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The slowdown meta isn't as bad as we are making it out to be.

BlightedDolphin
BlightedDolphin Member Posts: 1,875
in General Discussions

First off, I want to state that this is regarding purely the time it takes to repair generators and that I don’t think it is as broken or OP as people think it is, this has nothing to do about whether this is fun to play against or terrible solo queue teammates, which are a different story.

Secondly, I’ve seen a lot of people believe that slowdown perks stacking is ADDITIVE when it is MULTIPLICATIVE. So, a gen with Thanatophobia and Pentimento will take 164.8s rather than the 187.5 seconds I keep seeing people post. If slowdown perks were additive then theoretically you could get a negative repair speed. Ok now on to the actual topic :)

I’ve seen a lot of posts here talking about how it takes much longer to repair a generator now compared to last patch. This isn’t completely true. Let’s look at the feared 4 slowdown build I see people bring up a lot – Thanatophobia, Dying Light, Gift of Pain, and Pentimento.

At max stacks Thana gives 22% slowdown, Dying Light gives 33%, GoP gives 16%, and Pentimento gives 30%. Together, this would add up to a repair time of 292.8 seconds. Wow. That is a long ass time. 

Except… that is literally impossible to ever reach. You cannot have max Thana and GoP active, as being healed activates GoP but deactivates Thana. Dying Light cannot have more than 6 stacks (18%) with max Thana as anymore would mean someone is dead and Thana only has 3 stacks. And unless someone has a hex, Pentimento should never activate. 

So, the worst-case scenario would be YOU have GoP active but everyone else is injured – giving Thana 3 stacks – with 6 stacks of Dying Light (and you are not the obsession). This would equal 156.4 seconds. That is MUCH less than the previous number but still high. However, in this scenario, if the killer has everyone on death hook (to get 6 stacks of Dying Light) and you’re still needing to repair gens solo, you’ve probably lost regardless of this build. You could pair up with a teammate to reduce the time for this gen, but if you need to repair, say, 3 more gens… well then you would’ve probably lost without this build as it is nearly impossible to repair 3 gens with everyone on death hook.

Ok. But what if we used Plaything instead of Dying Light to activate Pentimento? 

If we use the previous scenario of GoP, 3 Thana, and now Pentimento we get 183.3 seconds. That is a long time. But again, this is a very rare scenario. You are not always going to have GoP active, you are not always going to have 3 Thana, and Pentimento is a hex that can be destroyed. If you remember where your Plaything was then you can go and find Pentimento later. Or don’t cleanse Plaything until you know they can’t get 5 stacks. 

The main thing about that build I see people complain about though is Legion. However, that build is TERRIBLE on Legion. Why? Because you shouldn’t be healing against Legion. And if you don’t heal, GoP will NEVER slow you down. But what about Plaything/Pentimento? Well Plaything makes you Oblivious, and Oblivious is terrible for Legion as they CANNOT SEE YOU with killer instinct because you aren’t technically inside their terror radius. So while you might have to play Oblivious for a bit, with one person affected by Plaything, Legion will never get his 5th stab down unless the survivors make a HUGE mistake, at which point you deserve to lose, sorry. But even if Legion does get Thana and Pentimento to activate, that would make gens take 164.8 seconds. While that looks long, you can still cleanse Pentimento and lower it back down to 115 seconds (Which is still boring as #########, don’t get me wrong). 

But still, 115 and 164 seconds is still a long time. Much longer than it was last patch, right? Well not exactly. For example, a single use of Pain Res + DMS would make a gen go from 80 seconds to 137 seconds. That is more than max Thana AND more than 3 Thana + GoP (which is 128.3 seconds). And that only required you to down ONE survivor as opposed to hitting all 4 AND down one if you want GoP. 

And that’s only Pain Res/DMS. Let’s not forget Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer. If the killer chased you off the gen for 1 minute, that’s another 30 seconds Ruin has added on. And the killer could do this MULTIPLE TIMES. And that assumes you get to go back to the generator. If you got hooked or lead the killer on a long chase, the gen was probably back to 0%. A gen regressing at 99% with Ruin would take ~160 seconds to repair if it reached 0 (of course this scenario almost happened, but neither do half the scenarios people are saying about this update).

And while those perks only affected 1 gen whereas Thana affects all gens, the killer still can’t pressure all those gens. So while it may take longer, if everyone is split up the killer cannot remove your progress as easily and another survivor can take over whereas last patch no one could take over and the gen progress was just gone. You had to start again. But now it stays and you or someone else can finish it later. 


This was a long post so…


TL:DR – The current slowdown meta is boring but not as strong as everyone claims it to be. Yes slowdown perks should be adjusted (specifically Thana), but it is not impossible to beat nor do I think it is as strong as the previous meta. Some of the scenarios people are scared of going against are impossible or won’t be active for most of the trial. Thana is the only perk I think is problematic as GoP and Pentimento can be avoided, and Dying Light's slowdown is negligible for most of the game. It feels worse than the previous patch because we are actually seeing the slowdown and experiencing it slowly throughout the game rather than having it all occur at once like in the last patch.

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