There is one big positive to the upcoming 6.1.2. Update

ad19970 · August 2022

Skip to the last two paragraphs if you don't want to read my thoughts on the changes and just get to the point of this post.

Now, people don't seem to be happy with the upcoming balance changes in the 6.1.2. update. And I kind of agree.

The Thana change is the best of the three. It's an extremely weird nerf, but at least it's nerfed. And I am honestly glad to see that the devs at least understood that Thana is a problem, even if they don't seem to have understood the problem accurately, or just had very weird idea on how to nerf it.

Nerfing the perk more for every killer that Thana wasn't as much of an issue with, than for the two killers that made Thana so problematic, is just insanely weird. It's now completely useless on every killer besides Plague and Legion. However, it might be balanced on those two killers now, but we have to see it before we can really tell if that's the case. People arguing it wasn't nerfed for those two killers are wrong though, it's just nerfed much less on those two killers than on the rest of the killers.

It's not the most uncommon thing for at least one survivor to be healed against a Legion. Harder against Plague, but it can still happen. It might just force survivors to cleanse a bit more. Fact is, Thana will now have much more downtime, since 6% with 3 survivors injured is so much less than 16,5% slowdown. And it will take longer for Thana to make a noticeable impact after the match starts. The max action speed debuff has also been decreased to 20%, not much, but at least something.

So I guess I am just happy it got nerfed. It's just a shame it got nerfed in the wrong way. Fixed values would have been much better. For example: 1 Survivor: 6%; 2 Survivors: 9%; 3 Survivors: 12%; 4 Survivors: 15%. Or something like that.

I am definitely not happy with the Pain Resonance and DM combo coming back. At least it is getting nerfed, and it has more counterplay. But it's not good perk design when a perk combo has a counter only very few people know about. That's just once again more damaging for solo survivors. I also don't like how DM is now kind of bad without PR, except maybe on Artist. I wish the timer would only start going down once the first gen was blocked.

I just can not understand why they didn't just change Merciless Storm to also deactivate as soon as a gen regresses in any way. Why on earth did PR need this change instead, that brings back an old, oppressive combo, that will be similarly oppressive, because gen times are now 90 seconds, making up for DM only lasting 30 seconds?

And then the Mettle of Man nerf might be the dumbest balance change I have ever seen. It's definitely one of them.

However, there is one big positive to this update. Can anyone name a hotfix update within the last years that ever contained balance changes to 3 perks at once? I surely can't. So while these changes are pretty questionable, and maybe even bad, it's good to see that BHVR is at least trying hard to change up the game's balance, making much more balance changes than we are used to. Even if these changes aren't good. It still makes me somewhat hopeful for the game to reach a much better state balance wise at some point, sooner than later. Just right now they still seem to be a bit clueless with some of the balance changes, and/or are just experimenting too much and taking risks at the moment. So I simply hope the balance changes we get improve.

But I do think that BHVR at least deserves credit for the effort they are putting into rebalacing the game, even though they also deserve criticism for some of these balance changes. This update also makes me at least a bit hopeful that we will see some balance changes in the next chapter release, especially nerfs to camping and tunneling, as well as nerfs to Erupition and Pentimento. Those would be absolutely huge, and are a must. Then I could properly get excited for Wesker, who seems to be a really awesome killer, without the prospect of having to wait 15 minutes just to play a match with him. I'd be beyond hyped if the game wasn't in it's messy state due to overpowered slowdown perks, and camping and tunneling still being a huge problem.