Comprehensive Proposal to Address Tunneling and Slugging
The focus on these changes are to incentivize multiple hooking, and give survivors tools to deal with the killer's strategies as a team.
Slugging:
- When 3 survivors are slugged, the remaining survivor gains the a status effect "Desperation". While they have Desperation, they gain: a 5% Haste, Endurance, they will no longer scare crows around the map, they will not scream (so Infectious Fright isn't an issue), they gain Elusive, they gain the ability to instantly pick up survivors from the dying state, and they gain the ability to heal themselves without a med kit at 150% speed.
- The picked up survivor gains Endurance for 15 seconds and 30% Haste for 5 seconds. They also gain the ability to pick up other survivors instantly from the dying state.
- The Desperation status effect disappears 5 seconds after more than one survivor is up from the dying state. It is not removed if a survivor goes down and once again only 1 survivor remains up.
- The status effect will modify the survivor's HUD portrait for the whole team and the killer so everyone understands it's at play.
- When a survivor has been in the dying state for a total of 180 seconds, they gain the ability to pick themselves back up when recovered.
- The recovery and crawling speeds of survivors in the dying state increase by 20% per downed survivor.
- Survivors in the dying state cannot recover and crawl at the same time.
NOTE: The aim of this is simple: Make it very hard for a killer to slug everyone at the start of the match by giving the slugged survivors the tools to spread out and the remaining survivor the tools to pick their team up. This makes them have to work as a TEAM to outplay the killer's strategy. However, if the killer deems it necessary to slug for pressure at some point during the game, the self pickup timer is long enough that it will never make sense to leave your teammate on the ground for gens, or during endgame, which is something that could happen late game with the proposed ptb changes.
Tunneling Protections:
- The hook status should not get hidden (this is vital macro info)
- Keep the Elusive status effect and see the killers aura when the killer is at 24 meters for 30 seconds and 3 seconds post full heal. Lost at endgame.
- Haste should be 7% instead of 10%
- Endurance and Haste only last 10% during endgame.
- They loose collision with other players.
- Survivors should still be visible with killer instinct.
- Unhooked survivors will have their aura revealed to every other survivor until they perform a conspicuous action or 3 seconds post full heal. (This is to facilitate other survivors to come take hits for their teammate.)
- If a survivor takes a protection hit for a survivor whose aura is being revealed due to this, the survivor whose aura is being revealed gets a 30% Haste for 5 seconds.
Tunneled survivor fight back mechanic:
- If a survivor gets hooked 3 times in a row while there are only 3 hook states, they gain status effect "Resolve". While Resolve is active the survivor can endure one more hook state (like base kit shoulder the burden for that one survivor but no one has to shoulder it).
- A survivor with Resolve will have a 7% Haste for as long as the status effect is active.
- A survivor with Resolve will have basekit UB and Tenacity for as long as Resolve is active.
- A survivor with Resolve will have basekit DS for the next time the killer picks them up, even if they have used DS before in the match, and if a teammate saves them with a pallet or flashlight, and they didn't use it, they will be able to use it to escape the killer's grasp when picked up, if downed again.
- If a survivor takes a protection hit for the survivor affected by Resolve, the survivor affected by Resolve gets a 30% Haste for 5 seconds and renewed Elusive and killer aura reading for 30 seconds. (Again this is to incentivize other survivors to come in to try to stop the tunnel).
- When a survivor is affected by Resolve all other survivors get 100% increase to non repair action speeds, the ability to self heal and sabotage hooks without the respective items. (This is in case they have to take a hit, run and heal to take a hit again and so they can have yet another base kit tool to save their tunneled teammate)
- Resolve is not applied if: 3 generators have been completed or the killer has at least 1 hook state on another survivor.
- Resolve is removed if: The killer gets a hook state on another survivor or the survivor with resolve performs a conspicuous action or 5 generators get completed.
Change to what constitutes conspicuous actions:
- Repairing generators, cleansing or blessing totems, performing an invocation, and performing a healing action.
