become trivial. One of the reasons for instance why Plaything + Penti barely registers for us is that the first hook tends to happen so late that the build rarely even really gets going early enough to become very impactful, and that's on top of course of our ability to collectively make the decision not to cleanse Plaything, call out killer location and terror radius for each other, and so on. Doesn't mean we never struggle, and against the top-tier killers anyone can, Plaything + Penti on a good Billy or Nurse is crazy scary. But yeah, while that is more so a "top-tier killers" issue, I know for a fact I would hold different or at least more emphatic sentiments regarding Pentimento (and a fair few other things) were I to regularly play solo still. …That said, I still cannot be on board with moving the repair debuff away from the first totem, that for my understanding really just kills the perk, and it's not like I don't have experience in solo against it myself, as well as experience watching others deal with it in non-SWF scenarios and also simply having played killer a lot with the perk myself, and not finding that it makes things too easy too often (with the caveat that I usually play pretty "nice" and don't camp or tunnel much at all).
I could be on board with a rework that simply changes its effects altogether, replacing the repair debuff on first totem with something else entirely instead, that is still impactful but perhaps not as debilitating as that debuff can be. The Hindered effect would actually be interesting for that, while also inherently coming with the awareness of everyone that Penti is in play the moment it activates. Or if that's too boring because Hindered and Haste seem to be all BHVR can come up with these days, something more out-there such as rekindled totems actually copying the effect from the cleansed Hex but only cursing the survivor that cleansed it could be something.
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@[Deleted User] said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3809959#Comment_3809959
20% repair speed reduction is still massive; 22.5 seconds for a gen is a lot by itself, but when you consider that it also gives the killer more time to Pain Res / Pop / [insert regression perk here] / kick it and let it regress passively while they chase, the impact is far greater than that, as you effectively need well over 100% of the charges to complete a gen. Working through it isn't really an option unless there isn't much gen progress left; if that actually works and the effect was applied early, that game would have been won regardless, as the slowdown wastes a massive amount of time for such a quick interaction. And doubly so when you consider that killers can defend their totems to make it risky and time consuming to remove even one Rekindled Totem, never mind several, and other perks (e.g. Devour, Ruin) make it borderline mandatory to cleanse a Hex in the first place. Choosing not to cleanse in a match without Pentimento would be a massive self-imposed handicap, so its mere existence buffs all Hex perks. Perhaps this was the devs' intention, but the inevitability of a strong negative effect, especially in solo queue, is just too strong and not the point of Hex perks, in my opinion. The reason that Hex perks are hexes in the first place is mostly because their effects would be too strong if they were permanently active; the trade-off for their high ceiling if you're able to defend your totem is a low floor if you aren't. All but ensuring that they will be active for significant stretches of the game feels too strong and out of alignment with the intention of Hex perks; the ceiling stays high, but the floor is way higher than in a world without Pentimento.
So, while I don't think it's reasonable to apply this much slowdown on a first totem, I do really like your suggestions to show the curse as soon as it's applied, and to show survivor status effects to other survivors in the HUD. That would make this much less problematic for solos.
I don't think 20% for a perk the killer first has to go out of their way to put up and that can be taken out again is massive. Like I said, I'm not even convinced current Pentimento is a pressing problem, personally, so if anything I would consider this nerf to it massive. Of course a constant 20% would be crazy, not least indeed due to its compounding impact alongside other slowdown perks (although the necessity to run at least one and ideally two or even three other Hex perks alongside Penti obviously takes away from the killer's ability to even have Pop, Pain Res, Eruption and whatnot equipped). But it simply isn't active for long stretches of matches most of the time. It has to be kept in mind that the 22.5 seconds are for an entire, 0-100% gen - any gen progress having happened before Penti is put up diminishes its impact greatly. And working through Penti if the killer is effectively protecting it is possible in part because the killer can spend quite a bit of time protecting it, so if nobody or at least only one survivor is even actively contesting it, it's passively taking away from the killer's pressure too. Another factor is that you can leave most Hexes up to begin with and win matches through them as well without even allowing Penti to come into play, particularly again if the killer is also concerned with spending time protecting them. Ruin is not a mandatory cleanse, and depending on how far into a match you are once it gets to 3 tokens (if it does at all), not even Devour necessarily is. Blood Favor is probably the most potent threat from the get-go, I think if anything that perk deserves some sort of nerf, maybe to the duration it blocks pallets for.
I get of course what you mean with it offsetting some of the by-design downsides to running Hex perks, but you are still spending a perk slot on this, as well as the time taken to rekindle the totem. And you're not bringing back the original Hex's effect. You are also spending perk slots on Hexes to begin with, and that is part of why I like Penti: it encourages people to go for Hex builds at all, which are really not very popular without it, since quite a few of them just simply aren't good enough to justify the risk of losing them altogether, and generally people dislike losing their perks indefinitely at some point. And I truly don't think Penti would be at all reliably impactful enough to use if it affected healing and recovery speed first, and repair speed only with 3 rekindled totems standing. I don't even think it would be worth it with the repair debuff second.
I will admit I'm a bit SWF-brained because that's what I the vast majority of the time play; I know that Penti can be downright devastating to solo groups, for one reason or another. That is why I would entertain the nerf to 20% (albeit compensated for with the "rebuild wherever" mechanic, which as we've mentioned even sort of balances itself out in the sense that if the killer chooses not to instantly rebuild the totem where it was cleansed and opts for a potentially more tactically valuable spot instead, they obviously forgo active Penti time for that), as well as the concessions with showing its curse to everyone the moment it is put up and general improvements to solo info sharing. And on a related note, I would also gladly welcome if BHVR were to make Boons much more relevant, which are a mechanical counter to Penti and would rein in its popularity simply by existing.
Either way, if you're really seeing and struggling against Penti frequently, for one thing I guess there's reason to be optimistic that BHVR might at some point look at it because it has definitely been growing in popularity alongside Ruin ever since the Pop/Pain nerfs. And for another there are of course things you can personally do to help at least with the playing experience of yourself and the players in your matches, such as bringing a map (perhaps even with the Crystal Bead add-on to share the auras among everyone), Boons or Inner Strength/Overzealous.
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@mizark3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3809696#Comment_3809696
The game has more and more embraced its' competitiveness - Yeah this is the same issue I had with Smash Bros. The game isn't suited for it (such competitive gameplay), yet people created their own walled garden. Then the garden overgrew its containment zone, and poisoned the surroundings as a result. I find it more and more difficult to enjoy Smash/DBD matches, because there is too much sweat permeating out from every corner.
Dowsey's MMR only skyrocketed because MMR was accumulating without MMR being used - I mean we still have the same conceptual issue now. People can still get that ultra high MMR, and they would have to wait hours for an actual accurate MMR match.
Less likely to have win extremes with stricter matches - Maybe if the game was actually based on 50/50 kill/winrates. The problem is the game is designed around 60/40. You can never really properly maintain 60/40 and 'fair' matches, because the system is designed to be unfair from the onset.
Restrict SWF loadouts - This is poison to non-competitive gameplay. Now just because I played in a 3-SWF, I can't use both SB and Deliv at the same time, but if I played with only 1 friend I could? "Sorry Billy, you suck at the game, I'm just gunna play with Julie so I can still have fun with my perks." The strength of SWF is already counterbalanced by natural skill differentials in friend groups. Sweat squads, or people calling out clocks, are the ones who pre-select their 'friends' based on skill level, rather than enjoyment to be around. Plus if someone brings Invo Spiders or No Mither, it would have to delete all perk restrictions for everyone else. Then you can't change perks mid-lobby, because Jim unequipped No Mither, unequipping everyone's perks. It is only a good system if you have a separate 'ranked' gamemode (as opposed to the current forced ranked we all can't avoid), where everyone is knowing what they sign up for. As for now though, that is best kept in customs.
Soloq - My main complaint here was that there is 'fun' horror, and 'unfun' horror. Current soloq is 'unfun', because it is a roll of the dice of which way your game will be screwed over. Imagine playing Elden Ring, and randomly when you enter each new zone, a button is disabled. That's current soloq. Can't use your Flask this map, better die and go next. Can't use basic attacks, and the weapons I have aren't good with Heavy attacks, better go next. Soloq is 'forcing' people to go next, because the dice rolls are too heavily stacked against enjoyment. If that same Elden Ring instead had a random enemy that wasn't normally in that area, it would be a novel challenge, but still possible to win. We need soloq to be more like that, than the random button disables it currently feels like.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3809731#Comment_3809731
SWF advantage - Yes like I said buried in my reply above, SWF's advantage does exist. The issue is that it is most often counterbalanced by skill levels between friends being varied. It doesn't matter they could call it out, if the weakest person lasts half as long in chase as the strongest person. As for matchmaking, this game has been so bugged I don't even know which system they currently use. At one point, it used lobby-leader MMR, so you could have a newbie queue as the leader to get free wins. At one point, they used the highest MMR in the squad, which leads to easy stomps for Killer. Average MMR is the best solution, because it is the most fair for all involved.
Are you saying Invocation of Spiders isn't intended, and thus reportable! I would love that. Sadly that isn't reality. All perks are 'intended' no matter how much of a grief it is for them to be brought. Also this was a counterpoint to the idea of the advantages of SWF, since if they were truly so powerful simply by being in the same Discord lobby, then surely 1 perk wouldn't prevent us from winning. You post did nothing to disprove that notion. If anything, you are admitting that you expect everyone to only sweat.
Agreed, there is no main stuff here, Survivor currently just isn't fun. I currently am comparing negative extremes to determine my fun for both sides. As Killer, I win, so I have no issues. As Survivor I lose, so the game has to be fun in the moment, not in the result. When I get bledout or a teammate gets bledout for the 4K in ~1/4 of my matches, I'm not having fun. When Killer perks/add-ons aren't revealed when I die early in soloq, forcing me to be held hostage if I want to find out what they are, I'm not having fun. When someone teabags at the exit gate, I can force them out, or get a cheesy kill. My main issues with Killer, are 'skill dif git gud', I can learn, and improve, and make up for my mistakes. My main issues with Survivor, are 'my team is always 1 throw from a loss', which doesn't feel good. No matter what I do right, I can't make a better decision, and my loss is artificially forced. I don't mind when I lose because I made a judgement call to risk the heal under hook, because I thought the Killer was going to stop the final gen from popping, causing me to be facecamped in endgame, as I took the risk and lost. The problem is most losses are 'Feng randomly decided to open a chest without chest perks, fail a skillcheck on a gen, then hide in the corner', or 'Mikaela decided not to take the safe unhook, forced a trade, then took a hit without trading, forcing the person into 2nd stage anyways', or 'Sable was in the lobby and you didn't lobby dodge against your better judgement'.
I find it more and more difficult to enjoy Smash/DBD matches, because there is too much sweat permeating out from every corner.
I for one enjoy that, the competition and competitiveness is what I play PVP games for, but I get you, if only to an extent. Again though, a properly functioning MMR system should mean you can escape the sweaty high MMR brackets simply by not regularly playing in sweaty ways and being fine with not winning so often. It doesn't force people to play hard to win, and if anything makes it less likely to face people that do if you don't.
Dowsey's MMR only skyrocketed because MMR was accumulating without MMR being used - I mean we still have the same conceptual issue now. People can still get that ultra high MMR, and they would have to wait hours for an actual accurate MMR match.
We don't have that issue now because of the MMR cap, that pools together players that win all the time with anyone that has won barely above half of their matches, maybe not even that. We wouldn't have that issue with a stricter matchmaking either, because then someone on a winstreak would face other such players, and likely wouldn't be able to keep up their winstreak for as long because of it in the first place, thus also not ending up with some absurd MMR value. But even if some of the absolute top players still could get into the hundreds of matches won in a row, again, I would simply make it so that the system only looks for accurate MMR matches for X minutes (perhaps even cross-region, to a point) before letting them loose to a more general populace again. I want a stricter matchmaking, not one that is prohibitively strict, and there are easy levers for that.
