We Need To Talk About Pinhead
When Pinhead first came out, I was super stoked about his power, cause we've never seen anything like it in the game. A dude who has a ranged ability that you can steer as it flies through the air? And he has passive slowdown? That's absolutely wild!
It's been a few months since he came out, but he has aged particularly poorly I think. This is a killer that has two of the most powerful types of abilities in the game: passive slowdown and range. Yet despite this, neither of these powers do their job particularly well.
First let's take about his chain ability. This is a power with an incredible amount of range to it, but absolutely no reason to use it at range. The slowdown you would get from using this at a distance does not surpass the ground you would gain by just walking for the same amount of time. And the fact that his chains break automatically on the environment turn it into an absolute joke on indoor maps, or even just regular jungle gyms. The only time his power helps you get hits is at semi-unsafe loops, which so many other killers can do better, since they actually get a damage state from using their power well. What do you get if you use pinheads power well? Neither jack, nor #########.
The Lament configuration. Something that offers passive slowdown should be powerful, but this somehow manages to avoid doing this. Chain hunts take a long time to start, and when it does start, the chains move so slowly they can be dodged with minimal effort. I know this because I've been the one having his chains dodged and the one dodging chains. And it is not difficult to solve the lament configuration. You get to see where it is at all times when it spawns in. It only takes a few seconds to solve. If hooks are far enough away from where someone gets downed, you can solve it before they get hooked. If someone's in a chase, chances are you can solve it safely because the person playing him may not want to abandon that chase for one reason or another. Once someone picks it up, it puts chain hunts on hold for everyone. You don't need to solve it to take the heat on your teammates, you only need to pick it up. The only time The Lament configuration does its job well is when you are running the Iridescent Lament Configuration. It's the only real way to guarantee you can get your relatively weak slowdown to actually come into effect in the first place.
There is basically no reason at all to ever play this killer, because everyone fills these roles better than him.
Huntress, Deathslinger, Trickster, Demogorgon, Cannibal, Hilbilly, Nurse, Hag, Doctor, Spirit, Clown, Executioner, Twins and even Wraith all do anti-looping and distance closing.
Several other killers are better at slowdown too. Pig is way better because survivors basically need to drop everything to remove bear traps once they're on. Demo can waste survivors time by making them use their time to remove his mobility ability. Nemesis can waste time by requiring people to find and use vaccines. Legion forces people to use a lot of their time to mend and/or heal. Hell, even killers like Hilbilly and Blight do slowdown better because they can pressure gens by traversing the map quickly. Pinhead can teleport, but survivors control when he teleports and where he teleports to.
I've seen a couple posts on here all like "why does no one play pinhead?" or "why do I not see many pinheads?". This is why. His power occupies two powerful niches, but somehow he sucks at both of them.
Comments
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Pinhead is overall a pretty bad killer who is only really good at stomping baby solo players (in which case, any killer could do it). The only reason I play as Pinhead is because I like the character a bunch but his power leaves a LOT to be desired. His chains are useless at best (and an actual detriment to you at worse since they're so hard to control and you get very little slowdown when you do manage to hit; there are very very very very few situations where you're better using your chains than just walking to the survivor).
Even his chainhunt can be pretty useless unless it's against four solos who have no desire to have any of them go after the box.
The only thing he really has going for him is the snowball ability if you can get the chainhunt to go off while you have a survivor or two hooked. But even then, someone like Oni or even Bubba have a much better snowball ability that isn't reliant on the survivors actions.
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As Otz has shown, a Pinhead who can successfully keep his Chain Hunt up is terrifying. It doesn't matter if you can dodge his chains, you have to dodge them constantly and progress gets ground to a complete halt.
But unfortunately, that's the only real case where Pinhead has some serious strength. Either he's incredibly oppressive there, or he's basically nonexistent everywhere else.
His Possessed Chain and other facets of his chain hunt need a well-deserved buff.
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I called it as soon as he released.
The Chain Hunt is his power. His Possessed Chains may as well not exist. They give you, at best, the affect of Clown's bottles whilst requiring the skill of Nurse/Deathslinger to pull off. You want to maximize the amount of time Chain Hunt is up.
Unfortunately, BHVR nerfed the best add-ons to do that and gave him nothing to compensate.
