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What perk changes would you like to see alongside eruption?
With eruption confirmed changed, what other perk changes would you like to see in the near future? I have a few I'd like to share. I generally consider perks pretty balanced at the moment, with most issues beyond eruption coming from items, killers or maps, but there are still a few things to look at. I'm going to focus on nerfs here because they're about 20 perks minimum on both sides that need buffs and ultimately nerfs do more for impacting the overall game than buffs, but I will include a couple of buffs. Finally, I'm not looking to gut any perks but tackle some of the more problematic elements of the perks currently in the meta:
Survivor:
- Dead Hard: The one people seem to be talking about now the devs confirmed eruption. I don't believe the perk is as strong as eruption however the similar "wait it out" counterplay makes it unpleasant to go against and leads to situations which are essentially gambles for the killer. Having an intense back and forth chase end with 5 seconds of the killer staring at the survivor's ass and risking what is essentially a 1/5 chance to prolong the chase anyway is unsatisfying. Unfortunately, this is how dead hard works with its effect and as I don't want to be suggesting a full on redesign for it I would like to suggest something else. When hit with dead hard, you get a 1 second boost rather than the usual 1.8 seconds. This leads the counterplay the same but the weaker power level means you should have to play around it less due to it having a lower play rate and because the punishment for hitting a dead hard is less, meaning playing around dead hard by default becomes more of a choice rather than a necessity until you see the perk. There is a case to make that this would have minimal effect on the play rate, as it is one of the more interesting and satisfying survivor perks to use, which is why I don't want to suggest a redesign, but those who use it because it's good would be more inclined to use something else.
- Off the Record: On one hand, having the anti-tunnel perk be very strong is a good thing as it means people don't give up much to run it and in terms of stopping tunnelling, I think it's fine. However, my issue comes from its second effect. Having an already good and common perk also block aura reading for 80 seconds really limits what perks are good on killer and pushes the perk a bit over the edge in its influence. I have two suggestions for this. Firstly, reducing the effect to 60 seconds would reduce the uptime on this effect and most likely have minimal effect on how the endurance status effect is used. Secondly, having the aura block and grunt of pain hiding also deactivate on conspicuous action would make it so the perk can't hide your location while you work on a gen or heal your teammates. I personally prefer the first option as having the perk hide your own aura while you heal yourself is fine IMO and it's a nice utility of the perk to help people recover however the second approach definitely is more straightforward in addressing the issues I had without weakening the endurance and main reason it's used for anit-tunneling.
- Hyperfocus and Circle of Healing (CoH): Personally I find both these perks are fine by themselves, hyperfocus is high potential but high commitment and inconsistent while CoH is powerful but is slow to set up due to a high initial time investment and often minimal gain if snuffed early. Both of these issues can be remedied with items, toolboxes and medkits respectively, and I don't think that's ok. If these were niche build options like stakeout or maps to help remove these weaknesses that would be fine, s you're giving up significant utility which is very important on survivor, but medkits are the strongest survivor item and toolboxes are the second strongest meaning you're giving up very little for these very strong interactions that throw the entire point of the perks out of the window. Having it so hyperfocus doesn't gain tokens while using a toolbox and CoH doesn't give bonus speed to survivors using medkits I think would go a long way for lowering the potential of these perks without hurting the average use case.
- Better than New: An interesting perk concept which is ultimately squandered by poor execution. I would personally think that having a gen speed buff would have been fine here but given the devs seem to be hesitant about that idea, and they tested it, so I'll suggest something else. I would give it a 33% increase to healing teammates, unhooking, chest opening, blessing and cleansing until the survivor next goes down. Each survivor can benefit from this effect once. This unhooking bonus allows teams to coordinate against killers camping hooks and being able to spread a healing speed buff allows your team to quickly recover and acts as an interesting option against 3 gens as well as hit and run killers. Having it last until down allows this to act as a punishment to killers who don't go for downs as well as making the perk more reliable with the unhook bonus, however only provides the healing buff to teammates to prevent stacking with other bonuses past current limits and healing mid chase.