Less likely to have win extremes with stricter matches - Maybe if the game was actually based on 50/50 kill/winrates. The problem is the game is designed around 60/40. You can never really properly maintain 60/40 and 'fair' matches, because the system is designed to be unfair from the onset.
I don't see how them aiming for a global live balance of around 60% killrates takes away from the fact that a stricter top-end matchmaking/special rules for extreme cases of winrates/streaks could help combat those extremes, and yield actually competitive and challenging matches again, for high-level players in pubs. These are very exclusive pools, they wouldn't affect the global results much. Besides, if anything these things would help get closer to that desired result, as many of the players currently having 70-100% winrates would not be able to keep up those rates under those conditions.
Restrict SWF loadouts - This is poison to non-competitive gameplay. Now just because I played in a 3-SWF, I can't use both SB and Deliv at the same time, but if I played with only 1 friend I could? "Sorry Billy, you suck at the game, I'm just gunna play with Julie so I can still have fun with my perks."
You could still use SB and Deli, only someone else in your SWF group could not also use those perks when you do. Issues with making sure everybody has their builds adjusted accordingly could be solved by showing survivors' each other's builds in the lobbies, highlighting duplicates. And if people load into a match with duplicates regardless, they are simply replaced with random alternatives until only one copy remains respectively.
There are more than enough good perks to have everyone on good distinct builds, and fun builds too. Plus again, in an environment where SWFs cannot any longer stack and synergize multiple instances of like perks (and items etc.) and coordinate their use in multiples, BHVR would have much more room to make them stronger in their own right, which benefits solos that still can end up using multiples of them but also makes unique builds in SWFs more attractive of course.
Precisely for groups that don't get together merely to increase their chances of winning but to have fun with friends these loadout restrictions shouldn't feel bad, because they aren't looking to stack perks and optimize loadouts to begin with. And SWFs generally benefit greatly from being able to stack, synergize and coordinate builds in ways solos can't, and can put together downright disgusting loadouts. Playing SWF even loadout-wise will still be a distinct advantage over not doing so, even when having to have unique builds, because synergizing loadouts and coordinating the use of them in the match makes them much more valuable.
The strength of SWF is already counterbalanced by natural skill differentials in friend groups.
In some groups, sure, but not generally, not least because the skill differentials in random groups can also be immense. Although again, I am mostly concerned with the high end of SWFs that actually leverage its strengths and can achieve performance potentials that are comparably as unreasonable as the killer equivalent, winning 90+% of the time or hundreds of matches in a row without often even being challenged. But I would also welcome if these restrictions only applied in the high MMR brackets, or indeed a separate, "competitive"/"ranked" queue.
But I have already shot my shot and made a thread for it where I discussed it in more detail, and of course nothing came of it, they likely never even saw it. So there's no real reason to discuss this possibility anyway. Plus I mean, even things BHVR outright say they want and plan to do (e. g. bridge the divide between SWF and solo by buffing solo, specifically by supplying them with more info) take them years to implement, and then they often don't do much either. The only thing we really got in the regard of solo info sharing are the activity icons, which are nice, but not nearly enough to bring it anywhere close to SWF of course. There are so many obvious ways in which they could be improved upon but they just haven't been, in the soon-to-be 2 years since their introduction. Let alone all of the other info that could be shared. So yeah, it's borderline impossible we will see something like SWF loadout restrictions, even though BHVR knows perfectly well they are a reasonable balancing measure (they used this exact format for their Community Cup tournaments, where every perk/item/add-on/offering could only be present at most once in teams).
If that same Elden Ring instead had a random enemy that wasn't normally in that area, it would be a novel challenge, but still possible to win. We need soloq to be more like that, than the random button disables it currently feels like.
Maybe for a large amount of the playerbase a more or less completely random matchmaking like that would actually be preferable for that reason. But it definitely would not be for good players that are actually looking for challenging and engaging gameplay, which is what I'm mostly concerned about. In a random matchmaking they would only be even more likely to handedly win most of the time and able to win hundreds and thousands of times in a row. So yeah, a casual and competitive queue separation could really be something.
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@[Deleted User] said:
I think Pentimento gets too strong too quickly and with too little effort in a Hex build, especially in solo queue. I see Plaything/Pentimento builds constantly at my MMR. If you try to cleanse through it, it's a 112 seconds of cleansing time (4 Plaything totems + 4 Pentimento totems), before you even get to the long stretches of heavy gen regression, the value from Oblivious, time waste from running to totems / looking for totems / being chased off totems, etc. Because of the time it can waste for survivors even with perfect information, but especially in solo queue, the best way to handle Plaything if you are sure Pentimento is in play is to never cleanse the totems. Good luck coordinating that in solo queue, though, especially as there's only a chance Pentimento is in play to begin with. Usually in solo queue it takes a while before most of the team even knows Plaything is in play, never mind Pentimento. And usually by the time you know Pentimento is in play in solo queue a couple Plaything totems have already been cleansed and it's already too late to prevent it from providing obscene value.
If Pentimento didn't exist, or if the gen regression penalty required (say) 4 tokens instead, or if you got the notification that you were hexed by Pentimento when first cleansing a totem, the calculus would change; without the threat of Pentimento, especially in solo queue, it would make sense to cleanse the Plaything totems you find, as the Oblivious can easily force misplays that sink the entire match and is therefore likely worth the cleansing time when convenient. Plaything would still gain the killer at least a minute of wasted time from dealing with the totems (and potentially much longer) plus shorter chases and general havoc. That is incredible value from a single perk slot before you even consider its great synergy with Pentimento.
Think about it this way too - Plaything/Pentimento gives the killer four chances to get better average gen speed reduction than old Hex: Ruin, which was meta despite being a hex that could be removed with a single cleanse. SWFs can probably mitigate the impact of long stretches of Oblivious should they (correctly) choose to not cleanse, but solos and new players are going to get shredded with little effort. It's a similar problem to old Ruin in that way.
The mere existence of Pentimento also heavily discourages survivors from cleansing dull totems, which I don't think is a good thing. Survivors should be encouraged to do secondary objectives and not just gens. They shouldn't be encouraged to avoid secondary options to avoid having to interact with the killer's perk.
Here's how you might change it:The killer can interact with the remains of a cleansed totem to collect its bones. While carrying a set of bones, the killer can then perform a short ritual at any potential totem spawn location to construct a Rekindled Totem, visually identical to a Hex totem. Only one set of bones can be carried at once.
For each Rekindled Totem active at the same time, Hex: Pentimento gains an additional effect:
- 1 Totem: reduces all Survivors' Healing speed by 10/15/20 %.
- 2 Totems: reduces all Survivors' Recovery speed from being downed by 10/15/20 %.
- 3 Totems: reduces all Survivors' Repair speed by 10/15/20 %.
- 4 Totems: applies 3/4/5 % Hindered to all survivors.
- 5 Totems: all Totems are permanently blocked by The Entity.
When a Rekindled Totem is cleansed, its remains are consumed by The Entity and it cannot be rekindled.
First of all, this would start the effects more gradually so as to be less overwhelming, while still ramping up to be quite strong if survivors are unable to cleanse. The perk still gives the killer a fun and worthwhile secondary objective to shoot for, and it still has good synergy with other Hex perks.
This version also gives survivors more information about how many totems the killer has lit, especially for solo players, as actions like opening the exit gates are pretty uncommon for a given player to perform in the match. Before the actions go from most to least common as tokens increased, so it was hard to know if a killer had 1 rekindled totem or 3/4 of them, especially in solo queue. Now, as soon as survivors see their repair speed drop (the most obvious sign) they know it's high time to hunt for totems, as the Pentimento build is already getting nasty.
Finally, one of the frustrating bits of this perk as a killer is that you're only ever going to get 5 totems against a clueless team, because a good team would likely never cleanse a non-Pentimento totem while Pentimento is up, as a 30% repair speed debuff is (arguably) stronger than every other Hex before you even consider the time it takes to cleanse. That limits the fun you can have with it as killer. Giving the killer agency to choose where the totem is reconstructed and making the totems impossible to identify at a glance makes it a lot more fun, in my opinion, and raises the skill ceiling for both sides. Survivors would need to keep search for totems as they navigate the map, even in areas they had already checked, and they would be rewarded for spotting totems that hadn't been there before. Killers would have to weigh the benefits of good totem hiding spots with the time necessary to grab the bones and reconstruct the totem in the new location.
This would take some testing, especially if it becomes clear that some of the totem hiding spots are just too nasty, but I think it would be a fun minigame for both sides! And I don't think it would be OP either, given that you really do need to make a Hex build around it.
One other change that would be important to make at the same time, and that I really think they should make regardless, is to allow any survivor to cleanse another survivor's Plaything totem at any time in exchange for removing the aura reading for the affected survivor. The way it works now just sucks for solo players, as you'll often find totems you can't cleanse and you'll have a really hard time finding your own totem. I also don't think it would play well with my Pentimento concept, as it would make it very obvious that certain totems aren't Rekindled Totems, and would allow survivors to dodge Pentimento by just not cleansing those hex totems.
Thoughts?
While I'm totally on board with the good idea to make it so that you "charge" Penti instead and can rebuild the totem at any possible totem spawn location and have it be visually identical to a regular Hex, I think the reduction from 30 to 20% repair penalty (taking it from 38.5 to 22.5 seconds for an entire gen) is already an appropriate compensatory nerf for that, I don't think we need to move effect orders around. Getting multiple Pentis up (and keeping them up) is actually incredibly rare, even with Plaything, and none of the other effects are nearly reliably valuable or at all impactful enough to justify bringing Penti that most of the time will only have the first effect active. I think it simply has to be the repair speed debuff first for Penti to be relevant. The Hindered effect is definitely better than the gate opening speed one however, it's a much more impactful reward for getting 4 Penti totems up and it also informs survivors of this, as you mention, at latest then calling them into action lest all totems become blocked. The recovery one has also always been pointedly lackluster, that could be a Haste effect for the killer instead, or maybe a reduction in hook times.
But yeah, either way, all of the other effects rarely come and let alone stay in play for long, it's really the first effect Penti lives and dies by, and a 20% repair speed reduction is something you could actually even ignore and push through instead, especially if the killer spent additional time to rebuild their totem elsewhere in order to hide it.
I obviously agree on the issue of Plaything + Penti posing particular problems for solo groups, in multiple respects. Concessions such as showing Penti's curse to everyone the instant it is put up could be made. Further general improvements for solos are also imaginable of course, such as status icons showing afflictions survivors suffer from to all other survivors (so you'd see they are Oblivious, and could deduce that it's Plaything).
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Pentimento is one of the strongest killer perks, probably deserves to be considered S-tier now that Pain Res and Pop have been nerfed. It adds almost 40 seconds of repair time to any gen, that's crazy. And then there's the other effects. And survivors having to go out of their way to cleanse multiple totems multiple times is still a huge time sink, but it's also not rare that the survivor that cleansed the original totem is in no position to go back and cleanse it, for instance because they are being tunnelled or camped, and other survivors might simply not know where it is, having to spend even more time searching. The killer can also protect their Pentimento totem, with various killer abilities making that downright oppressive (e. g. killers that can force people off of the totem at range such as Doctor, Pyramid Head, Pinhead or Artist, Knight that can both force people off and patrol it using guards, Trapper/Hag that can trap the totem, Singularity that can have pods there, Demo that can have a portal on it, Nurse/Billy/Blight that can easily check on it whenever, …), and if there's a hook or gen cluster within proximity, the killer can protect both simultaneously.
