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Honestly, but with all due respect, this is the update I hate the most since the addition of Boons
Before saying anything else, I want to make clear that this is NOT a rant against the devs. On the contrary, I think they have made many right decisions and good changes lately. I liked the perk overhaul that shifted the meta, the increase in gen times, the base-kit BT, the grind reduction, the fact they were willing to listen to the community and revert an unnecessary nerf (Mettle of Man) after a single patch and even change the number of pallets in new maps (reworked RPD) when they came live, among other things. However, they can still make mistakes, so I decided to make this thread to say why I disliked this developer update so much and why I think it's a big mistake. To sum it up: I think it makes mori'ing less fun in general and creates unnecessary balance issues.
How moris currently work
To begin with, I don't think the way moris work is that "toxic" right now. It doesn't shorten the amount of downs needed to kill a survivor anymore. It has two possible advantages right now: bypassing DS on death hook (which the survivor will hardly have if he/she was really tunneled) or bypassing saves via pallet, flashlight or sabotage. There is also another niche advantage related to preserving hooks, but I will come back to that later.
DS is much weaker now and less used anyway, flashlight, pallet and sabo saves are really situational unless you're against an organized SWF. In other words, a mori rarely makes tunelling a particular survivor that much easier.
Only one mori per game
It was announced back then that mori offering would lose their effect. I was hopeful perks like Devour Hope would be spared but NO, BOTH DEVOUR HOPE AND RANCOR ARE ABOUT TO LOSE THEIR KILLING EFFECT. That means that, unless you play Myers, we will se only ONE Mori per game regardless of build, regardless of the fact that one of the perks only works in endgame and the other is a HEX PERK (they are quite underwhelming right now) that requires 5 stacks and incentives the killer not to camp.
That means that we won't be able to chose to kill every survivor with a Mori or see more than one per game. We'll also never find corpses of other survivors lying around unless they bleed out (which will hardly ever happen after this update), and killers that actually leave no corpse behind after a mori (Pinhead and Dredge) will make no difference whatsoever since the game will be over. Additionally, do you like seeing Wesker's special line to Chris during his Mori? Do you like seeing Nemesis yell at S.T.A.R.S. member during his? Well, if you go against survivors that allow those interactions to happen, you will only see them if you leave those survivors for last, but then they may get hatch and you might not see them anyway.
To make it worse, when you down the last survivor you will all be immediatly sent to a preset point on the map... so you cannot chose when nor where to Mori, and the mori will ever happen on the same preset places on each map. With less background variety, it will always be the same default thing and the only different things will be the skins wore by killer and survivor. It might look cool initially, but will eventually feel repetitive and boring.
Know those funny shenanigans that happen during mori animation sometimes, including on some famous streamer games? Sometimes a survivor crouches beside Ghostface to take a selfie with him, some rare times a Pinhead moris a survivor right above an open hatch or hole in the ground... well, it's gone, we won't be seeing those anymore. That's why I think making the Cypress Mori base-kit but keeping the mechanic the same would be a much better choice.
Devour Hope and Rancor are getting nerfs
Devour Hope and Rancor are far from being overpowered perks. Now Rancor won't have an instant kill effect anymore, which was the only reason it was an endgame perk worth using. Sure, it gets an aura reading effect, but that simply doesn't have the same weight.
The coolest thing about Devour Hope is stacking until you're able to Mori survivors. Since Hex Totems are hard to protect and rarely stay up for so long, you usually want to mori someone immediatly after you get each down with 5 stacks, since you never know when the totem is about to blow up. After this update, however, you can't Mori and you still have to take the survivor to a hook. So now the totem can be cleansed/blessed during the time you take to carry them, and the other survivors can possibly stop you by sabotaging the hook or making a flashlight save. In addition, there's a chance that it makes no difference anyway, if the survivor is already on death hook.
There is also one little advantage moris have over hook sacrifices: they preserve hooks, so you can avoid situations where there aren't enough hooks in an area and, by sacrificing a single survivor there, hooking in that area becomes impossible. That's ridiculously common on Midwich on its awful hook spawns, but can happen in multiple maps due to bad RNG and low numbers of hooks. By the way, hooks are distant from one another on many of the most recent maps. RPD and Thompson's House can have some awful hook distribution, and there's a HUGE distance between hooks on new Haddonfield. This hook spawn problem will be made worse by another bad change announced on this update: the base-kit unbreakable.
Base-kit unbreakable. Why?
I see no need to a base-kit unbreakable at all. Camping and tunneling can be problematic because they may allow killers to get some really cheap early kills against solo survivors who aren't very skilled. Slugging doesn't have that issue and is anything but cheap. If anything, it's risky but potentially rewarding. You let a survivor on the ground instead of hooking them, not spending time carrying them but also not giving them a hook stage, knowing someone might come and rescue them OR they might have unbreakable. In return, you get pressure as another survivor usually needs to stop whatever is doing to save the dying person. They are forced to group up, and you can punish them for it. 4 man slug wins are rare and only happen when the whole team makes a huge mistake.
But then, let's see the reason given for this survivor buff: "With this new system in place, leaving Survivors on the ground (A.K.A. ‘Slugging’) may seem more appealing, opening the possibility of ending the match early". This doesn't make that much of a difference. Most of the time, downing and slugging all survivors is ALREADY a win for the killer. The triggered Finishing Mori doesn't really change that unless you down everyone before a single unbreakable is used, which is quite unlikely unless, again, everyone makes a huge mistake.
