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Why is billy not as popular as he once was?
I know that he got reworked and stuff, but his overheat mechanic doesn‘t really affect me when I play him and he‘s still a pretty strong and fun killer to play. I remember him always being one of the best killers to play as and to play against him but nowadays I barely see anyone other than me playing him.
Comments
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He was gutted.
Here is how the list goes of reworked killers to make them more “skillful and fun”
Nurse
Billy
Pyramid Head
Next on the “more fun to play” list will be:
Deathslinger
Spirit
Freddy
Mark my words. 😐
33 -
Because there are a lot of other choices out there. I don't play Billy, except for challenges, because I never bothered to get good with him.
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Billy is so much less fun now. Curves are much more difficult to do because missing one is very punishing. Billy's playstyle now boils down to sawing across the map just like he used to, but now due to overheating your best option in chase is to backrev which in all honesty just isnt that fun
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and Huntress and Myers
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There was a PH rework? Don't remember seeing that.
1 -
Why play Billy now when you can play Leatherface?
24 -
Simple he's not fun to play along with the developers beloved FAILED killer mechanic resource management.
Resource management isn't fun on any killer due to killers already having a massive time micromanagement to deal with every game adding in additional micromanagement is overbearing and off putting to most people.
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He screams now. I can't stand that. It sounds dumb and removes any mindgame from his chainsaw.
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How the turntables
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Honestly it’s a bit of an overreaction to his nerf. He’s still basically as food as he used to be, you can still do curves and zoom around the map and backrev for instance. And overheating the chainsaw is pretty uncommon.
Also two other killers now fill similar niches but are better at them
- Bubba is the better chainsaw chaser with his buff. If you like Billy because you can down people with a chainsaw Bubba can do it more easily.
- Blight’s movement ability is better than Billy’s. If you like Billy because you can zoom around the map Blight does it better.
So basically Billy is now like a hybrid between Bubba and Blight, but not as good as them in their specialty. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a number of people who like Billy who are now playing one of those two instead.
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Cause we have options...
All killers are being played... and that's a good thing
Do we actually want to see three or four killers being played all the time?
Side note...... ummmm I don't play much of Billy but when I do I'm basic attack Billy and chainsaw for mobility
1 -
They adjusted the timings of his power. They made it so when you stick the sword in the ground and cancel it you have to wait like a full second before meleeing. It was so if people ran to a vault, he stuck his sword in the ground, the survivor saw that and backed away he couldn't unstick it and immediately hit you. To compensate they lowered the recover time it takes after using the wave but the issue is it's so telegraphed most people won't use it unless the survivor is animation locked into something. Honestly I haven't noticed much of a difference but they might tweak the number in the future.
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It is kinda sad you don't see him as much even with a challenge in the archives for him
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+1
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I think a lot of people played Billy for the pure simplicity. Get in, vroom vroom, chasey time. That's not so simple any more - sure, the overheat mechanic barely effects me, but the threat of having my power confiscated is just so naggingly oppressive. Then there's also the people that crutched Insta Saw, but the real drop in Billy feels like it came after the second rework (when they tweaked his Overheat to be somewhere between PTB and the initial live release).
I'm not a Billy main, though, or even really a Billy player, so my experiences may not be... Accurate? I can't English at the moment.
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I enjoyed the occasional Billy game for the meme of just running around a map with my chainsaw, if a survivor ran into me it was their own fault. Can't do that anymore, and I disliked the backhanded way his nerf was handled. "He's skill-focused and has good counterplay so the more skilled player wins" turned into "he's overtuned, NERF BAT" in about a week.
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Sounds more like a tweak than a rework xD
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He got the Nurse-lite treatment. Introduce a super unfun mechanic that punishes skillful play, add a bunch of bugs, don't fix the bugs. Also, he yells every. Single. Time. It's really annoying.
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For me it’s the horrible animation. He’s constantly bobbing up and down, stares at the ground after using chainsaw, and that god awful growl. I won’t play him due to those things. The overheat means nothing to me
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People got salty and took their ball home.
I guess instantly downing everyone at the beginning of a match was like hard or something and took loads of skill.
And they ruined that. Shame BHVR, shame!
Shame!
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I am pretty sure that the number of Billys will go up again in the future. Players are once again overreacting, when Spirit got her Add On-Nerf you also did not see that many Spirits anymore (good times).
