The Fundamental Issue with Dead Hard
I used to be a proponent for Dead Hard, its on-demand nature gives players a greater sense of agency, and the distance gained is about that of something like Lithe or Sprint Burst.
While all of that is true, there is one fundamental feature of Dead Hard that the other two Perks lack: It activates at the tail end of a chase commitment by a Killer.
Better explained by @Akumakaji
Or to break this down even further: every other exhaustion perk has its uses during a chase, either at the very start or shortly after the chase went on, while DH literally activates within the 9 frames prior to ending this chase and finally reap its benefits, and thats extremely frustrating.
Its the only exhaustion perk with a guranteed activation condition (safe for a couple of insta down effects) that is not tied to any tile or random quirk of the map, and all this combined makes it the strongest and most desirable exhaustion perk.
It would even see play if it could only be used once per game, it is that strong, and being able to use it over and over is just unparalleled in the game. Yes, its fairer then it previous itteration (wow, how broken was that?) and it can be baited out, but it is so meta that every single survivor gets the benefit of "baiting it out" until the killer knows for sure that a given survivor doesnt have it.
For Example:
Head on needs a 3s build-up to activate and can be baited by the Killer.
Lithe is used as part of the standard loop, and even if it was on demand needs to be used before the Killer gets a hit in on the Tile and needs to use a Vault.
Sprint Burst is used immediately, or 99%'ed to be used in a Loop, but still takes a moment of hesitation and has to be used a decent amount of time or distance away from the Killer so as to not be hit by a Lunge. (And could even be reworked to need a kind of Insidious style staying still to activate as an on-demand feature).
Balanced Landing does add distance, but requires specific map setups, and still allows you to be hit if the Killer is too close.
All of those Exhaustion Perks suffer, and are mostly ineffective, when the Killer is right behind you.
Dead Hard is used when the Killer is right on your butt.
This may seem fine at a surface level, but think for a moment that the game is designed around giving you several options to prevent the Killer from getting that close in the first place. Pallets/Vaults/Mindgames/etc.
Dead Hard is the only Exhaustion Perk that allows you to forgo any of those options and can still work when the Killer is literally swinging at you, and lets you go to more of those defensive options.
I don't know how rework Dead Hard, but it certainly shouldn't be able to be used as a tool to prevent a Swing from occurring, as the point in time that a swing occurs is usually the moment when the Killer has invested the most amount of time in chase, rather than being a preventative measure taken by the Survivor like the rest of the Exhaustion Perks.
Comments
-
For a former proponent, I'm surprised this version is what causes you to say it's a problem.
0 -
The problem is that it has no downside. Every other exhaustion perk has some kind of downside.
- Adrenaline - Only activates in end-game and only activates once, mostly used for the heal more than the sprint burst.
- Balanced Landing - Very limited usage and heavily map dependent. Many maps only have 1 or 2 spots you can consistently use this at.
- Head On - Requires the survivor to jump into the locker and sit there for 3 seconds, can't really be used effectively in a chase without combining it with other perks.
- Lithe - Requires you to fast vault, meaning you can't loop perfectly efficiently when using it. In theory you could fast vault and not need to "waste" it, but if you slow vaulted you would get hit, making it one of the least efficient perks, but outside of dead hard is more on demand than the others.
- Overcome - Only works when going from a healthy state to an injured state. If you are hit while injured it doesn't work.
- Smash Hit - Requires you to land a pallet stun, which is sometimes easier said than done. Additionally, a pallet stun, depending on the pallet, killer and setup, can already be a chase ender anyway, so the value you get on this is much lower.
- Sprint Burst - You have to walk to not accidentally use it, or 99 it. This requires you to play around the sprint burst very very specifically and it isn't available for you on complete demand.
And then we have dead hard, where the "downside" is that you need to be injured, but becoming injured is a natural thing that will happen in the course of a chase. And if you don't get injured and you don't use it, you didn't need it. If yo do get injured, then it is always available to you at that point with no downside.
7 -
Yeah, it's only beneficial at the very last moment of any chase.
Everything else occurs mostly mid-chase, or before the first hit, such that even for M1 Killers it's not used before serious chase commitment.
0 -
what exhaustion perk do you want survivors to use? keep in mind that survivors have to prepare to go against the strongest killers such as Blight and weaker nurse. If i have to vs blight a perk like Smash hit or Balance landing is just not going to cut it. 150% m/s for 3 second is pointless when the killer i am going against is moving 230% in his power for 4(5) dashes. DH is most effective choice vs strongest killers. Furthermore, what even be viable version of these other exhaustion perks when going against blight?
Head on could be instant charge up, 5 second stun and silent lockers and I am not sure if head on would be useful vs blight.
