Slowdown Perk Changes
I'm fairly new to this community and, relative to a lot of the other people around here, this game, so maybe I'll be missing the mark with this in some way that others can explain, and I don't expect this concept to be bulletproof against needing further tweaks/consideration to actually be balanced, but I have a bit of a lengthy suggestion for shaking up the killer perk meta.
Some of the two most complained about perks I see in this game are pop and pain res, not because they're generally perceived as extremely overtuned, but because they seem to be the go-to meta slowdown picks for the majority of the killer roster outside of specific edge cases or complimenting more unique builds. It's not hard to understand why they're in this position, and why they're not problematic enough to receive nerfs: They allow killers, especially stronger ones or killers being played well, to capitalize on success and get more pressure out of just doing their job. This risk/reward of not getting any value unless you get hooks has kept them in a pretty fair spot, but this also means that they're tuned around the idea (and the resulting player stats) that a lot of players are going to fail to use them properly, meaning that when they are used well, they're often some of the only ones worth using.
I think a small buff pass to some other slowdown perks would really help to alleviate the build homogeneity people complain about on both sides and give weaker killers better pressure tools, and for a lot of perks it might not even require numbers tweaking. With longer hook stages on the horizon, it'd help many killer players feel like a full slowdown build is less "necessary" if they had more options for creative and synergistic slowdown combinations that could give them a closer value to pop + pain res.
I have two main suggestions:
Changing a lot of the slowdown perks that require the damage generator action to proc on any regression event would allow for some more interesting combinations, with the caveat that perks shouldn't be allowed to proc themselves. If some kicking dependent perks like Eruption, Call of Brine, Overcharge, and Undone were applied on every regression event, it'd both make those perks more valuable and incentivize combinations where they can be procced this way.
My other key suggestion would be to add a small regression event— probably a minimum -2.5% proc— to ruin if a gen has been worked on for more than fifteen seconds straight before being abandoned, so it can also benefit from these changes and add more slowdown utility to hex builds as a whole. This would be a great tool for weaker killers, since making the right call in committing to a difficult chase would be much more valuable without forcing you to stop and kick the gen at either end of it.
"Okay, but wouldn't this just further incentivize 4x slowdown builds, or be too overbearing on high tier killers, or be too difficult for newer or more casual survivors to deal with?"
Good question! While it might make pop + pain res more powerful in the early game by virtue of being more effective in combos and might initially incline some players to run full slowdown or do so on stronger killers, a careless or overly efficient user of these perks could easily hit the regression limit on multiple gens. In trying to specifically deny a generator that the killer finds early on with a large amount of progress, kicking for eruption, downing to proc it, hooking with scourge, and kicking for pop would already be half of their limit for regressing that gen at all, and that's not to mention the two other survivors that could be spreading gen progress across the map in this hypothetical. More regression events are a double-edged sword for the killer and it'd be very easy for one that's too single-mindedly set on slowing the game down fail to capitalize on it if they're playing poorly or are against players that can coordinate properly. Newer or more casual survivors are generally much less likely to play against builds like this to begin with, but when they do, the common playstyles of avoiding terror radius to work on gens across the map or just trying to stealth away from chases as much as possible will lend themselves to a degree of natural counterplay, where the survivors staying in one place and making gens repeat targets of these builds can cause them to hit regression limit and make them almost guaranteed pops and the survivors spreading gen progress across the map can negate a lot of the info gained by these perks and stifle the slowdown they provide by making their procs less individually valuable.
This would also be an indirect buff to Oppression without needing to change it, since it would probably be— funny enough— too oppressive if it procced on every regression event, but spreading pressure across several generators would be a much more effective tool against survivors if they were generally more incentivized to spread their own gen pressure instead of making themselves the target of heavy regression event combos. Other perks that remain on-kick would benefit from this change as well, making for a wide variety of reasonable options for many killer builds.
TL;DR:
Allowing some perks that are currently based on gen kicking to proc on regression events instead could give almost every regression and gen-based info perk more interesting value and synergy and encourage greater build variety at all levels of play without being much more than a further anti-proxy incentive to complement the recent hook stage timer increase. Killers could benefit in more interesting and diverse ways from playing the game actively and designing builds to accommodate their playstyles and favorite killers.