Pig's Identity Crisis
It's not really a bold, iconoclastic opinion to say the Pig changes look kinda bad. Even if I appreciate the direction of making her less reliant on scumming RBT kills, the buffs to her crouch are only okay and the Ambush buff is like putting frosting on raw dough. Ambush isn't a worthwhile mechanic as it is, even if you make it a little longer and shave some cooldown off. It's still a terrible chase option. But it's not really meant to be a chase option, is it? It is, after all, named ambush and done out of stealth--It's meant to catch people off guard. Pig is supposed to be a stealth and macro killer, not a chase killer.
I get the impression BHVR doesn't know what to do with Pig. The direction they're taking her now--emphasizing her dash attack and de-emphasizing her actually unique tool--doesn't make Pig a better version of herself. It makes her a worse version of other killers. I'd like to propose that Pig needs an actual rework, not just small number tweaks to what already exists. The direction Pig is headed right now is any other dash killer with mediocre stealth and game delay. That sort of homogenization isn't really good for the game. I feel like Pig--on top of making her stealth actually useful--needs more strategic, macro elements to her power. More types of traps, I'd argue. After all, trap variety is a large appeal of the Saw series, so, it's unusual that she only has the one.
I think it would be good to give her, say, a nerve gas trap to set up in advance, based on Saw 2, that poisons survivors and forces them to look for a cure at risk of being downed. Something to emphasize her unique aspects rather than the dash that so many killers these days have. Or, simply make RBTs more than a time waster, maybe make RBT'd survivors expose or give KI on other survivors or survivors doing objectives. Something to give her a strategy to play around. People enjoy using RBTs to get kills not (just) because it's cheesy, but because it's something only Pig offers. Pig needs a unique game plan. Adding more elements of trapping and letting her leave survivors to sort out their issues with urgency makes her feel more like she's a Saw killer rather than a Saw-themed one. There are other mechanics I might suggest--allowing survivors to excise a key from another's body, skipping the box searching but inflicting the other survivor with a lengthy Broken status effect, most importantly. I think this would impose that classic Saw question of what you're willing to do to save your own life, if it's worth it to put yourself at risk just to save others, and also lets Pig actually play around her traps and stealth in a way that isn't just harassing one survivor. She gets to instead let them harm someone else to save their own skin and pick that second survivor off, creating consequences to their approach, maybe punishing them for their selfishness. Anything to keep her unique, and to keep her a representation of the Saw series rather just the aesthetics of the series.
Comments
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If nothing else, I really think Pig's RBTs need to interact with more mechanics than just the boxes. They're incredibly surface level for what is ultimately the only interesting part of Pig's kit, and for what is apparently supposed to represent the whole of Saw's traps and kidnappings. That it doesn't reveal any auras of other nearby survivors to incentivize putting other survivors in traps, or reveal survivors doing gens while a trap is yet to activate so the Pig can go and sort of make them face consequences for trying to progress their own survival while putting the trapped survivor at risk, or do ANYTHING beyond serve as a tool for stalling or cheesing out a kill is frankly pitiful. It doesn't compellingly represent Saw in any real way.
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For me, Pig is killer about her traps. That's what makes her unique and stand out. You put deadly traps on Survivors and force them to do new objective, which is nice.
However I don't think they should nerf her traps in any way. Or you know what, I think it would be fair to increase the timer by extra 30 seconds base kit IF she will get Rule set 2.0 (add-on currently) base kit = that add-on will hide auras of boxes to Survivors until their trap is active. Making them more scary but also waste extra time if they want to remove them early.
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I wish Pig could booby-trap the whole map to make everything more complex to deal with. Traps on survivors, traps on generators, traps on the exit gates, traps on vaults. Make playing a Pig match feel different from every other match, like how Xeno matches are like tower defense with the turrets. It's too ambitious to hope it'll ever happen but it's what I daydream about.
Pig has deathtraps with no real risk of death, stealth that barely conceals her, and a stealth dash that is loud and slow.
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Like, in Saw 2 and 3, the whole POINT is that the location of the game is not just one singular trap, but a large series of diverse traps that--by making the subject panic--string into one another, you leave one and trigger another. In Saw , the entire thing is just one make-your-choice, one lives one dies escape room. In Saw, the ENTIRE environment is the trap. That should be so easy to emulate in DbD.
Besides that, Ambush and RBTs just don't interact with one another, they don't contribute to a singular mechanical identity. If Pig had more forms of traps or even just, surveillance cameras, even, she could have everything play into that snowballing mental stack. Pig herself could be anywhere, but there could also be a gas trap or tripwire or camera somewhere that would also screw you over. As is, Pig is a brute force slasher who can buy herself 20 seconds per down.
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