Think about it, unbreakable is one of the best survivor perks already. One of the few among the old meta perks that didn't get nerfed, and it's balanced by the fact it can only be used once. Now all survivors can pick themselves up, and anyone with unbreakable will do it even faster than before and an UNLIMITED NUMBER OF TIMES. That simply murders slugging as a strategy, it's the whole "Boons ruined hit-and-run" problem again. Why would a survivor bother leaving a gen to group up and heal if the slugged Claudette will pick herself up anyway?
One of the biggest problems with this is that slugging is one of the best ways of countering many survivor tactics. A survivor falls right below a pallet with other survivors around? Slug them. A survivor probably has DS and is near a safe pallet or window (on this scenario DS can still be strong)? Slug them. The hook got sabotaged and there is none other around? Slug. A survivor got downed in a Midwich corridor with no hooks? Well, you HAVE to slug. Also, slugging multiple survivors is often the only way of turning the tables on a strong survivor team when they complete many gens before you can catch up on hooks, now many situations will be impossible to turn around even if they make a big mistake. Not to mention how ridiculous they can be with unbreakable+soulguard now. You down Dwight, they swarm you to save him, and if you leave him on the ground for more than 22 seconds he can just get up in your face and tank a hit.
My point is: in some situations you NEED to slug. Also, this is a huge nerf to endgame builds (you just can't down everyone in endgame before they get up by themselves, don't bother bringing a build that only works in endgame), to Knock Out (a niche perk that got a slight buff recently only to be made borderline useless now. What's the point of hiding the downed survivors' aura if they will pick themselves up anyway?), to TWINS (by the entity, playing them is miserable enough as it is. You often NEED to slug with them) and even to MYERS (one of his few strenghts is his snowball potential, that gets quite a nerf if he can't expose everyone and keep downing one by one before hooking).
Finally, making a strategy unviable is bad for the game in general. If there is a smaller variety of strategies a killer can use, the matches will end up looking more and more similar to one another. Not very fun.
TL;DR: The mori change makes the whole mori more boring and repetitive; Devour Hope and Rancor didn't need a nerf; and base-kit unbreakable will be unbalanced and create many issues.
Comments
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Just one thing to add about the removal of strategies: if you keep making strategies like hit-and-run and slugging less and less viable, we will end up seeing less and less of them and more of the same "chase a survivor - hook them/leave them - find another survivor - repeat". Either that or camping. By the way, if killers cannot slug, they will just hook everyone they down right away, no risk taken, which might lead to a little more tunneling, and survivors will not even bother trying to rescue downed survivors, which means less team work and less interactions between survivors.
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You put it better than I ever could, I do appreciate the work the devs have been putting in recently but I don't think these changes are the way to go.
I actually think the community has a consensus on that, which is pretty rare. The only ones I see happy about these changes are survivor mains salivating over breaking the anti-slug mechanism.
I don't think they've considered if 4 slugs is a win and slugging for pressure is no longer a thing they'll be seeing Starstruck Sally a LOT.
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Treating Moris like this toxic BM behavior is silly in my opinion, that is a feature they chose to program and put in the game. Why shouldn't the killer get to Mori a particularly difficult to catch survivor? If they want a particular survivor out of the game they can just as easily facecamp, which is way less fun for both sides
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Maybe they could rework Knockout/devour hope to not allow a survivor to recover from the floor alone?
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I'm worried about Meyers Sadoko and Pyramid Head will they remove thier special Moris too because by the standards they said as their reasons for the changes they should have their specials removed too.....
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For Knockout alone this could be the way to go, but honestly, I prefer this self pick-up feature just doesn't get implemented at all.
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According to the patch notes, they still function as before. This is relieving, but also a bit funny, since they are the only kind of mori that can actually be used to remove "a particular survivor" from the game.
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I wouldn't put it past a Dev to remove them just because of reasons though
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Base kit unbreakable is dumb, but is absolutely necessary if they want to implement this kind of Mori system. Without it, every single game would just be a race to slug all four survivors until they bleed out or you use them all as bait. There would be literally no reason to play for anything else.
As it is, even with base kit unbreakable, eventually someone will find the most efficient way to tunnel out one survivor, and proxy camp the second to end the game in roughly 4 hooks or less.
Personally I think both the mori and base kit unbreakable should never be put to live servers.
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This update is salvageable, they need to make the Last Standing thing only works in actual 1v1 situations (when all other 3 survivors are dead), revert the Devour and Rancor nerfs and increase the cooldown of the basekit Unbreakable. Would also prefer to see it getting entirely scrapped but I really don't see BHVR accepting this option, sadly.
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Agree that all these changes you mention are terrible, and also add the flashlight changes to that. The devs have really outdone themselves this time pushing changes that are going to make the game less fun because they need to justify their time by making changes for the sake of change. Meanwhile, they continue to ignore other things that the community have been requesting for a long time like reworking broken maps and add-on passes for killers either garbage add-ons.
Hell, I’d be fine if the devs continued to ignore those requested changes and just leave the damn game alone for a little while. I’ve actually been enjoying the game recently and felt like it was in a decent place. Wish the devs would just stop insisting that the game has to be fundamentally changed every three months.
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