Concerning Ruin and Gen Times
Let me start off by saying that, no, I am not a professional, but I am currently an aspiring student. I love you, BHVR, I love Dead by Daylight, but I genuinely do not believe that the recent change to Ruin was the way to go.
There have been a lot of questionable choices, mechanically speaking, that has been made since I started playing (sometime around 2.1 or 2.2, and I'm just shy of 2k hours as of writing this). These particular choices I'm going to use in my example, as they were later balanced to function in a different, or more fair way, would be the Deep Wound Effect timer functionality with Borrowed Time and Legion, and Prayer Beads for Spirit. Yes, these are both in much, much better places now as compared to when they were first released.
Referring back to my first paragraph, I wish to reiterate that I am a student. I am not a professional. While it was something I was aware of before playing Dead by Daylight, something that I have become HIGHLY aware of in my time playing is this - if it CAN be abused, it WILL be abused.
Now, I understand that in initial mechanical design, player abuse of the mechanic is, most likely, not factored in. I can also, very distinctly, recall my reaction when I first saw the Deep Wound Timer mechanic, and how it functioned with Legion - this will be abused. Sure enough, we had Legion players moonwalking on the PTB in an attempt to abuse the mechanic. However, nothing was done until much later.
When I recognized the issue, my immediate thought was that there had to be a better way, a healthier way for both sides. My first thought jumped to linking the timer with the terror radius, and not the chase requirement. Just because the mechanic was reworked (or introduced) with Legion, didn't mean it was specifically a Legion problem. I had witnessed other killers abusing the mechanic when someone used Borrowed Time. If the timer was linked with the terror radius, that would prevent it being abused and force the killer to hit the player again.
Eventually the change was made, but not after a serious uproar from the community. However, let's direct our focus to Spirit Beads now. This add-on existed in, my opinion, a broken state for much, much longer than Legion and the chase-functioning Deep Wounds Timer did. After much thinking on it, I decided the best change would either be to make the effect map-wide (like Wraith's bell), or to make it so it's quieter, as to still provide some form of counter play to survivors. We, fairly recently, received one of these changes.
There was one thing with Prayer Beads, however, that I think is also something of a reoccurring theme within Dead by Daylight - a lack of, or very little, trade off. Iridescent Heads, as much as people complain (in my opinion), as a solo add-on, are much more balanced than the original Prayer Beads. There is the trade off of only having one hatchet versus having five.
So that brings us to Ruin and repair times. I know, this post is long, please hang in there with me. I genuinely think that there may have been a bad judge on what the "issue" with Ruin was. While I do agree that the skillcheck requirement was certainly difficult for new players, I do not believe this was the way to do it.
Instead, I'd like to provide you, BHVR employees, with an alternate design for Ruin that could be flipped to work as either an early game perk, or as a late game perk. I'll even throw in another alternate idea that I had that could also promote survivors doing "secondary" objectives.
The first idea would be to make Ruin function based off of the number of remaining generators. This could either work in a manner where the more generators there are, the it takes to repair a gen, or where the less generators there are, the longer it takes to repair a gen. Again, this can be used to either make a strong beginning of the game and force the survivors to move to "odd" locations (which could heavily influence how games go), or make it so that it's a late game perk that makes it much, much harder to do gens, forcing survivors to think about gen placement, or to go and cleanse totems late game.
The second idea that I had, was to make Ruin function like Thrill of the Hunt, to an extent - a token-based system that works with dulls. Each dull would provide and increase slow to the time required to repair generators. Cleansing a dull would make it so it isn't so bad, but make it so that the active totem still provides a small amount of a slow to repair time - so the survivors, again, would be encouraged to complete side objectives.
However, I want you to note that both of these focus on making generators take longer to repair. Dead by Daylight, at its core, is a time crunch. How long should it take a killer to down a survivor in order to be "efficient"? How long should a generator take to repair? As it currently stands, assuming a survivor hits no great skill checks, it takes eighty (80) seconds to repair a gen. There's four survivors, all who need to go through two phases on the hook, if not be hooked three individual times, in order for the killer to win. It takes sixty (60) seconds per hook phase, so you're looking at an entire two minutes if the person isn't rescued off the hook.
In two minutes, an efficient team can easily get three gens completed, and almost have two more finished. This isn't even calculating for how long it takes the killer to catch the survivor they hooked. There is a flaw with this design. I believe that if a perk similar to what I suggested isn't implemented, that the natural time to repair gens may need to be lengthened.
Now, yes, Dying Light was changed fairly recently (and to be fair, I've been using it on Huntress in place of Ruin since Dying Light was changed), but most killers either seem to be unaware, or unwilling to use it. Some people like the new Ruin changes, and that's okay. However, I again, genuinely do not believe this was the way to go about changing it.
Camping and tunneling are now being seen frequently across games, even from red rank killers. The negative impact that this has had on the community can easily be seen in survivor queue times - no one wants to play killer because it's awful now, and survivors can't find a match because no one is playing killers.
So, BHVR, I'm begging you, as someone who honestly love this game and loves what you've made - listen to us. Listen to your community. I know an asymmetrical game is incredibly hard to balance, and I never expect it to be perfect. I appreciate what you guys do, I genuinely do. But please, take into account some factors that you may not think of when designing perks.
TL;DR: Ruin wasn't the problem, but its change has created a ton of problems. Please address gen repair times by either increasing the time to repair, or providing more options to directly slow the time it takes to repair.
Comments
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+1 my guy!
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Survivor gen speed is based on their items and your pressure.
In my opinion Franklin's Demise is one of the best tools to slow down the game at the moment.
Doesnt matter if they have items or not,they will find them in the chests.
The old ruin made just the low-mid tier survivors struggle.Meaning the new ruin punishes also hardcore survivors.
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You are not entirely wrong - I know some killers (very specifically talking about the player) that don’t have issues. However, I’m trying to keep the mass of players in mind, and not the outliers.
As I mentioned, Dead by Daylight is a time-based game. Everything comes down to whether or not it is efficient. However, everyone is at a different skill level and cannot perform in the same capacity as another player. Just because your favorite streamer or YouTuber always 4Ks (for example) doesn’t mean everyone can.
This was more of an idea to get a discussion going, more than it was to just say “I don’t like it” while making a bunch of memes to try to bully the devs into a change. I’d rather provide thought and insight oh why something is bad or feels bad and provide an option or thought on how to make it not feel so bad.
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