A new Baseline Survivor defense

aarongai

I know many players ask for ways to play against the killer that don't involve pallet looping. It's pretty boring for both sides involved, and doesn't really showcase much skill. But the problem is that Survivors just don't have very many options available in a chase. So here's an idea:

Let Survivors create false scratch marks 8m in the direction they're facing by kicking up dirt. Give it a 1.25 second animation time. If the Killer falls for it, great you get away without having to resort to looping. If the Killer catches on, they cut their chase time with you significantly.

Perks can be introduced to adjust the range, duration, animation time, and other properties of this ability. 

Best of all, it's a realistic suggestion that could be implemented just by adding one animation for Survivors.

Terratoast

What would the motivation for the survivor be to use this and not just pallet loop when the pallet loop is much more reliable?

aarongai

@Terratoast said:
What would the motivation for the survivor be to use this and not just pallet loop when the pallet loop is much more reliable?

Nurse and Spirit often ignore pallet looping and rely on scratch marks in chases. Doctor can prevent pallets from being thrown or vaulted over. Huntress often throws hatchets through pallets. So there's a good number of Killers where creating fake scratch marks would be a viable defense.

Other scenarios might be maybe you're not in a chase yet, but the Killer is near so you use this ability to lead the killer away from you, preventing a chase altogether. Or maybe all the pallets near you are broken and you can't loop. Or maybe you want to try window juking the killer.

Giving Survivors another way to lose the killer makes for more dynamic gameplay and increases the skill ceiling for both Killers and Survivors.

Incarnate

I definitely think more ideas should be explored, as it is quite boring to just keep chasing, keep being looped or keep being chased and keep looping. There are few other option, thats called breaking line of sight or using lockers. Lockers are a gamble, but certainly can be used to lose the killer. Breaking line of sight is also viable, trying to use the environment to blend it, basically hiding. It can work but it is situational.

There several things that haven't been explored yet, like being able to affect the light - turning off lights.
Being able to open and close doors and windows.
Being able to pick stones that could be thrown to create a distraction (I know there is a perk for it, but I think it should be universally available without a perk.)
Weapons could also be considered (but only have very, very limited amounts of uses) - mostly to used to harass the killer than anything else, these should only be possible to be found in the map and cannot be extracted from the map.

In regards to the idea, I think it's a decent option to have, especially if one is trying to evade the killer through hiding.

aarongai

@Incarnate said:
I definitely think more ideas should be explored, as it is quite boring to just keep chasing, keep being looped or keep being chased and keep looping.

There should be other options for Survivors yes, but new suggestions that require reworking many aspects of the game probably won't come to fruition because it'd be too much work for the developers to create new models / animations / reworking old elements to function with the new ones. That's why I made the scratch mark suggestion. It takes an existing mechanic and allows it to be used in a new way without radically changing the game or requiring large resource investment from the creators.

Being able to alter the lighting would be cool and not much work either I'd think, but Survivors would just turn all the lights off in every room then, wouldn't they?

Diversion is a pretty crap perk the way it is right now. It takes too long to build up, half the killers in the game have a small or none-existent terror radius, and even if you throw the pebble, the Killer is usually in a chase with another Survivor and ignores it. If it were made into a baseline ability, then it might actually be useful.

Bravo0413

But we already have the pebble that was just buffed

Eul

Survivors are already stronger than killers without any new defense mechanism dude...except nurse and spirit.

aarongai

@Bravo0413 said:
But we already have the pebble that was just buffed

Doesn't matter if the perk never activates. If you're going up against any of the following killers: Hag, Wraith, Myers, Spirit, Legion, Huntress, Freddy, or Pig (while crouched), you'll be lucky if your pebble perk activates even twice during the game. It's totally luck based whether you get a killer with a large terror radius or not, but a large portion of killers have a smaller radius so I'd never use Distraction regardless.

@Eul said:
Survivors are already stronger than killers without any new defense mechanism dude...except nurse and spirit.

It's not about buffing Survivors. It's the fact that pallet looping is all Survivors can really do to get away from a Killer during a chase. Giving Survivors an alternative defense during a chase leads to more skill-based interactions between both sides.