With all of that said, I think Penti is in a perfectly fine spot and just about as good as it has to be given that it requires the killer to use other Hex perks alongside it (and preferably multiple), for them to get cleansed in the first place, for the killer to go out of their way to rekindle them, and is more at risk of getting cleansed swiftly than Hex perks generally are because its location is always known to at least one survivor. There's also something to be said about Boons countering Pentimento, although Boons unfortunately aren't nearly relevant enough for that to be a real argument (although they might become somewhat more commonly used again should Penti become ubiquitous, because that collaterally raises their value). I also agree with the sentiment that Penti being as strong as it is is good as it helps Hexes in general be more relevant, encouraging people to run them (including some of the less common ones such as Plaything, Thrill or Third Seal) and reducing the risk of running them and ending up perkless at some point.
It's a pretty great design and I'm still happy that the original wording (the first rekindled totem causing the healing debuff) wasn't what actually ended up in the game. If there are any changes I have in mind for the perk, it's buffs: Victor should be able to snuff Boons and rekindle cleansed totems, and Dracula's Dominance should apply to rekindled totems.
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A tier or not, if you're struggling to perform as Wesker that's mostly on you. He's one of the easier killers for good players to win the vast majority/all of their matches with. Killer tiers are a fun exercise, but they are irrelevant for the live game balance and only compare killers relative to one another, they don't say anything about how well you can do with the respective killers against survivors. And with the reality of the matches that one actually gets in this game, even F-tier killers like Ghostface (on outdoor) and Legion can win most of any match in the hands of a good player. Complaining about a killer potentially not being "A tier" anymore, well, if you get good enough you won't have much reason to care, and even if you're merely average you should still be performing pretty well, killing around 60% of the survivors you encounter. In the unlikely scenario that you're playing tournaments where tiers actually matter for the balancing, well, both teams play both sides, so you both equally suffer and benefit from something being weaker or stronger, balance is established inherently by the format.
The only thing infection resetting to 1% on hooks changes is that Wesker cannot tunnel as effectively anymore now. Good riddance. And the 4 instead of 8% Hindered isn't very meaningful because not only is it still a notable constant slowdown, but Wesker with his chase ability has a terribly easy time catching someone that's slowed down by any amount. His chase strength is such that it regularly shouldn't even happen that you are chasing someone that's fully infected, because you down them before that point.
What I will say is that there are some bullshit collisions on the maps that sometimes just swallow your bounds right up, which is pretty awful. I think Wesker bounds should have a certain amount of "slideyness", not to the extent that he can actually "hug tech" straight into walls, but at least such that texture collisions at certain angles don't just stop him dead in his tracks. Feels awful and robs you of perfectly deserved hits.
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@mizark3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3809279#Comment_3809279
I understand most matches ended up being 'free', and it was just who got that roll of the dice. However, I see this as a feature, not a flaw. Back then, you would know the next match very well might just be your 'free win', so you could afford to run the goofy builds and still win while having fun. It made the game less sweaty, and more enjoyable, at least for what I want out of the game.
That's also why 'carrying as a duo' felt possible, you got the 'free win' that roll of the dice. Killer is different, since they are already designed to win 50%-100% (multiplicatively) more often than Survivor. I wasn't a fan of the ultra sweat-fest matches, so I didn't always play immediately after resets. The people who did, were still afforded that opportunity, as well as customs as always.
I can also understand the desire for an ultra-sweat environment, the problem is that this game ain't it. When they had the intense limitations, Dowsey had 2hr+ queues as Twins. The game was literally unplayable, because the playerbase isn't large enough. It's the big fish little pond issue. That's why I always encourage people who actually want to sweat to take it to DOTA, or SC, or CS, or customs on a Discord channel purpose built to sweat.
The largest problem with balancing for SWF, is you can't just punish people for playing with their friends. They will just hard quit the game, to find a place where they aren't punished for playing together. Heck, most SWFs aren't even sweating. Nearly no one is actually calling clocks, but that is the image in main-brain Killer players when they hear the term 'SWF'. Most of my SWF (half of which quit the game since it got so bad,) brings meme perks like Invocation of Spiders or trolls us with No Mither. So any nerf to SWF is flawed in its conception, without a counter-balance of a single bad perk negating everyone elses limitations.
I agree in a sense that soloq is an entirely different experience, one where horror and suspense lies around every corner, but the problem is that the horror comes mostly from your soloq teammates. "How are they going to throw this match" is the looming dread each time you hit the play button, not anything from the Killer. Heck, the most suspense you get from the Killer is "are they going to bleed us out or not". Every one of these is such a horrible experience, that it should never have had the potential to be real in the first place. Soloq is only a place to do tomes and dailies, fun is illegal there, because if you try, one of the other players WILL ruin your day. The only question is who. (It's Feng/Sable/Mikaela 90% of the time for Survivor, Blight/Plague/SM 90% of the time for Killer IME.)
However, I see this as a feature, not a flaw. Back then, you would know the next match very well might just be your 'free win', so you could afford to run the goofy builds and still win while having fun. It made the game less sweaty, and more enjoyable, at least for what I want out of the game.
That's fair, and a matter of preference of course. I just think the game has more and more embraced its competitiveness, and the matchmaking system should follow suit. Which it did, until it again didn't. I personally also prefer things to be competitive, to have more of an actual challenge more often, hard-fought matches. But I'm mostly concerned with the ridiculous extremes of players being able to have winstreaks in the hundreds and thousands, and generally winning 90+% of their matches decisively. That just shouldn't be a thing.
When they had the intense limitations, Dowsey had 2hr+ queues as Twins.
Dowsey's hours-long queue was a special case however, for multiple reasons. For one thing, it was a test run of their MMR system, so who knows what was really going on under the hood that may have caused the queue to be that long. My suspicion is that it was simply strict to the point of only ever giving someone a group if they had an exact MMR match, just for BHVR to see what really accurately matched trials based on the rating looked like in practice. But more importantly, they had had the rating system active in the background for weeks or months prior to actually running this test where the matchmaking was then based on those ratings. So in those weeks and months, Dowsey's rating increased into the absurd in the background because he won hundreds of matches. Had the matchmaking already been based on those ratings however, he would likely never have gotten to that point in the first place.
It's the big fish little pond issue.
There likely indeed aren't nearly enough high-level players (and even less so high-level SWFs) out there to give these winstreakers a challenge every match, but there is an entire world of improvement possible still between the current reality wherein people can win hundreds and even thousands of matches in a row without it even getting all that close even just once, and at least spending a few minutes trying to give these players an actual challenge every then and again. Like I mentioned, at the beginning when the MMR cap was higher, the matchmaker more strict and less people populated that capped bracket, meeting high-level players was actually a fairly common occurrence, with queue times being 2-4 minutes at the higher average. There was also an active EU crossplay off scene for a while, where a lot of highly skilled and experienced players gathered, and you had instant queues and competitive matches. The players are out there, they are just almost never meeting each other in the cesspool created by the MMR cap. And the players at the extreme end that have 90+% winrates and long winstreaks having to deal with, say, 10-minute long queues is nothing I think is too unreasonable. Plus, again, with a more strict system in place fewer and fewer players would even be able to get to that point in the first place.
I wasn't a fan of the ultra sweat-fest matches, so I didn't always play immediately after resets.
Generally under this system the game would only get sweatier and sweatier for a player if they actually manage to sweat themselves into these more and more exclusive high MMR brackets. If someone does not like that kind of sweaty gameplay, they can simply refrain from playing in those ways and they won't be able to end up having the ridiculous winrates/streaks required to get there. My concern most of all is with high-level players that currently almost or actually never lose. Adjusting the MMR for that realm specifically would affect almost no one, relatively speaking. But yes, there's also a lot of not-so-high-level players that are still winning some 70-80+% of their matches, particularly as killer, and I guarantee there's actually more than enough players out there capable of competing with them to make that a more reasonable 50-60%. Without prohibitively long queue times whatsoever, at that. And it wouldn't have to be tough matches every time either, since the matchmaker would still expand the MMR range it searches within after some time, and there'd definitely still be times where it can't find 5 players within the same, more strict bracket.
While I think that they could simply make these things more strict for the top MMR brackets and that it as a result wouldn't affect most players all that much (not even most streamers, who would presumably fall more so within the "3-5%" brackets than the "1-0.1%" ones), and that it could simply happen on a basis of at least looking for a few minutes before widening the MMR to match players among (e. g. 1 minute in the 5% bracket, and then an additional minute from there for every bracket above that, meaning that even if you reach the 1% bracket the game would at most look for 5 minutes for other 1% bracket players to pair you up with before widening the search), maybe an alternative really would be to have separate casual and competitive queues. BHVR has already talked about the possibility of having modifiers active year-round, so the idea of a separate casual mode queue with much more casual matchmaking (and perhaps even some gameplay adjustments to "casualify" the experience) isn't too far out there anymore.
Or again, they could at least implement special rules for the really egregiously extreme cases, of people that win 90+% of the time or have long streaks, making sure that if someone breaches certain thresholds the matchmaking will give them a special pool treatment. Won your last 10 matches in a row? You will now be matched with other players that also did, only returning to the normal queue pool if no match can be established after 1 minute. Won 20? 2 minutes in the special pool. And so on. (One reason why I suspect BHVR is not too keen on having strict high MMR brackets is that there's tons of cheaters in this game and this would lead to players in those brackets encountering them frequently, so part of the reason for the huge """high MMR""" pool created by the low cap is not unlikely to be that they want to obscure and mask the amount of cheating going on.)
So any nerf to SWF is flawed in its conception
My preferred SWF nerf would be to restrict their loadouts such that any perks/item/add-on/offering can only be present at most once between the members of a party. I don't actually think this would chase off many SWF players, and could if anything even be a welcome change of pace, having to decide who gets to use which perks, adopting "signature" perks within their respective groups, assuming "roles" of sorts for the team. And it would significantly increase the design space for perks (and items/add-ons/offerings), that then wouldn't have to be designed anymore with the concern in mind that multiple survivors can be abusing them in coordinated manners, therefore also allowing for individual perks(/items/add-ons/offerings) to be stronger, which benefits solo groups disproportionally since they as opposed to SWFs can still end up using multiple copies of those. I went into various considerations regarding this topic in another thread if you'd be interested (https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/304057/swf-loadout-restrictions). Of course, the idea here is to bring the SWF performance potential down alongside that of some of the strongest killers.
I agree in a sense that soloq is an entirely different experience, one where horror and suspense lies around every corner, but the problem is that the horror comes mostly from your soloq teammates.
The uncertainty, the things that are unknown, unpredictable, having to figure stuff out on your own and to try and play along and around random strangers - all of these aspects are "horror", "survival"-type gameplay elements already, it's not only about the suspense or scariness created through that, it's just the quality of gameplay this more so leads to. I obviously share your pain with regards to solo queue being messy and rough mostly due to awful teammates, although a stricter matchmaking that tries to pair players of more similar performance levels should also help with that, more so in my opinion than giving these bad players more and more info would. But I can definitely empathize with the desire to simply buff solo survivors, and I guess that is more realistic since BHVR has at least said they want to (not a whole lot happening in that regard however).
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@DarKStaR350z said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3809279#Comment_3809279
I definitely think they should look into hooks instead of just kills for MMR and balancing, i think it would be much more healthy for the game.
Also instead of just escape it should take into account what a survivor does during the match similar to the old emblem system, that way someone who runs the killer all game would rank up while someone who hid all game doing nothing wouldn’t even though they escaped.
I think it’s why we have this mess in solo queue where really bad survivors have ranked up while some people feel they are stuck in an MMR hell they can’t climb out of because it’s so reliant on your teammates performance. I think we would see a massive improvement in match quality.I am not convinced that including more factors would improve things. I have talked about this (too) extensively in the past, unfortunately it was all for naught because what I believe is the true culprit behind the MMR system not working well enough to at least prevent these ridiculous winrates and streaks and wildly inconsistent solo experiences is the fact that they've lowered the MMR cap more and more and made the matchmaker algorithm less and less strict, prioritizing fast queue times over actually looking closely at MMR values. Things were different at first, sweaty players actually met each other very frequently, I met more comp players in pubs during the first one to two months of MMR than I probably had in the years prior combined (excluding crossplay off). But with the MMR cap being lowered, the matchmaker being made less strict and more and more people arriving at said cap, things now are not much better than they had been in the rank-based matchmaking past, which is especially rough on solo/duo survivor because the base balance has shifted significantly from what it was back then.
