The Unknown changes | Undeserved, Unnecessary, Unfortunate...
Hello!
I'm Brandyn, but many know me as wispfell. I am one of the top Unknown creators and players of the Unknown on steam. I have roughly 2000+ and counting UVX downs, and I have spent a large majority of my time playing the Unknown since its release. It had come to my attention early on during the Dev update that you all were making the decision to change The Unknown, however I had decided to let it sit for a little bit in order to determine my true feelings on the changes.
I love a large majority of the decisions BHVR make on Dead by Daylight, but I have to say that they completely missed the mark on the Unknown changes in the PTB.
The Unknown changes are a FLAT NERF in every single way, with a single miniscule buff to his basekit teleport speed.
"That makes no sense though, all of the changes seem really positive on paper?"
If you put the time and effort into understanding and trying out the changes, you will come to recognize that all of the changes added to Unknown are pointless, and don't even do what they are intended to do.
To quote Behaviour:
"We tend to revisit Killers a few months after they release and see if they need any balance changes. It turns out The Unknown is already in a pretty good spot and is well liked by players, so that makes our job easy this time around!"
To say this, and nerf every aspect of The Unknowns kit seems really silly to me?
The UI Change:
While the changes to the UI seem solid on paper, and portray a new amount of information to newer Unknown players, in execution you notice that the icons take up too much unnecessary space. The icon next to the UVX power, which shows that you can press M1 to fire the UVX projectile is redundant and unnecessary as this information is already portrayed at the bottom of the screen like every other killer power. This icon in particular needs to be removed, as it serves no purpose other than to clog the screen with unnecessary UI elements. Everything else is nice!
Movement Speed now Decreases Sooner When Charging Your Power (UVX):
Out of all the changes in the PTB, this one hurt the most. Why? This is the largest nerf The Unknown got. The Unknown now gets slowed 0.07 seconds after you begin holding M2. This makes Unknown get less distance in every chase, encourages newer Unknowns to M1 and most importantly makes Unknown a killer that relies entirely on ping. The 0.07 second window cannot be hit on high ping. What this means is if you suffer from network issues, or don't have access to a close enough dedicated server, you will be even weaker. This is also a severe accessibility issue, as the window to tap is so fast, that individuals may have issues regularly being able to do this. BHVR completely missed the mark on this change, and this is what they claim:
"Tapping the Power button can postpone a Hallucination from spawning, but to a Survivor it appears as if you’re about to launch UVX. This forces Survivors to constantly dodge and lose distance without slowing down the Killer. We have reduced the window before the Killer slows down while charging their Power. This will make it harder to tap the Power button without slowing down while focusing on a chase."
To claim that tapping the power button can trick survivors into thinking you are about to launch UVX is a complete fabricated lie. Not only is there a distinctly visual and auditory representation of when the Unknown is able to fire the UVX, Unknown is also slowed down to a vast amount. To any survivor it is very clear when The Unknown is able to fire, BHVRS reasoning for this change is fundamentally flawed and it shows that BHVR doesn't understand how Unknowns power works. If you don't believe me! The attached video shows proof of this. The execution of this change on PTB also doesn't even work correctly, as Unknown can still tap the UVX, however to a way lesser extent. This change should be entirely reverted as all it does it nerf the Unknown in chase, because new players don't know how to read animations and sound queues.
Addon Nerfs:
The next thing that was changed were the addons Blurry Photo and Vanishing Box. Both of these addons received flat nerfs that are both too much. You might say, Unknown got the basekit TP so they obviously had to nerf the Blurry Photo to compensate, however unlike other examples of BHVR adding an addon to basekit, for Blurry Photo on the PTB it does not equal as much as the current Blurry Photo on live. This means running Blurry Photo is not as good. Vanishing Box received a much deserved trade-off, which only needs adjusted in my opinion. 80% is a massive number for the addon to slow the hallucination spawn time. This means you roughly spawn one hallucination every 81 seconds if nobody is currently weakened. This addon is not reliable at all, and newer players will not get any value out of this addon. The trade-off needs to be reconsidered, or lowered down to a more healthy value, because as of now there is 0 reason to run Vanishing Box if it goes live in this state when there are alternatives like Captured by The Dark which work way better, with barely any trade-off.
The VFX Change and Sound-effects:
Finally! The VFX change, while miniscule in detail, actually change quite a bit about how the Unknown can read survivors. Now whenever a survivor is weakened, that purple goo (almost like the nemesis infection) stays persistent on the survivor. This effect used to only show during the duration of the hinder for Unknown, this was good information to have as Unknown. I think that the purple VFX staying persistent should not have been added. The sound effects are good!
