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The new update highlights a distinct problem in balancing based off stats
I'm still kind of in disbelief that Nemesis and Twins received what I assume are going to be some pretty significant nerfs to their best addons in this upcoming mid-chapter.
I don't think anyone thought these Killers were overbearing. Maybe a bit boring to play against but not overbearing. So why the nerfs to their strongest addons? Personally, I think the problem comes from BHVR focusing primarily on stats as opposed to in-game performance. Maybe shoddy wording, what I mean is that BHVR saw the data of Nemesis matches for example, saw that most of them were using Marvin's Blood and decided that the best way to promote diversity was to nerf it without really thinking if Nemesis was too strong with Marvin's Blood.
In my opinion, it leads to a very bad situation where stats will make a Killer or addon seem overbearing (or in Nurse's case underbearing) when the reality is a lot different, and then these nonsensical balance decisions are made.
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They gutted clown while they were at it. Literally he has like 4 addons that are not a borderline waste of BP and 2 of them just got nerfed! Why would you ever put BP into him? At least other killers like Nemesis / PHead who have dogshit addons actually have a decent base kit.
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Like I said before, this is why stats should be left to a statistician, and not game developers. If they are this desperate to base every move they make off stats, then they should hire a statistician.
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You say strongest add-ons but from my experience with these killers, a better term like "least dog #########" sounds more fitting.
The add-ons like Marvin's blood and the victor cool down addon are basically QOL changes that make playing the killer less of a slog chore, not more powerful.
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I don't think the issue is the use of the stats. They don't need a statistician to figure out why some addons are being used a lot. All they need to do is reach out to the community and figure out why "x is being picked more" before deciding to nerf the addon to fix their ideal stats.
But they don't understand how their own game is played and refuse to educate themselves.
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Not to mention they buffed admittedly one of blights worse addons but no mention of alchemist ring or blighted crow, 2 addons that make him completely busted and I like blight he's one of my favorite killers but those addons are blatantly busted
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To be fair, they did say that "just because a specific addon wasn't mentioned in the list doesn't mean it's not on our radar"
I'm almost certain they're looking into Alchemist Ring.
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I'll wait until tomorrow then before calling them out. I don't think they learned from the Demo Rat Liver add-on nerf that they said they were gonna do and I have never seen such a huge ######### storm before on the forums before. Decided to nerf the only good add-on demo has while nearly every single add on was worthless.
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"Maybe a bit boring to play against but not overbearing."
This is exactly why. DBD isnt a competitive game, there is no competitive ranked mode. The killer winning doesnt mean the survivors lost. The survivors winning, doesnt mean the killer lost. Even with MMR, this is still the case. If you have(as an example) survivors with 400, 600, 700 and 3900 MMR, and the killer has 1000 MMR. The killer gains and loses MMR based on the difference between the kills. Now, if the killer has NOED, downs the 3900 MMR survivor and hooks them next to NOED. The killer only gains 1 kill, but the first kill also gives the most MMR.
Meaning if the killer might have gained a total of 100 MMR if he had a 4k, but now has a gain of 20 MMR(assuming he'd gain 60 MMR from the highest survivor, loses 25, 10 and 5 MMR from the escaping survivors). You'd have a situation of a killer getting an MMR win, when they lost. While the survivors "won", but the teammate with 3900 MMR still lost 60 points.
All this, is simply evidence that DBD is not competitively designed, but designed around fun. If something isnt fun(this is mostly due to the rating post-game, if you're not rating your matches, you're letting your games being balanced by people who do), it gets changed.
It's not done to promote addon diversity, its simply them seeing people rating the fun of matches very low when those killers use those addons, even if they ended up winning the game. While players showed to have more fun against different addons, even if they ended up losing the game. And that is quite important, to be able to have fun, even if you lose.
So remember kids, rate your matches on the experience.
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I suspect that's not quite how they look at stats. What's more likely is they compare games where a killer uses a particular add-on to games where they don't use a particular add-on at various levels of MMR and see if there's significant differences in the kill rate or possibly if there's some other red flag. A perk being really popular on its own wouldn't be enough for them to nerf it, if that were the case they'd have nerfs Dead Hard or NOED by now for example since they're maybe the two most popular perks in the game for Survivor and Killer and neither's been touched in a long time.
The fact is nobody on this forum actually knows what the stats behind the scenes are for these particular perks you're talking about. But I will say there's a decent chance both Twins and Nemesis have decent if not above average kill rates even without using those particular perks despite what some people on the forums seem to think. So I'm not surprised that if they determined an add-on gave a little too much of an edge they'd tone it down.
Also a couple other notes
- The devs have explicitly said that they don't just look at kill rate in a vacuum and used Nurse as an example of a killer with a low kill rate in the overall averages which does not need a buff because her performance is significantly better at high ratings.
- You mentioned Twins and Nemesis, but the biggest nerf was actually to Clown's Pinkie Finger, they pretty much did the same sort of nerf to it that they did to Huntress' Iri Hatchets where his ammo is greatly reduced. And frankly that Clown add-on deserved that nerf, it was way overpowered. Clown himself is probably not great overall in my opinion, but that's just me, I don't know the stats behind him. But presumably they're comfortable enough with him without using that red add-on that they haven't buffed his base kit so far since his last rework. Then again, base kit reworks take a while and they already mentioned Legion being the next target, so who knows? Maybe Clown will get another look someday.
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I think suffice it to say, even if the evidence supports it, they simply will not nerf Dead Hard. Or do any serious balancing against survivors for now. I'm guessing they have all eyes on killers... but the string of nerfs I keep hearing about are questionable at best. At least for higher MMR, survivors need to be under the knife... not killers
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Marvin's Blood nerf is kinda bs. Reaching tier 2 with 2 tentacle hits just feels right. And I don't think I'm being greedy, since our special attack gives survivors an extra health state(4 in total if you include dead hard) as well as a free sprint burst.
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