Killer Perks Downward Trend
Recent Killer Perks have been either decent, to bad, to completely useless, for the most part.
Its definitely a recent trend, cause back when Artist dropped, with amazing perks, almost every Killer before Artist had pretty good Perks, not saying every single Killer had 3/3 amazing Perks, but there wasnt as many bad releases.
Ever since then there has been alot of times where you could go multiple Killers with no good perks.
And recently, its just been nothing good, not saying there is completely no value of any of the perks within the latest Killer Releases, but overall its quite a niche set.
The Animatronic: Phantom Fear is probably the only perk that will see any use, and even then its not great.
The Ghoul: Forever Entwined, as a feel good perk, and then 2 Niche Perks that either arent great choices or undertuned.
The Houndmaster: Just Jagged Compass and the rest are niche at best.
The Dark Lord: Human Greed atleast has the unique funny power of letting you Kick chests, but theyre overall not great, unique, but not great.
The Lich: Nothing great, a vault speed perk with a pretty big downside (Just use Bamboozle), Weave requires Franklins, and Franklins just met its Demise, so thats a 2 for 1 deal going down, and Languid Touch is an exhaustion perk that exists.
The Unknown: Unbound finally saw use for like a month after being useless since release, didnt last long, Undone, has been awful since release, a perk that relies on missing Skillchecks, i mean if they miraculously miss 7 Skill Checks u can finally get, a SINGULAR use of Pop goes the Weasel, Congratulations, Unforeseen is alright but its quite obvious.
Thats 6 Killers in a row with no Objectively Solid perks.
Perks are alot of the Spice of the game, and it feels like BHVR is too afraid to add good Killer Perks.
With how Haywire got treated, it basically got Skullmerchanted, before it even released, yes it was badly designed.
What is another badly designed perk that is recent, oh right.
Conviction, 0 changes from PTB, i wonder why, 25% pickup infinite unbreakables at a 'cost' of healing once.
Clearly BHVR doesnt have this same mindset for Survivor Perks.
We still get great perks like Shoulder the Burden recently, and Nic Cage who is a little less Recent, probably has the best 3/3 Amazing perk design, all 3 of his perks are mostly well balanced, fun, and still see constant use.
I would love to see similar energy on Killer Perks, experimenting with unique, cool and fun ideas (Chem Trap, Dramaturgy, Shoulder the Burden, Plot Twist, Bardic Inspiration, Mirrored Illusion)
Even if they dont wanna design good Perks, id love to see more original and fun ones (Human Greed) but we just get neither, and a whole lot of mediocrity at best.
Maybe im wrong, but i just barely see any interest in most recent Perks from Killer side, and its gotten stagnant.
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Krasue once again follows this trend of having mostly niche perks being generous, Ravenous i find pretty interesting, but its countered by Vigil as any other Exposed perk and statuses in general are, and a one time proc.
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same with survivor perks. Perks seem like they’ve been left behind in favor of killer powers.
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I feel this is just perk design on both sides, it sucks.
from Invocations being horribley useless to Apocalyptic ingenuity having such a stupid activation for what's just a party pallet.1 -
It feels like a negative feedback loop to me.
- Killers have obnoxiously overpowered killer powers in the roster that, when combined with perks, makes the killer ridiculous, so killer perks have to be nerfed constantly around this fact.
- Survivors in soloQ get smoked constantly because Survivors have obnoxiously overpowered SWF strats to make perks ridiculous, so survivor perks have to be restrained constantly around this fact.
- Because SoloQ gets merced at every turn, survivors keep getting more effects basekit and the odd yolo buffs to older perks that then become abusable by SWF.
- Lower tier killers become ever more increasingly difficult to play, so everyone switches to killers with obnoxiously strong powers and continues to stomp soloQ games, the cycle repeats.
No one is willing to take a nerf or any restrictions for SWF, because "that's punishing you for playing with friends"; because apparently the obvious problem of coordinated SWFs spamming powerful perks is not an issue enough to be worth using your brain for 20s to come up with an alternative combo before you ready up.