I think a player's average escape and kill performances over large numbers of matches will be a perfectly accurate indicator for their skill/sweat levels, and regardless, it's the things people actually play for and care about and what the MMR should look at to create matches where both sides have a roughly equal chance of succeeding. I guarantee the issue is that the MMR cap is so low/the matchmaker so lax, that the players ending up in matches with each other there simply have wildly different escape/kill rates. This is easy to realize if you look at extreme examples of winstreakers, who obviously have a 100% winrate over their last hundreds or thousands of matches, and yet I have not once heard of one such winstreaker ever encountering another one. The opponents they most of the time encounter likely have escape/kill rates barely above 50%, which appears to be enough to gradually arrive at the low MMR cap, which they then also apparently never quite drop out of anymore even if they aren't hitting that 50%, or simply because they face enough fellow gradually-climbed-to-the-cap players such that they can keep a sufficient rate.
I think we need a stricter MMR/matchmaking at least for the extreme high end of the spectrum. Currently my casual feeling is that "high MMR" due to the low cap likely captures 5-10% of the player population, which is a ridiculously huge pool with ridiculous variations of skill/sweat/experience levels and winrates therein, ranging from someone that has won 1000 matches in a row to some Meghead that is happy if they survive at least a few times in their playing session. It has to be kept in mind that huge swathes of the player population are sub-100 hour newbies and other very casual players - exclude all of these and those 5-10% of "high MMR" players probably represent more like… hell, maybe even 50% of the active player community that frequently plays the game. They need to distinguish within the higher brackets more strictly, and at the very least separate the 1% and 0.1% of players out from this pool more, at least looking for closer matches for a couple of minutes before letting the wolves run wild with the sheep.
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Chaos Shuffle is the best modifier by far. It's exciting and engaging, funny and fun to load in with random perks and to have to make them work or to have to make do with them, and the same being the case for everyone else. It also leads to people trying perks they otherwise never would have, for whatever reason (including that they simply don't own them), as well as experiencing others using such perks, and this can lead to people discovering new perks and synergies and evaluating them from both roles' perspective.
…Of course, one issue with this is that too many perks in this game are too bad and simply not up to snuff to compete with the ~20% of good perks. While this is not a huge issue if everybody has random perks, it obviously can lead to skewed matches if someone happens to get lucky and score multiple of the select few great perks, and it also takes away from the excitement and discovery aspects of loading in with perks one normally doesn't use - because the most one will often discover in these cases is why nobody uses these perks to begin with. That said, there are still quite a few perks that while not being up to par to actually compete for slots with the best, are at least still good enough to use without it decimating your ability to succeed and can make for fun and interesting gameplay interactions. And there's also something to be said about playing the game for fun, and not caring so much whether you are put at a disadvantage or lose, and to instead even go out of your way to try and get perk value even if it's detrimental to your chances of winning. Living a little.
My biggest disappointment with this mode however is that not only did they not randomize items, add-ons and offerings the first time, but they didn't even do it the second time around. I thought they were looking to improve these modifiers iteratively. Most of everybody will most of always be using the strongest add-ons and items and offerings and that not only takes away from the fun and makes things more repetitive, but it also encourages a cycle of tryharding in what's supposed to be a more fun environment, because you know everyone is still trying to get any advantage they can. Having 5 random offerings would be hilarious, and random items and add-ons would really spice things up. And if the issue with this is that they don't want to rob people of stuff in their inventory that they might not have wanted to use, simply give them add-ons/items/offerings for free that they don't get to keep after the trial (unless they randomly get a Black/White Ward, ha).
Hell, even random cosmetics would be great chaotic fun. Spawn people in with a random selection of cosmetics from all of the ones available, even ones they don't own. Not only would this create some hilarious outfits and make for a funny moment every time people load in, but it could even lead many to purchase cosmetics after having been able to "trial" them.
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@mizark3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3806970#Comment_3806970
Yeah, needing all 4 Survivors to be as sweaty as the Killer means the Killer is always going to come out on top in normal cases. Since 4-SWF is only ~5% of matches, that makes the chances all the lower.
I'm not fully sold on stricter matchmaking. I think maybe looser matchmaking is better. During the climb of MMR, seen in the 'all MMR' stats, everything larger plays out as we'd hope. I think this is because we get more 1-sided stomps, so Survivor is actually getting more chances to win. When it is stricter, everyone is sweating for just one more kill/escape. The only 'evidence' I have for my opinion here is old Emblem based matchmaking. I personally preferred that, and it also encouraged everyone to 'play the game' in every facet. It was much more loose, because sometimes Iri matchmaking was against Purples (we'll just assume a free win), sometimes Iri was against fellow Iri's, but they were goofing off, and sometimes Iri was against fellow Iri's calling clocks.
I disagree on the directional balance shift for SWF/soloq, but agree on adjusting Killers on the extremes. I wouldn't go as far as to add voice comms in-game, but I do think info should be freely shared and Blindness buffed to cover up the Survivor HUD as well as auras (other than Health states and Hook states always being visible). I hate the Chaos, because it almost always means something bad. For Killer balance, I think we currently have S→D tier, and basically the top 5 are S and the bottom 5 are D. I would love to see no S or D tier, having the range be from A to C instead (if we use current power levels). Just occasionally buff the bottom 5 a tier or two, and nerf the top 5 a tier or two. This may just be me, but Horror can never exist with multiplayer. Even playing RE:Revelations 2 in co-op, all illusions of fear are shattered when you have a buddy by your side, or an opponent calling you slurs lol.
I know this might be utterly crazy, but that dead Survivor bug that caused multiple gens to pop might not be bad to basekit in some fashion. I would say if the Survivor died at 6 hooks or fewer, then their death causes gens to count as an extra one. I normally play to 2-hook everyone before killing them, so even if at least 1 rat hides, the death hook for the other 3 are at hook 7. This would naturally punish tunneling early, and if someone is tunneled late, it was largely because they ratted earlier in the match.
I do agree with the invulnerability alternative post-hook, as long as there is no collision off-hook (to prevent intentionally bodyblocking, either Killer to basement, or Survivor to protect fellow Survs).
Personally I really disliked the rank-based matchmaking (both the original one based on bloodpoints and the emblem one), it led to way too many "free" and boring matches as killer or in a full SWF due to awfully lacking opposition, and solo matches were a complete crapshoot. I mean, these were the matchmaking systems under which various killer winstreaks in the hundreds had already existed, despite the game having had a plethora of ridiculous stuff for survivors back then none of today's stuff comes close to.
I will say that duos back then were more enjoyable because you could actually more reliably carry two randoms against the regularly pretty subpar killers and it was sort of a welcome challenge, whereas these days it feels like even one random is often too much of a liability. And during the first week after rank reset, you would usually get a more consistent quality of players in the high ranks, although that was mostly only due to those people being the ones that played a ton, which tends to correlate with skill/sweat level. But at latest after week two red ranks were full of anyone that played a match or two every other day, win or lose.
I was elated when they first started implementing kill and escape-based MMR because it promised to lead to much more consistently competitive matches. Which it absolutely did at first and still at least more so than the old matchmaking systems does to this day despite having become more and more relaxed and with more and more players reaching the MMR cap. If they were to at least make the upper MMR brackets more strict it wouldn't impact most players, while helping where it's really needed, giving the top 1% (and the top 0.1%) of players an actual challenge more often than once in a blue moon. There's a ton of very experienced and skilled players out there being mixed into a huge pool of players that are just nowhere up to par. Raising/removing the MMR cap and changing the matchmaker algorithm such that it looks for closer rating matches beyond a certain MMR threshold is a no-brainer change in my mind. Especially these days where frequent modifiers promise respite for experienced/skilled players if the argument is that they would grow tired of having real competition in matches regularly. Players with 90+% winrates or long winstreaks should be meeting each other which they currently almost never are, and if it takes them 5-10 minutes to find each other so be it, that at least might change some of these players' minds about sweating hard for the win every time. Plus if they were to actually more regularly meet other such players, their winrates and streaks wouldn't even get to that point in the first place, meaning their MMR wouldn't keep increasing either to where they'd only meet other winstreakers. It's just absurd that someone can have won 1000+ matches in a row, and yet their queue still pops after <1 minute and gives them the next hopelessly lost group of randoms that barely manage to get 1 gen done before they're all dead. Hell, it would already be a major improvement if BHVR implemented special rules where players with an 80+% winrate over their last 100 matches or 20+-match winstreak would get put into special pools where the game first tries to find a match for them, pitting them then against other such players.
The balance shift between solo and SWF is definitely more subjective, it would of course benefit game balance to make solo more SWF-like since it makes the game overall easier to balance, just like getting the killers closer together does (which I also think should all fall within a range of what we currently know as B to A tier, nerfing S+ and buffing C- killers). But apart from the fact that you can also get SWF and solo closer together for balance purposes by nerfing SWF which I think is preferable route (specifically by implementing loadout restrictions for SWFs), I personally simply like that solo is essentially a different gamemode, where lacking all of that info is part of the appeal and point. And not necessarily in a horror sense of being afraid (although jumpscares and tension still exist in this game, and much more so in solo of course), but in the sense that many things are simply unknown to you at many given points, and navigating that state of being in the dark with strangers is the survival-type horror gameplay many people look for in DbD. While I much prefer to play in coordinated teams with voice comms and scrims and like that it becomes a much more strategical teamplay game in that environment, I still enjoy dabbling in solo, for that stark contrast in playing experience.
Yes, baseline changes to alleviate the issues of tunnelling could also be things that simply make the resulting 3v1 be less decisively skewed in the killer's favour, such as by increasing the gen repair speed of the remaining survivors, the amount depending on how many hook stages happened before that sacrifice. And yes, collision should absolutely be removed during those 10 seconds of unhook invincibility.
@crogers271 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3807023#Comment_3807023
Yeah, needing all 4 Survivors to be as sweaty as the Killer means the Killer is always going to come out on top in normal cases. Since 4-SWF is only ~5% of matches, that makes the chances all the lower.I think the 5% is actually deceptively higher than it is.
Most SWFs are groups of friends playing together. They are likely going to have difference in ability within the game, even if they've been pulled up to high MMR. They're playing together because they're friends.
A comp team has things like tryouts and tries to assemble the best 4 person (sometimes 5 person) team possible. Players are evaluated on their ability, not because of a prior social connection.
The chance of hitting a team like that in pub is vanishingly small. Not only are there not that many of them in the world, most of them practice just playing other comp teams. This is also why, while I think stricter matchmaking would be nice, I doubt it would solve the problem as there just aren't that many top teams to match against the players going all out on killer.
There would definitely be much fewer survivors than killers in such a more strict high MMR pool, simply because it takes a good/sweaty 3/4-player SWF to consistently escape, which are indeed vastly less common than good/sweaty killer players. But the idea is not to have the matchmaking be so strict here that it looks until it finds someone appropriate, but that it at least spends the first few minutes trying to look within a more limited pool. This would obviously escalate with just how ridiculous a respective player's winrate/streak is, having the matchmaker look for longer and longer times within more and more exclusive pools. I don't think it's ridiculous that someone that's won hundreds or thousands of matches in a row should expect for the game to spend 5-10 minutes seeing whether it can't give them at least a bit of a challenge rather than create the next non-match.
Certainly there is much room for improvement with the current matchmaking paradigm, which seems to be "make sure queue times coalesce around <1 minute, no matter what". And be it with some special rules such as I alluded to above, where it has nothing to do with MMR value but will simply be looking at the winrate of players and create pools for those with high rates and streaks that they're preferentially queued into before mixing them in with the general populace.
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@mizark3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3805979#Comment_3805979
Yeah competitive 1on1 games shows how winstreaks really shouldn't happen in excess of 100 in a truly balanced game. As great as insert your favorite pro here is, they lost one of the tourney matches, even if they won the set.
