Thought's from a Dredge Main.
Hello DBD community! I'm Khamura Tal, and I play a lot of Dredge. Months ago I used to be a Ghostface player before I fell in love with guy and have been playing him pretty much since the PTB. Recently there has been a buff towards the Dredge's visibility in Nightfall and a planned nerf to Spine Chill which, to me, is essentially an indirect buff in and of itself. That said I do think there is one major problem to the stealth aspect of the Dredge that could use some adjusting.
A recent video from Scott Jund talked about the Dredges strengths and pitfalls. I don't agree with all he has to say in that video(For example I think even with some level of RNG the Dredge can function perfectly fine on most maps. Just not the Red Forest, Swamp, or ironically Garden of Joy due to locker placements.) but something he touched on was the sound effect for the Dredge and why he suffers a lot when he's trying to ambush survivors. The Dredge is at his strongest when he's hitting survivors who are healing/have just finished healing, or bouncing between targets in Nightfall, but it's often difficult to get into these situations because of the sounds he makes.
For those who don't know, the Dredge produces a loud clanging sound when he teleports into a locker, and he also produces a loud sound effect when moving around in Nightfall. This sound is so loud that often you can predict exactly where he's going to be even through walls with perfect accuracy, and rarely do survivors not immediately start running when they are near a locker which makes getting a hit difficult, especially if they have perks like sprint burst and lithe.
My recommendation is to shrink his sound effect to be around eight meters of his body, the same effect as Ghostfaces whooshing sound in Nightfall so that you only hear it when he's right on top of you. Likewise I would remove the locker sound effect entirely so it's a bit easier for him to get the jump on survivors. I don't think this would be too much to ask because unlike Ghostface he's a very tall noticeable killer, even in Nightfall and even with the reduction to how far you can view him he's pretty hard to miss without cover. He also lacks any kind of insta down without perks and lockers are often distant enough from Gens that survivors could just keep an eye on one and still have a measure of counterplay.
I think these sounds are why a lot of Dredge players suffer against more competent survivors. You're incentivized to go after those that are wounded or distracted, but your presence is so loud that it's often difficult to capitalize on that strength.
Comments
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Howdy, another Dredge-main-ever-since-they-released player here!
I haven't seen Jund's video on the topic, but its clear to me with the way the Dredge is designed that the devs put a ton of energy into deciding how to make sure the Dredge can simultaneously take advantage of a unique means to deny visual info (nightfall) without becoming unreasonably difficult to track.
Before I mained Dredge, I mained Nemesis - and Nemesis's teachables and addons both include ways to suppress its terror radius. For the Nemesis, this is nearly worthless - they stomp around so loudly that audio tracking them is hard to miss. The Dredge is very similar - they're a huge killer and they're very loud.
When I first started testing out the Dredge, I had the assumption that they'd be an ambush killer, but I think it was the moment where I discovered that lurking in a locker for too long causes it to start emanating very obvious warnings that you're present that I realized Dredge is not an ambusher - they're designed for uncanny pursuit.
While surprising people out of lockers and under the shroud of nightfall is alluring, BHVR clearly does not want the survivors to be unaware when the Dredge is nearby - they want you to take advantage of confusion and a limited ability to plot long-distance movement. If you predict a locker they'll run past or interact with, you can take advantage of that, too, but I think trying to force the Dredge to perform in the capacity of a stealth killer would be asking too much.
Survivors are already kind of mixed on the experience of playing under Nightfall. BHVR just made it even harder to see Dredge (at a distance) than before - so there's a clear model that BHVR is pursuing here, but it requires looking towards Dredge's actual strengths over pushing them to be something they might seem to be, but aren't.
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I agree to some extent. I do believe that the Dredge is designed to pursue survivors relentlessly and to be difficult to shake in a chase, but I think the ambushing is a component of that. I don't feel Behavior would of designed Nightfall the way it is(Much less actually REDUCED the range you could see him.) if the intent wasn't for him to jump survivors. Heck he even has unique score events tied to surprising survivors for touching his lockers or striking a survivor rapidly after a teleport.
He's clearly not supposed to be hard to notice when he's actually out and about in the open outside of Nightfall, he's just too tall. But on the other hand his sound effects hurt not just his ability to ambush but his ability to engage in that pursuit. Certain advantages you'd have in chase, like his lack of red stain during said Nightfall, are negated by having that perfect directional awareness caused by his sound effects. Likewise the process of actually getting Nightfall going to begin with relies on pulling off locker ambushes efficiently, you can't just roam around and hope to do well without using your teleport to hit survivors when they don't expect it or from unusual angles.
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