Smash hit could increase pallet stuns by 2 seconds and trigger on pallet drops instead of stuns. Would this be remotely useful vs blight? Would be pretty weird meta exhaustion perk to use vs Nurse.
Balance landing is conditional perk that requires elevation. there is no way this perk in isolation can ever be meta because its depends on maps. Maybe if you gave survivors a jump function and the perk triggers by jumping? this perk was only used when it had 100% stagger functionality which was independent from speed boost itself. This is type of perk that might be better off as passive ability that is earned by doing some side objective. maybe you cleanse a totem and the next fall is 100% stagger with no speed boost. I don't think balance landing in modern version of dbd can be counted as exhaustion perk. Its not versatile enough to be one.
Lithe could be that when pressing E during a pallet slide/window vault, you become invulnerable during the window vault/pallet vault(for 0.5 seconds post sliding) then break into sprint burst for 3 seconds. Maybe this would be meta?
Overcome: Probably make it work like Mettle of man when your healthy. this makes instant downs not counter it. this perk would be like reverse dh in the sense that you need to be healthy for it to trigger.
Sprint burst is easily closest perk to DH in term of being meta. Giving Sprint burst an activate button instead of running would easily replace DH in the meta if DH was nerfed because it mirrors old DH for distance that DH used to be.
my guess is that if they ever weakened Dead hard to not be top meta perk, They would likely buff one of these perks into meta exhaustion to replace it.
0 -
combining dead hard and deliverance is basically a guaranteed escape if you're hooked after gates are open. dead hard, adrenaline and deliverance is basically free money.
dead hard should apply broken. not endurance. if you use dead hard you're broken. and the perk disables for the remainder of the match. give it decisive strike balancing.
you'd think after all the legion nonsense behavior would learn that mending is a pointless mechanic.
0 -
Its dead hard. A perk from a survivor that was designed to have a high risk high reward playstyle. So of course its gonna be different and in your face type of exhaustion. Besides, dh is considered a Mindgame like you mentioned. Most killers are just complaining because they may lose that mindgame if dh is successful.
0 -
there is probably an easier to kill the perk such as Head on treatment. Put a 3 second delay which makes your character flash in white(like dredge nightfall) before activating dead hard. During this time, you get shock therapy doctor debuff that prevents you from vaulting or putting down pallets. Baiting DH in the open and DH at pallets becomes cakewalk to counter now.
0 -
i dont think it should be counter capable. i think it's fine if it's used to survive a single hit. the problem is that you're able to constantly reset it since it's an exhaustion perk. i think if we move away from having it be an exhaustion perk and redesign it to be similar to decisive strike/deliverance/unbreakable to where it's a 1 time get out of jail free card for a specific scenario, then i think it will serve the game better.
edit
also - i think decisive strike should just be *press vault while being carried*. the minigame isn't necessary. maybe require searching a chest or at least 1 generator remaining or something for a conditional, but the minigame is too much.
0 -
Or to break this down even further: every other exhaustion perk has its uses during a chase, either at the very start or shortly after the chase went on, while DH literally activates within the 9 frames prior to ending this chase and finally reap its benefits, and thats extremely frustrating.
Its the only exhaustion perk with a guranteed activation condition (safe for a couple of insta down effects) that is not tied to any tile or random quirk of the map, and all this combined makes it the strongest and most desirable exhaustion perk.
It would even see play if it could only be used once per game, it is that strong, and being able to use it over and over is just unparalleled in the game. Yes, its fairer then it previous itteration (wow, how broken was that?) and it can be baited out, but it is so meta that every single survivor gets the benefit of "baiting it out" until the killer knows for sure that a given survivor doesnt have it.
3 -
That exactly, a much more detailed description than the way I put it. Would you mind if I posted that as an addendum at the top of the main post given the proclivity of users to skip thread contents?
However even if that is addressed, then you come across the problem with how most Exhaustion Perks like Sprint Burst/Lithe/Balanced Landing are disproportionally effective against Killers without mobility than those with mobility, as those Exhaustion Perks revolve around simply adding raw distance in a chase instead of attempting to augment how a player engages with a Loop.
1 -
You can gladly do with my post as you see fit.
Well, Exhaustion perks are a class of strong survivor perks that give them an edge, nothing wrong with that. Not every killer needs to be able to keep up with a survivor sprinting off, but if I startle a survivor at the gen at the upper level of coal tower, we both jump down and they speed off with balanced landing, I can then and there decide if its worth pursuing them, I don't have to wait till the end of the chase.
There is exactly nothing wrong with surviviors having strong perks that give them an edge in certain situations, thats why you design a build, but DH is so universally strong that its seen ubiquitous and disproportionately often. The short time after the 6.1 update was pretty fun: no one was using DH anymore, if you cornered someone you could just SWING without sniffing their butt and you saw all kinds of exhaustion perks. Now its again 3-4 DH per game, with the outlier being the game with just 2 DHs and this shows that there is something fundamentally wrong with the perk. If an option is SO much better then everything else in their class, this should be the biggest red flag that something needs to be done about it.
