The Onryō Rework: Better than I thought [7.1.0 Feedback]
Introduction
As you can probably guess from my name, I'm an Onryō main and have played her consistently since her 2022 release. As a huge lover of the Ring franchise, Sadako Rising was a very special Chapter to me. While her power was underwhelming, I grew to love it and appreciate her niche in the game. I was of the opinion that a few tweaks would maker her feel much better to play (see here). Hence, you can imagine I was thrilled when the news broke that she was going to be adjusted, and eagerly awaited the 7.1.0 PTB to see what was in store.
Unfortunately, I wasn't fond of the direction they took with her power on the PTB, and I wrote a pretty lengthy post dissecting my issues with the rework. She felt slow, clunky, and too at the mercy of survivor actions. After it seemed much of her players agreed that the PTB changes were unfavourable, I was certain they would reassess and pursue other avenues. However, the July 24th Developer Update dropped with the news that the rework was going ahead with, what I thought were, insignificant buffs that would not address her issues. Frustrated, I made a thread expressing my thoughts before actually waiting for the release and testing it on live.
After playing 7.1.0 for a day, I've come to realise that the changes she's received from the PTB are actually very impactful and I jumped the gun with my prior thread. On that note, @Steel_Eyed, you were right -- apologies for being brusque with you yesterday.
I've decided to attempt to more constructively deliver my thoughts in this thread. I'll proceed by laying out what I thought was flawed with her prior to 7.1.0, and whether her changes have resolved the issues.
Problems Solved?
Map traversal from Projection that is hindered by a long cooldown.
- MASSIVELY improved! Lowering the post-Projection TV cooldown to 45 seconds, and reducing the generic Projection cooldown to 10 seconds (was 15 on the PTB) gives her much better map traversal than previously. Projection is much more frequent in a match now.
Stealth from Demanifestation that is nullified by an overbearing lullaby.
- Unfortunately, Demanifestation has not improved at all. Preventing The Onryō from getting stunned while Demanifested is gimmicky and not worthwhile. Survivors have no reason to drop pallets when you're Demanifested because you can't injure them without Manifesting first (which slows you down). It's also much harder to pull off mindgames with Demanifestation in a chase now because of the Reiko's Watch nerf and the fact Demanifesting breaks Bloodlust. Removing chase potential in favour of a pointless stun avoidance is an unwelcome change and has removed opportunities for skill expression.
Tape Transports not being effective at slowing the game down because noone ever interacts with TVs.
- Global Condemnation from Projection means that applying your power is much easier and more consistent. Survivors now either have two choices: take a Tape early to avoid global Condemnation, or focus on objectives now and transport Tapes later after gaining stacks. In the latter situation, significant time is wasted and they risk you interrupting them while they're close to 7 stacks. The former situation has more nuance to it that I'll discuss later.
- Raising the Turn-off cooldown and Tape-play cooldown to 70 seconds is a great change that encourages survivors to actually interact with TVs and waste time. Yes, your TVs are going to be disabled, but in doing so they're putting themselves at risk of being caught out and gaining a quick +2 stacks.
- The ability to insert Tapes at any TV means that the actual moving of a Tape from one location to another takes way less time. On the PTB, when she had longer cooldowns, this hurt her too much. But now I actually don't think it's unreasonable. Save for instances of unlucky RNG which means two TVs spawn essentially next to each other, but that's a problem with spawn logic and not the mechanic itself.
Lethality from Condemnation that virtually never comes into play (without forcing it through old Iridescent Videotape and Ring Drawing).
- While it's now easier to inflict Condemnation, it's also much easier for survivors to avoid and remove it. So in theory, this change should've been a net neutral. However, I'm finding myself getting way more Condemned kills than ever before. I think there's a little nuance to this so I'll revisit this again below.
A bizarre mix of add-ons that mostly range from useless to mediocre, with one or two that are incredibly powerful.
- Unfortunately her add-on diversity has not improved whatsoever. Once again, I have more to say than just one bullet point so I'll dedicate a section to this specifically.
