Nerfing Items by making Items more easily available to survivors.
Here's a plan: Chests will open instantly. There'll be more chests per map (in total 8 or more?). Items from chests come with add-ons. Chest related perks will be buffed appropriately and keys will be adjusted in a way to be more appropriate to this giant item influx.
So what do you think? Are you happy with the item buff?
In this version of the game, every killer would get "gen-rushed" by 4 survivors with on average yellow to green toolboxes with add-ons or have a med-kit to quickly undo your hits.
That is the first step to nerfing items.
Let's assume that the killer without add-ons and the survivor without items have an equal power-level as illustrated in the picture above. A killer can have add-ons slightly increasing their power level, but we will assume the effect of it being a low-medium increase.
When we look at survivors and them having items, we would see a medium to very high increase:
The orange section is the extra power the survivor has for having an item equipped in the lobby. Now here's the problem: Your job is the move the killer power level up or down in order to create a balanced experienced for all players.
If you move it to the Survivors with items height, then item-less survivors are too weak to play as, in the same way as playing against equally experienced survivors with 4 insta-heals would be overpowered.
You can choose to shove the killer in between, but then again: Now you're not satisfying either situation.
The solution of this problem is to decrease the difference between Survivors with items equipped in lobbies and survivors that don't equip them. Basically: The right-side chart will get its own orange section, but theirs will be granted during the game.
If a survivor currently searched through a chest, they already lose a lot of time. Imagine finding a brown toolbox, which almost wins you as much seconds as it costed you to open the chest, let alone searching for it; such a survivor wouldn't have managed to get even close to the orange area in the chart above. After all: The time it took the person equipping it in lobby was 0 in-match time.
That is the current fundamental flaw with items: Where as the ability to equip items in the lobby should've only granted you the option to CHOOSE your exact load-out, due to how finding items during the match plays out, it also grants you the ability to meet a superior power-level.
It is the power-level aspect that we seek to destroy and have item-equipping in lobby serve as a mechanic that let's you specifically choose. Once item-less survivors can meet pre-equipped survivors, then the job of moving the killer chart up will be easy, and we can freely choose in which way we'd desire to do so. If all survivors would be able to acquire 2 items each, then even the lousiest killer buff of buffing generators up to 90-100 seconds would already likely have done its balance job. In fact, in many of those games, those generators would continue to only take 80 seconds to repair. The only difference is that the precious power level deemed problematic with items can no longer be reached as the base game can be considered harder. Now there's no need for a lousy compensation. There's a see of posts of passionate forumers detailing interesting and healthy killer buffs that would serve as an appropriate compensation.
now...;
Here's a plan: Chests will open instantly. There'll be more chests per map (in total 8 or more?). Items from chests come with add-ons. Chest related perks will be buffed appropriately and keys will be adjusted in a way to be more appropriate to this giant item influx.
If you got a Deja Vu from that, then, well; you were correct. But now you understand the "why".
Thank you for reading!
To keep things short and to the main idea:
The specifics of the key or perk change will not be discussed in this post.
The specifics of how the blood-web and frequent item collection may result in an overdose and how to address it will not be discussed in this post.
etc.
but feel free to think them out in the comments!
Comments
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Why do you think it's necessary to rework the entire system? Why not simply nerf the existing items and add-ons that are too powerful?
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Because that approach tries to balance things by making something less significant. The less significant, the more the left green chart looks like the right green chart (2nd image). Perfectly balanced here would be no significance; items without value.
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But a nerfed item would also be less significant. What is the difference?
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I was responding to your second sentence, not your first. There is no difference because nerfing the item makes it less significant. That is the problem. My approach isn't linked to making items as insignificant as possible to achieve balance.
There's this sort of humour that when you'd want to design an item in DBD you'd have to make sure it isn't that significant. The best job you could do is to not have made an item at all as that has 0 significance.
If an item were to be strong, one could still easily buff killers appropriately; but now item-less survivors are in trouble.
Hence the problem comes from the gap between those 2 different survivors and the ways through which they could acquire an item.
In the version I propose, significance of the item isn't a problem as you would be able to buff or nerf the killer appropriately as the difference in strength between the 2 survivor types is closer to being nullified.
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So you are looking for a scenario where it doesn't have a big impact on the trial whether the survivors equip items in the lobby or not, is that right?
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Correct.
From the OP:
That is the current fundamental flaw with items: Where as the ability to equip items in the lobby should've only granted you the option to CHOOSE your exact load-out, due to how finding items during the match plays out, it also grants you the ability to meet a superior power-level.
The lobby item has to serve as giving you a choice option, but is not exclusive in giving you the power that items give you.
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Are you looking for a scenario where it matters whether the survivors get the 8 items from the chests instead of ignoring the chests?
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I'm not sure if I understand your question, but: If a survivor would deliberately ignore items and chests, then they should expect to feel behind, in a similar fashion to how playing perk-less would feel as similar to perks in this version we'd expect them to have perks and we expect them to have items (even if they didn't pick them in the lobby. Due to their easy availability they would get them effortlessly)
There would be scenario's where it matters whether someone uses an item or not if the chosen significance standard of items were to be medium-high.
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