Don't get me wrong, clock SWFs are a pain to deal with, but honestly they nearly never happen. They actually finish the game in ~4 minutes, so most of the complaints are about close 15-20 minute matches that the Killer lost due to a skill issue.
That's why I'm for balancing around a 60% winrate these days, rather than a 60% killrate. 60% killrate yields nearly 70% winrates, which is much too high. Like you said, 4-SWF at 48% escape is actually remotely fair for everyone playing.
One feature that really should be implemented, is Survivor loadouts visible to fellow Survivors during the match. Tap escape really quick and see the person has Unbreakable, so let them be slug camped. Hooked in basement? Check for Wicked or Deliv, and pump gens.
Even 100 is crazy in a 1on1 game, but it obviously depends on the matchmaking. In DbD, you have multiple killer streaks in the thousands. DbD both has way too lax matchmaking and is a 4v1 format that inherently favours the killer on the randomness of that matchmaking as they will only vanishingly rarely meet 4 different players each of which can match their build, skill, sweat, strats, etc. - and even if they would I'm convinced that in many of the constellations (killer, map, map generation, loadouts) the survivors are still at a notable disadvantage if they aren't coordinated, i. e. a 4-player SWF team on voice comms.
I think a killer-leaning balancing for the live matchmaking environment (be it based on killrate or winrate) is appropriate, the game generally feeling like an uphill battle for survivors fits for the type of playing experience being offered. Full SWFs performing equally as well on average as killers is also appropriate. But first we need a stricter matchmaking.
There is still a decent amount of balancing between killers to be done too, and there can also be balancing between full teams and solo/duo/trio groups. Although personally I would much rather they go the route of nerfing SWF (and accordingly nerfing overperforming killers) than buffing solo. While I agree that seeing other survivors' builds is sort of a no-brainer (certainly for BHVR who have claimed to want to bridge the info gap between solo and SWF), personally I don't want solo to become all too SWF-like. The chaos and lack of knowledge are part of the appeal and make solo something very distinct from SWF, and a unique challenge (including figuring out and playing around what perks fellow survivors are or could be using). It's much closer to that horror survival-type gameplay DbD is originally marketed as, because you find yourself in the dark with strangers and any coordination and teamwork has to happen organically.
That said, I do think solo has become bad enough to warrant some improvements. Showing builds to each other could certainly be one of them, not least because there are many perks now the value of which really depends on others playing around them. Another has always been to nerf camping and tunnelling, the generally strongest strategies that uncoordinated groups suffer against disproportionally (not only because it is difficult/impossible to effectively deal with them without coordination, but also because they exacerbate the issue that weak links pose for random groups, as ending up in a 3v1 too early on regularly spells defeat even if the 3 remaining survivors are as good as or even better than the killer). One no-brainer step to nerf camping would be to show the self-unhook meter to all survivors. It also shouldn't pause if another survivor is slugged around the hook. They could even implement status icons that show if a survivor is within 24m of a hooked survivor. For tunnelling, one really easy and good change would be to turn unhook Endurance into unhook invincibility, such that getting hit during this 10-second window does not put the survivor into the Deep Wound state. This would make tunnelling less attractive as the risk of having to deal with OTR, DH, Second Wind, Styptics, Syringes and so on is much increased, and you also can't two-tap the survivor through unhook Endurance anymore like you currently can on some killers. A more direct way to help with tunnelling could be to show the aura of the most-recently unhooked survivor to all others until they are healthy, enabling others to help and preventing them from accidentally leading the killer to them.
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@StarstruckFrog said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3805987#Comment_3805987
Wacek is a friend of mine and here is his comment on my video where I expressed my opinion of trickster being nerfed.
https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/DATZBAH7CRYH/image.png
He was absolutely nerfed into the ground in the 7.4.0 update, but was made passable in 7.4.2 with some minor buffs and targeted reversions. Trickster currently does not function without Memento Blades. Even still, the experience of playing him is still much different than before, in a negative way.
We've all been slowly trying to get him to feel like how he used to for almost a year now but nobody is willing to even hear us out because Trickster is unpopular. I do not want the same to happen to skull merchant, despite me not liking her that much. You're correct that I'm being hyperbolic but you also have to understand that people do legitimately spend a lot of time on this game grinding specific characters and playstyles, so seeing them just be removed without our input being taken into account is just terrible for player trust and business. The amount of people in this thread trying to tell me my feelings are invalid because I agreed to an EULA is just silly to me, and I don't understand how people can expect to have a productive conversation if they simply lack empathy.
But that's the type of silliness I mean, here's a guy winning 80 matches in a row and rarely having anyone escape even if he isn't winstreaking and just chilling reading chat talking on stream, and yet he shares your opinion that Trickster was "nerfed into the floor"? As far as I've heard from Trickster mains including Wacek himself (or so I thought, maybe I misinterpreted what he said), Trickster is now in a stronger state than he was before all the changes. Maybe that does depend on add-ons, and it's totally possible he relies on some add-on(s) now to be stronger, or yet that while being stronger he perhaps isn't as fun to play anymore for original Trickster mains. But he's highly viable, perfectly good enough for all intents and purposes, meaning you can win most of any match this game gives you with him, and pretty decisively at that. He still melts through health states which is particularly dangerous around hooks, he can deny unhooks and interrupt trades altogether, and the now ever-present threat of Main Event exacerbates the issue of contesting hooks against Trickster big time. With frequently having ME available now he also has much more snowball potential in general than he used to have.
If you really just don't enjoy Trickster anymore say that, I can empathize with that (although personally I've never seen much of the appeal in playing him when Huntress exist), but saying he was "nerfed into the floor" just suggests he is very weak now, but the reality is that if you are good at Trickster, the world's your oyster, you can win basically every time. Hell, Wacek even ended Hens' winstreak he did with comp players. I will not empathize with saying something is "nerfed into the floor" while this is the reality, I see too many people throwing around buzzwords and phrases like that. Trickster isn't the strongest killer in the game of course, decently far from, but he is provably strong enough to be able to win 90+% of the time with him and have long winstreaks, he clearly isn't in a problematically weak state whatsoever.
I also won't empathize with people that like to play Merchant a lot, ha. Only half-joking, but yes, in my opinion she absolutely needed changes. Merchant as she is on the PTB would definitely be too weak though, I hope for you she won't be in quite as sorry a state once the update goes live. And I doubt she will, there isn't a trend of them nerfing killers "into the floor", and even if they were to completely change how Merchant plays, it wouldn't be indicative of some worrying trend, since again, she's a very unique piece of game design the negative response to which has been largely unprecedented in the games' many years of existing, not even original Legion (an even worse design) came close. I do empathize generally of course with losing aspects of a game you like, I liked original Freddy much more than his reworked self for instance, but feeling like "refunds" would be appropriate is still a reaction I can't relate to. And if you're mostly concerned with bloodpoints, well, I would advise to simply not P100 a character (or certainly not one as contentious as Merchant has always been), it doesn't do anything for you. Just spend points on them if you need add-ons.
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@StarstruckFrog said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3805555#Comment_3805555
Nobody has done a notable winstreak with trickster since his rework, and the point you bring up about main event is irrelevant to me because I don't play trickster to play Main Event sim. His power became unpleasant to use unless you spam main event which every trickster player will tell you is boring.
Regardless, I'm merely making a point that people invest time and bloodpoints into characters with no guarantee they will even be fun to play after a random, unannounced update. Dev communication needs to be more clear in the future, or they should offer bloodpoint refunds for characters so i can invest them into other characters I would rather play. I don't see how this is unreasonable to ask. Acting like I shouldn't be allowed to be upset when I invest time and BP into something only for it to basically no longer exist is just weird, and your metaphor doesn't even make sense. You sound like someone who has not experienced this problem yet wants to speak for people who do.
Wacek is casually on an 80-game streak, and generally winning 90+% of his matches while chilling. The notion that Trickster is "nerfed into the floor" is just silly, especially given that known Trickster mains such as Wacek are of the opinion he is better now. Trickster is a really potent killer, and regardless, when provably being able to decisively win the vast majority of one's matches it's more than a bit silly to talk about state of balance anyway. Trickster is more than perfectly viable for all intents and purposes. I can't talk to whether Trickster is more or less fun and engaging to play as now than he used to be because I don't play him, but whenever I did play him Main Event was the most fun thing about him. Having Main Event constantly now and being able to keep it up for something ludicrous like 20 seconds is crazy, and crazy fun. I also think he is more enjoyable to play now merely due to being 4.6m/s, enabling more of an ability to have standard chase dynamics. Which also made him faster during Main Event.
I have been playing the game since 2017, believe me I have experienced a lot of perks and characters and maps being changed in ways I did not approve of or was even "upset" about to some extent, but never have I felt like I deserved compensation for it, let alone after more than a year of having had gotten to use something I purchased. The Mettle Of Man thing was really poorly done, I would have wanted to refund back then, but mostly in protest, not because I was actually scandalized over the devs ham-handedly butchering a perk that everybody knew they had to change something about (although it is rather upsetting that to this day they haven't really revisited the perk, but that goes for countless other perks too). Similarly, the Merchant changes should came to no surprise to anyone that's been following the game (and she as opposed to Mettle got a lot more than a mere couple of weeks before being changed). Her kill rates and the general community opinion of and reaction to the killer made it obvious that something was going to have to change. The devs said months ago that they too still aren't happy with where she is at and looking to address her at some point. Again, I do agree that they are nerfing her too hard, to both make drones much easier to play around and remove the major threat that drones pose if they do scan you is redundant and turns her into a strictly worse Plague, or a Legion with extra steps, they should do either or.
That said, I also don't agree with making this out to be some "route" or trend. Skull Merchant is wholly unprecedented in this game's 8-year-spanning development history, no other killer has come close to garnering this negative response as consistently for as long. And they didn't even kneejerk-nerf her for all this time. And she likely won't come out of PTB in this sad a state either.
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@[Deleted User] said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3805552#Comment_3805552
Can this post be pinned? I really couldn't have said it better myself. The only thing I would add is that while DbD is more or less skill-sided, it's also effort sided. As you alluded to, a killer is only one person who has to make the decision to run their strongest build and try as hard as they can for a 4k. There is so much randomness in solo queue that this becomes unrealistic, as you said.
Exactly, the randomness or "chaos" favours the killer in the matchmaked asymmetrical format in multiple ways, from the loadout stage, to their skill and sweat levels, the amount of impact their decisions have on a match, how well their gameplan translates into the match, and more, simply because the survivors are 4 random players without any coordination or cohesion, whereas the 1 player is obviously as cohesive a "unit" as it gets. I expanded on that concept in various posts, some of which in this thread: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/405382/new-stats-feb-15th-2024. Specifically:
Skill and sweat is much more impactful on the killer side. This is simply because on the survivor side you have 4 players, which have varying levels of skill and of trying to win, with weak links of subpar players that can doom an entire match even if the other 3 players are better than the killer player, and with people not playing in earnest (i. e. not trying to win, but to do funny or stupid things, or tome challenges, or at least not trying hard to win, or just playing for hatch). On the killer side, there is 1 player, their skill level therefore obviously determines 100% of their skill-based performance potential, their degree of "trying to win" 100% of how sweaty their side will be. Any survivor on the other hand can only determine 25% of their side's skill and sweat levels. There is the disparity in strategical game approach as well - again, with 4 players things can be very disconcerted and downright chaotic, whereas on the killer side, even if their approach to the game may not necessarily be good, at least their approach is as concerted as can be, the decisions they make translate into the game as well as the gameplay design allows for them to. The asymmetric nature of this game favours the killer player's skill, tryhardiness and decision-making to have a more notable impact on the outcome of matches. And this of course starts before the match has even begun, at the loadout screen (it is infinitely more common to have a killer that has the best thing equipped in every slot than an entire group of survivors doing the same, again simply because they are 4 players - when have you last seen even just 4 BNPs in a match?)
