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It's time to put an end to these lazy, do-nothing add ons; Blindness and Haemorrhage.
The Current situation
A year ago Freddy got his big rework. With it came disappointing news; 4 of his add ons, the blocks, were given haemorrhage and blindness debuffs.
We were told by @Peanits at the time that the devs would "keep a close eye on those add ons" and further evaluate them. Well I don't know about you, but I haven't seen a single person use either of them, nor any of the other countless blindness and haemorrage add ons in the game.
Why? Because blindess and haemorrage are downright terrible.
Time and time again we see new killers released with these absolute filler add ons cluttering up their possibilities. The Executioner just released and two of his very rare add ons costing 6k bloodpoints apiece are these two debuffs, neither of which I have any desire to use, let alone waste that many points on.
So, whAt is the problem?
Haemorrhage is very simple. The only value of it lies in tracking; a bleeding survivor leaves more blood on the ground so you can follow them more precisely. The issue is it's a very esoteric form of tracking that in 99.99% of cases is completely unnecessary. Scratch marks, aura reading, sounds, and general game knowledge all generally trump blood pools. The second point is, there are already blood pools without haemorrhage. When tracking by blood is useful, the debuff is not necessary to do so.
Worse is that many of these effects come at inopportune times; interacting with killer items and powers that can be miles away from the killer, so they will never notice your bleeding, or you are perfectly healthy so the debuff does nothing. The only exception is the Z Block which makes healthy survivors bleed, and even that isn't all that useful.
Blindness is a whole other problem. Many of these add ons are intended to apply blindness while in a chase with a killer. While in a chase with the killer is the absolute most useless time to restrict vision of auras. Outside of a very small amount of perks this will only slightly prevent survivors moving to a correct pallet or avoiding an ally, but the frequency of those perks is nowhere near high enough to bring a blindness add on with the assumption that it will achieve anything.
Another issue with blindness is how ephemeral its effects are. Most add ons only take effect for around 30 seconds. The likelihood that something worth seeing happens in those windows is very low, especially when the most important notifications often come alongside other effects like the scream bubble for hooks, or the 'schwing' of alert. On top of that any form of SWF renders blindness useless, as the information can easily be conveyed by voice.
So the problem arises with these two debuffs that many, MANY add ons are devoted to inflicting them. These were never prevalent debuffs on the early killers and have started being used more and more as gap fillers for newer killers, and many killers have two add ons to inflict the same debuff, usually for slightly varying durations. These are not rewarding. These are not used by anyone who cares what add ons they have. The only purpose for these that I can honestly see is "we could not think of another add on worth having, so we filled the blanks with the usual trash."
What is the Solution?
Haemorrhage should be deleted. There's no question about it. In any case that it's used it's because something applies mangled and haemorrhage, and it's being used for the healing slow. Mangled should now include the increased bleeding effect, all current uses of haemorrhage should be change to mangled, and any cases where this causes duplicate/similar add ons should result in a new add on being created. The esoteric value owuld be maintained along with the debuff it already usually accompanies.
I can not see any legitimate reason why this should not occur except "it would take a little bit of work."
As for blindness the goal is to remove some of the information that survivors have. Really, with how briefly it is applied, why not change it into oblivious? I'm not sure whether oblivious should include its effects, but not hearing the terror radius is already far and above more crippling than not seeing auras when you may see none at all. Considering the icon for oblivious is already someone covering their eyes, yet it only applies to sound, I don't see why not. Again, cases of duplicates should be removed.
TLDR
Cases of running out of ideas for killers and just shackling them with terrible blindness and haemorrhage add ons is not going unnoticed. These should be merged into oblivious and mangled respectively, and real, usable add ons should replace them.
Comments
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For blindness the only perk i seem to find useful is HEX: Third seal
Sure it can be broken, but when you apply it to all 4 survivors, and make a big chaos for them, like playing pig, applying it to all 4 survivors will make it likely that they will come more to the hook or less.
SWF tho?
Yeah, i wouldn't take that for that one.
The solution in my eyes would be that blindness intensity/haemorhhage intensity could be increased, like multiple effects with other statuses, etc..
For example:
If you have haemorrhage, you will bleed... however if you are deeply wounded as well the bleedout rate will be doubled.
If you have blindness your screen will be covered dirt at the middle, where skill checks appear, making skill checks trendemously harder.