First of all, if you read all the way through this, thank you for taking the time out of your day to understand, and discuss these changes. It means a lot to me.
I will be severely upset if all of these changes go live, and I'd go as far to say as I think that I would rather NONE of this go live at all and I mean that sincerely, I never needed blurry photo. I did just fine without the basekit teleport buff. This overall just hits me and many others in the gut for no reason other than BHVR wanted to change stuff. If this change goes live, newer players will not be able to pick up Unknown to the same extent, as all these do is make him even more complicated and clunky.
I will also be uploading a full yet simplified video on this if you don't want to read this. Likely tomorrow which will go over everything I discuss in here, when I do post it, I will edit this post and attach it here.
If you have any feedback, or wish to discuss this please do reply! I understand not everyone will agree with me and I am content with that.
Thank you!
Comments
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You're a 100 percent right
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I'm unknown main myself and i completely agree with wispfell (brandyn) opinion on changes to unknown that we saw on PTB.
- The UI icon that tells you that you can shoot your UVX (second from the left side) is completely unnecessary and should be removed + the change of desing of the power ability is actually worse than the previous one (now on ptb it reminds the design of a "Septic touch" perk from The Dredge. The old design of a power ability icon was fine as is and did not needed to be changed.
- The change to the movement speed was aimed to fix the problem of faking but this change completely fails at doing so, because you still can tap power button without slowing down (which u should be able to because unknown needs to postpone hallucinations) and instantly make a sound which would let "some" survivors believe that you want to shoot UVX, but where it succeeds is in the making unknown feel clunkier to play as by punishing various scenarios of using your power with more sooner decrease of a movement speed making unknown more clunkier to play and less begginer friendly. This way of treating a problem is conceptually wrong and will lead to a more heavily M1 based playstyle instead of a fun and unique M2 based playstyle on unknown. One way of properly fixing this problem would be to make the action of tapping a power button (trying to postpone a hallucination) not threatening to the survivor that they need to dodge upcoming UVX shot. The way to make it work is to remove initial (instant) sound when unknown taps power button but instead make it so that initial sound appears after 0,2 seconds of holding power button (like old 0,2 second window to penalty). This will make it so if unknown wants to fake and make survivor dodge a shot of UVX he needs to hold the power for 0,2 second after which OLD unknown started to slowdown and now it will become more of choice "do you want to fake a survivor but suffer a slowdown after 0,2 seconds or you don't wanna fake. But if you just want to postpone a hallucination the sound will not trigger. Additionally you can keep a sound instantly triggering on the killer side of things while on survivor side it will trigger after the unknown gets slowed (after 0,2 seconds) this will make it so unknown player can enjoy the immensely satisfying sound of tapping power button extremely fast while on the survivor side they will not hear any sound from tapping the power button but only the sound that triggers after pressing the button for 0,2 seconds.
- Blurry photo Add-on was fan favorite not because it was good in a scenarios with 1.4 seconds of recovery (20% base kit) but because it was good in a scenarios with 0.85 seconds of recovery (50% old blurry photo). The recovery speed basically has a line (time of recovery) after which it renders useless and this line is what was making blurry photo fan favorite (it's the scenarios for example that unknown can tp on the same side of the pallet as a survivor and survivor will not make the vault and will get hit but if he can make the vault without getting hit when unknown teleports then this recovery speed renders useless. And the 20% base kit + 15% of new blurry photo doesn't cross this line and renders it useless so it needs to be not lower than the previous 50% that provided old blurry photo and if you want to "allow more freedom to experiment with other addons without missing out", then the base kit value should cross that line of recovery speed and be like 45-50% then you will get more variety in addon choices for unknown.
- Vanishing box grants on average throughout the match 1-2 extra weakened survivors that makes the hallucinations respawn time 36 seconds for 1 weakened survivor and 26 seconds for 2 survivors (middle ground is like 30 seconds) while base hallucination respawn time is 45 seconds. This addon saved you on average 12-18 seconds on hallucination respawn time but now with 80% penalty to respawn time this addon absolutely kills early-game where no one is weakened because u will have 81 seconds base hallucination respawn time and in middle-game with 1-2 extra weakened survivors provided by Vanishing box hallucination respawn time will be around 54 seconds. This is way too much of a nerf to the vanishing box. In my opinion downside should be around 30-35% it will make base respawn time around 60 seconds and with 1-2 survivors weakened respawn time of around 40 seconds.
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