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Why are we determining how strong a killer is based on what Otz does? The supreme majority of killer players aren't anywhere close to that level
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He's part of a trend in killer powers that we've been seeing lately. A lot of setup for not a lot of payoff, or a very high skill requirement for little payoff. It started with Nemesis, in needing to infect people before you can damage them with their tentacle. Then Pinhead continued this trend with his possessed chain, and it feels like its come to a head with The Artist and her dire crows. Whatever they have planned for the Ringu killer, I hope it doesn't continue with this trend.
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I love that everything breaks Pinhead's chains.
Walls? Breaks.
Junk? Breaks.
Other Survivors? Breaks.
An errant insect that happened to fly between the Survivor and the chain? Pretty sure that would break it.
Does it happen to be 50% humidity that day? The moisture in the air breaks the chain!
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It started with trickster. Atleast pinhead was unique and had the chain hunt and box to make him fun the rest had the same old 1v1 Schlick
Trickster 1v1 no map pressure
Nemesis 1v1 has some map pressure
Pinhead 1v1 and 1v4
Artist 1v1 decent map pressure
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The Cenobite is just a weirdly designed killer.
At base, he's pretty weak. A mediocre anti-loop and a secondary objective that is basically meaningless, thanks to how easy it is to completely negate (and the weird 'tech' that lets survivors solve the box without allowing you to teleport).
A huge amount of his power came from his addons, which were then nerfed to Freddy levels.
He needs...something. A good start would be removing the gimmick where he breaks his own chains, fixing whatever allows survivors to negate teleports and bringing up his weaker addons.
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I really love Pinheads style, he just oozes power and control... two things you have to work really hard for to wrestle from the players.
His build in slowdown is pretty cool, but his active power is really weird. I don't know, I had this one game om Disturbed Ward were I pretty much nailed every single skill shot I went for, but it felt like I barely got any payoff for it. Like you gain maybe 1/2 a second on a survivor, and that's when things are rather perfect, they can't immediately break half the chains on the environment and you don't walk through them yourself.
And if you miss your skill shot, well, then the survivor can pretty much traverse half the map. I really don't get this power... the scouting part is pretty cool and sees quite some use on indoor maps, but the fact that the casting slows you down and the execution actually has you to stop dead in your step is so baffling.
I would love so see the chains autoaim themselves, once you threw the spawn out, so that you don't lose that much distance on a survivor. Or maybe make a hit much more detrimental, I dunno, chain the survivor really in place and they have to solve a yellow rune in order to get free, but I know that that would be unpopular with the survivors.
And half the add-ons are pretty useless, increasing max chain reach or turning speed, which you nearly never should fumble with. Its really a frustrating situation as I really love Pinheads concept, but his execution feels so clunky and half-finished and his building blocks just don't add up.
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I think Pinhead would be a lot better if his chains worked like Deathslinger's harpoon. Instead of instantly breaking when passing through something, they would only break slightly faster. In compensation you would have to nerf a bit of his Chain Hunt (maybe make the timer for the box to respawn longer after someone solves it), but he would still be very solid.
Worth mentioning though that Pinhead is not at all a weak killer. The problem is that he requires a very focused playstyle around the box, and he's only weak if you're actually going for chases instead of pressuring the box. It's the same with Twins being strong only when playing around slugging, which makes them unfun as hell to go against.
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Problem is that pinhead is soloQ stomper, because of his Chain Hunt wastes way more time than against SWF.
I wouldn't really mind buff to Possessed Chain and some nerf to Chain Hunt just so he feels better to play with. If you are unlucky on RNG and don't manage to keep Chain Hunt active, you are screwed.
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Wait, Survivors can solve the Box while denying Pinhead his teleport? Wonder how long it will take BHVR to fix this. Or will it be like the audio bug, where it won't be fixed because it benefits Survivors?
Whereas, when Killers were losing their TR; it was fixed within a day. 🙃
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- Anti-Loop killer (Check)
- Slows down survivor (Check)
- A mandatory secondary objective (Check)
- Requires coordination to beat (Check)
There's a reason his killrates were the highest and I feel like his nerfs were not enough. He either needs a weaker anti-loop power or his Lament Configuration power needs to be much less punishing.
There is also an unfair strategy where I see Pinheads know where the box is located. Hoarder needs to be nerfed so it doesn't show this particular box. Both needs to be fixed.