Tape Transports and Condemned Kills
The Onryō was revealed to have a surprisingly high kill rate in September 2022, despite the fact her basekit was severely undertuned. I gave my thoughts on why that may be here. One of the main arguments I presented was that her kit is multifaceted and hence confusing for newer players and solo queue teams to grapple with. In other words, she stomped inexperienced and casual teams, and her perceived weakness arose when facing competent survivors (particularly SWF groups).
It's early days still but from my experiences so far, her rework seems to have exacerbated the divide between these groups. Matches as and against The Onryō seem go one of three ways now:
- Against 4 inexperienced survivors: The Onryō stomps them with ease. In a surprising amount of matches, survivors are completely failing to manage their Condemnation. I had 2 games yesterday when ALL of the survivors ended up with 7 stacks of Condemnation simultaneously because they never bothered to retrieve or transport Tapes. Then, they all scramble to try and remove Condemned and the whole game falls apart for them. Why are so many survivors not touching Tapes? I have no idea. Perhaps they're unaware of the rework? Maybe they've never encountered Onryō much before given how rare she was? I've seen suggestions that The Onryō is now overtuned for this reason, but I think it's too soon to assess whether she's really too strong or whether survivors just need some time to learn. Time will tell I suppose.
- Against 3 decent survivors and 1 weak one: This is the most common scenario. DbD matchmaking is notoriously bad and in most solo queue matches you're going to have one teammate who is significantly weaker than the rest. Ideally, everyone would be on equal footing but with how MMR currently works, that's rare. In this case, the early game plays fairly typically: The Onryō gets some hooks in, a generator or two pop, and the 3 decent survivors manage their Condemnation. However, that one teammate fails to and ends up getting Condemn killed at 3 generators. And now the match is effectively over for the remaining survivors.
- Against 4 experienced survivors: Against a team who knows what they're doing, the experience is quite the opposite and The Onryō can struggle to get a foothold. Because passive Condemnation no longer applies when holding a Tape, you need to hit them if you want to rack up stacks. Survivors, however, can be in 4 places at once -- The Onryō cannot. Therefore, the best way to counter her is to split up at the start of the match and have everyone grap a Tape. That way, four of her TVs are on cooldown from the get go and everyone is immune to global Condemnation. Of course, someone will inevitably be found and hit, but having +2 stacks on one survivor is preferable to having a couple of stacks on everyone. And as soon as the first survivor goes down, the rest can use the safety of The Onryō carrying and hooking them to quickly deposit their Tapes. The match then proceeds in this fashion, where one survivor is pressured at a time while the rest are safe to focus on objectives.
In this way, I think compared to her pre-7.10 rendition she's:
- Much stronger in the vast majority of matches (against solo teams).
- Slightly weaker against coordinated SWF teams (which are very uncommon to be honest).
To me this seems an acceptable trade-off. I get that it sucks as a survivor to have a matches thrown by one solo teammate but that's not a problem with The Onryō's kit specifically and more a problem with well... solo queue. Plague and Pinhead are very similar in this regard -- teams who fail to coordinate fall apart.
Messy Add-ons
One of the biggest problems with pre-7.10 Onryō is that her add-ons were terrible, with the exception of just three: Iridescent Videotape, Ring Drawing, and Reiko's Watch. The first two were problematic as they elevated her strength exponentially and made it impossible to balance her basekit. The third was well balanced, allowing for additional mindgame opportunities and skill expression.
What most of us hoped for with the add-on pass, was that:
- Iridescent Videotape and Ring Drawing would be nerfed. ✔️ achieved
- The strength of the aforementioned combo would be redistributed across her kit. ✔️ achieved
- Her lacklustre add-ons would be improved, providing more interesting options and improving build diversity. ❌ failed
Instead, Reiko's Watch was needlessly gutted -- removing an important tool for skill expression and chases -- and most of her reworked add-ons are still terrible. Why does she have TWO blindness add-ons? Why does she have an add-on that inflicts Oblivious when she has a Lullaby that is not supressed by Oblivious? Why are Distorted Photo and Telephone Very Rare when their effects are so diminutive? etc.
