Leatherface rework idea: meltdown
As the community has noted time and time again, leatherface is perhaps one of the weakest, or most boring, killers in dead by daylight. He is often outshined by the thematically similar, yet much more effective hillbilly.
From my understanding, leatherface's power was designed to be a sibling to the hillbilly's, trading off speed and pressure for control and the ability to down groups with a single charge of the saw. This, perhaps unintentionally, made leatherface's incredible defensive game his only viable strategy.
With this proposal I intend to keep what I believe to be the identity of leatherface and his power, while also adding a good bit of variety and skill into his kit. This will be done by slightly tweaking the base kit to make room for a new alternate attack, the meltdown.
The changes to his base kit are relatively few, but are fairly important to how the new component of the power will operate, for the most part. Firstly, the chainsaw file is now part of the base kit. Secondly, he will no longer throw a tantrum if he bumps into something during a chainsaw sweep, instead incurring the same stun that the hillbilly suffers. And finally, if leatherface downs a survivor with a chainsaw sweep, he will immediately begin a new sweep, while maintaining the acceleration of the old sweep.
The new component of his power, "the meltdown," is an alternate attack that requires a meter to be filled before it can be used. The meter is empty when you start the trial, and can be filled with several methods. The meter fills passively whenever leatherface is not in a chase, but at an incredibly slow rate (think the passive recharge of Oni's power), and will stop at 80% of a full charge.
The first way to primarily charge up leatherface's meltdown is by missing failing to hit any survivors with a chainsaw sweep while in a chase. The amount of charge you get from this depends on how many of the chainsaw swings you missed while in a chase. For example, if you began a chase six chainsaw swings into a chainsaw sweep, you would not get nearly as much charge as if you had begun the chase one swing into a chainsaw sweep. This could net you up to a third of a full charge if you somehow whiffed the entire chainsaw sweep. If you bump into something while doing a chainsaw sweep in a chase, it will grant you two fifths of a full charge.
When meltdown is fully charged, it becomes much riskier to use the normal chainsaw sweep, as failing to connect the chainsaw during a chase or bumping into something while using the chainsaw sweep at any time results in leatherface performing a four second tantrum, and losing 5% of charge to meltdown. In order to activate meltdown, hold the active ability button for as long as it takes to normally rev the chainsaw. Once fully revved up, release the button to lunge forward with surprising speed and perform a brutal swing with the chainsaw. While this attack can also break pallets, whiffing the swing or hitting anything other than a survivor will cause leatherface to enter a six second "meltdown" where he spins wildly in place and flails his chainsaw about. This meltdown has great reach in a complete circle around leatherface, but completely disorients the killer. If the brutal swing does connect with a survivor, it will down them and give them the broken status for 90 seconds. If the survivor is under the effects of borrowed time then the brutal swing will either injure them and still apply 90 seconds of the broken status effect, or overwrite the protection of borrowed time and not apply the 90 seconds of broken. After the brutal swing is made (or after the meltdown if the swing doesn't hit a survivor), leatherface will stop and "mope" for about two seconds, forcing the killer to look at the ground while leatherface recovers from the strain that the meltdown puts him through.
Survivors can tell if you have meltdown ready based on the breathing leatherface makes, as he will sound like he is holding back from sobbing. While you are revving up a meltdown attack, leatherface will hold his chainsaw lower than a normal chainsaw revving. Both the brutal swing and the following meltdown are incredibly loud and can be heard nearly across the map.
This is just a potential idea, and I am uncertain about how balanced this may be, so please leave feedback.
Comments
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Bumping this back up to the top. I put quite a bit of thought into this idea, but it's not perfect as I am in low ranks where playing killer has become very hard due to long loading times. That, and my knowledge lies mostly in stealth killers, not loud killers with high lethality.
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Leatherface already has good chase potential (particularly with PWYF + Nemesis), but much like Clown that doesn't always translate to being a good killer. He has no good mobility in a game where many maps are absolutely massive.
Honestly, the maps getting fixed would help a lot of killers. Most top-tier killers are high-mobility because some maps are so big. If map size was more consistent, the weaker killers would also be more consistent.
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All valid points, but this wasn't meant to necessarily improve his chase potential, but rather further solidify his identity of "slower hillbilly who is much better at downing groups of survivors and playing a bit more defensively" and bring him out of being, as Otzderva put it, being "Soo booring" by actually making his iconic chainsaw tantrum an interesting feature other than a five second stun with a nearly pointless hitbox. And in order to use the meltdown, you have to intentionally mess up during the chase, making a risk/reward system to using the chainsaw to scare survivors versus using it to actually down them.
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Bumping this back up to the top, and I might just copy it over into the suggestions and feedback portion of the forums, as it probably fits there better and might get more attention.
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I honestly would like to see all big maps reworked before we get to any killer buffs or reworks
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