Let's Discuss the Removal of Blight's Hug Tech
Greetings everyone! Time for a new discussion.
As many of you know, Blight is getting his collision improved to make it more consistent. This way, Blight will be able to collide on various surfaces more than what we have now. However, the devs have also pointed out that this will also fix, "an issue which allowed The Blight to incorrectly slide along obstacles and lunge around tighter corners than intended." This statement from the Developer Update obviously refers to the hug tech. In this discussion, I'll be talking about the hug tech and all details about it and perhaps why it should stay in the game.
Before I begin, I would like to state that I have 7.2K hours in DBD. I play both sides as equally as possible to understand the mechanics and arguments of both, but when I play killer, Blight is my primary main. He's the killer I have the most hours in at nearly 4k hours. However, this is just an estimate.
A lot of you may know what the hug tech is. The hug tech allows Blight to slide against objects to ignore their collision by either looking up or down. As a result, this allows him to hit survivors who may also be hugging a loop. This tech or exploit, as various people have been referring to it, has gotten a lot of controversy. Many people say that this should not be part of Blight's base-kit since it's too powerful. Even the devs have considered the hug tech as a bug. However, many people have advocated for the hug tech to stay. Why is this the case?
When Blight first released, he never had a hug tech to begin with. I remember playing him about two or three weeks after he was released. His collision worked very differently since this was before the devs added a raycast to his camera and when his POV was short. At the same time, many people discovered how to perform the well-known J-flicks. J-flicks were a type of flick that Blight could do where he could lunge around loops and corners very tightly just like the hug tech. This would involve flicking to the left or right in a single frame because, at the time of Blight's release, there was NO restriction to how far you could flick in a single direction. There was no external software or hacks needed to pull these off. What you needed was patience and practice because it was also very easy to over flick. Despite this flick also being considered unintended, there were other flicks that were not just unintended but also straight up exploits.
Once example is the lag flick. This flick involved using external software to drop your frames while rushing. This would result in Blight rotating a full 180 degrees mid rush and running backwards momentarily to then lunge forward. These flicks were the definition of unintended. Thankfully, the devs patched it. There are various montages of Blight lag flicks on YouTube in case you're curious.
However, you may be wondering, why am I mentioning the J-flicks? The reason is because, just like the hug tech, they were met with criticism. Many survivors complained on how powerful they were, but just like the hug tech, J-flicks were counterable. How? There are three factors that play into this. The first being the survivor's positioning, the second being Blight's hitbox and camera, and the third being Blight's positioning.
For the longest of time, survivors have always hugged loops very tightly to avoid losing distance while in chase. I remember when people back then considered hugging a loop and looping in general to be considered unintended but the devs accepted it as a core mechanic in the game, but that's not the point. The point is that survivors will hug loops to avoid losing distance. The J-flick was, in essence, a counter to survivors hugging tiles or loops very tightly. However, that didn't stop survivor from learning the counterplay.
Blight's hitbox during a Lethal Rush is a wide cone, but it's short in length. However, this initial hitbox turns into a longer, but narrower one once you go for a swing in power. Because of how narrow the hitbox became, survivors who played as Blight or have heard of this info took this to their advantage to avoid the J-flick by simply going wide or moving away at the last second depending on ping. The other detail that survivors used to their advantage was the fact that the J-flick would lock your camera in place making the Blight unable to move during the flick. You couldn't do correctional flicks at the time like it is possible now. In essence, once you went for a J-flick, it would be a calculated, but risky play to go for. The locked in camera was also taken as an advantage. Lastly, the survivors would also be aware of Blight's position during a rush. Let's take, as an example, a car or truck on Autohaven. In a typical looping scenario, both the survivor and killer would be at opposite ends of the vehicle. If the survivor sees Blight rushing to their end and the survivor runs to the other end and proceeds to see that Blight has now fully rotated, that would give the survivor a good indication that Blight is going for a J-flick. Because of this visual and the information mentioned in this paragraph, the survivor would simply take a step back from the tile or move to the side very quickly at the last second.
If you want a visual of what I'm talking about, here's a good video from Lilith Omen displaying this exact example:
Now, why am I mentioning the counter to the J-flicks? It's because hug techs and J-flicks have lots of similarities. Firstly, they're both a counter to survivors looping tiles and loops tightly. Secondly, they both had risks. Once you went for a J-flick or a hug tech and you miss, you risk having the chase last longer. Thirdly, you can see a Blight going for a hug tech just like the J-flicks. If you see a Blight hugging a tile in a stationary position during a rush, that gives a clear indication that the Blight is going for a hug tech. This, again, would allow survivors to react in time by either moving out of the way or by simply going to another part of the tile that's safer. Lastly, the only difference between the two is that the hug tech doesn't lock your camera in place like the J-flick did, but the fundamentals of knowing how the hitbox worked and knowing the position of the Blight during a rush are all still the same.
As of recently, there are many arguments people in the DBD community have been saying that I personally find quite irrational. One of the two most prominent ones' I've been seeing is that Blight will no longer be S-tier and that he'll be boring. I civilly disagree with these two arguments for the following reasons:
- As mentioned before, Blight never had a hug tech when he was released. When people kept on playing him, they discovered how strong he was with bump logic and the flicks. So, to hear these people say he will no longer be S-tier is quite irrational.
- Learning bump logic, while it may be discouraging, can also be fun.
I myself am not impacted by the removal of the hug tech since I played Blight way before it was discovered. As a matter of fact, I'm convinced that the removal of it will definitely increase Blight's skill floor, but will it remove a bit of the fun factor? Yes, but not too much. This is understandable though. The hug tech is a fun but risky move to go for. In contrast, bump logic, the collective knowledge of what you can and can't bump off of to then create a path with the rushes you have in order to hit a survivor, is a very efficient way to play. You can even see this during comp as well. It's pretty safe to say that 9 times out of 10, survivors will not be able to avoid a bump logic hit unless they spin you or do something to your FOV to make you miss.
For the reasons above, this could be a case of why the hug tech should stay, but if it eventually gets removed, then it'll get removed. Thank you for reading and like always, I'm open to being wrong and corrected. Cheers.
Comments
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Like I said, people are overreacting about this, it was only a matter of time before the day came that they would remove hug tech, because Mandy announced it 2 years ago, but then when the announcement was made, it was the same thing, people defending whether it should stay or not, but they took so long to have another news about it that they were calm, but now that it has arrived, they are thinking as if it was not inevitable, and hug tech was not the first Blight exploit to be removed, people talking like
Oh no, now we're going to have to play the way it was meant to be played, now everyone's going to use brutal and break the pallets fast and take down the survivors faster than they do today
Fun fact, people already do that nowadays, so it won't be new, but let's wait until ptb to see if at least his hitbox is better, if so, great progress, but he has so many hitbox problems nowadays that it's hard to believe they'll fix it 100%
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