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Three new base kit mechanics for game health.

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I have three suggestions for new base kit mechanics that I believe would help address some problematic gameplay behaviors.

1. Wiggle bar reduction.

For each hook state a survivor has, the amount of wiggle progress needed to struggle free is reduced by 30%, sort of like a brand new part but on the wiggle bar, but for every hook state on other survivors the amount is reduced by 10%.

So in the case that the killer has singled out a survivor at the beginning of the match to tunnel, and hasn't hooked anyone else, when that survivor is on their death hook they will struggle free at 40% progress. Similarly if a killer has just been juggling two survivors, and they are both on their death hooks, while the remaining two haven't been hooked, then both survivors will struggle free at 60%. Alternatively if all four survivors have been hooked once or twice then they all have to wiggle the full 100% to struggle free.

2. Blendy killer instinct.

As much as tunneling is a problem, there are also quite often survivors who, very early on in a match, stop working on generators and start hiding and just waiting for the other survivors to die so the hatch will spawn. Sometimes these survivors stop playing as soon as one survivor has been sacrificed, or even sometimes from the beginning of the match if they have a key or a challenge, effectively making it impossible for the other survivors to finish the generators.

My response to this behaviour is every 90 seconds each survivor generates a killer instinct notification for the killer, and for every hook state 30 seconds are added to the timer, but every hook state on other survivors reduces the timer by 10 seconds, therefore a survivor that is getting tunneled will only give off a killer instinct every 150 seconds, but a survivor who has survived to the end game collapse without being hooked would have a constant killer instinct.

This wouldn't completely prevent these survivors from throwing the other survivors under the bus, but I think it would add a needed level of risk to their gameplay. I think we've all been that second to last survivor, hitting the skill checks on our second stage hook, just trying to make the game last a little longer, hoping the killer can find the survivor who threw the game for everyone.

Edit since the point of this is to punish players who are taking the game hostage/not participating, the timer would pause when a survivor is working on generators, healing, unlocking a chest, cleansing a totem or opening the exit gate.

3. 4% slug recovery.

The earlier attempt at a base kit unbreakable didn't go very well, but it remains true that a killer going for a four man slug, especially at the very start of a match, is a very aggravating experience, and unless the survivors have very specific perks to counter it than it can be very difficult to deal with.

My idea here is that after a survivor has fully recovered, to the point where they have to get help from another survivor, they are given the option to try to get up, maybe give it a little animation where they try to push themselves to their feet.

Each attempt would take a few seconds, maybe 3-5, and have a 4% chance of success, just like trying to jump off the hook. To balance this out, so that a survivor can't just crawl into a corner and get 50 free tries to get up, every attempt to get up would generate a killer instinct notification at their location, so if used in a more normal match, where the killer simply lost the downed survivor, it would carry an element of risk as you're revealing your location to the killer.

Comments

  • StikMC
    StikMC Member Posts: 32
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    Curious, how would a Survivor gaining Killer instinct, therefore telling the Killer where they’ve been hiding for the last three minutes, punish the killer?

  • mizark3
    mizark3 Member Posts: 1,760
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    1. Only if this applies to Survivors already at 100% also. That way if I got 6 hooks on 3 Survs, the Distortion Rat has 160% wiggle bar size, so they get out in 25.6s on their first pickup.
    2. This seems good. I originally had a suggestion that if you are tied for the least hooks, then Distortion/OTR/Shadow-Step stealth perks don't work on you. That way you still needed to balance your build as Killer and bring Intel perks (to prevent 4 slowdowns). This could work though, I just don't like the idea of hiding for a hook save being cut short by a KI giving the Killer 2 hooks in basement for free. Maybe if the bar was visible for Survivors, and you could do a 'hold-breath' type action to delay it by 30s once per match/hook it would be fine.
    3. The problem with the basekit UB was the Mori system duct-taped to it, and healing slugs taking longer (poorly coded so it took 22.5s to heal instead of 16s as normal). Without the Mori system (and the heal bug), the basekit UB was fine. I think this attempt to stand should also come with a quicker bleedout/15-30s instantly, to make it a parallel to Kobes in allowing a surrender when being bledout like surrendering on hook to spawn hatch. Maybe to prevent abuse, enable Survivors to heal you for 5s after an attempt, that holding Run doesn't even prevent. That way it can't be used to tantrum without getting picked up.

  • Seraphor
    Seraphor Member Posts: 8,821
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    1. My initial reaction was "wiggle is ony meant to prevent the killer from walking around with a survivor and force them to use the nearest hook, not to actually prevent hooks without outside intervention". However this idea has something. I think the values need toning down a little, but a mechanic that literally makes a two-hook tunneled survivor a little harder, and riskier to hook could be a decent deterent.

    2. Not a fan. I think this is a little too "hand holding", particularly on how often the timer goes off. It might make a decent killer perk, but not basekit.

    3. This one I like, providing it comes with a similar cost mechanic to the unhook attempts. Each attempt reduces your bleedout timer by 10% or something. Have 'Luck' affect it similarly too.

  • goodfriday
    goodfriday Member Posts: 193
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    There was once upon a time when wiggling met something for hitting great skill checks=its shaved off 1 second per great wiggle, I cant tell you how many times I be like 99 and still get hook and its really really really irritating.

    It so called claimed that hitting great skill checks is now to let the killer sway by 20% like a pre built in boil over but killers walk to hooks no problem all the time, once more as if they didnt have agitation/iron grasp to carry survivors to hook in the first place, even that had counter boil over when it was buffed. The fact that every map had also got like 10 to 15 more hooks just shows the lack of care for survivors.