Similarly, no one is willing to nerf the strongest killers in the game in a meaningful way, because if you aren't at least as strong as Ghoul, the community largely deems you as trash and not worth playing... which to be fair is quite true, as m1 gameplay gets punished more and more by the ever increasing threats for all aspects of the game, to the point the only way to keep up is to have an obnoxious power.... set to be even more an issue following the incoming anti killer update.
So basically, perks have to suck because killer powers have to sit in the Singularity kind of tier to not get run over by strong survivors teams and builds... which makes any non A tier killer a ballache to play, so people only play A tier killers, and thus killer perks "overperform" and get nerfed.
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Agreed with the feedback loop thing on most of this, Strong Killers have basically put a chokehold on Perks forcing them to be undertuned in fear of being too good on 1-2 of the strongest killers, even if it was balanced on 90% of the Killer roster.
For Killers, i would make these changes:
Nurse should not see Aura when using her Power.
Blight should not be able to break a pallet and immediately rush, when Ghoul had the ability to do that taken away within like the first weeks, give him the same change that makes him lose Tokens and put his power on cooldown when he breaks a pallet.
As for SWFs, id rather they dont nerf SWFs, but give SoloQ bare minimum comms, if they bridge the gap between the 2, the Solo Q experience will be better overall, and if there no longer is as vast a canyon between the two, maybe they can balance Survivor in general, instead of tip-toeing around SWF/SoloQueue, cause currently most of their changes just make lower tier killers worse, and SWFs stronger, cause they dont wanna address the elephant in the room, which is COMMUNICATIONS, there is nothing stronger than Communication in DbD.
But i will say Survivors are still getting really good perks, and Gen-speed Stacks stupidly well, especially when coordinated.
As of recent perks they got One-Two-Three-Four, Ghost Notes, Conviction, One-Two-Three-Four made Genspeed-Builds even faster, Ghost Notes is more anti-exhaust, but also, it allows some insane scratchmark removal, allowing you to nearly have no scratchmarks, and Conviction is Conviction.-1 -
I think Compromise perks need a Rework, the playstyle they require makes very little sense, and the stuff that has to line up to get value feels very forced, its like you play around getting VALUE of the perks instead of just trying to play the game, maybe just me though.
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Even Phantom Fear is pretty bad. A single 2 second aura read per minute is awful. Languid Touch is good, too good, that perk pretty much permanently keeps the survivor you're chasing exhausted
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and it doesnt help that kicking gens without perks for it just doesnt work… 5% and then regressing at 0.25% is just unacceptable in modern dbd (it gets repaired by 1% per second…) especially with the 8 kick limit. Killers just do not have the tools to create more time hence the constant tunneling and slugging to generate a form of pressure you cannot otherwise create
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surelly not, every new survivor release, we see a new build and most times a new meta perk arises… that doent happen on killers
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DBD as a whole really needs a mid-chapter dedicated to toning things down. Half the problems in the game stem from the fact games can be over within 5 minutes. DBD matches need to be slower in pace so there is time for both sides to really engage with the game instead of speedran to endscreen.
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I think the problem is more that people have an unreasonably high standard for perks, on both sides. Artist is a really good example- she didn't just have good perks, she had two perks that were TOO good, and one of them needed multiple rounds of noticeable nerfs until it's finally landed in its current resting place of… one of the strongest perks in the game.
Release Pain Resonance and Pentimento shouldn't be the standard, they were too good. Those are examples of perks that overshot a reasonable strength on release, in my opinion the ideal state for perks should absolutely be weaker than that.
Of the six killers you listed, I would argue at least five had objectively solid perks on release, as much as anything can be argued to be objective in this context. That's not a high bar, after all- the perks just have to be good enough to be noticeable and worthwhile in their intended use cases.
Houndmaster, for example, has Jagged Compass, which you mentioned too. That's a solid perk, no two ways around it, it's just good.
Even her other two perks, though- No Quarter has some good use cases when used more actively and is a reasonably okay if unreliable anti-medkit perk when used passively. All-Shaking Thunder, too, may be niche but that doesn't make it bad- it just means it has a specific effect you go out of your way to use, not that the effect is weak or unreliable by default.Taking a brief (hopefully, I tend to get long winded…) look at the other killers, we have…
Springtrap: Phantom Fear is quite solid, it's a quite good information perk that also has the added benefit of forcing a scream to interrupt actions which gives it a lot of synergies. Not necessarily top tier, but one of the stronger perks we're going to discuss in this list. Very good.