Killers:
- Scourge hook: Pain resonance (Pain res): With gens taking longer, killers being stronger and other scourge hook options being better pain res has slowly power crept itself. On a normal killer, it's strong but fine but on strong chase killers such as nemesis, blight or nurse it very quickly snowballs often becoming -15% per down which alongside other perks or inbuilt slowdown can very quickly become unstoppable unless the survivors get a god tier chase against one of these strong chase killer, easy said than done. On one hand, scourge hooks are inconsistent but over time I feel like that inconsistency has been understood better and it's not as much of a cost as we may have initially thought. This inconsistency ends up being similar to not being able to kick a gen because it's too far away or downing a survivor in the wrong spot for jolt but considering this can regress gens anywhere on the map it's a bit much. My suggestion is to change it from 15% to 12%, this makes it more comparable to other regression perks and gives the survivors a bit more breathing room when playing against it while still keeping the perk a good option.
- Deadlock: This perk is generally fine it has limited potential, doesn't snowball with killer pressure and is something you can play around by stacking gens while still being strong. Despite this, the perk had one interaction I'd like to address. Because the perk doesn't ask anything of the killer this means the killer doesn't have to do anything to use it, and what infamous and generally unhealthy strategy asks for the killer to do nothing, camping. Namely camping the first survivor you see and although this strategy isn't too effective against smart survivors, even if survivors are smart and do gens efficiently deadlock will stop them and basically always buy the killer enough time to get a 2k minimum assuming they're competent. My suggestion is to change the wording but essentially: This perk activates whenever you injure a survivor, while active if a generator is completed this perk deactivates and blocks the generator with the most progress for 30 seconds. This means that for the perk to block gens, you need to actively be hitting survivors, if you're camping a hook and survivors are smart enough to just do gens then this perk will most likely only activate once or twice in the match not giving you that guaranteed 2k. In what may be considered normal gameplay this shouldn't do too much as when this perk buys you 30 seconds a pop and expecting the killer to get an injure during the time between gens isn't much to ask for.
- Overcharge and Call of Brine (CoB): These perks are another lot that are fine but I would like to look at an edge case. Obviously, the most important gen-kicking perk is getting nerfed however there is no reason to assume that people won't stop going around every gen and kicking them constantly instead of going for downs. I wish to prevent perks like this from being spammed while having minimal effect on the perks outside this use. For CoB having the effect only apply to one gen at a time keeps its identity as a perk that can protect a gen with information and regression while preventing it from being used to protect multiple gens. I chose this over a cooldown because being able to swap the gen it's applied to has utility when it gives information and slowdown. Overcharge is definitely the weaker of the two so I do wish to provide some slight compensation for it. I would add a 60-second cooldown but change the regression from 75-200% to 100-200%. I've always been of the opinion that this perk, prebuff, should have had a cooldown not because of balance but because of new player experience. Having a doctor, who is a starting killer on console, go around kicking very gen with overcharge, a doctor perk, against new players is ridiculously unfun and demoralising. When I was first learning the game this made me almost uninstall several times and I have heard the same from many other people over the years, yes get good but remember that the skill on the killer end here is to do a 2 second interaction and we're talking about the new player experience here not top-level play it needs to be inviting. A cooldown makes more sense than only applying to one gen here because the skill check is indefinite and the increased regression adds up to about a couple of extra seconds which although minor should be enough to make the perk a bit stronger to compensate for the nerf, although you could perhaps increase the bonus regression or how quickly it builds up further.
