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Remove Cooldowns from Killer Perks

Calchexxiss
Calchexxiss Member Posts: 43
edited June 2020 in Feedback and Suggestions

So many Killer perks are borderline worthless because of their cooldowns.

I'm All Ears has a 40 second cooldown on it. Why? Thrilling Tremors and Trail of Torment both have 60 seconds! A full minute! Same with Blood Echo. A 60 second cooldown! Surge is a terrible perk and even it has a 40 second cooldown.

Do the Devs realise that in the span of 40 seconds, two people can complete a generator from 0 to 100% granted at least one of them hits a couple of great skill checks? Not even a LOT of Greats, just a couple. And that's not counting if they have a toolbox or Prove Thyself.

The developers removed the cooldown off of Alert but they keep adding cooldowns to Killer perks making them demonstrably bad compared to other perks just because they stop working.

Just remove them. It's not even that Killer's don't have options. We have options, but these perks are interesting enough to make new builds with if they actually WORKED all the time.

ADDENDUM: These perks aren't even very good (barring Thrilling which is only okay) they're just kind of fun to play with.

Post edited by Calchexxiss on

Comments

  • NuclearBurrito
    NuclearBurrito Member Posts: 6,807

    Some of the cooldowns make sense. Thrilling Tremors and Trail of Torment for example. Surge however, does not need a cooldown.

  • NuclearBurrito
    NuclearBurrito Member Posts: 6,807

    Note that I don't necessarily agree with the MAGNITUDE of the perks cooldowns.

    It would be much better if the perks had their cooldowns start on the perks activation and not when the perks effect ran out.

  • APoipleTurtle
    APoipleTurtle Member Posts: 1,274

    The easy solution for that is just to adjust down the perks' cooldowns to account for the length they are active. Ie, Thrilling Tremors lasts for 16 seconds, so take 16 seconds out of its max cooldown timer.

    Though I do agree that a lot of these timers need to either be shortened, or the perks need to stay in effect longer.

  • Calchexxiss
    Calchexxiss Member Posts: 43

    If you're fast-vaulting all the time, I don't what to say to you mate. But yeah, that's what I'm talking about though. If you're at a T-L or a jungle gym, and someone is just fast-vaulting everywhere, I'm All Ears should show you them. It doesn't let you catch up to them, it just balances the power of a good loop by giving the Killer an advantage in exchange for a perk slot. You say 'too strong' but frankly most Killer perks are pretty weak.

    I say 'Most' because you have to think about just how many perks never get used in the Killer's arsenal versus the six-ish 'good perks', i.e. Nurses, BBQ, Ruin, Surveillance, Sloppy, Corrupt, and Pop. Those being the 'meta' perks for Killer. You can literally just run 'Ruin, Surveillance, Pop, and BBQ' on every single Killer.

    Thrilling has a Cooldown because it makes generators uninteractable. I think. Trail of Torment can't make you perma-stealthed because if you were in a chase and stopped to kick a generator, you'd immediately lose that person. Even with Brutal. Best case it can give you the ability to approach, and then you still have to chase them down. And even then, an alert player or team can still just, y'know, see you.

  • Twillzy
    Twillzy Member Posts: 11

    Killer perks need cooldowns. You might argue the extend of some, but to say they shouldn't have any is silly. Well, that one guy is right about Surge though, it shouldn't have a cooldown. You can't really exploit it if it was removed since it's tied to downing survivors.

  • JustCats
    JustCats Member Posts: 298
    edited July 2020

    The problem with killer perks is really killer add-ons. Add ons serve the purpose of perks - enhancing your killer's abilities - making perks too hard to balance across a roster with very diverse abilities. That's why you get these weirdly long cooldowns and the clumsy totem mechanic. When killer abilities aren't even consistent within the context of the killer it's very hard to determine when and where a perk is OP. Right now it's backwards, where a killer's perks are picked for their general utility and the items are specific - so the most useful general utility perks become the default meta.

    Add ons should be relatively generic consumables the same way they are for survivors. A stim for increased movespeed or a thing to bust pallets quickly or whatever. At that point you'd be able to examine perks with a more even balance foundation.

