http://dbd.game/killswitch
Killer Concept - Jacob Harvey, "The Drowned" (With Perks!)
DISCLAIMER: I have done my best not to give any hard numbers when it comes to distances and percent slowdown, as I have never been particularly good at gauging distance in DBD. Any numbers I do give are also not set in stone!
The Drowned has standard Killer stats, moving at 115% and being of average height with a 32m Terror Radius. Visually, he is a tall and relatively burly man wearing an old school diving suit, the kind with the dome helmet that has portholes in it; through those portholes, no face can be seen, obscured by sloshing water that fills the helmet. Additionally, water drips from his body, especially his heavy boots, giving the impression he's only recently surfaced.
The Drowned's default weapon is a heavy pipe wrench, perpetually dripping with water.
The Drowned's killer power is split into two; Pressure Gauge and Hull Fissure. We'll tackle those separately to explain them.
Pressure Gauge. The Drowned has a passive meter that fills over time, taking 60 seconds by default to hit its maximum. When it reaches that point, it resets back to zero and all survivors scream, revealing their location. There is no limit to how often this effect can trigger, but the meter must fill back to maximum each time.
Hull Fissure. The Drowned has the ability to place down Fissures on walls and other vertical surfaces, that are visible to survivors by their jagged "cracking" look. This process takes 1 second for placing, and can be activated instantly. When activated, Fissures cause a spray of high-pressure water to eject horizontally outwards, extending about far enough to block off most doorways in the game. If a survivor is in the way of this spray, they are damaged, but either way neither the survivors nor the Drowned can walk through the spray. This lasts 10 seconds by default, and the Drowned may carry 5 Fissures at one time. If the Drowned attempts to place a sixth, he must deactivate an extant Fissure, an action that takes 2 seconds but can be done at any range. Both placing and removing slow the Drowned down slightly, but activating does not. Activated Fissures cannot be removed, and are automatically removed once their duration elapses.
The goal with this power is to give the game its third true trap-based killer; going for damage states will take good placement and good timing on activation, but if one prefers to, they can simply use them to block off strong areas and go for the M1, giving the killer decent depth (ha!) for skilled players to practice and hone.
This killer's addons are mostly a blank slate, with obvious scaling tweaks being for number of Fissures, length of duration, shortened Pressure Gauge time... I do have two Ultra Rare addons for him, however:
Iridescent Needle: If used on a pressure gauge or other such meter, the effects could be... disastrous. When Pressure Gauge activates, survivors who scream are Exposed for 25 seconds. Pressure Gauge takes an additional 60 seconds to hit maximum, and does not start refilling until the Exposed timer elapses.
Chitinous Lining: Worn beneath the standard atmospheric diving suit, the nagging itch is worth the vastly increased protection. Activated Fissures no longer damage survivors, but the Drowned may walk through them freely.
Next, we'll take a look at the Drowned's teachable perks:
Hex: Waterlogged. It's hard to focus with the sound of water pounding in your ears. While this Hex is standing, Survivors working on a generator are afflicted with the Oblivious status effect. This effect lingers for 8/9/10 seconds after the survivor stops working on the generator.
Debilitating Pressure. There's a certain weight to working at this depth. Every 6th/5th/4th basic attack inflicts Exhaustion for 10 seconds.
Scourge Hook: Riptide. Who knows how far a current can take the scent of blood? When hooking a Survivor on a Scourge Hook, the furthest Survivor from you will scream, becoming Incapacitated for 15/20/25 seconds.
Finally, a short Bio:
Getting his start in the US army during World War One, Jacob Harvey specialised in submarine operations until he was dishonourably discharged one year into his career for a variety of aggressive behaviours. For a time, he was listless, unsure of what to do with his life- until he was approached one day by a representative for a gang of three criminals specialising in illegal deep-sea salvage. His experience with underwater operations made him the perfect muscle, they explained; all he'd have to do is don a diving suit, bring up the salvage, and get paid a handsome amount.
These operations lasted for thrice as long as Jacob's military career, but as they say, there's no honour among thieves. The men never truly got along with one another, and especially not with Jacob; as time went on, they all started scheming to take the goods for themselves. Being a more straightforwardly violent man, Jacob's plan was the simplest: under cover of night, where all their operations take place, he'll simply take the lives of his companions and leave their corpses to wash up on some beach somewhere. As he rose from the briny depths that night, he grabbed a pipe wrench, and succeeded in killing the first of his colleagues.
Overconfidence and hubris were his downfall. His motions were clumsy, hampered by the suit, and he was spotted; his two remaining partners in crime overpowered him, cutting the breathing lines to his suit and wrapping him in weights before shoving him back into the sea. As his suit filled with water and he sank slowly to the bottom of the ocean, he cursed in desperate fury, consumed by rage. That rage attracted the Entity, and now he walks in the Fog, every step dripping with the water that would have taken his life that night.
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Thanks for reading! I'm curious what people think, I'm pretty pleased with what I've got here. Would this killer be fun, is there anything you'd tweak?
Comments
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I like this concept a lot, I don't really have any major criticisms about it.
The one thing I'd probably change is which hit Debilitating pressure applies to, probably to 5th/4th/3rd hit. I just feel like the hit it applies to should be an odd number, because typically your even number hits will be the ones that put survivors into the dying state, so exhaustion woudln't do much of anything to them at that point.
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That's a good point, I hadn't considered that- probably a good change to make, with that in mind!
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