And:
Absolutely, and this is implicitly included in what I meant with the greater degree of disconcertedness among survivor groups as compared to the killer, for the simple and obvious reason that there will be much more randomness in the loadouts, mentalities, intentions, decisions, skills and so on of a random group of 4 players than in the 1 player. As long as the killer player doesn't have 4 personalities or is in 4 different minds about what and how to play, they will on average be about 4 times as concerted as the survivors, ha.
This sounds obvious at best and silly at worst, but to highlight in simple terms what this means using something you also brought up in the example of loadouts: just think of the fact that the killer's loadout consisting of the killer character, 4 perks, 2 add-ons, and an offering is the equivalent to the survivor group's loadout of 16 perks, 4 items, 8 add-ons and 4 offerings. How often will the killer player have a (more or less) perfectly concerted, synergistic loadout, where the character, perks, add-ons and offerings each and all make sense together, are well-rounded and can even serve very precise strategic intentions (e. g. Mirror Myers with a Lery's offering), and how often will the same be the case for the survivors' loadout? For killers, most matches. For survivors, outside of 4-player SWFs, basically never. As you said, some perks can be overrepresented, others underrepresented or not represented at all, all of which detrimentally so, there can be multiple conflicting offerings, and in any case, it will essentially never happen that all perks, items, add-ons and offerings will be perfectly synergistic and fine-tuned, let alone serving a preconceived strategy. In my SWFs we will sometimes use 4 luck offerings alongside 4 Up The Antes and 4 Slippery Meats. This allows us to unhook ourselves on the first hook every time. It's an incredibly strong loadout. How often do we think random groups have used this build in the history of this game, among billions of solo queue matches? 0 times, in all likeliness. Even having something like 4 BNPs in a solo group is vanishingly rare, and that despite the fact that everybody knows how good BNPs are, and they cost nothing to bring and are merely an add-on for an item. It's easy to understand from this that killer loadouts will most of the time be enormously more optimized than survivor loadouts, and from there the jump to understanding in what other ways killers benefit from their concerted approach, efforts and decisions as compared to the more disconcerted survivor groups is easier.
The consistency with which killers can win in DbD is unheard of in any comparably popular multiplayer PVP game, and being able to win thousands of times in a row flies in the face of anything that is a remotely competitively balanced game. It's simply insane and would be scandalous in most other games. Apart from the lax matchmaking, one of the major reasons for this absolutely is the asymmetrical, 1v4 format itself: the only constant in all of those matches is the 1 killer player; as survivor, unless you are playing in the same 4-SWF every single time, you can never have that consistency, in fact you will be a universe away from that consistency, every single match is a crapshoot.
@mizark3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3805552#Comment_3805552
This multiplayer stomp as Killer is so accurate. Back before engagement based matchmaking styled MMR was frequently used by every game, you could play social slayer on Halo and stomp newbies. Most the times you would only do that if you were playing with weaker friends though. Now, since the game is leveraged for Killer to have a greater win chance, if you sweat and your opponents sweat, they needed to pre-sweat more than you, in order to have a chance of winning, to bypass the default 60-40 killrate odds stacked against them.
That's probably why so many main-brained Killer players complain so much about SWF, it is the only people who have a 'fair' chance against them with 48% escape rates. It is almost a coinflip where the side with more skill exclusively prevails. They queued up for their free win, they didn't want to have to actually try to earn their win.
The rest of this post perfectly describes nearly every facet, but I just wanted to add on to the old vs new multiplayer differences on top of that.
I do think that contrary to common belief, the game is actually sort of well-balanced for the 4-player SWF team format, certainly well-balanced enough for the expression of that idea in the matchmaking gameplay reality where these SWFs aren't tournament-level teams (as the stats obviously also support). Of course, killers, maps and loadouts at play will always affect things greatly and there certainly are still things to be balanced out in those regards, but generally, through the skill range spectrum, the game is much closer to being competitively viable for the idea of a premade survivor team on comms than people assume. And average killer players on average having 2 survivors escape in those matches seems completely reasonable, unless of course they don't actually want a competitively well-balanced experience where their opponents can outplay and outperform them and instead want to win most of the time no matter what. And I do think a lot of players do adopt this mentality when they play killer, that they think they should be able to win every single match, and the game reinforces that idea because you actually can win most killer matches even if you aren't an outstanding player. Which leads to them then taking any loss (and especially if it's a decisive loss) as an affront and are quick to invoke game design as the reason for their loss, and this obviously is more likely to happen against the rare full SWF teams.
What people rarely consider when they think about "solo queue" and how bad it is, is that it is killer-favoured at a basic level. It's not merely that solo queue has people trolling, throwing, giving up, being bad, stupid, or whatnot, that causes it to be so rough, it's also simply that the game appears to be killer-favoured if the 4 survivor players are strangers with no cohesion, coordination and communication, knowledge about each other's builds and playstyles, gameplans, and so on. That is to say, even if every single one of those 4 players is equally as skilled and experienced as the killer player and trying equally as hard to win, from loadout to gameplan and gameplay, I'm still convinced that the killer has the base advantage in that scenario generally (again, it does depend on the killer, maps and specific loadouts at play too, but generally I guarantee this holds true). With most (around 80-90%) survivors being a mix of solo and duo players, average-and-above killer players are simply used to winning and being at an advantage, they are conditioned to expect to do well, and so whenever they don't they quickly feel like something is wrong with the game, that their opponents beat them "unfairly", and so on. The asymmetrical format also seems to make it really difficult for people to accept that skill and effort just like in other PVP games play a huge part in the outcome of matches, to conceive of the idea that a better player would have performed better in their stead, that the opponent can play better and outperform them. And that despite being a good player, not winning all the time is actually normal in balanced games because you are supposed to be facing other good players on an even playing field. That I can see really rather mediocrely skilled streamers lament day in and out, year after year, the oh-so survivor-sided terrible state of balance in this game despite winning some 80+% of their killer matches when literal world champion deities in other, much more competitive games such as Starcraft are barely hitting 70%, I feel like DbD is some insular kindergarten community where people expect things to go their way by design, and don't want to challenge themselves and others and work for their successes. I've been in a few competitive gaming communities, but this phenomenon is unique to DbD.
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You bought a character for 5 bucks, could play them for one and a half years, and now you want "refunds" because they get changed in a live service game. That's like wanting to get a refund on a coffee you've had a year ago because they changed the formula recently. Not quite obviously, but it's just silly to me people make a fuss over these things to the point of talking about refunds.
Also, this is typical forum user hyperbole. No, Trickster was not "nerfed into the floor". Do you want me to show you Trickster players with long winstreaks, that win 99% of their matches handedly? And that are of the opinion Trickster is better now? He's 4.6 and his main event can last an eternity even with low rarity add-ons.
And Skull Merchant won't be dead either. And she first has to go through PTB anyway. Granted, I think they are overnerfing her, removing one scan line would have been enough, with both that and the removal of stealth mode as well as no Hindered or Haste (at least not on scans), drones just don't do enough. Personally I would have preferred if they had just made it so hacked drones cannot be recalled, maybe slowed down their rotation speed a little, and removed stealth mode. Her chase strength is probably the issue for most average players because she is very easy to play as and not easy to play against in chase, but it's not like she's the most oppressive chaser either. Her major design flaw in my mind has always been her propensity to hold a generator cluster, spamming drones around them, with which being unable to recall hacked drones would help tremendously.
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I don't understand why Legion gets killer instinct on survivors in Lights Out. He doesn't get it on survivors afflicted with Oblivious, and they don't have a heartbeat here either. And I'm saying that as someone that has mostly played Legion in this mode both last and this time around.
That said, this mode should probably have some other objective. It's very "killer-sided" but that's not necessarily an issue if you change the basic premise of what survivors are supposed to achieve. Maybe just finding event-related items would suffice, with survivors "winning" if they manage to find all the items but being mori'd as soon as they get downed. No gens, making it much more about a hide and seek gameflow where you want to evade the killer or lose them again should they have found you. Getting rid of the tired dynamics of tunnelling/camping/slugging too, that feel worse in an environment where you have no idea where the killer is.
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@[Deleted User] said:
DbD has a deeply insecure playerbase. It's inconceivable to players that they're average or not good, or had a bad game. If you give players no feedback about where their skill level is, they're going to make something up and move the goal posts whenever they need to.
What did many players do when BHVR released kill rates showing SWF in the top MMR bracket still escapes less than 50% of the time? They said the data was wrong, made up a reason why the data couldn't be valid, or assumed they must be in some unaccounted for Ultron MMR bracket on a hidden server.
The crazy thing is that the below-50% escape rate for high-MMR full-SWF survivors excludes matches with disconnects and includes hatch escapes, so the number that would be more closely resembling the played reality is even lower. What additionally has to be considered is that for these stats, they look at the survivor players' MMR value, which means there are tons of matches in there where these high-MMR full-SWF survivors met non-high-MMR killers, because we all know the matchmaking isn't all that strict at all. And despite all of that, they still didn't get 2 out on average.
For the larger topic, well, it's an eternal "conflict" that will never be put to rest, it's the lifeblood of the forums and of the game in some respects. And these discussions are always tinged with a lot of anecdotes, emotions, personal opinions and experiences. With a lot of people I assume even unloading their frustrations from a match they had literally just gotten out of, their entire view blinded by that one experience and their emotions in that moment.
Most of the casual opinions that the game is totally survivor-sided are based on (or rather: uninformedly parroted from) a distant past when survivors legitimately had comically broken nonsense. Now mind you, killers also had hilariously broken stuff back then, but survivors had more, many of the killers we have now didn't exist and maps are a shadow of what they used to be for survivors. Thing is, even apart from the fact that all of that has changed drastically throughout the years of course, even back then competent killer players won more than they didn't, good killer players still basically always winning. For which there are various reasons. To begin with, the fact that survivors don't always use the strongest stuff, and in fact, it basically never happens that you actually get a group stacked with the strongest stuff times 4. When have you last seen even just 4 Syringes/Styptics or 4 BNPs in a match? And that's just add-ons, that everybody knows are the most impactful choices among them, and they don't even cost a perk slot. And yet you almost never see it. Killers using the strongest stuff in every slot however is much more common, because it is only 1 player having to make that decision. Next thing is that survivors are almost never full SWFs, let alone on voice comms. And believe it or not, the game is notably killer-favoured if the survivors have no communication and coordination, don't even know each other's builds and play patterns and such. And another major reason is the matchmaking that fails to give good players adequate opposition, let alone 4 adequate survivors. A good killer player will maybe face 1 adequate group of survivors every hundred matches? If that. Facing a really good 4-SWF on comms trying hard to win stacking the strongest stuff is a one-in-a-million occurrence.
The mythical "balance" of the game whatever it may be does not matter if you can win 99-100% of the matches that the game actually gives you, and it has been proven time and time again that you factually can (as killer anyway, or in a 4-player SWF on voice comms), with countless winstreaks of hundreds (and thousands) of matches in a row on just about any killer.
But yes, even the supposed base balance is a world removed from what people casually or ignorantly or deliberately falsely make it out to be. Killers win more in tournaments too, so the assumption that killers don't stand a chance if everybody is highly skilled and experienced is provably wrong, always has been. Of course tournaments employ perk and item/add-on restrictions, but they go for both roles and they also don't change the base game, so at most arguments would shift to say the game is loadout-sided, that it is only ever (potentially) survivor-sided if every survivor is using the strongest stuff in every slot. But not even that seems to hold true, given that in tournaments where everything was allowed, killers still outperformed survivors. Of course, there are different killers and some are clearly more lethal than others so balancing between those killers seems called-for, and there are things to be said about whether the game couldn't be balanced better for the idea of getting more hook stages rather than relying on camping and tunnelling to succeed. But all of that stops being relevant in public matches anyway, where we can see even perkless winstreaks on even the weakest of killers, even winstreaks where the players will actively refrain from camping and tunnelling.