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I think the solution is to buff Blindness and haemorhhage. I can think of some insane ideas.
- Blindness also causes a loss of hud and makes it impossible for other surviors to aura read the inflicted too.
- Haemorhhage causes loss of life bar, means that getting this effect is like being slugged but able to run.
You may need to nerf Sloppy Butcher 😉
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Blindness should maybe
- Periodically obscure survivor vision like clown gas or flashlights
Or
- Adittionally to removing auras slso remove the accompying hud notofications. In the most extreme change it could actually limit vision range to x metres and darken the map for that survivor.
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I think Blindness is a fine effect because it counters lot of survivor items and perks and deprives them of information. It blocks auras from Object of Obsession (and therefore gives the killer free wall hacks), Kindred, Bond, Empathy, Aftercare, Alert, Windows of Opportunity, Saboteur, Rancor, Dark Sense, maps, keys, hooked or dying survivors, etc. My problem with Blindness isn't the status effect itself. It's the the fact that most add-ons only inflict it for a very small amount of time. I think increasing the Blindness duration a bit would be useful enough.
As for Haemorrhage, I agree that it's hot garbage. The only situation in which it's consistently useful is if you're running Bloodhound or the add-ons for Spirit and Wraith that give a similar effect. Even in that case, though, it's just a "nice to have" - you should still be able to follow blood trails with the normal bleeding frequency. You might get a slight benefit from it on some tiles against Iron Will users, but when I say slight I mean slight.
I still think they could rework it without fully removing it. For example, you could also make Haemorrhage start a timer, similar to deep wounds, and if the timer runs out before you heal it could apply the Mangled status effect. You'd have to rework perks like Sloppy that currently apply both, but I could see that being useful for time wasting - people might opt to heal rather than just do gens because they know that waiting will just make their heal time longer.
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Haemorrhage and Blindness add-ons are both actually stronger than you give them credit for right now, though. Applying a status effect while hitting a survivor will consistently cause the game to freeze for half a second, which will often result in them sprinting into a wall and wasting their free speed boost. Working as intended? No, but they will still give you some free hits.
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I had this idea once about changing Blindness to something called Limbo. The effect is pretty complex, so I wasn’t too sure about it. Here’s a list of its effects:
- Your screen is tinted gray.
- You can’t see auras.
- Your aura cannot be seen by anyone.
- You cannot see or touch other Survivors.
- Other Survivors cannot see or touch you.
- Getting downed removes the effect.
The effect pretty much displaces the Survivor and damages their ability to work as a team, as they are unable to heal each other. However, this idea is super flawed, specifically regarding unhooking, soooo... yeah. Just throwing this into the mix.
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I agree that blindness in and of itself isn't entirely useless. The issue is almost none of those you mentioned are affected by an application for ~30 seconds usually on a hit of some form, and those that are affected are rare at best. It's also something you have to sacrifice other add ons for, so the decision comes down to "do I take an add on that gives a tiny benefit IF they're using X, Y or Z perk," or "do I take an add on that will have an effect no matter what happens in the match" and basically nobody goes for the first option.
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I see your point, but I think it's fine for some add-ons to be weaker than others. So long as the effect is useful I'm fine with it, and I still do think that blocking auras in a chase is quite useful. Bond/Empathy/Aftercare allow you to avoid running the killer past injured teammates and/or teammates doing objectives, which can save your team time and hook states. Alert shows the killer's aura when they break a pallet, which gives the survivor an advantage and can sometimes let you lose the killer in a chase. Windows of Opportunity is self explanatory although experienced survivors won't run it. Keys with the Blood Amber add-on are very useful in chase on tiles with poor visibility. Perks like Dark Sense are less likely to help you in a chase, but if your timing is lucky it could still benefit you. Like I said I think increasing the blindness time for most of these add-ons would be good, but the effect itself is useful.
With that said, experienced survivors are a lot less likely to use aura-reading perks given the current meta, so it makes sense that high rank killers wouldn't want to run blindness add-ons unless they have no other choice. Newer survivors are also more likely to play cautiously and make mistakes if they're blinded than experienced survivors would, so blindless add-ons make way more sense against newer survivors. I think it's fine for some add-ons, perks, etc. to be much more viable at low rank, though. After all, plenty of people are low rank! Sometimes it's nice to have tools aimed at newer players even if they're not relevant at rank 1.
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