Solution to Camping and Tunneling: Pain Shock effect
Besides camping and tunneling this proposal also partly solves self-care being too viable, "gen-rush" and trying to unhook yourself while the killer is standing near the hook to down you again if you succeed.
Disclaimer: anything I propose in this post is not supposed to make survivors or killers stronger. If any part of my proposal makes any side stronger as a side effect, it can be balanced out with other changes to restore the balance.
Analysis
Camping
The motivation for camping is:
1. as a killer you want to have as few survivors in the game as possible. With each sacrificed survivor, there's one survivor less that can do gens/save/heal. And a sacrificed survivor can't heal himself anymore, eliminating your effort of injuring him.
2. you can be unsure if you can down more survivors during the game, so you want to secure points
The solution for this is simply longer hook phases. Camping one survivor the entire game should secure only 1 kill for the killer. This will discourage camping for the most part. This will also allow other survivors to go for unhooking more strategically. It might be worth it to disallow suiciding in the struggle phase. It would make games much more predictable for balance purposes.
Tunneling
It's more effective for the killer to chase the unhooked/hit survivor, because:
1. global motivation: if you hook the same survivor again, he enters the struggle phase, so he is much closer to being eliminated from the game. This brings us back to the motivation #1 for camping. So, tunneling has the same motivation for the most part. If motivation for camping is eliminated, half of the motivation for tunneling is eliminated too.
2. local motivation: you only need 1 hit for the unhooked survivor instead of 2 for the person who unhooked him if he is not injured. It's also easier to track the unhooked/hit survivor, because he leaves blood trails and moans. These reasons also bring us back to motivation #2 for camping - it's easier to secure points with injured survivor.
The solution: "Pain Shock" effect
Pain Shock: each time a survivor feels pain (after being hit or after being unhooked - you get a metal hook out of your body, after all), new status - "Pain Shock" is applied for duration of about 2-3 minutes. During this time the speed of actions of this survivor is reduced by 15-30%. It affects repairing gens, healing etc. The timer of this effect is not affected by anything (maybe except for Adrenaline perk). Healing doesn't get rid of Pain Shock, it persists until the timer has run out. The timer can run out while you are still injured (the shock, caused by the pain is gone).
Pain Shock has two phases.
First phase: "Deep Shock".
It is very short (2-3 seconds). It is the time period, when survivor runs faster right now after being hit by killer or unhooked. You are deeply shocked by the pain, as a result you can run faster and are immune to more pain for a very short time. If survivor receives a hit during "Deep Shock" phase, effects of "Borrowed Time" are applied to him, he doesn't get downed immediately. This effect will almost never play a role when a healthy survivor is hit, it only affects survivors when they are unhooked.
The purpose of this is to target the second part of the motivation for tunneling. It discourages killers from tunneling the unhooked survivor (or healthy survivor that was just hit), because with Deep Shock the unhooked survivor is not the easiest target anymore for being downed. Instead of 1 hit you now need 2 hits both for him and for the unhooker, if the unhooker was healthy. If the unhooker was injured you need 1 hit less to down him than the unhooked survivor.
As a side effect, Deep Shock also prevents situations when killer hooks you, no one can unhook you, the killer waits near the hook while you are trying to unhook yourself to down you again. This situation makes no sense. With Deep Shock you have a slight chance to get away, which is much better than being doomed.
The second phase of Pain Shock status lasts 2-3 minutes. During this time the speed of your survivor actions is reduced by 15-30%, because you are shocked and can't perform actions effectively. This is done to counter the first part of the motivation for camping and tunneling. When a survivor unhooks a hooked survivor, in many situations it will be more efficient for the killer to target the unhooker now, because the survivor that was just unhooked suffers the Pain Shock effect anyway and he would be repairing gens slower than the unhooker, while he unhooker could just get back to gens and repair them at full speed otherwise.
Another side effect of Pain Shock is that it prevents situations when you hit survivors and they heal afterward and this repeats again and again without any downsides for the survivor. Self-Care and healing in general becomes less powerful.
Optionally Pain Shock can also be applied while the survivor is being healed (you feel pain while bandaging). As soon as you stop healing (if you are fully-healed or not doesn't matter), the Pain Shock timer starts and your survivor actions are slowed down for 2-3 minutes.
It also gives an additional reason to be less cocky. Even if you DS out of killers's grasp, you will be more of a burden for gen repair for 2-3 minutes.
All this opens new strategies. As a survivor sometimes you might decide not to heal. As a killer you might decide not to down a survivor, but injure as many as possible instead to slow down gen repair process etc.
The only possible problem I can see with this solution is that it might slightly discourage survivors from saving, but I don't think the effect would be too big, most people are ready to take the risk for unhook points.
Comments
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@Troman said:
If survivor receives a hit during "Deep Shock" phase, effects of "Borrowed Time" are applied to him, he doesn't get downed immediately.
Free borrowed time would encourage bad play for the survivors. Yolo saves!
@Troman said:
The second phase of Pain Shock status lasts 2-3 minutes. During this time the speed of your survivor actions is reduced by 15-30%, because you are shocked and can't perform actions effectively.Some matches last 3-4 minutes.
If 3 gens are done when the first survivor gets hooked: Do you think it would make more sense for the killer to chase another survivor at this point of the match instead of tunneling from a strategic point of view?0 -
Dying Light. Remember Me.
Some builds require you to tunnel. Other times it's just bad saves.
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This makes the game more difficult for killers, which it already is.
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Hmmm. I'm not sure I like the solution to camping. But the Painshock mechanic seems like an interesting sidegrade. Borrowed time might need a change however of course.
I would like to point out that Pain Shock might help with camping too. Cuz if you go for other survivors then you would be able to apply it to them even if they get an unhook. Also the timer is already long enough that camping isn't worth it.
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I have to say that I hate the name "pain shock". There has to be a better word to describe it. I also think the effect should only happen to unhooked survivors. Just being hit by the killer should not result in a 15-30% action speed penalty for 2-3 minutes. That is just absurd. Perhaps a future killer perk could do something like that, but it definitely shouldn't be a free effect for killers.
As for the anti-camp mechanic, I would be okay with extending the duration of sacrifice phases on survivors, but I think it should be tied to the number of generators that still need to be completed. That way, early game while most or all of the gens still need worked on the killer would be punished for camping, but late game when there is only 1 or 2 gens left the killer has the option to actually finish a survivor off. So currently the hook phases are 60 seconds for stage 1 and 2. A modified version of this based on generators that need finished to power the exit gates might look like this:
5 gens left: 90 seconds
4 gens left: 80 seconds
3 gens left: 70 seconds
2 gens left: 60 seconds
1 gen left: 55 seconds
Exit gates powered: 50 secondsSomething like that seems fair to me, especially with "pain shock" slowing down hooked survivors action speed.
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The solution to camping is simple.
DO THE ######### GENS, that is all.
The solution to tunnelling get better team mates that don't yolosave and learn to run chases better.
You don't need to escape to pip or come out ahead on points.
You can't win every game the killer certainly does not which is probably why he's camping.
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