Gen Regression: A General Change

Jakeroo

EDIT: Welp, I confused which forum I was posting on and used some HTML that doesn't work. Whoops! Will edit shortly.

Hey all!

So I wanted to talk about gen regression. Specifically: your standard, run-of-the-mill, kick the gen and walk away regression.

Killers these days with very few exceptions all have to run gen control perks... Nurse/Spirit/Nilly aside, which killer doesn't use Corrupt intervention, Pop Goes the Weasel, Ruin, or Surge?

I think the main reason for this is pretty obvious: Kicking generators really just isn't worth it at base.

I think a buff to the basic generator kick would be great for improving the quality of life of weaker killers (and as a wraith main, that'd mean a lot to me).

I don't want to make it absurd, but I do want it to be meaningful.. so I'm just going to provide a list of changes that COULD be given to the basic generator regression and see if anyone reading this likes them.

NOTE: These are meant to be taken a la carte: I am not hoping that all of them get implemented. That would be ridiculous.

**Current Generator Repair Stats:**

Number of Survivors | % of Total Repair/Second | Total Time for Repair

--- | --- | ---

1 | 1.25% | 80 seconds

2 | 2.12% | 47.06 seconds

3 | 2.62% | 38.2 seconds

4 | 2.75% | 36.36

Killer | -0.3125% | 320 seconds (from 99.9%)

Hex: Ruin | -2.5% | 40 seconds (from 99.9%)

I think a lot of people mistakenly think that a damaged generator regresses at the speed that one survivor repairs it. This isn't true: It actually regresses at 1/4th of the repair speed of an individual survivor. This is why unless you're running pop or you're hooking someone next to a generator and camping (a strategy I think everyone can agree sucks to experience), regression just isn't worth it. Bearing this in mind, here are some suggestions:

• Increase generator regression %: Fairly straightforward, my recommendation would be to regress at 75% the speed of a survivor, so it would take 100 seconds to regress from full.
• Add a delay to begin repairs on a damaged gen: The killer has a small progress bar to break a generator, right? Add that same progress bar to survivors beginning to repair the generator. You can't just tap mouse 1 and have nearly no animation, you have to commit like 2 seconds before you actually undo the regressing status.
• Trickle Drain: Generators that haven't been worked on for 5 seconds begin to lose charge at the current speed (1/4 survivor progression). These generators are not considered 'regressing' and there is no visual indication that this is happening (so as to not give the killer info on whether the gen was recently worked on). This is basically a passive VERY-small-ruin.
• Kicking a generator stops repairs for X seconds: This basically guarantees some small amount of regression and makes it so you can take a few steps away from a generator to hook a downed survivor or chase one of two survivors working on a generator briefly without fear of losing the gen. I think anything more than 5 seconds here would be excessive.
• Kicking a generator reduces progress by some % immediately: This would make it so that tapping a generator while being chased by a killer is actually a bad idea: if you want to keep working on the generator, you need to lure the killer away from that gen so a teammate can work on it or ditch the killer and return to it... Otherwise, the killer's going to kick it and do more damage than you're fixing. I'd say no more than 10% of current progress or 5% of total progress.

As a final thought, I don't want to suggest anything too crazy because in the end I think (and am worried that) anything that would make the game fun for wraith or clown or trapper would make Spirit/Nurse/etc overpowered... And I also recognize that solo queue survivors already have a tough time. With that in mind, I think one or two of these options wouldn't break the game, and might be enough to slow the game down - as a well-known streamer might say - just a little bit.

Ideally, I'd like to see some kind of general mechanic that's adjusted per killer... IE, each killer has their own regression speed, or each killer gets some number of generators blocked for some number of seconds at the beginning of the match... Something that can be tweaked so that weaker killers don't necessarily get directly buffed and lose their identity like old vs new Freddy) but still get a chance against competent survivors. But for now, this is all I could come up with.

APoipleTurtle

The 5th point in particular is one that I've been fond of. Just have the "Kick Gen" action instantly remove 5% progress (4 seconds of total gen-repair time) per-kick and begin regressing as normal. If survivors keep stopping the regression, killer could actually have a viable choice to keep smacking it to further inflict this repair penalty.

I also know that the 2nd point (Restart-Gen Channel) has become a popular consensus in the community. I've most often seen it suggested that survivors should be forced to complete a skill check to stop regression and continue repairs, but failing the skillcheck would remove more progress (I believe it's about 10% lost per failure), meanining gen-tapping in chases is still possible, but a much riskier choice.

Honestly, I think these are great suggestions and most of them could probably be implemented together to improve killer's quality of life without making things miserable for the survivor team. The only one's that I might not make base mechanics would be your 3rd and 4th suggestions (the 4th could instead be used to improve Brutal Strength and Surge).