  • Calchexxiss
    Calchexxiss Member Posts: 43

    You can't exploit Thrilling Tremors or Blood Echo either for the same reason, you need to down/hook. You can't exploit Trails of Torment because it's tied to kicking generators, which takes time so you can't do it in a chase, and you can't damaged unworked or already damaged generators. You can't exploit I'm All Ears because it relies entirely on the actions of the Survivor, not on anything you do.

    Think before you speak, mate.

    I can't say I agree with you. Most Killer add-on's are incredibly generic to the Killer. Most add-ons just change the charge time of powers or add effects to special attack hits. Only the rarest add-ons do anything special. Take Pyramid Head for example. Every single one of his Brown, Yellow, and Green add-ons do exactly the same thing with rising levels of power. Only the Purple and Iri add-ons alter his power at all. That's largely true across all Killers with a few notable exceptions like the Doctor.

    That aside, you're missing the main point of my argument. By and large, these perks aren't used at all with the exception of Thrilling. Meaning they're badly designed. Anything that's put into a game and is never used is, by definition, badly designed.

  • Twillzy
    Twillzy Member Posts: 11

    Thrilling Tremors is activated on pickup of a downed survivor, so you can chain activate it every 16 seconds on a slug to abuse the heck out of it and keep gens chain locked!

    Trail of Torment can be abused by simply kicking a gen, walking to a place you expect survivors to be, failing at doing anything, and kicking a nearby gen to chain-stealth, go back to another gen, repeat. Super abusable.

    I'm all ears can be exploited by erasing the mindgames of any vault loops.

    As a not-so-wise person once said to me, think before you speak, mate. You're clearly not.

  • JustCats
    JustCats Member Posts: 298
    edited July 2020

    I see what you're saying but you're missing my point. Add-ons aren't generic to the killer, they're specific to the killer. A chewed pen increasing the rate of GhostFace power recovery does nothing for any killer except GhostFace. Thrilling Tremors, however, is generic to all killers.

    What does this mean? It means that every perk has to be balanced for every killer, and then also balanced within each individual killer add-on ecosystem. So a perk that's reasonable for a somewhat stealthy killer might be way out of bounds if another killer can use an add-on to get super stealthy. So the perk gets an outrageous cooldown or gets put on a totem to balance for that - making it useless for any other killer (including the one it was designed for originally) that doesn't have that add-on.

    Perks should be designed towards killer archetypes instead, with an understanding that any killer could use a standard item to make themselves faster/better/stronger in baseline mechanical ways. So a Perk designed for GhostFace might work pretty well with Myers, for example, but not with Leatherface. But some Leatherface perks might work pretty well with Myers and not with GhostFace, as Myers is closer to Leatherface in archetype than GhostFace. That's how you create build diversity with a roster of different characters.

    Instead we have a core group of meta perks for all killers to boost their baseline mechanics, who each have their own specific items that also have clear bests, leading to a stale meta with a million unused perks and items - and every killer essentially becomes the same killer with a little tweak depending on the power.

  • Calchexxiss
    Calchexxiss Member Posts: 43

    Boy, if you're slugging a Survivor team so hard that you're able to chain-lock generators with Thrilling, then you did not even need Thrilling.

    Chain kicking generators is a waste of time since you can only bop one generator at a time, so you're invisibly jacking off in one corner of the map while the rest of the Survivor team is actually accomplishing their objectives.

    I'm all ears doesn't erase mindgames from loops any more than Bamboozle does, which has no Cooldown, and while you can only lock a single window with Bam, you only need to lock one window in a jungle gym to destroy the loop, but I don't see you complaining about that.

    You clearly don't play this game much, either that or you play at yellow ranks, where I can conceivably see these complaints being valid.

    actually yeah. now that I write that, I see your point. If you're playing at a rank where other Survivors literally do not know how to do generators, then these perks must seem incredibly overpowered.

    I get it now.

    mb

  • Kind_Lemon
    Kind_Lemon Member Posts: 2,559

    I would like to point out that if Thrilling Tremors was changed to be that it blocked all generators while carrying a survivor that it would no longer be abuse-able to the degree that you state (also could work well with meme-y builds revolving around carrying survivors).