DBD will never have a nice QoL without a major rework to its mechanics

Theoskaiser

First of all, I wanna clarify that im not a sweaty player, maybe there's a lot of players that have much more hours than I have (although I think I do have many hours of play), and maybe this opinion isn't the most expert, but I wanted to share it and Im curious to know what do you all think of it. So please, be nice and lets get a nice discussion here.
Also, english is not my first language so sorry if something is written wrong.

So, what I wanted to say is that I think that DBD is frustrating and sometimes even boring because of its core mechanics, which are hard to balance without the risk of worsen the Quality of Life of the players.

Lets talk about survivors first: The main objective is to do gens, which literally comes down to left click for a minute, or sometimes even more, with just a few skill checks that you dont even have to do great. Its not the majority of the experience, but I do had some games where I dont even see the killer, and Im sure that I'm not the only one. This lack of complexity makes that the most direct strategy to prevent survivors to do their objectives its to make the "left click" moment longer, which make this part of the gameplay even more boring when its to long. But if there's no mechanic to make longer (and more tedious) the gens, then you make a game where Killers players feel that they dont have tools to hinder the survivor objective. This part of the game is already hard to balance while keeping the QoL: or you make survivor objective boring, or you make killers frustrate for not having an efficient way to prevent the gens get done.

This isn't a new issue, and isn't the first time that someone complains about it. So, why dont change it? We already have second objectives that feels so useless , and feel like a complete lose of your time. Why don't give them a more important role in the game?

I allow myself to imagine: what could happen if survivors had to search some missing parts of the gens in chests, and gens could not be repaired without them? And maybe make more hidden chest (like in the Silent Hill map), so you even have a second objective to make the other second objective even more viable. You can do so much more with the balancing and the strategies. Aura reveal perks becomes more usefull. Maybe one survivor can become the "chest opener" of the team, maybe two. Maybe, if survivors are escaping to much, you dont have to make the gen repair longer, you just have to nerf chest timing, or chest spawn, or whatever is involved in the mechanics. And if survivors are not escaping, you can spawn one more chest so its easier to get that objective. Also, this makes killer experience more entertaining, because you dont only have to patrol gens, and gen regression perks are not the only strategy against survivor objectives. As a killer, you could bring perks like Dominance, from Dracula, instead of Corrupted Intervention or Grim Embrace.

I really think its a great idea to make the survivor role more dynamic.

Now, speaking about killer side of the mechanics: the hook stages are literally an incentive to tunnel. If a game gives you a price for doing the same action against the same target 3 times, its obvius that people would want to do that action against the same target 3 times. In every game works like that. As an simple example, in League Of Legends, why would you bring your entire team to kill the 0/12 enemy troll instead of trying to kill the 6/0 carry that gives you more gold? Maybe for fun, but if you want to win, its clear which one of the objectives its better to do. Its the same with survivors, why do chest when you have a gen almost completed? Why, as a killer, chase the 0 hooks survivor with escapist build instead of the dead on hook one? Just make no sense, I insist that the core mechanic incentive to tunnel. And with more and more basekit tools to prevent some frustrating situations (with which I mostly agree), they are just making killers search for even worse strategies. The current slug meta its not an accident, its the result of putting obstacles in the way of the main and core objective for killers: hook someone 3 times. Thats why competitive killers back then only tunneled and camped, and now they slug, cause they cannot tunnel or camp as they used to do.

So, we have again a balance and QoL paradox. You make tunnel or camping viable and frustrate the survivors, or you have to nerf tunnel and camping, and you have a killer with an confusing role as you are suposed to hook 3 times someone, but the game basekit are not allowing you to do it as efficiently. And gets even worse when hook stages are long enough to survivors ignore some hooked ones while doing gens, so as a Killer you dont even feel rewarded for hooking, cause you make no pressure.

Maybe hook stages should become global, so you dont have to hook the same survivor to kill, just hook a lot of times. I even imagine changes to slug without feeling it as bad as the previous proposal of Bhv, like the dying state having stages based on time on the ground, so you can prevent extreme sluging without nerfing it as a situational pressure mechanic. Imagine if in the last 20 secs of dying state you can always get up yourself. And maybe the last 40 seconds you always show your aura, even across blindness.

Idk, maybe my ideas would be terrible in gameplay, but what I want to communicate its that I feel that the core mechanics and objectives of the game should be reworked, because these mechanics are in themselves an obstacle to QoL in DBD.

Please, let me know what you think. I really like this game so its interesting to think how can it be better.

Thanks for your atention and sorry the long paragraph lol

piplup55

they just need to incentivize survivor-killer interaction. more base tracking for killer, more exploring for survivors that let them repair gens faster. shift the gameplay from chasing to simply interrupting. chasing should still be a core part of the game, but make the killer understand that the longer they spend chasing someone, the more they lose the gens and give them a reward for abandoning a chase and go patrol gens.

this would drag out matches. but that's how the game should be, a tug of war between survivors trying to do gens peacefully and being chased by the killer when they do. games shouldn't last 5 minutes cause the killer spent those 5 minutes chasing a single person who is clearly better than them and the other survivors did all 5 gens, or because the killer is an omega nurse who decided to slug all survivors since the beginning of the match. the second option is now being worked on thanks to operation health, thankfully.