- Grim Embrace: A cute perk but the effect is inconsistent and has awful timing for its own effect, usually blocking the gens when survivors have other interactions they could be doing in that time. I want to try and keep the idea of having this be a powerful one-time effect as it's an interesting concept, but the perk is just weak at the moment. Firstly, having it show the obsession's aura is nice but is reliant on the obsession being the survivor you want, let's say isn't the one on the hook, given this is a one-time effect I'd change it to show everyone's aura for the 5 seconds, also prevents survivors form waiting the effect out making it more engaging. Next off is the gen block, in 45 seconds you will most likely down and hook a survivor while the survivors not on the hook get the unhook and reset and most likely one person will be injured alongside the person on the hook. This means that in those 45 seconds, very little of that time would be spent on gens if the survivors decide to reset so I'm going to be bold and bump it up to 60 seconds. This makes a perk a midgame No Way Out with the downside that you have to gain all 4 tokens before the gens are done, I'm concerned that blocking gens for 60 seconds make be boring for survivors as they may feel like they're just stalling for time but with the added info and the fact the killer wants to make as much use of this time as possible I hope this wouldn't become boring or too infuriating to play against, hopefully feeling like a fun test of survival rather than a slow and boring one.
Obviously, there are other perks that could do with changes but these are my personal top picks, I'd love to hear what other people have on their own wishlists for future changes, and I hope everyone has a good day.
Comments
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I want the crow perks to be buffed, spies from the shadows and the other survivor one I don't really remember the name of.
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Calm spirit? I wouldn't mind more interactions with crows, they're a fun part of the game and birds are cool.
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Could I throw in a couple more?
Resilience should apply hemorrhage. If you 99 a heal it is a pretty low-risk gen speed bonus.
You could buff its effect a bit if you'd like to help it out, like make it affect mending and locker animations so that it genuinely does buff almost every action speed. That wouldn't be terribly OP imo as being stuck in the injured state is something you would not like to be in, and it'd be novel to have a perk that affects mending.
Calm Spirit should have its 30% slower totem time removed. It doesn't need this downside due to how absolutely niche of a perk it is.
Revert the self-care nerf, it wasn't necessary.
Windows might deserve a nerf... if I were to do it I would return it disabling on fast vaults for a bit. This leaves it a really good scouting perk while making it not play the game for you. This perk could also be left alone too, I don't think it's much of a problem in itself, any problems with it are more because it exposes how badly the map design punishes certain killers.
Oppression: Instead of reducing the cooldown as many suggest, they could consider having it reveal every gen it affects. Currently, you only know what gens it hits if someone on it fails a skillcheck. This would make it a neat info perk, in addition to its current role of being like a super diet ruin that regresses inactive gens.
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Circle of healing.
That perk shouldn't even exist.
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Dead Hard: The change is mostly fine. I'm not sure it will change that much though. The problematic uses are typically the 50/50 at a pallet/window, which doesn't change except that it may force them to drop the pallet after being hit. For a window 50/50 there is effectively no change as much of the speed boost was already eaten up vaulting.
Off the Record: I agree with these changes, but I have one tweak to propose. The long cooldown has never made much sense to me; if you are being tunneled, you're almost always going to get hit really soon, closer to 20 seconds. The long cooldown only encourages new players to play immersed and not contribute once they are safely away from the killer, lest they lose their protection. The tweak I propose is that the timer changes to either 20 or 30 seconds, but the timer is paused when the killer is within 16m or 24m; additionally, the survivor loses collision with other players. Like the longer timer, this strongly discourages the killer from waiting it out. Unlike the longer time, it both prevents OTR from being used to body block counter to its purpose (collision is removed), and it doesn't incentivize players to refrain from working on their objective to keep their protection.
Hyperfocus: Synergizing with toolboxes is indeed a problem, as toolboxes guarantee 3 skill checks. I'm fine with Hyperfocus not gaining tokens or awarding bonus progression while a toolbox is in use. Alternatively, if Hyperfocus is equipped, it could suppress the skill checks the toolbox usually generates.
Circle of Healing: Usage with a medkit is only part of the problem. CoH effectively deletes an entire playstyle, one that weaker killers rely on: hit and run. Spreading injury is a great way to create pressure. When CoH first released, playing nearly every M1 killer was absolutely miserable because your primary mechanism to generate pressure was taken away from you. Now that CoH isn't the shiny new toy and has undergone a few nerfs, those killers are somewhat viable again. However, if you load into a match with CoH on such a killer, you're very likely to have a hard time. CoH needs some tweak that retains its spirit, but doesn't delete an entire killer playstyle just by being in the match. Maybe it doesn't grant the self-heal ability -- or, there is no speed bonus whatsoever when a teammate heals you (it's purely a self-heal thing). Something needs to be done, though.