Of her post-7.10 add-ons three stand out as being incredibly strong compared to the rest: Iridescent Videotape, Ring Drawing, and (the newly improved) Mother's Comb. Are these add-ons problematic? No, I don't think so. But they're so, SO much better than the rest of her add-ons that you'd seem foolish for running anything else.
A huge complaint about pre-7.10 Onryō was that she was predictable. And she still is. Every Onryō I've played against so far has been running either Iridescent Videotape and Ring Drawing or Iridescent Videotape and Mother's Comb. Do I think that it's overpowered? No. But variety is the spice of The Fog -- playing as and going against the same builds all of the time gets boring. They need to go back and improve her weaker add-ons so there's not such a massive discrepancy in strength.
Why is it that killers like Blight (who already have a GREAT basekit) are allowed to have almost every add-on be a strong and viable choice but killers like Onryō, Nemesis, and Executioner are left with maybe a couple of good options each?
Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked so I'll leave that there.
Final Thoughts & TL;DR
I realise this is long and I've rambled a lot so thank you for reading this far!
I'm really pleased to say that The Onryō rework seems to be a net positive change, and I can't think of anything else she'd need other than having her add-ons revisited. Her stealth could be improved, but given how much better she is at map traversal and slowdown now, I'm not sure she really needs it.
I'll finish this off with a TL;DR for those of you who (understandably) don't wish to read the above mountain of text. In short, my views on each aspect of her rework are:
- Map traversal: 📈 MUCH better.
- Stealth: 🔄 No net change.
- Chase potential: 📉 A little worse.
- Built-in slowdown: 📈 Better.
- Lethality: 📈 Better.
- Add-ons: ❓️ Need revisiting.
Comments
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You said it was overall good that she’s now better against bad players and worse against experienced players essentially. This seems like bad design. It’s like saying she’s better against solos and worse against swf, when what we want is the complete opposite of that. We want her worse against bad solos and better against good swf.
Hypothetically here: I feel like if a killers design is “well they’re really good if the survivors play stupid” isn’t a design we want. I feel like this applies to a majority of the killer roster already though unfortunately.
I don’t think we want killers that rely on survivors playing bad to win. We want their wins to come from having a higher skill ceiling which gives them potential to outplay good players.
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She seems overall better to me than used to be.
Kinda an issue is that most optimal playstyle with any build is never hook (almost). Just keep teleporting, slug and hit&run.
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It’s like saying she’s better against solos and worse against swf, when what we want is the complete opposite of that.
That would be the ideal, yes. But that will never be true. It's just not possible to have a killer that is better against SWF than solo queue. Balacing killers with this in mind is tricky:
- Make them strong and you can compete with SWF no problem but solo queue never stands a change.
- Make them weak and solo queue can compete fairly but the killer now stands no chance against SWF.
In an ideal world, solo survivors and SWF are on equal footing. But in reality, they aren't and never will be.
“well they’re really good if the survivors play stupid” isn’t a design we want.
Once again -- in theory -- I agree with you. But this just isn't how DbD actually plays out. Most of the killer roster rely on survivors messing up or being uncoordinated:
- If one member of a solo queue team cleanses their sickness against a Plague, they're putting the rest of their sick teammates in immense danger from Corrupt Purge.
- If solo queue teams all waste time running to solve the Lament Configuration, or none of them opt to solve it, then the game is thrown.
- If your solo queue teammates fail to split up against Legion and keep letting them chain Feral Slashes, then The Legion is able to apply incredible amounts of pressure.
- If a solo queue teammate lets Oni get an early hit, then the rest of the team gets screwed over.
- If a solo queue teammate lets Myers stalk, then the next person found is going to get instantly downed.
- etc.
If survivors always played with perfect coordination, then killers could be rebalanced to be much stronger and not reliant on survivor mistakes. But most survivors don't play perfectly and never will, so they have to be slighltly weaker against those actual coordinated teams to give the rest of the playerbase a fighting chance.
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Personally, I haven't found this.
I've been trying out different strategies since the update dropped and for me what's most effective seems to be hooking normally. Slugging didn't really get me anywhere when I tried, but there were Unbreakables in my lobby in the two matches I tried it and it's still early days.
If it turns out that slugging is her optimal strategy they might need to reassess things though for sure.
