Hook incentives are enough
In this post, I will go over why hook incentives should already be enough to make slugging and tunneling less of a win condition. I'm not gonna go into why the survivors shouldn't receive most of the changes that were planned for them in the slugging reduction and tunneling reduction update, because that has been picked apart quite a bit by most of the community.
Why do people slug? Some people do it to counter strategies from the survivor side, others recognize that it's the right play at the moment. Some however see it equal to hooking, and in reality, it's not too far apart. Both eventually kill the survivor. The only difference is that hooking can kill a survivor faster, while slugging saves you crucial seconds that you would spend picking up and walking to a hook.
Tunneling is the other option, which is really the only thing that competes with slugging. If you tunnel, you have the chance to get someone out the game early, swinging things in your favor. Both carry their risks, like if survivors manage to pick the others up quickly, slugging doesn't give any other benefits. Or if you can't tunnel out the person you've been hooking quick enough, the survivors can make progress quickly.
Spreading your hooks has no benefits compared to them without perks, and hook incentives (like the ones we had in the ptb) should aim to address this on a base kit level. Of course, making these better than the other two win conditions is gonna be a challenge, but not impossible, as they are on the right track. Here are a few ideas and some feedback on the ones in the ptb:
- Aura reveal is a really good incentive, allowing killers who spread their hook to have information is an amazing way to make people who have a more macro oriented playstyle to flourish with hook spreading.
- Haste is a nice addition. It clearly has some issues, like having higher tier killers benefit from them more, but maybe changing it to be an indefinite haste until you enter chase or get too close to a survivor would make killers without mobility get similar benefits from them as other killers.
- The gen regression part should be tied to the hooking action, not to the kick. Pop has always been favored by high mobility killers, who can quickly get to a gen to kick it before it pops. Making this work more similarly to Pain Resonance would allow all killers to benefit from it equally.
- Increase carry speed and possibly hooking speed. Part of the reason slugging is better is how long it takes to carry a survivor to the hook and hook them. Decreasing that time would allow killers to have less downtime. Even though it sounds insane, a 100% carry speed as well as reducing hooking time to 0.5 seconds would be a huge help in this. Agitation would need to be adjusted, in order to not grant speeds higher than 115%. This would also in turn reduce the effectiveness of sabo squads, something that has been a pain point for some killers.
I wanna close this out by saying, that making tunneling and slugging into unusable strategies or in some cases, unusable win conditions hurts the complexity and enjoyment of the game. I hope survivors remember the days when they were forced to run Borrowed Time, Dead Hard, Unbreakable, Decisive Strike and think of them as boring days, where not even build diversity was available for them. Currently, most killers are in a similar boat, but instead of perks, they have no playstyle diversity. And while for some of the killers, it's a deeper design issue with said killer, others would very much like to spread their hooks and play a slower, less stressful game.
Comments
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"The gen regression part should be tied to the hooking action". I've been thinking about this as well. Give killers base 10-15% pain res for unique hooks to naturally encourage hook spreading and less regression heavy build variations. Tone down the regression perks at the same time so that it doesn't get overwhelming for the survivor side.
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