I only ever used DH for the couple of tome challenges, and I felt somewhat dirty about it. Besides that, I am a proud non-DH-survivor, who dies when cornered, but who also doesn't crutches on a single perk.
People alway claim that "when DH gets nuked, killer mains will just complain about SB, because that is actually stronger", but I call this a load of BS. Don't get me wrong, SB is strong and can be pretty anoying, but I have seen 3 SB lobbies shortly after 6.1 and that was no near as aggrevating then getting constantly robbed of your price 45s into a chase, 7 frames before you win. People who claim that the compaints about a SB meta (that never came into fruition, btw, no matter how much peeps struggled with the new DH at first) would reach ANYTHING close to what we see about DH of the past and the new DH are just coping so hard.
1 -
I could ask you the same thing about eruption.
But, what i really want is for us to either :
- Balance the game around top players
- Balance the game around average players
If we want to balance the game around top players, which i am assuming you do, because you mention blight and nurse, which are a large minority of players, let alone good ones. Then we need to take a look at what top survivors are capable of, and survivors as a whole need some massive nerfs.
Or, if you think that the above gameplay is fine, because those survivors are rare. Then we need to balance around the "average player" So lets look at kill rates.
If we are balancing around the "average" player and the devs are looking or a 60% kill rate (which they have stated at some point) that means we need to:
Massively buff:
- Nurse
- Trickster
- Billy
Minor buff:
- Demo
- Doctor
- Trapper
- Blight
- Twins
- Deathslinger
- Huntress
So which is it? Should we balance the game around the top players like you said? Or should we balance around the average player?
0 -
Appreciate it.
I don't disagree that Survivors should have Perks that can give them an edge, but the slight issue is that Exhaustion is an effect that passively "restores" the Perk after it has been used. If used correctly, these act as pseudo health states. As noted in your example with Coal Tower, you were unable to get a hit in, and if you left the chase, the Survivor is able to go back to a Generator, start repairing, while that Exhaustion Perk is recharging concurrently. (Saying to just use Fearmonger is a band-aid and also reduces Survivor agency on actually using their Perks in the first place).
A Killer like Blight or Nurse might think of it as a relative non-issue, since they can catch up quickly and consistently make sure that Exhaustion Perk is suppressed for the remainder of the chase, but it's a different issue for slower Killers.
0 -
Not saying DH is 'fine' per se, but you're leaving out some pretty relevant points.
Dead hard is currently the only exhaustion perk that is completely disabled while in deep wound, a status that is clearly visible to the killer and can be triggered by base kit mechanics, among other things. Hitting someone off hook means they can't use dead hard, where they could, for example, still smash hit or lithe away later in that chase.
The perk is only active for .5 seconds, a window that is highly subject to latency, and not even your latency. The perk is soft countered by VPN or just crappy connections that aren't even visible on the Escape screen that displays your own ping. The only other perks in the list that even come close to requiring this kind of timing are smash hit or possibly head on.
Every other perk you listed, with the exceptions of overcome and smash hit, can be activated early or at a safe distance from the killer and still gain full value. You don't need to wait until the killer is within lunge rage for Sprint burst or lithe to gain distance, for example. You completely waste dead hard if you press e when the killer is heading toward you but not near you, but you are getting full Sprint burst value if you use it at that time.
And, just for comparison's sake, dead hard has the same flaw that overcome does: if you are insta downed from healthy in one hit, the perk doesn't come into play at all.
0 -
I am just saying that historically. DBD has already had a very powerful exhaustion perk that was universally meta. I would be surprised for them to weaken DH to the ground and not introduce another exhaustion perk that takes its place.
I also do not agree that survivor need massive nerfs, maybe nerf in certain aspects of their gameplay but I would say that its better to buff killer powers then it is nerf survivors because better killers can use their killer power more effectively to win games while worse killer will not notice much of a change in effectiveness as they will not use their power at its peak. Nurse and Blight are good because their power at peak is relatively rewarding to use. The difference between good nurse and good blight is night and day compare to bad blight and weaker nurse. Sure there is skill-floor difference reflected in kill-rates(Like bad nurse does worse then bad blight) but that aspect is normal for every video game. This is just my opinion but i think a lot of peak killer power usages do not match peak survivor gameplay. The majority of the cast of killer have narrow usages in their powers and little creativity flexibility to win. that is why I think a lot of them struggle to put up any resistance against strong survivors then again, maybe survivor do not want any resistance and want to have dominating wins against killers. I have no clue.
0 -
That last flaw is something that DH then counters when Survivors stop healing.
0