Help Wanted is more in the "decent but not great" vein, but it does at least have one very strong synergy in Machine Learning. It's fine, could do with a buff of some kind. Haywire is mediocre, fair enough on that front.Ghoul: Weaker across the board, but you have a feel-good perk that can help fool flashlight saves in Forever Entwined and a perfectly worthwhile + potentially strong endgame perk in None Are Free. While Nothing But Misery isn't good now, it's one small number buff away from being good, and I think that's worth mentioning in this context.
Dracula: I'd argue all his perks are at least "decent", with Wretched Fate being genuinely quite strong but in boring ways. The other two aren't bad though, they're just solid overall with relatively low but reliable impact. Dealer's choice how to count them but I lean towards them being solid over mediocre.
Vecna: All his perks are good. The downside for Dark Arrogance barely matters (though I will agree there's no reason not to run Bamboozle over it - this perk is badly designed, not weak), Weave Attunement's synergy with Franklin's wasn't affected by that perk's nerf, and Languid Touch is an extremely solid anti-Exhaustion perk that can counter basically any Exhaustion perk other than Sprint Burst. These are just good perks, strength-wise.
Unknown: This one I'll grant. Unforeseen is okay, but Unbound is mediocre and Undone is miserably awful.
There are very decent good perks in there, they just aren't on the same level of Pain Resonance and other top-tier perks. I don't think that's a problem, necessarily, even if a few of these perks could use buffs on their own merits.
Also as an aside I don't want to seem like I'm supporting the opposite claim, so just to be clear: Survivor perks across this same time period are just as good if not better on average as the killer perks, recent releases have been pretty good overall with only a few flops.
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Yeah the new killer perk releases have been unusably bad for a long time now. It's not even their design, it's just that their numbers are way too safe. This isn't even developer time to fix, it's just number tweaks. For how many wildly bad perks there are we should be seeing at minimum like 10 perks on each side getting huge buffs on every patch. As with the recent perks, most these are just number tweaks again, so "time" shouldn't be a factor.
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I mean, yeah. Multiple perks released with such awful numbers (All-Shaking Thunder, Haywire, Phantom Fear, Unbound, Dark Arrogance, Dominance, ect.)
To the topic, there are some better perks we recieved, but there is no denying that Krasue released with a triple meh.
Ravenous has the same issue as Grim Embrace had, plus being fully countered by staying injured or prerunning.
Wandering Eye is weird. I am wondering if they made it for Nurse and maybe Plague?
And the Hex is kind of mid, too. We got a way better version not long ago - Unforseen.
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And most of these aren't flawed at design, it's just numbers. Excessively and unnecessarily long cooldowns, laughably low durations, downsides that have no reason to exist given their power level ect.
Ravenous requiring 4 unique hooks for only 60 seconds of Exposed is garbage. You can easily avoid them for the duration and if they're injured you just wasted the whole perk slot. Either needs a much longer duration, some seconds of aura when it activates, or maybe it also causes anyone injured when it triggers to also become broken for 60 seconds as well.
Wandering Eye either needs a significantly larger radius or making it show survivors outside X meters instead of inside. I personally like the outside X meters version a lot better. I've tried to make this perk work, it's just bad.
The hex is so bad. It could literally sit on a gen they never even touch and do nothing or they cleanse it before that gens touched. For a perk to be a hex the power level needs to be significantly higher and immediately impactful. I'd probably make it apply to at least 2 gens instead of just 1, maybe even 3. Most hex perks in general are just too high risk for too low reward. They need either lower risk or higher power for a lot of them.
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I think unfortunately it’s impossible to provide us strong killer perks without making one killer annoyingly unbearable in match. I don’t expect to see new strong perks anymore
I feel perk system starting to feel outdated, and maybe we need something like tree of talents which is really limited to specific pull but actually provide strong effects
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Staring at Nurse, Blight and Singu…..
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Yes. But me personally remember SM story
Some killers need to have built in limitations for not making perks straight up useless for others. Singu is also not that unbearable as soon as not using 3 gen hold perks or Blight and Nurse not having info around map
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