The realization everyone should be glad to come away with if they look at the environment that actually matters for most of everyone (public matchmaking) is that high winrates and winstreaks prove that it is skill-sided, and as such, you can succeed (and even dominate) in the vast majority of your matches if you practice, improve and get good enough. Now, I suspect this precisely is a realization many are in denial of, because it means if they are struggling they would have to face the fact that they simply aren't good enough, that another player in their place would have done better, that it wasn't the game that made them lose, that they would have to put in more time, effort, work, thought. But for everyone that actually plays competitive multiplayer games to practice and improve their skills and for the competition, to put in that time, effort, work, thought, this realization should if anything be exhilarating, as few other multiplayer PVP games allow you to win as consistently and decisively as DbD does purely by leveraging one's skills. And this is all the more so true on the killer side, where your skill constitutes 100% of your side's skill and you aren't at the mercy of the matchmaking system, which more often than not throws together blatantly mismatched players. The skill-sidedness of DbD in its main mode (public matchmaking) favours killers, which is obvious both from global stats as well as from the way larger number of killer winstreaks, that have also achieved way higher records.
In fact, if I have a problem with the game in terms of its competitive viability, its "balance design" so to say, it's if anything that it's too easy to win as killer and in a full SWF team. I believe balance-wise the primary and major and for now really the only thing anybody that is even halfway decent at the game and not looking to constantly win more or less effortlessly (i. e. looking for an actual engaging and challenging multiplayer gaming experience) should be complaining about and annoyed by is the poor state of the matchmaking system, that allows one to win 80+% of the time handedly once above a certain skill/experience threshold, rarely getting a real challenge or competition, much of the time beating up on clearly subpar players. A higher MMR cap (or even its removal) and a more strict matchmaking algorithm are the first things people should be advocating for. If in that new environment actual balance grievances then arise, those can then be talked about. But until then, people bickering about the game's supposed balance when you have players out there winning 1000-2000 matches in a row is pretty asinine and futile and ridiculous. Even many of the players that constantly complain about how survivor-sided the game supposedly is win their killer matches most of the time, seemingly not wanting a challenge or engaging competitive gaming experience and to improve and grow as a player, but wanting to just win the remaining 5-10% of matches that they are currently not winning too.
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There has been a definite shift in the "sidedness" of maps in the recent 3-4 years. Whereas in the past I would say a good 60 or even 70% of maps more so leaned survivor-favouring, with 10-20% favouring killers and the rest being more or less balanced, now it can not only be said that there is a bit of an even split between sided maps, but the amount of balanced maps has also grown considerably.
All of this is obviously difficult or impossible to objectively quantify, and the fact that maps are procedurally generated in somewhat unique ways every trial further complicates things, but here's my rough take on it:
Of 53 maps, I think 14 (26%) are survivor-favouring:
Groaning Storehouse I
Ironworks I
Blood Lodge
Gas Heaven
Cowshed
Disturbed Ward
Grim Pantry (much depends on the pier version that spawns however, with a bad pier it's a map that would fall under balanced)
Badham Preschool I-V
Eyrie Of Crows
Garden Of Joy
13 (24%) are killer-favouring:
Coal Tower II
Resting Place
Rancid Abattoir
Rotten Fields
Thompson House
Haddonfield
Temple Of Purgation
Sanctum Of Wrath I & II
Dead Dawg Saloon
Forgotten Ruins
Midwich
Hawkins
And 26 (~50%) are more or less balanced:
Coal Tower I
Groaning Storehouse II
Ironworks II
Shelter Woods I & II
Suffocation Pit I & II
Wrecker's Yard
Torment Creek
Wretched Shop
Chapel
Pale Rose
Mother's Dwelling
Family Residence I & II
Ormond I-III (depending on RNG can swing killer or survivor)
Greenville Square
Shattered Square
RPD East & West
Gideon
Lery's
I'm undecided on Nostromo and Toba Landing - I think they're both more so leaning killer but I can't really tell, they also have things going for survivor. So I'll count them under balanced.
While this trend is a good thing, I think with a few maps they have gone a little too far (such as Haddonfield and the recent Coldwind adjustments, or the Red Forest reworks and the worrying trend of what's happening with MacMillan), and it can also be said that what more than anything else complicates things is that there are many different killers that of course change how the base "sidedness" of a map plays out in practice, as well as whether the sidedness isn't reversed altogether (e. g. Blight (a top tier killer) struggling on Lery's to the point of it becoming survivor-sided, vs. Ghostface (a low tier killer) excelling on it and it being decidedly in his favour). A Groaning Storehouse spawning an average of 12-14 pallets may be fine as and against a Legion or Trapper, but with a Billy or Blight in play that melt through these pallets, 16-18 would seem more appropriate. And so on. So this all is not very accurate or too telling of the match-to-match reality, but the general trend is certainly there, and there are only few maps left where you load in as killer and think you're fighting an uphill battle just on the basis of that, and there's now also a few where you have that feeling as survivor.
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The bonus for me has consistently been on survivor most of the time that I've played, ever since its release. And especially in the first months (and still quite regularly now) it was 100% BP much of the time (as opposed to 50/25%), meaning a dire lack of players queueing as survivor. But region, time of day/night and MMR do affect it, because those will obviously determine the player pool discrepancies and what is needed more in those pools. It also has to be noted that due to the 4v1 format, you need 4 times the players in the pool queueing on survivor, in theory. So a bias of it trending toward survivor incentive is to be expected.
But yes, I have never believed in or experienced the "enjoy long survivor queues because nobody wants to play killer" thing that I've seen thrown around all too often. People enjoy playing killer, it's completely obvious to me why they do, and that's a good thing. Solo/duo queue survivor on the other hand (which combine to make up around 80-90% of the survivor player pools last we got stats on that) a tad too often can be a rather miserable experience. So if they want to get more people playing survivor and the BP incentives are not working well enough for that (which they seemingly aren't), they need to do something to improve the actual gameplay experience. Matchmaking improvements would be one thing. But there's various actual gameplay changes that could be considered too of course, ranging from simple things such as showing the survivors' loadouts to each other (perhaps even in the in-trial overlay), to more involved changes such as more status icons and more means of communication, or doing more against camping and tunnelling, strategies uncoordinated groups suffer against disproportionally.
Personally I'm not the biggest fan of making the solo experience more SWF-like, I think major part of its appeal precisely is that aspect of often not knowing what people are doing, using, planning, and having to make do with the info one has, acquiring info as one goes, and navigating to the best of one's ability these much more uncertain circumstances. Call it "horror" if you will, it's much closer to that single-player survival type of gameplay, the chaos is the point, the bad stupid ######### that happens integral to the gameplay experience as "terror". I experience that to be an entirely different game mode from playing in a premade group, which makes it a tactical teamplay multiplayer game, and I enjoy the fact that you essentially have different game modes. But some things do seem like a bit of a no-brainer, such as making perks that other survivors cannot possibly know or realistically figure out you have but whose value depends greatly or even solely on them playing around that knowledge actually announce themselves to the others.
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Leave it to DbD netizens to instantly make it about sides and who's got it worse. How about we advocate for good perks period, regardless of which "side" they're for. There's tons of, frankly, trash released for both killers and survivors, that's been the same story throughout all these years, legitimately 80-90% of perks are objectively subpar and not being regularly used by anyone seriously trying to win, most of the most popular perks being 6+ years old. BHVR buffing perks is rare enough, buffing perks even just to semi-serious viability is a once-in-a-blue-moon event, most perks are tragically lackluster even if they receive buffs. And yes not every perk needs to be S-tier (although personally I would like if most perks could be serious contenders for serious builds), but most of the subpar perks are underwhelming even at doing the "fun" or gimmicky or niche things they're supposed to. BHVR has no issue with perks being useless and having usage rates in the 0.XX range - as long as the DLCs sell that just means less work for them to come up with and code more ambitious perks and less potential balancing and bug fixing upkeep associated with them. It's on us to keep complaining about bad perks, rate and buy releases accordingly.
But that's for another topic (literally: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/405984/various-perk-buffs - I will at some point add the perks released since creation of that post to the list). For this topic, I will say that Dramaturgy, Plot Twist and Champion Of Light also deserve to be in the 4* category. Dramaturgy is a good perk in and of itself, the issue it has is that as an Exhaustion perk it of course directly competes with other Exhaustion perks as they can't be used alongside one another well or at all, and since it can only be used while healthy and has random risks attached to it, it is simply not as good as some of the others, therefore not being worth the slot over those others if you're being really serious about optimizing your build to win. I do however think it's in a pretty decent spot, where it is viable enough and a fun and interesting alternative to the available options. It wouldn't really need buffs, apart perhaps from minor things such as making it so the silly animation doesn't lock your movement into one direction. That said, I don't see why the perk could not also be usable when injured. I mean, I know one or ridiculously enough maybe even the primary reason for that is the fact that it would clash with Dead Hard as they use the same input, but there's really no compelling reason why this Exhaustion perk needs that stipulation that none of the others do (well, Overcome does, which it also should not, i. e. it should work on any hit sprint, even if you had already been injured). The "Exposed" risk could turn into a Hindered effect if injured, or even putting you into the dying state, which would be fairly hilarious and maintain the status of the perk as a decidedly less "serious" choice, while still being a buff.
Plot Twist has a lot of interesting use cases, is noteworthy as an anti-tunnelling tool of sorts, and even just the ability to heal on your own up to two times per match can be impactful. And Champion Of Light is not to be underestimated because not only does the Hindered effect give you so much distance that killers will not seldom give up on the chase, but the faster walking speed while using the flashlight can make saves easier and even enable you to break chase state more easily, to prevent or drain bloodlust or the entity window blocker.
Chemical Trap similarly is a bit of a chase ender, and even does the job against killers such as Billy and Blight. You obviously need an at least semi-safe pallet to use it at, but if you do and know your checkspots and play it well, you either get the killer to break it giving you half a map's distance, likely leading to them simply giving up on the chase, or you get them to refuse to break it and waste a lot more time on that pallet than they otherwise likely would have. It doesn't quite make the 4* cut, for that it is simply not reliable enough, doesn't consistently give value. But if you are already using a perk that mostly only helps in chases such as Finesse, maybe try ChemTrap in its place sometime, you might be surprised what it can do for you and the round. 3*.
Made For This is obviously a mere remnant of its former self, but I would still put it somewhere between 3 and 4*, or just 4* outright. Picking people up off the ground isn't rare, and with MFT you can do so aggressively, starting to heal, taking a hit, finishing the heal, then being able to take another hit. Particularly good if you have something like We're Gonna Live Forever alongside it of course. It also procs on healing someone from injured to healthy, something people tend to neglect. And in those instances if you tank a hit (and most killers won't even try to play around this because MFT is a rare perk to be seen these days) you get the Haste. And then there's Endurance from unhooks, Off The Record, Dead Hard, Styptics and various killers/their add-ons that also put you into Deep Wound. I will say that MFT could now be 4 or even 5% Haste - still considerably less than Hope, but since its activation condition is rather situational and since the killer can simply leave you forcing you to mend, I don't see why it shouldn't be stronger. In fact, since the killer is more likely to notice the 4 or 5% of Haste, it could even be argued to be a bit of a nerf, in the respect that the killer instead of overcommitting to a potentially bad chase for them with the more sneaky 3% will simply leave to do other things due to noticing the 4/5%, again, forcing you to mend and lose the speed boost.
Worth mentioning: Moment Of Glory should be 3*. It isn't a good perk, for that its activation condition/accommodating perk investment is too steep and its activation time too long, but it is definitely better than the others on that 2* list. Weaving Spiders is 1* material, or in fact material for a killer perk tier list. Lucky Star and Hardened are 2* at best.
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Dracula is just about an A-tier killer, he's got good lethality and decent mobility but there's nothing incredibly oppressive about him, he's fun to play as and not unfun to play against. If they remove wolf hug-teching, he might end up being high B-tier instead.