Better than New: Similar to the above, having the healing speed boost last until down punishes hit-and-run. You saying that this perk would "act as a punishment to killers who don't go for downs" pretty much makes this point for me.
Pain res: Honestly a 3% nerf might actually be too little for a map-wide perk. Maybe it could go the PGTW route and instead have it take off 18-20% of the gen's total progress instead of a flat amount of progress.
Deadlock: I think your proposal is good. My only worry is that the precondition means a killer who is struggling to get hits isn't going to get value out of the perk. It might also cause some problems with certain killer powers (for example, Trapper can injure with a trap across the map).
Overcharge and CoB: Honestly, I'm not a fan of the design of either perk and would probably opt to rework them. Ruin-style x% regression increase on-demand is not interesting. CoB is like mini-Ruin plus mini-Surveillance. Overcharge is also like mini-Ruin, except with the surprise skill check, which I kind of like. I'm not sure how to address it for newer players, but limiting how often it can be used isn't the right answer, I don't think. Basically, I'd rather both perks did something entirely different than what they do right now, but I don't really have any good ideas to give.
Grim Embrace: I think 60s is a bit overtuned, and aura after a hook is redundant with BBQ (I'm not even sure why the perk currently has that effect). Another aura reading effect could be cool, like: for the duration the generators are blocked, any time a survivor moves more than 16m away from a generator (even completed ones) they have their auras revealed for 3 seconds. This creates an interesting dilemma for the survivors: stay near the generator they were on or risk being revealed. It also makes generators act like traps, revealing any survivor who goes near one and then leaves it.
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Thrilling Tremors Cooldown 40 instead of 60
Opressions Cooldown 30 instead of 80
Give Urban evasion an extra buff where footsteps are near silent or give this to Lightweight
Calm spirit remove the penalty for interactions with side objectives (Boons/Totems)
Buff Dance with me duration of no scratchmarks from 3 seconds to 5
Premonition when looking in the angle of 45 degrees to the killer not only a noise notification triggers but u see the killers aura for 3 seconds
Quick Gambit buff so it shows teammates you have this perk equipped visually like Open handed, additionally you can see each others aura in the 24m Radius.
Red Herring after repairing a gen for 25% of its progress this perk activates, Gens which survivors are not actively worked on by any Survivor light up Yellow, select one gen with holding shift when beeing inside a locker and the Killer gains a loud notification on that gen. Afterwards the perk deactivates until the requirement is met again.
Residual Manifest You are granted a basic Flashlight but u have the chance to get a higher rarity Flashlight by RNG
Up the ante Luck now also effects Chests and which items will spawn inside
Dissolution when this perk activates Survivors no longer get told by an icon this perk is active.
Dragons Grip Cooldown reduced from 80 to 60 and the time the effect lasts on the gen is increased from 30 seconds to 45 seconds.
Eruption incapacitated effect removed and replaced by beeing Oblivious for 60 seconds when hit from it while working on the gen, the regression lost is increased from 10 to 15%.
Fire up for each gen that is completed the Killer gets 6% (was 4) faster action speed.
Furtive chase each time you hook the Obsession up to 4 tokens your Terror Radius decreases by 5% outside of chase and increases for each stack by 5% in chase. ( The change from meters to % in this perk is changed so Killers with a low TR wont be granted a 0m TR)
Gearhead when hitting a great skillcheck by any means, the Killer now sees the Survivors aura for 10 seconds. (including by perks like Overcharge,Opression)
Hex: Huntress Lullaby No longer needs to build in power. It will have its full strength from the beginning until cleansed.