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They were so busy putting in counterplay to Pinhead's abilities that they forgot to stop and think what Pinhead is supposed to do with his abilities.
"Competent as long as your opposition falls apart and ignores the box" is not fun. Active skills that take a lot of finesse and do nothing, up to and including Pinhead breaking his own chains, except in a few very lucky loops are not fun. His one strong scenario is to get the box rolling and then basically track everyone the entire match so you know where it spawns, which is just a ridiculous level of awareness needed to do anything except be an M1 killer with nice aesthetics.
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Otz is one professional, how about the entire community who isn't?
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Did you see the rest of my post where I said Pinhead needs a well-deserved buff?
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No I didn't, I apologize
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I think pinhead is fine as is really. Aside from minor tweaks here and there he should be left alone for the most part since big changes can either make him way too strong or way too weak. Both his chains and box can be played around by both sides, the chains are kinda annoying when they break on the environment but they aren't totally random so once you learn the ins and outs of it you kinda play around that fact. All in all I think he's the closest to being a perfectly design killer and I'd rather they don't touch him. Except engineers fang, just delete it and give it another effect.
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Yeah his chain hunt is the only valuable feature. Nothing better than having it activate with 3 survivors left or mid chase. If you have played more than a few games with him you get pretty good at knowing where the lament spawned in. I dont even have to run lethal to start a hunt at beginning of the game.
His shot chains are worse than the smell of a port - a - potty though. I can count on 1 hand how many times it has helped/been better than walking and attacking.
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So his chain hunt is bad cause: BOX, While his possessed chains aren't very good for slowdown. Personally I don't like Slowdown powers for chases but if his kit needed a buff I feel like it's chains being broken by objects and survivors and his box not spawning in until maybe halfway before it starts a hunt.
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He shouldn't break his own chains,that's for sure
No killer is way too strong
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I wanted them to make him be able to set chains up as traps in particular locations, but on the walls like Symmetra in Overwatch. And when a Survivor comes near the chain would latch onto them and they'd have to break free like a Trapper bear trap, but no using the environment to break them and other Survivors CAN NOT assist you. I wish that was where they went with it. Imagine setting up a few good chains in choke points or EVEN being able to set 1 chain at a time on a pallet to keep it from being dropped. There was a lot of potential with him. I struggle to see how they ended up at what he has, but I like the whole idea of his head motioning with the chains movement. That's okay.
They should really not let him break his own chains. Just give him the dissolve effect when his body moves through them like when he vaults a window for instance. That electric dissolve effect. Letting him walk through his own chains would be the best thing they could give him IMHO.
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Every killer is way too strong if streamers can 3k average with no perks and 30 second afk. Now imagine what they could do with perks and no delay. Scary to think about how killer sided this game truly is.
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Every killer is way too strong if streamers can 3k average with no perks and 30 second afk
Rofl. Please tell me this is a spoof post, because this was...I can't even.
The streamers who can perkless 30 second AFK are god-tier players. If all Killers were nerfed based on how Otz and others can play; no average Killer player would ever get even 1 kill, ever.
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Pinhead breaking his own chains is a major flaw that punishes good players.
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to be honest pinhead should get a haste buff when he gets hit by his own chains
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None of them reached a 3K as an average, the only one who supposedly did that was actually cheating with stretched screen-resolution and didn't even bother to wait 30 seconds. I've seen his footage myself, I guess Otz didn't bother doing so himself otherwise he wouldn't have mentioned that guy on his list.
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This is pretty funny, I'll give you that.
No idea. I'm seeing it in maybe 1 game in 5. I've tried to talk to people postgame, but the closest I've gotten is 'I learned how from a streamer's Discord, it's a secret'. And I'm not sure if they were winding me up.
Did they? I'm not sure on those numbers. That said...
Does it matter what Otz and co 'can' do?
These are people with 8000 hours who basically play this game professionally, playing against people with 5-10% of these hours mostly.
Otz has 4k'd on Deathslinger without using his gun and tons of other silly things. This isn't a good barometer for balance.
Some of his addons either need a buff, or to do something different.
They need to fix whatever weirdness allows survivors to solve the box without allowing him to teleport.
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Engineers fang should be basekit and the cube should have a kindered like effect. Swfs can play easily around cube, while it is a nightmare for Soloqs.
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