Let's Rework Demogorgon's Teachables

Lexilogo · April 2020

Characters having a selection of bad teachables is never good and Demo's got some of the weakest offerings out of the Killers. So, imma suggest how I would change all three of them, without breaking their themes of screwing with Generators.

Surge

Your eerie presence charges the air and interferes with technology.

Putting a Survivor into the Dying State causes the nearest non-regressing Generator to immediately explode and begin regressing. Surge applies an immediate regression penalty of 5/6/7%.

My thoughts with this are that Surge in its current state is honestly too polarising for my tastes. I think the current design of affecting ALL generators within a radius creates a feast/famine design I don't really enjoy that encourages 3-genning too much. This version essentially creates a more automatic, but less controllable version of Pop Goes The Weasel that doesn't require you to invest time to slow the game down but has a decent likelihood of having much worse payouts.

Mindbreaker

Your distressing presence drains and weakens your prey.

While repairing Generators with less than 50% Repair progression, Survivors are afflicted by the Exhausted Status Effect. While repairing Generators with more than 50% Repair progression, Survivors are afflicted by the Oblivious Status Effect instead.

Any existing Exhaustion/Oblivious Status Effect timers are paused while Survivors are repairing Generators. After ending the Repair action, the Survivor is afflicted by the Exhausted/Oblivious Status Effect for 1/2/3 seconds.

I decided to be weird with this one and have a half and half between Exhausted and Oblivious, that I think could be pretty interesting. Oblivious would definitely allow for some interesting shenanigans and I think would be a nice backup to Mindbreaker if you never pull anything off with the below 50% Generators.

Cruel Limits

Your ties to the otherworldly manifest when your prey attempts to get away.

Each time a Generator is repaired, the 2/3/4 nearest Windows or vault locations to the Generator within 40 meters are blocked for the remainder of the Trial.

Really simple but I think this would be effective. Instead of the extremely specific design Cruel Limits currently has that'll maybe get you an extra hit in once in every ten games if you bring Tinkerer and are constantly on the lookout for Cruel Limits opportunities, this steadily cuts off avenues for Survivor movement as the game goes on. This is definitely something that'd require playtesting and potentially map changes to make work properly, but I really enjoy the idea of a permanent map lockdown version of Cruel Limits and think it could be a pretty fun Perk.

Feedback is welcome, I definitely think there's other valid approaches to buffing these perks and maybe some of these weren't too well thought out. (Mindbreaker is probably the one I'm most clueless on to be honest) Would be interested to see other approaches to buffing these too.

PigNRun · April 2020

Much easier way to boost these perks without making them "unfun".

Surge:

Remove the basic attack condition. If you really are downing people as much as making this Surge "OP" during a 3-gen, then you probably wouldnt need Surge in the first place. Plus, Devs literally said they want Killers to defend certain areas of the map (aka 3-gen), so at this point they might as well make a perk that makes it a bit more manageable.

Mindbreaker:

Remove the 50% limitation. Make Survivors choose whether to wait for their exhaustion or focus on the objective. Simple.

Cruel Limits:

This is the one Im not sure. People have suggesting blocking all vaults in the map, but I disagree with that. At the same time, it definitely needs something, since it will only trigger 5 times during the match completely out of the Killer's control.

Trwth · April 2020

For Surge, remove the cooldown and basic attack condition. That’s all that needs to be done.

Mindbreaker, remove the “below 50%” nonsense and increase the Exhaustion timer up to about 6 or 7 seconds.

Cruel Limits is difficult because, on paper, its effect sounds amazing, but since all of the old maps (Macmillan, Asylum, Swamp) don’t have as many vaults as the newer maps (Hawkins, Glenvale), it’s not as strong as it should be.

Even still, my idea is that it blocks all vaults within 24 meters around regressing generators that lasts for an additional 20 or so seconds. This way, you’ll always benefit from the perk and it synergizes very well with Ruin.

Steel_Eyed · April 2020

The devs have announced a rework for cruel limits. I would also like to see the other two perks boosted as well. Shake up the meta.

Lexilogo · April 2020

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1226152#Comment_1226152

Maybe I should rephrase my thoughts with Surge: I don't like how it's a generator "delay" Perk that mostly functions for defending gens in a situation where you're already in the best possible situation for generator defense. Plus, there are other Perks like Pop or even Surveillance that IMO fit a 3-gen strategy better anyway. (and are versatile perks that have uses outside of 3genning)

I think having Surge only apply to one gen at a time removes the huge situational potential the Perk has, which is what can justify removing the cooldown and making it work consistently on every single down. I generally prefer consistent Perks with some specialisation to a Perk that's generally bad but might be really, really strong once in a blue moon.

This might well be my bias showing though, because I've always wanted a Perk that damages generators automatically for me to save time, and Surge ended up bittersweet thanks to that because it's so close to what I wanted that kind of Perk to look like.