Idea for game change to address camping/tunneling
At the moment, the game feels healthier when it comes to a "normal" gameplay style. One where the killer hooks someone and then chases someone new, pressures generators, maybe proxy camps a bit if they know that an unhook is happening, and chases the unhooker.
But there's also a big problem. Camping/tunneling are easier than ever and part of this is it's just so much easier than doing the above while being nearly as effective. The longer generator times are healthy for the first playstyle, but feel oppressive on the survivor side if the killer chooses to hard facecamp or tunnel the first person.
I don't really think that this is as simple as "restore DS time to 5 seconds". Or "add a bit more endurance" or "remove hook grabs". You really have to give the killer a reason why they shouldn't be standing next to the hook and none of those really do that. You can encourage chase-style gameplay by making chases easier all you want, but it's still going to be harder than securing 1 kill and going from there.
A few potential ideas. All of these are with the assumption that killers will be potentially buffed more if needed to make chase-style gameplay more fun and rewarding. Or generator times can increase more to give more time between each down if needed.
The goals of these are:
- Buff chasing and hooking. Winning chases and getting hooks is very satisfying and fun for both sides.
- Make facecamping essentially untenable. It will result in a 0k a far majority of the time.
- Countering facecamping doesn't require huge amounts of coordination from survivors or "just do gens" and leave the person on the hook. It should be easily possible for someone to counter in their first 10 hours of the game because the tutorial showed them how to do it.
- Allows chasing to be buffed while not also buffing facecamping.
- Core gameplay problems should not require perks to counter. Kinship is essentially the only counter to tunneling and the "counter" is just "killer gets a 1k on the person who has the perk rather than snowballing into a 4k".
In summary, there are three ideas I've heard before that I feel meet the above criteria.
One idea is to have an alternative way to unhook that spawns if the killer is in a certain radius of the hook for a certain amount of time (cumulative, not all at once). This method of unhooking would be a ritual of some kind in a different area of the map kind of like PH's cages. In order to make this ritual not more attractive then a normal unhook, it would have to come at some cost to the survivor doing the ritual and it would have to take more time than running over to the hook and unhooking. Placing survivors on hooks in appropriate locations is a skillset for the killer so we don't necessarily want to take that away. The ritual would cause the ritual performer to become broken for something very long, like 90 seconds, or maybe render them incapacitated for a shorter period of time. The actual ritual might spawn where totems spawn and take the same amount of time as a totem (or longer, maybe 20 seconds). The idea is that survivors can now easily get an unhook against a facecamping Bubba, but it comes at great personal cost and buffs chase based killers so you wouldn't want to perform the ritual against someone not facecamping. If someone is hard tunneling, you might choose to do the ritual so that you can put the person being tunneled far away from the killer, heal them, and then take the aggro yourself or have a teammate take the aggro. If the killer tries to stop the ritual, one of your teammates just gets a normal unhook. As the ritual only spawns if there's a facecamping situation, the objective would be highlighted and it would be similar to how Kindred informs you of camping but basekit. What we don't want is someone waiting 40 seconds on a generator, popping over to the ritual next to them, and getting a safe save and then immediately hopping on a generator again with no negative effects because that will make traveling for the unhook completely useless and will make proxy camping impossible. Maybe the ritual only makes itself shown to a person hovering around the hook to try for the save. Then the killer would be able to leave the hook to stop the person from starting the ritual. Or a person close to the hook performs the first half of the ritual and then a second person completes the ritual far away from the killer.
Another idea that someone else had, but I thought was good, was to add a "husk" of the survivor on a hook close to the original hook either when facecamping is happening or just normally after some amount of time (say 30 seconds). You can rescue from either the original location or the husk. As the hooks would theoretically be close to each other, it would still be possible to proxy camp, but it would be harder to hard facecamp. Proxy camping is fine since it allows some kind of interaction between survivors and allows anti-tunnel perks to actually be used and it enables more interactive gameplay where two teammates coordinate which hook they will save from. This one has a certain elegance that it makes hard facecamping difficult to hard, but it enables all of the other gameplay elements that currently exist. And in this scenario, hook grabs would still exist and still be exciting.
Then another idea is just to have all hooks act exactly like cages and balance generators/chases around that. I'm not the biggest fan of this one, but it is probably the easiest one to implement and would fix the problem.
In addition to the above, I think the Haste effect from unhooking should be lengthened to the 15 seconds from BT as basekit or made longer and disabled with a conspicuous action. It should be harder to tunnel than waiting 5 seconds and hitting them. And there's entire killer powers that make tunneling easier like Legion, Deathslinger, and Pinhead with his deep wound addon.
Comments
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Not a fan of the husk idea myself but that ritual idea seems legit. Even if they don't add it in exactly, adding it in as a boon totem could also work.
Boon: Sacrificial Offering
A Boon that offers comfort amidst the terror.
Press and hold the Active Ability button near a Dull or Hex Totem to bless it and sacrifice the totem.
When beginning to bless a totem, a global chime will play indicating the boon attempt.
Soft chimes ring out within a radius of 24 meters during the blessing attempt.
When the totem is fully blessed:
The totem breaks and a random survivor currently hooked will be rescued and summoned to the broken totem.
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I don't like the idea of tying it to a perk because then it would require that perk be used, but the rest of this idea is entirely legit. Instead of spawning in an area with a totem, you could use a totem to perform the ritual and it could take the same length of time as blessing a hex totem. It would also give a reason to do dull totems and limit the number of times the survivors could perform the ritual by virtue of the number of totems. The only downside is that Hex: Pentimento would reveal exactly where the ritual happened, but that seems like it would even be good? If they revive the totem to get the slowdown, you get another totem to perform the ritual on if they try to use it to facecamp.
Even if this was a perk, the perk's existence would be more effective at stopping facecamping than basekit BT, DS, or Kinship. If you facecamp, you're taking a gamble that none of the other 3 survivors brought the perk. If it was a perk though, I think the afflictions given to the ritual performer would have to go away. The ritual already takes long enough and a perk is really supposed to be mostly beneficial.
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Yeah, I would like something to counter it by base game means, I just think making it a perk would be more enticing to add as it doesn't require changing base mechanics. Idk, anything to counter the facecamp.
I don't think you can bless rekindled totems at current patch so this perk/action can't punish pentimento, though that would be a cool interaction.
Yeah, I think it would be pretty effective. I think there needs to be some sort of downside so people don't just do a totem because it is closer. If a survivor is selfish to complete a gen across the map, they shouldn't also be able to get the unhook right away just because a totem is nearby. It should take some time and have some sort of counter play to it.
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