The only thing truly obnoxious and fairly oppressive about him (well, apart from the bugs such as instant hit out of bat form) is the hellfire ability. This is Pyramid's punishment on steroids, and punishment already is an oppressive ability that often leaves you with next to nothing to do but hope the killer misses, most of every chase interaction becoming a cointoss at best, and a rigged one at that.
Sure, hellfire doesn't go through high walls, but it does go through most obstacles, most importantly of course pallets and windows, where just like with Pyramid's punishment, every interaction is either a cointoss or a guaranteed hit. They both have an 8-meter base range, but punishment has a delay before it does damage that allows you to see the attack trail and try to dodge if you're not already right inside of it, and this delay is even longer the further away from Pyramid you are due to the cascading nature of the attack, whereas hellfire instantly damages, and as far as I can tell, does so even at the tail end of its range. Between the charge time, attack time, time to apply damage, the cascading, and the animation and sounds of putting your knife into the ground, Pyramid's attack is much more telegraphed and as such cannot even be used very effectively out in the open, mostly just becoming a zoning tool in those instances. Hellfire on the other hand has a shorter charge time, no delays, doesn't announce itself nearly as noticeably, and can be cancelled more easily too, making it dangerous all the time, and something you have to preemptively try to expect and dodge, not something you can at all react to. On top of this, while Pyramid is fairly limited in both his character and camera movement while readying the punishment, Dracula can move freely while readying and holding hellfire, even being able to strafe around corners and easily flick his view, both of which make hellfire more dangerous. Hellfire can also travel both up and down elevations, punishment only down. I think hellfire as opposed to punishment can also go across gaps. I don't know whether Pyramid moves slower during or after punishment, but it's obvious to me that Dracula loses less distance on hellfire, regardless of hit or miss, because he's not stuck in charging and readying the attack nor in the attack itself for as long. Hellfire's hurtbox seems to linger, so you can actually end up dodging or running into it. Both also damage through pallet stuns, changing which could be a balance adjustment, just like Nemesis' tentacle is cancelled by stuns.
I think they should nerf hellfire and buff bat to compensate. Maybe make the pillars have a more pronounced cascading effect where it takes noticeably longer to apply damage the further away the target is, enabling survivors to potentially be able to dodge if they have the distance. But stuff like charge time, movement speeds, cooldown could also be tinkered with to rein in the hellfire. Bat on the other hand does not move fast enough for my taste. All bat is good for is mobility, so it should be better at that than it currently is. 7 or even 8m/s instead of 6m/s would be one thing. Another would be removing the cooldown on teleports completely, such that bat can go from one spot to the next and traverse the map that way, tarzan-style.
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@NarkoTri1er said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3792534#Comment_3792534
Any second a survivor spends on hook is good for the killer, unless they are looking to camp and tunnel that survivor.
not only unless they are looking to camp and tunnel that survivor, but also in majority of other cases, especially when killer knows how to strategize around hooks.
If the killer is not camping and if they aren't going to tunnel the unhooked survivor, it would always be objectively optimal to unhook as soon as possible. Any second that survivor spends on hook is wasted time they could be spending contributing to the round in countless ways instead. It's only if the killer is camping and tunnelling that this changes, because then the survivor's hook time also wastes time of the killer, and even if they aren't hardcamping they will periodically be returning to hook so as to be there once the survivor gets unhooked for the tunnel. So the longer you can delay the unhooks in those cases, the more of the killer's time you waste, the longer you can delay that survivor being taken out of the round and the killer's focus shifting to other things. The more likely you can also make it that the killer will grow antsy and venture out to pressure other survivors and the unhook then happening without the killer right around the hook, potentially losing the unhooked survivor or at least giving them a headstart, time to heal, hide, or such.
going for an unhook asap is the most predictable thing and ab easy call for killer to return to hook so that they can get another hook. Unhooked survivor is also not even safe to do gens if they are unhooked too soon, because in that case, they will be easy prey.
I had gazzilions situations where survivor unhooked another one asap, i returned to patrol a gen near the hook and boom, unhooked survivor repairing it, getting downed and hooked again. Think a bit about why anti-tunneling perks, the most powerful survivor perks, get deactivated prematurely if you start repairing a gen.
If you aren't camping or tunnelling, survivors leaving others on hooks for longer periods of time is actually beneficial for you. You will build more pressure on the survivors that can actually contribute to the round, have a survivor less to worry about that is not contributing, and the survivors can actually end up losing due to "greeding" unhooks, getting snowballed.
ohh, it's very beneficial, especially when hooked survivor has Deli active and ready for usage combined with anti-tunneling perks, but NOT for the actual countreing of tunneling.
Now, camping and tunnelling is often necessary to win against strong survivor teams, at least on the relatively less strong killers. But if you're a competent killer player, around 90% of groups you'll meet won't constitute a "strong team", and you won't have big issues winning regardless, not even having to camp or tunnel to begin with. That goes up to 99+% if you're a really good killer player. And for the rest, well, it's not like the up to 16% more hook time makes things all the more challenging, particularly given that this only comes into play if the survivors actually only unhook past the 60 seconds.
not really, camping and tunneling are far more situational in high skill matches than they are in average pub ones, because survivors know how to easily counterplay both of those.
Only beneficial and low risk way to tunnel in high elo is if you actually manage to get a very quick down after match starts. But that doesn't really happen often, and puts tunneling at a very high risk spot to practise.
Proxy-camping is only beneficial if you are able to get a beneficial hook that overlooks a 3 gen or another similar strategic zone, other than that, camping is a free card for losing the match.
I think overall this is a slight change to make camping and tunnelling a little less attractive, but it won't have too much of an impact on most matches. That it makes the anti-facecamp mechanic a little more relevant is not a bad thing, because unless the killer is literally facecamping, that mechanic is irrelevant. You can stand a certain distance away from the hook to prevent it from triggering while still being able to intercept unhook attempts, if another survivor is around the hook it pauses altogether (ridiculously enough even if that survivor is slugged), and other survivors don't see the progress bar so they can't know whether it would be better not to be around the hook or whether they need to get the unhook.
this change will do nothing against your very average pub camper, people will still suicide on hooks and grief. Quite soon, we will see people begging for further nerfs for camping again.
This will only have impact in truly high skill gameplay, and not some minor impact, but an extreme one.
A little thought experiment: Imagine if they simply removed hook timers completely. I'm not saying this would be a good change - much as it may often feel bad, I think camping and the urgency and risks and dangers and snowball potential it yields are integral to the gameplay experience, the excitement, the frustration, the relief, all of that gets people hooked emotionally on the game. But still, if we imagine a scenario where hook timers are removed, survivors would certainly not leave people on hook indefinitely. But camping as we know it would stop existing. Maybe something to try in a modifier.
the worst possible balance decision around hooks ever.
not only unless they are looking to camp and tunnel that survivor, but also in majority of other cases, especially when killer knows how to strategize around hooks.
I don't know what you mean by "strategize around hooks", but "camping" should capture all of that. There's periodic, patrol and proxi-camping, too.
But yes, survivors spending time on hook is good for a killer that is not looking to camp or tunnel or "strategize around hooks".
going for an unhook asap is the most predictable thing and ab easy call for killer to return to hook so that they can get another hook. Unhooked survivor is also not even safe to do gens if they are unhooked too soon, because in that case, they will be easy prey.
I had gazzilions situations where survivor unhooked another one asap, i returned to patrol a gen near the hook and boom, unhooked survivor repairing it, getting downed and hooked again. Think a bit about why anti-tunneling perks, the most powerful survivor perks, get deactivated prematurely if you start repairing a gen.
You are describing tunnelling. Yes, like I said, if the killer will tunnel the unhooked survivor, unhooking asap is regularly not a good thing, because then you give up on all of the time and attention the killer spends hovering around or returning to hook with the intention to be there once the survivor is unhooked. And like I had also mentioned, even if the killer is not hovering or returning to hook, not unhooking asap can be good because then you give the killer time to venture out and be otherwise occupied, giving the unhooked survivor time to hide, heal, have a headstart. But again, if you would be able to know for sure the killer is not going to tunnel, unhooking asap (without trading the second the hook happens, of course) would always be optimal for survivors. The more time survivors spend not on hook, the better for survivors. Camping and tunnelling are the only things that change this frankly obvious fact.
ohh, it's very beneficial, especially when hooked survivor has Deli active and ready for usage combined with anti-tunneling perks, but NOT for the actual countreing of tunneling.
I'm not sure how this is relevant, but if the survivor on hook has Deli, them not using it despite the killer not camping or tunnelling and staying on hook for no reason is a waste of time. The only thing that changes this is, again, the idea that the killer might return to hook to camp or tunnel at some point, therefore holding your Deli to waste more of their time.
not really, camping and tunneling are far more situational in high skill matches than they are in average pub ones, because survivors know how to easily counterplay both of those.
No, the difference is that in your average pub match you don't need to camp and tunnel to win, but you would of course usually win even more easily and decisively if you were to camp and tunnel. In high-level matches, camping and tunnelling become much more important because apart from on a select few killers, you cannot consistently build enough pressure and end chases fast enough to win with all 4 survivors standing, and need to take a survivor out of the match as quickly as possible to turn the tides.
Only beneficial and low risk way to tunnel in high elo is if you actually manage to get a very quick down after match starts. But that doesn't really happen often, and puts tunneling at a very high risk spot to practise.
While it's generally true that you want a quick down (not necessarily "very quick") to be comfortable with committing to a tunnel (or camp) against strong survivors, it isn't like it cannot work if you don't get an early down. A thousand different things still factor into that. But more importantly, "high elo" is the issue here: in this game's matchmaking system, there exists no high elo or regular high-skill matches, there is a low MMR cap and lax matchmaker and so even if you are on a winning streak of hundreds of matches, the survivors you face can and will most of the time still be fairly bad to mediocre players with a fraction of your hours, experience, and skill.
Proxy-camping is only beneficial if you are able to get a beneficial hook that overlooks a 3 gen or another similar strategic zone, other than that, camping is a free card for losing the match.
I disagree, the purpose of the camp often can simply be to take that survivor out of the match, creating a 3v1 scenario the killer can control much better and dominate. Or have survivors contest the hook and lose time, health states and lives in the process. But I won't go into a discussion about whether camping is a good strategy or not or when it is: if you don't even think camping is all that great a strategy, the increase in hook time should be even less concerning for you, since again, that only benefits the survivors if the killer camps.
this change will do nothing against your very average pub camper, people will still suicide on hooks and grief. Quite soon, we will see people begging for further nerfs for camping again.
It won't change much about camping and tunnelling in pubs because most pub players won't make use of the extra seconds, but it does give clever and especially coordinated survivors some more leverage against those strats by delaying unhooks a little longer, and can have a deterring effect on some killer players to not even attempt to play around hooks quite as much anymore given that survivors could leave someone on hook for a total 20 seconds longer and concentrate on gens.
This will only have impact in truly high skill gameplay, and not some minor impact, but an extreme one.
The impact will definitely be felt much more in high skill-matches (read: tournaments), but they can and do make their own rules, such as negating self-unhooks. And killer vs. survivor balance doesn't even matter in tournaments because both teams play both sides. Also, again, the reason why it will be felt more is because killers in tournament DbD usually camp and tunnel to get a survivor out as quickly as possible, so the 20 extra seconds will regularly matter.
the worst possible balance decision around hooks ever.
While that's certainly not the worst possible thing they could do to hook gameplay and while it is debatable how bad it would be or whether it could even be good, and apart from the fact that I had already mentioned that I also don't think essentially removing camping from the game would be a good decision, I only brought this up to make it obvious that leaving other survivors on hook just because you can is not beneficial, be that an indefinite amount of time or 69-139 seconds. For survivors, it is clearly beneficial to have survivors on the playing field contributing to the round at any possible second and not sitting on hooks. This only changes because of the existence of camping and tunnelling.