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I'm glad to hear that Sadako is turning out better than the "The Devs did a thing! WRYYYYYY!" crowd were screaming about.
I'm much more willing to take your word on things, @OnryosTapeRentals , not just because you seem to know what you're talking about, but because you can acknowledge where you had been wrong or behaved wrongly.
I haven't gotten around to trying Sadako myself yet, but to me the rework had always fixed what I personally considered a big weakness to Sadako's: there was no way to force interaction with her power the way Pig, Cenobite, and Mastermind can.
Are there any perks you find worth better or worse for her compared to before? I'd always been fond of perks like Gearhead, Thrilling Tremors, and Hex: Face the Darkness to allow for accurate teleporting. I've seen people say you can just teleport mindlessly now but I disagree, since it's still to your benefit to teleport somewhere you can pressure Survivors.
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I guess it’s just a core design problem in dbd with the swf issue that we don’t have a solution for yet. I thought all the HUD information was supposed to bring them closer to make balancing around swf more ideal but I guess not.
The HUD didn’t bring them as close as they wanted because at the end of the day the main advantage in swf isn’t even the info, it’s the guarantee of 4 good teammates. It removes the weak link.
However if the core issue isn’t even the info but the skill of the players then that’s impossible to fix.
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it’s the guarantee of 4 good teammates. It removes the weak link.
100% agreed. I regularly play SWF without comms because I find trying to focus on conversation and the game at the same time difficult and I still manage to do better than when I play solo simply because I know my teammates are reliable.
Being able to pick your teammates is the true strength of SWF -- comms is just the icing on the cake really.
Post edited by OnryosTapeRentals on2 -
I think my problem is they nerfed down most other playstyles that didn't rely on condemning while boosting the condemned playstyle drastically. Much easier now to slug for anyone holding a tape or is at full condemned while never really needing to commit to chases. I use Deadman's Switch in conjunction with the VCR addon to fake projections to TVs near gens to get max value out of DMS when they let go, and now it only works when the survivors decide tapes are too much of a hassle. Which is a lot, I will admit, but once they understand to touch tapes they'll destroy what made my chase game strong.
And from my point of view, it has been either you have no powered TVs, or people do TV's too late and get Mori'd out. Condemn will get nerfed, I believe, and it will emphasize how little she has going for her when it does.
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because you can acknowledge where you had been wrong or behaved wrongly.
I appreciate you acknowledging this :) Admitting I'm wrong is something I used to be terrible at but I'm slowly working on being more open minded and accepting of criticism.
I haven't gotten around to trying Sadako myself yet, but to me the rework had always fixed what I personally considered a big weakness to Sadako's: there was no way to force interaction with her power the way Pig, Cenobite, and Mastermind can.
I hope you enjoy her when you get the time! I've been having a lot of fun matches lately. Survivors being able to ignore TVs was probably her biggest weakness before the update, so I'm really glad it has been addressed.
Are there any perks you find worth better or worse for her compared to before?
Glad to hear someone else enjoys Gearhead! It's an underrated favourite of mine. I don't think any perks have gotten significantly better or worse on her after the update but I do think she's less reliant on slowdown perks now. Before, I was running at least two slowdown perks in most of my Sadako builds (Corrupt Intervention and Deadlock mainly) but now that she has a lot of in-built slowdown I'm finding I can get away with just one and go for either a chase or information oriented build.
It's not a really strong perk, but I've been having fun with the buffed Coup de Grâce. Because Onryō is short and she doesn't use a traditional weapon, I've found survivors often underestimate her lunge range. Add CdG into the mix and you can get a lot of hits survivors don't expect.
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This is a valid criticism.
I used to play with VCR + Videotape Copy a lot to try and catch survivors off guard after Projection. Obviously that doesn't really work anymore which is a shame.
It's still early so I'm waiting to see if any new playstyles crop up that I've overlooked but overall it does seem like she has a narrower range of skill expression.
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A little self-awareness goes a long way in my opinion.
Re: Gearhead, it occured to me after its last buff that Sadako (and Freddy for that matter) get good use out of it since their teleporting is gen based, either directly (Freddy) or because TVs tend to be close to gens.
