Killer is kind of pay to win

Nurse, Billy and Huntress can completely compete without perks as well and are non DLC. And two of the perks you mentioned can be bought with shards, same for Spirit, which also doesn't need perks to perform well. I wouldn't paint it too black.

Sure, good killers with experience can clean up with meme builds or no perks. The problem is that new killers are the ones most in need of good perks to help them compete, but are also the people least likely to have them.

Let’s say I’m a new killer who has reached rank 10 for the first time. I’m going against survivors with hundreds or thousands of hours in the game. If I want matches that last longer than 3 minutes and that are fun for me, I probably want perks like Pop or BBQ or Corrupt to help me. Except that because I’m new, I don’t have them. I have to buy the DLC killers, then level them to unlock their perks, then level my killer(s) of choice to get them. By the time I’ve done all this I probably don’t need to perks as much anymore. It’s backwards.

The same thing applies for survivors - new survivors are the ones most in need of help from good perks. Except that most of the best perks for newbies are on default survivors or are baseline perks.

It's not relevant to my post because I already explained that the killers I was referring to didn't need to use such tactics to win, at least not to my recollection. I'm refusing to elaborate on what I think the devs could do to prevent camping or tunnelling out of respect for the OP (and for the forum rules), since it has very little to do with the original topic, and explaining it to you would constitute discussing it. If you like, I'll mention it to the person I'm thinking of the next time I get a chance to speak to him, but I'd rather not tag him here since he already gets hundreds of mentions on the forums and, again, it's off-topic for the thread anyway.

That's a fair point, although to a large degree I think the problem you're describing is more one with the matchmaking/ranking system than it is with the perk grind, and I'm generally against breaking one thing to compensate for a different thing being broken, since that doesn't really improve the game as a whole. Having said that, I do think the perk grind is pretty unreasonable and not at all friendly to new players - I just think "pay-to-win" is too extreme a descriptor in this case, and I also think that many players rely overmuch on particular perks so I like to discourage that wherever possible.

To be fair though, if we're looking at this from a new player's perspective, survivor does have a much steeper learning curve than killer - kill rates are highest at low ranks - so there is a sense in which new survivors are more in need of good perks than new killers are (botched matchmaking aside). Again, that's not to say that there isn't a case to be made for making perks in general easier to obtain, I just don't think the imbalance is as pronounced as it may seem at first glance.

It's not, although now you mention it, I imagine Peanits would probably say the same thing. And what I said was that I know of at least one developer who would tell you that the reason camping and tunnelling are still in the game is not because they tried to remove them and had to admit defeat, but because they never seriously tried to remove them. I then went on to say that if it were something they wanted to do, I'm sure they could easily come up with ways to do it, as I can think of one or two preliminary ideas myself. I have no idea whether the devs have come up with a means to "fix" camping and tunnelling, since as I said, I'm pretty sure they have never seriously tried to expunge them from the game to begin with.

You can create another thread if you want - it's better than continuing to hijack this one - but I'd honestly rather not discuss it further, not because I can't but because debating is tiring and I have an assignment to finish, and I only brought up the idea that camping and tunnelling could easily be removed in response to what I believed to be untrue assumptions on your part, and not because I really wanted to get into a late-night balance argument. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it at all if I wasn't prepared to defend it to the death - if so, I'll gladly admit fault for that.

Other than BBQ, the perks you listed may be dlc perks but they are free dlc you can obtain fairly easily by using shards.

Bbq is 'needed' to win, its just there for bloodpoints. Of all the paid dlc that you can not get with shards, the Halloween dlc probably has the best perks for either side. And even then you can argue that the killer perks aren't 'needed' and personally i don't think DS is 'needed' on survivor side. Though some would argue that.

In my opinion the biggest problem with the dlc is that they don't release really strong perks with any real frequency anymore. They are afraid of being labeled pay to win.

Personally i feel that if they release a great perk on a character you can purchase with free currency, its not pay to win. Its grind to win, which this game already is

I didnt mention the shrine for a reason. You can buy non licensed characters for 9000 shards.

You must be absolutely terrible if you don't think you can play Killer without addons and even struggle then to secure kills.

Let me throw my two cents in as an actual relatively new player. Purple rank survivor, green rank killer. It feels HEAVILY that killer is much more pay to win than survivor is. A majority of the generic perks on survivors are pretty good as are the teachables that come with the base game. Killers on the other hand get rather shafted in that area because god ######### damnit there is litterally no perks available to slow the game down without dlc and there's a bloody good reason they are very meta to run. Kicking gens does absolutely jack nothing by itself and getting tossed against great survivors can leave a killer with no way to slow the game down feeling extroidinarily powerless to the point where it stops being any kind of fun. You know that anyone one you are not chasing is 100% on a gen and you can't get any of that gen time back and even the shortest chases just lose you the game. Turning around to inturrupt the gen also can screw you just as much because you do have to end chases eventually and they'll be making gen time regardless of how much you inturrupt them.

I get a lot of escapes even as a newb solo survivor who can't loop for the life of me and it's always killers without slowdown perks that make it easy so I know how they feel from both sides. Killers really need them if they aren't gods yet because any mistake on the killers part is much more punishing as even a complete potato can double pip as survivor even if they screwed a ton of skill checks. I should know because I 1-2 pip every single survivor game and I am pretty far the opposite of good.

Feels to me pay extra to have actual power over the game speed feels aweful, I can see why everyone runs NOED or camps because if you didn't pay extra on top of the game there isn't that much available in tools to deal with good teams. Probably a big reason the only killer I feel like I can win with is pig because game slow down is baseline and has saved me many times. Glad I eventually bought Saw pack that's for damn sure. Complete game changer having a slow down the game button. Games feel WAY too fast without one.

I suppose it's true that clown and stuff can technically be acquired for free. Takes a hell of a long time dealing with a complete lack of perks though. 60 hours in I've only just acquired enough shards in total for a single character. Bought some stuff off shrine though so still more grinding for me to actually be able to stand up more consistently competitively. Feels like a huge pressure to just throw money at it especially when clown is the grand "prize" for 60 hours of work. Wouldn't feel so bad probably is clown wasn't a complete trainwreck that exists purely to sell perks. Constantly being up against meta perks without them is very depressing, probably why I play as much survivor as I do because it's just more fair by default. I can do good stuff with things like deadhard, borrowed time, spinechill, ect. What I do know is after buying pig the game instantly felt a lot more fair because I had gen slowdown built in. I still have no good slowdown perks but spending money to buy a character had an overwhelming effect on my enjoyment of the killer half of the game. She might not be A teir but games way too fast to be fun without some way to slow it down. That's the exact type of pressure playing survivor definitely doesn't have. I don't need any shards, no 60 hours or wallet warrioring just to unlock competitive potential as survivor.