Hex: Thrill of the hunt changed to a non Hex and the Speed penalty will be 30% by default
And many more i could think of
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For DH I agree it doesn't change much and although I think it's unhealthy at the moment that's mostly due to needing to play around it as a default, with a weaker effect playing not playing around it until you see it is less punishing and a lower play rate from it being weaker would hopefully influence that too. The 50/50s definitely would still exist but the punishment for failure would be less which could make up for that.
Off the record change is cool. If you're going to remove collision I don't mind that for all endurance to discourage off the hook blocking, stops survivors from getting themselves tunnelled, if not you may make the perk a bit too much. It provides 4 effects on a timer that constantly pauses and unpauses with some effects deactivating early and although it does the most to make the perk fair it does make it a bit of a headache. Also, the timer pausing in its current suggested state would make it much stronger on smaller maps and act as a way to find out if a stealth killer is nearby.
Personally, I disagree that CoH completely invalidates spreading pressure, it makes it weaker while the boon is up but I would say it doesn't completely invalidate it, rather it requires you to change your tactic around it such as focusing on removing map resources rather than getting hits. I don't usually like to add personal elements to these kinds of discussions but some of my favourite types of killers are hit and run killers like ghost face and wraith so hopefully you can believe I'm not talking out of my ass here although maybe we have to agree to disagree on the impact this perk has on a match. Either way glad we can agree that both this and hyperfocus have problematic elements with items.
Having a perk be good against hit and run isn't an issue even if that strategy isn't good, because then the perk wouldn't see use. You could argue it's an issue if the perk is seeing play even if the strategy isn't good but with my suggested change to better than new it would be an option for when a strategy like hit and run or defensive gen play are good currently. It isn't even good against these tactics so even if they were good the current perk wouldn't see play, the plan behind this change is to keep this idea of a stronger recovery perk in tack although maybe I went too far with it.
For pain res, I don't disagree but I would be concerned that it would be hard to evaluate what the perk is really doing for you. It hits a gen, who knows which one, which had some progress and regressed it by an unknown amount. It also overlaps with pop goes the weasel which I'm not massive with as it already does this quite a bit, but in terms of making the perk fairer to play against your suggestion might go a bit further. Alternatively, you could do 10% regression but we'd be here all day arguing about small numbers like that if we wanted to.
For deadlock yes but if you're going that long without a hit I don't see why the perk needs to hold your hand. Even if you're struggling I feel like most of the time you'll be able to get it back before you need it again unless the survivors have 3 gens close to completion.
Overcharge and CoB are fair enough, you could redesign them but I don't think they're unsalvagable in their current state and it's a lot of work to make completely new effects.
Grim Embrace, your idea is interesting although in practice serves a similar function. The aura reading is there otherwise survivors would just hide for 45 seconds as without objectives they have no incentive to take risks which may hurt them down the line. But you may be right 60 seconds is a long time.
Many of these are quite nice. Premonition would probably be too much unless you specifically made it not trigger in chase unless it already works like that.
Silent footsteps I'm not massive on only because it makes tracking healthy survivors while blinded impossible and would be kind of annoying to play against a healthy survivor pre-dropping and blinding you at every pallet if they have this.
Up the ante sounds cool but that sounds a lot like plunders, although maybe luck needs a look at as a mechanic.
Dissolution isn't the strongest but would probably be unfair if the survivors didn't know as it triggering almost always gives the killer a free down.
Furtive chase giving a % decrease in tr is interesting and I'm not entirely sure if that's how it should work, but having it increase and decrease in and out of chase sounds fun.
Hex: Thrill of the Hunt I would say benefits more from being a hex because the survivors have to spend a lot of time cleansing it, it'd be more consistent but at 30% and not giving the survivors the totem to waste time on you'd probably make it weaker than it is now.
The rest seem like genuinely good changes, not entirely sold on red hearing but not entirely sure what's wrong for me not to be sold, and would like to see these tested.