- Interacting with the following killer props will be considered conspicuous actions: Sadako's Tapes and TVs, Alien's Turrets, The Lament Configuration, Hag's Traps, Trapper's Traps, Skull Merchant's Drones (basically anything that could be consider disrupting the killer instead of protecting yourself)
Note: The idea here is to ONLY address hard tunnelling at the start of the game, which reasonably is the only type of tunneling that should be considered problematic. The way it's addressed gives plenty of tools for the tunneled survivor to use their own skill to give their team time to finish the gens. Notice how if Resolve is activated, it does allow for the team to pump out all gens. But if the killer is struggling for pressure and survivors have completed 60% of their objective already, then everything goes.
These changes also incentivize other survivors to come take protection hits for the tunneled survivor, and unhooked teammates, again incentivizing team play.I originally thought it would be nice to have other survivors have haste when far away so they could come faster to help the tunneled survivor, and to have them get endurance if they get a protection hit for the tunneled survivor. But then we run into the issue of the tunneled survivor harassing the killer and giving everyone else haste and endurance. if you can think of another way to incentivize the team to come help the tunneled survivor that isn't abusable, by all means tell me about it.
Unique Hook incentive:
- Base kit Pain Res (16% damage on most progressed generator) for Unique hooks, but you can make it current progress instead of total progress. This will apply to every killer regardless of their perceived strength. Pain Res reworked: spawns 4 scourge hooks, gets a token for every new survivor hooked on a scourge hook. Every token increases the base damage on unique hooks by 2%. So if you get all 4 survivors you'll get 24% current progress damage for every unique hook.)
- 15% haste for 15 seconds post hook for all killers that move at 4.4m/s except for Spirit. 10% Haste for all 4.6m/s killers except: Blight, Ghoul, Deacula, Singularity, Nurse, Hillbilly. The exception killers get 5% Haste for 10 seconds instead. (This haste effect ONLY starts when the killers in question have left the vicinity of the hook 20 meters to account for indoor maps that are still hard to traverse like RPD)
- Killer instinct for 6 seconds on all survivors around the map. 3 seconds for Blight, Ghoul, Nurse, Spirit, Dracula, Singularity and Hillbilly.
- Nerf Pop Goes the Weasel and Dead Man's Switch.
- Hex Ruin Change: Buff regression speed to 150% HOWEVER if the generator receives an instance of damage, it will no longer regress until the equivalent of the amount regressed is repaired. So for instance if you use the base pain res on unique hooks, the most progressed gen goes from 99% to 83%. Until this amount is repaired by the survivors, this generator will not regress with the 150% from ruin. Imagine like the little bar you see that they added to prevent gen tapping after a kick, but in reverse. This is to prevent Ruin Synergy with other gen regression perks.
- Blocked Generators can no longer receive damage instances. (This is to prevent Dead Man's Switch or Deadlock from synergizing with the unique hook reward, or with something like Surge).
- Keep the BBQ and Chilli changes from the PTB.
Note: The idea here is to give an actually significant, meaningful rewards for unique hooks, while at the same time trying to mitigate the effectiveness and synergy between gen perks. Hopefully this doesn't allow too much stacking of regression with the base kit regression and frees up killers to bring more varied builds.
The regression rewards synergize well with all killers, not just high tier ones. I don't really like making exceptions for killers, because deciding what killers should and shouldn't get them becomes a tad arbitrary. If you have more elegant solutions to help out low tiers but not completely overbuff high tiers, let me know.
The only downside I see from these changes is that they are a tad complex for new players. But to be fair all the changes that BHVR were thinking of were brutal for new players as well. At least my ideas shouldn't really affect most normal matches, and should only really deter turbo tunneling and turbo slugging.
Anyways. Let me know what you think. But I will say, if your reply is some variety of "solo queue is uncoordinated", I know that and I understand, but I think the solution should be to make solo queue coordinate more easily, not to safeguard survivors from playing poorly as a team.
Edited for clarity.