    Sometimes I think I do not waste my breath anymore as survivors will continue to suffer from 6.1 to now. Hence what made me play this very less/stream it very less and play/other streams far more. I recently got into Identity(even though I hate keyboard and mouse as an avid controller player but I must say its far funnier than dbd. Duo hunters is super fun.

  • Xernoton
    Xernoton Member Posts: 5,081
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    1. Not a good idea. A survivor that makes themself vulnerable to tunneling (i.e. working on a gen right next to the killer) should not be protected against it. If you make a mistake, then your opponent should be able to punish you for that.
    2. This sounds like a bad idea. The timer doesn't reset unless the killer instinct was granted. That means that you have to manage it as a survivor so that it will only activate when you're not your team mates, in a dead zone or going for an unhook. This is very risky and can potentially give the killer a competitive advantage even outside of the instances it is supposed to work in. Picture a Doctor, Sadako, Pinhead, Nemesis, Wesker, Dredge, Plague or Legion that can force you away from objectives even for a short time with this.
    3. This would still be abusable in hook dead zones. Basically, all 4 people cannot be slugged, no matter their perks and the killer instinct doesn't help either because there are no hooks around. So the killer has almost no way to beat this. Getting all 4 down at once is already a struggle when this happens, so let's not make it any worse. Slugging needs to be addressed but this is not the way to go.

  • WitchQueenTrina
    WitchQueenTrina Member Posts: 24
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    Having the wiggle bar extended starts to get into more complicated territory, however it would incentive killers to go for fresh hooks because those survivors would be easier to hook, so it could work. The numbers would probably need to be adjusted though.

    I agree with your points about the Stand Up attempts having a penalty to the survivors bleed out counter, and the cooldown afterwards where their team can pick them up so they can't rage quit.

    5 second animation, 5 second cooldown and 15 second penalty would be 25 seconds of bleed out in 10 seconds, so a survivor could leave a hopeless game 2.5X faster.

    Even with a 15 second penalty a survivor would bleed out most games before they actually managed to stand up, but I'm sure that a lot of survivors would prefer that to being slugged for the whole timer, and the fact that they have a chance to get up would still add incentive for the killer to think twice before leaving someone slugged for long periods.

  • WitchQueenTrina
    WitchQueenTrina Member Posts: 24
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    I spent some more time thinking about my ideas and I've made a couple changes.

    1. Wiggle

    The point is to discourage killers from singling out a survivor and tunneling them out of the game, not to remove options in the case of a game going badly for the killer.

    With that in mind I would change it so that the number of generators that have been repaired also counters the wingle bar reduction by 10%, or maybe even 15%, and of course the system deactivates completely during the end game.

    So if you have one survivor on their death hook, with no on else hooked, but there is only one generator left, then that survivor only has a 20% reduction, needing to reach 80% wiggle progress to struggle free, and if the last gen pops then that reverts to the standard wiggle bar.

    2. Blendy

    The idea is to discourage overly stealthy gameplay, where it negatively impacts the other survivors or is used to take the game hostage, therefore when a survivor is performing an action, such as healing or repairing, rather than pausing the timer it could refill the timer, so a survivor repairing a generator would gain an additional 90 seconds on their timer.

    Additionally the survivor being in chase with the killer, or on the hook, would pause the timer, and getting hit would add thirty seconds.

    3. Standing up

    4% chance of recovery on a 5 second animation, following recovering to full, means that on average it's going to take a survivor somewhere between 1 1/2 minutes to over 3 minutes to successfully stand up. The average number of attempts being 25, most successful attempts falling between 15 and 35 attempts. If a survivor even succeeds at getting up they will only do so once, or maybe twice if they're really lucky, before their bleed out timer kills them.

    This mechanic is less about actually getting the survivor up and more about making their situation feel less hopeless, while giving the killer an additional risk for attempting a four man slug.

    The game is still heavily survivor sided, and it has to be in order to function as an asymmetric multiplayer game, the larger number of players has to have the balance in their favor because in order to utilize that advantage they need to be coordinated and working in sync, if the advantage was on the side of the smaller side that side would win every game because they only need to play well, they don't need to rely on their team also playing well.

    I believe there are a lot of killer related things that need to be addressed, but in order to improve the gameplay for the average killer they need at address the problematic behaviors, of the ones who are abusing gameplay mechanics for an advantage, first in order to even get an accurate idea of the overall balance.

    Fix what's broken first, then balance the rest afterwards.

  • Devil_hit11
    Devil_hit11 Member Posts: 6,466
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    imagine breakout with 40% wiggle bar completion. perhaps they invent that as a perk. every hook state, you get a default wiggle progression of 10/15/20% filled.

    It is going enforce killer to slug especially if the team uses breakout+boil over.

    A perk that already is attempting to force this gameplay is Decisive Strike.

  • Neaxolotl
    Neaxolotl Member Posts: 393
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    Never mess with the wiggle bar

    That only makes game bad, just make change for other aspects

  • KatsuhxP
    KatsuhxP Member Posts: 218
    edited April 16
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    1. You'd have to make gens take longer, you can't hook on some maps without hooking at least 3-4 people before killing someone. So you'd have to give the killer the time to do that. Besides that, I'm not even tunneling if I switch between 2 survivors, it wouldn't be very wise to hook more than 2 if you ever want to get a kill before endgame.
    2. That sounds good I guess.
    3. Why exactly would you give them the chance to get up? If your team goes down all at the same time you've heavely missplayed, there's no reason to punish the killer for it. There's enough rng and perks involved you have to think about: UB. Deli. Soulguard if you're using hexes. Exponential. No mither (makes it impossible to 4-man slug, use it with buckle up and you have infinite UB with safe pickups), ftp+buckle up. So you have a lot of risk and to think about, not even talking about 4% that's already a rng-part.