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Came here because of the tag. Thank you for saying that. Not many people do that.
I will read through the thread in more detail later today.
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I still run Iri Tape/VCR with Deadmans, Jolt and Gearhead out of spite and mostly just because I'm stubborn. When it works, it works, when it doesn't you get Wrecker's Yard with good loops at main and have a Nic Cage call you bad for running an iri and purple and only getting 2 kills.
Though mostly I'm still getting 3/4ks a match, so I can't complain too much, it just still doesn't feel like the Sadako I learned to play though.
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Sorry but i really do not enjoy this rework, as mentioned the best plastyle is to just teleport through the map. There is no interaction. It is just slow, brainless and boring. Really do not like that, i am constantly running between TVs and can hardly work on gens.
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ah...now all of a sudden she doesn't need anything else...
She needs serious adjustments...all Sadako's I've played against yesterday were just playing hit and run while teleporting from tv to tv and not committing to a single chase unless someone is close to or condemned.
Meanwhile survivors are running around the map all game like headless chickens looking for a TV to take the tape from. Incredibly boring gameplay. I think I'd prefer old condemn Sadako, at least you can just bleed out on the floor and go afk.
Games are either dragging or end really quick because someone gets condemned in the first 3 minutes. I do realize it must be fun from killer perspective finally getting all that condemn and stuff but from survivor side this is a rather boring experience.
I don't blame players for this particular playstyle because they've been given that by the devs but clearly some adjustments are needed.
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I feel the same way, on paper the changes from PTB to the new update felt like a minor tweak but somehow made the character feel entirely different from how it was on the PTB version of Sadako, which on the contrary felt really bad to play. This new version still sacrifices her chase power and all her other playstyles, which is pretty bad, but I do think it at least enables an effective way to play Condemned that was envisioned on the PTB but that we couldn't see because of the stats on there. I was also really frustrated about the changes going through and I feel the need to apologize for just being very brusque after the news.
She'll definitely need some tweaks to make her more bearable for SoloQ, but I wouldn't give too harsh of a judgement for now as it's basically a completely new killer and both sides still need to understand the best strategies to adopt - it's just that in this case it was much more immediate to understand the Sadako strategies than the survivor ones. Only time will tell
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Hear me out yeah?
Instead of the No stun - revert that - she can go through pallets while demanifested but being inside the pallets model cancels her Manifest Action.
This would give her a little zoning ability that can help her chase and it fits the character
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remember what I said. a strong killer dominates bad players first before it poses a threat to experienced players. this is why it is difficult to balance killers because if you make killer good at base-kit for good players, it is imbalanced for most players but balanced for the top. vice versa, if you make killer bad at base-kit, then the killer has add-on variety problem and the killer will under-perform vs good players because it is being balanced around weaker players. so in the end, you have to choose one side. most games choose to balance around good players but they also keep in mind to not balance too far to the top so that it is somewhat enjoyable experienced to the middle-level player.
the 3 good players and 1 bad player is because of lax matchmaking. awhile back they did something where the mmr has lower soft-cap to make matches a bit less competitive because playing weaker killer with strict matchmaking is too unfun for killer. Sadako is in realm of being good for high-level so she does not need that lax-matchmaking. that's kinda case for a lot of stronger killers. they're fine being in strict environment. that is why some people have at some point suggest something like casual que and competitive que. i think for survivor, that is kinda silly but for killer, I think it might be good idea that some killer have more lax matchmaking while stronger killer face better players. that whole thing is weird problem.
soloq tends to have just some information/coordinate issues, otherwise playing survivor is a lot of fun. sometimes you get weaker teammates but it is overall ok.
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I think the biggest problem with Onryo, and most other killers is player inexperience.
It would be great if some tips about killer counters should pop up in the side of the screen from time to time, especially if killer power is in use:
You got global condemn from Onryo - on the left side of the screen, pop up tells you "protect yourself from being condemn when Sadako teleports by ejecting tape from nearest TV".
Being hit by Huntress hatchet, the pop up sais - "Huntress has finite amount of hatchets with her. Then she has to reload".
One should be able to disable all/specific killer hints.
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