Personally, I dont really like his animation changes. I cannot even say what it is, he just feels weird since they bugged him a few months ago.
But I also have to say, I see at least 2 Billys per Day.
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They got the roar from oni. I know they I did. The roar shouldn't have never been implemented into him.
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Cause it's not as easy to get an insta-win with him as it is with bubba. I mean, people stated this already, just that they have an odd way of saying 'they took away the ez kills'
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Alright let's go through the ######### bhvr pulled with this killer recently....
- Horrendous animations and camera bugs
- Stupid roar that has already made me hate playing him
- PTB Billy was atrocious and killed everyone's hopes of Billy being playable
- Billy came out on live, and was actually not bad at all. I could've maybe lived with it because the overheat felt fine and didn't need any further changes. It stopped facecamping with the chainsaw and people spamming it.
- Then what did they do a week later? ######### nerfed it yet again to the default cooldown rate, from 5 to 3.8. ######### WHY?! People were happy with it before! But apparently people weren't overheating as much as they should be (This roughly translates to "you're having too much fun playing Billy and you need to notice how cool our new overheat mechanic is that we spent so much time and money working on") Now if you're running addonless you absolutely have to wait and babysit the stupid ######### overheat. You might say you aren't affected by it but you are, you're definitely not playing the same way you played Billy before if you played him a lot pre-nerf.
So yeah, that's why nobody likes Billy anymore. He was completely fine without the overheat, all he needed was an add-on rework. Hell, he didn't even need all of them reworked, all that was needed was to change the cooldown and charge time add-ons into something else. So Thompson's mix, carburettor, vegetable oil, (shop lubricant? Don't quite remember the name), spark plug and primer bulb.
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If they buffed his two charge time addons to just give him charge time without involving pallets or 4.4 m/s, he’d blow up in usage. People only played him for instasaw.
They nerfed a couple of other addons like bumper Billy that noone really noticed. Pretty much only undone engravings but the charge time penalty on that appears to be a bit worse than it was too according to Otz’s two addon videos.
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"people only played him for instasaw" I don't agree with that. There were a lot of Billy players who were always running addonless or maybe only using turning add-ons. There were very few double engravings players and that playstyle is effectively dead now with his new changes. Haven't seen a single double engravings Billy in a LONG time, not even anyone on Twitch has done it in forever. Insta and crack were definitely popular but not THAT popular. You'd still see a lot of Billy players who would just run something different if all they did was change the charge time and cooldown add-ons. And they would also be the good Billies too so you'd know it'd be a fun match if you ever saw a Billy.
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a lot of players depended on addons to need less skill at sawing, some players simply dont like him after his rework compared to his past self, a lot don't like how they cant mindlessly spam/hold his saw.
he isn't as easy anymore which is a factor to how often a killer is played.
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I don't play him that much anymore because they changed his movement. It is so clunky and bad that I just can't play like I used to with him. Really sad, he was probably the most fun killer to go against.
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Yeah people need to learn the definition of "rework".
Adding a CD to a blink, an overheat to a chainsaw, or completely changing what a killer does(Old Freddy and current Freddy). That's a rework.
Adding an extra second to something, that's a tweak.
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You seem to genuinely say this out of confusion, so I'll link this here for your information:
Reasons people don't play Billy (i.e. reasons he's not fun to play):
- The roar
- The roar (again), janky animations, forced camera angles, and general sounds
- Curving for the hell of it is punished beyond missing the survivor
- This one might just be for me, but his specific music is really not something I want to hear
- This one might also just be for me, but I can't repeatedly start a chainsaw rev at a survivor as a taunt without dealing with the overheat mechanic
Reasons Billy still is sometimes not fun to play against:
- very large chainsaw hit detection zone
- backrevs are strongly rewarded
And you know what the rework did to solve those issues or any of the other ones survivors had and still have? Nothing. The rework only made him less fun and nothing else.
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Well I have to push back on this because all the styles listed are still very much available.
Except instasaw.
If you want to see double engravings Hillbillies go check out the Syndicate.
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They are but is it still fun for the people who played Billy a lot before now having to babysit dumb mechanics? Not really
And I haven't seen a single person from that team in any of my games or on Twitch since the Billy rework. If you have any videos of them playing double engravings post-rework then I guess I'll eat my words.