Although the perk has its problems I would like to make one case for its existence. Against long, grindy matches survivors have very few options to win, in a way this is ok as the killer has to force these but with the power of slowdown that isn't too hard to get, and having options on the survivor side to break these statemates like strong healing options or perks that get more value over time is healthy. Generally speaking, aggressive killer play and going for downs will beat a circle of healing because the survivors will get fewer chances to heal which although not equally viable on all killers I don't think is impossible on any killer except maybe hag. As a result, it forces the killer to adapt and actively try and end the stalemate by going for a win. The one thing I will say is on stronger survivor maps it could be seen as unfair to ask weaker killers to compete with this however you could argue this is an issue with those killers or maps instead.
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All non meta perk should get either a overhaul or buff. We need to have more strong variety for both sides. More synergies between the perks to allow for more builds. Instead of only "fixing" the same 5 perks that continue to be meta.
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I personally don't mind resilience and it debuffing you when injured kind of goes against the idea of being "resilient" but your version is a cool idea, I'd say better implemented as its own perk.
I wouldn't mind self-care going to 40% (40-second heal if I'm right) however I find that I value reliable self-healing very highly so I could be overhyping it and 50% would be fine.
Windows nerf may not be an awful idea, it does allow people to turn their brains off quite a bit however it doesn't provide a massive benefit beyond that and is a nice option to use yourself.
That's a nice oppression change I've not heard before, honestly focusing more on the information side of things sounds fun.
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Yay and nay. Some non-meta perks aren't even that bad but just unfavoured. Ruin getting nerfed just as a bunch of gen-kicking perks that it synergies poorly with was just bad timing, the perk is good just has very poor synergy with the current meta. Similarly lithe and overcome aren't exactly meta but in a game where most survivors run dh of course other exhaustion perks aren't seeing use. In a world where dh doesn't exist, I'm sure people would use more lithe and overcome and in a meta where killers want hex synergy or surveillance, ruin would be much more prevalent. These perks don't really need buff they just need to wait for the right meta and fill their niches in the meantime. Ruin is still good on killers like legion and overcome works well with lucky break, until the limelight comes I'm sure they're fine in their roles currently.
Furthermore, if a perk is a problem what does buffing do? Make a bigger problem that power creeps the old one? Not all perks that are meta are problems but if your solution to the ones that are/have problems is to make more I'm not sure that helps long term.
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All hex perks need a rework/buff. The risk vs reward scale is completely off the chart and the advantages of the perks stand in no comparision to the risk of losing the perks in the first 30-60 seconds.
Overcome is actually a really good perk for new players that don´t know how to time a DH or don´t want to constantly walk around to prevent starting the exhaustion of SB. So while its not really used often, it has its place for new players and does a good job at that. Biggest problem it has, is that the target audience simply doesn´t know it exists.
We had a short period where Boil Over was op. Many killers complained (rightfully) about the perk. But it actually made other problems more obvious: how unbalanced or bad some map spots are. Things like the second floor of the library in the RPD map. Those things have been removed in later patches and i think it was also partly to how survivors used Boil Over on those spots. Strong perks can make game issues more visible and lead to a overall improved gameplay for both sides. Having a meta shake up every 3 months sounds great and could help the game with longevity. So power creeping doesn´t scare me, if its for the good of the game. Since perks can always be toned down.
But i like the idea that the devs get more daring with the reworks.
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Honestly think the only problem perks are dead hard, eruption and COH.
As far as buffs are concerned, I want them to take time to undo some of the harsh nerfs they did in the perk overhaul patch over them buffing new ones.
Ruin back to 200% regression but keep it deactivating when a survivor dies. Return self care's heal speed to 32 seconds, they took away it's medkit efficiency, that's a big enough nerf. Iron will should lose deactivates when being exhausted or put it back to 100%, Revert thana to it's pre overhaul patch status it didn't need to be buffed anyway.
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I just hope perks that are in a good spot on both sides don't get unnecessary nerfs because they have a certain % usage rate like in the first perk rework. There were perks on both sides that were just fine that were made useless just so people would stop using them not because they were causing any issues.
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Honestly they could completely remove the distortion effect of Off the Record and it's usage rate would likely remain the same :p
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I wanna see some of the lower used perks be changed too tbh. Having new things to try is just fun
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