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I can only answer as to why I don't play him anymore and that is because he just feels so clunky and jerky. That coupled with that stupid roar he does and I just have no interest in using him anymore.
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Seems like you're a tad bit biased my dude!
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Billy was the go to for a relatively easy to play/strong killer that had room to grow and become truly great at. He still is but the overheat punishes new players who dont know when to use and not use their chainsaw pretty hard.
And like others have said there's significantly more killer than there were 2 years ago. I still think he's high tier. The removal of instasaw and crack billy hurt his viability against good teams.
Crack billy was extremely niche as he was pretty hard to play properly but it was always fun to see. Most of his new add ons suck.
Also like Yords above me. Something about his movement has felt off to me for a long time. Not just his chainsaw but his basic movement. Getting caught on nothing and lunges getting blocked by air. Devs have never commented on it so I thought I was crazy. That's why I dropped him. That and after a few years he just became kind of stale to play.
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The biggest thing for me is that Billy is extremely headache-inducing now due to all the new audio associated with him. The roar, the chase music, and especially that ear-splitting menu theme.
I actually like his new chainsaw noise, but it's outweighed by everything else that he's assaulting my senses with.
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along with what others have said.. his addons aside from 2-3 are straight trash
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I dunno man, I still enjoy him quite a bit. His rework hasn't really affected my playstyle with him at all honestly. I'm still performing just as well, if not better, than before his rework
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They nerfed instasaw and a huge amount of Billy players used those addons as a crutch.
I personally won’t play him because of the dumbass groan he does when he takes off. Only bhvr would think this sounds good.
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If a killer gets nerfed in any way their playrate plummit, Nurse is still S tier but no one plays her, billy is still amazing but people dont like the overheat even though it can be deleted with a brown addon, people stopped spamming spirit after prayerbeads nerf(shes still popular but not as much as she used to be). People stopped playing legion after they found out that he can't make 4 people dc.
Just something i noticed
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People here acting like Billy was super popular before the change, at least in my region NA, he never was that popular before the change, he's boring tbh.
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They aren’t exactly content creators but their discord has a bunch of clips. Here’s one:
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What this man said, ever since they moved billys POV slightly forward he feels clunky, add in the fact that after every chainsaw you look at the ground like nurses fatigue and then you let out that stupid rawr every time you wanna chainsaw.
The overheat mechanic was pointless and not needed nor wanted. Nobody was complaining about billy but they nerfed him anyway. Most of his new add ons are suppose to make billy a silence killer like ######### no i dont want stupid add ons that make me quite or make my chainsaw cool down faster while being blinded by a flashlight 😂😂
Add ons are jokes and billy just feels different.
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They accomplished what they wanted: nerf instasaw, remove chainsaw hook guarding, remove hostage taking at loops, and buffed silent billy builds / cross map snipes.
I think the instasaw could be buffed again. He has no cooldown reduction anymore or addons that buff two to four categories. Let us play a regular 4.6 crack billy again. With the old brown/yellow addons as higher rarity (green/purple).
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Personally I can't stand the limp movement of the camera when walking around as him and backrubbing someone with the chainsaw is stupid difficult without shadowborn if they just start spinning out (the devs seriously should put a cap on survivor move speed when rotating the camera).
He's very high risk, high reward with a ton of counterplay available to both him and the survivors but in the red ranks it feels like you have to be a Billy god to 3k or 4k before gens just fly because one missed chainsaw can pretty much cost you the game. This last portion being why I suspect a lot of people don't play him.
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Just the absolutely unnecessary yell alone is off-putting enough. Might be more acceptable if he shouts "chu chu"
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because of his add-on change.
without his old add-on.
it take too long to charge.
he can't really use his ability to kill survivor in most of situation.
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But was it nerf he got a sick new theme. The add-ons aren't as good anymore. And overheat occasionally gets to me. But overall I play the same and the theme is awesome.
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Billy wasnt gutted he just requires more skill just like the Nurse rework. Only players that know how to play them get 4k easily. Killers now and days just want easy wins so majority is Freddy.
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dunno, he has those weird overheating problems with his chainsaw lately...
damn thing keeps exploding in his face.
he decided to take some time off and tinker on it, in hopes of fixing it, but ya know... its gonna take a while
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