I think Oni has really shown me the wild power differential between Killers.
Gonna start a bit rambly here, and the post is long, forgive me. I've only recently started playing DBD regularly, a few weeks after the Silent Hill chapter started is when I started actually playing "for real" rather than a very occasional single match.
Initially I started with survivor, and have slowly drifted to Killer as I find it has more actual gameplay, despite the exponential increase in stress, at least when you're still learning.
With that said, I don't have all the killers unlocked, I got Pyramid Head to 50, and then just kind of bounced around between him and the other killers I had, Trapper, Huntress, Clown, Michael Myers, Billy, Nurse and Wraith.
They've all been pretty fun, so once I noticed I had 27k shards, I purchased 3 more killers: Deathslinger, Spirit and Oni.
I played a few rounds as Deathslinger, and he's pretty fun although it's still hard for me to gauge the projectile speed of his shot, I only got him to level 7. Haven't really touched the Spirit yet although I know she's good.
But then I tried Oni.
It was abundantly clear that he was made with a completely different design philosophy from all the other killers I played. I really liked the concept of the Nurse, she's real powerful when she's not janky, but also just miserable to use because you spend so much time with your screen darkened while you stare at the floor after your two whole blinks. An excessive punishment for simply using your power. I absolutely adore the nature of the Trapper, because it's really satisfying to place traps where you know you'd run as a survivor and have them work perfectly.
Billy's fun to zoom around the map on, even if it's tricky for me to actually get chainsaw hits still. The Huntress might be my favorite out of the bunch, simply because of how satisfying it is to hear that SPLAT as a hatchet lands from a distance, and the skill involved. Pyramid Head... well, I haven't played him since I hit 50 with him, so I never actually got good with him, but I liked being able to hit through walls.
All of those killers are fun, but come with massive drawbacks. The amount of traps the Trapper has access to is changed by whether or not he brings bag add-ons. So if you bring no bag add-ons, there's literally less traps in the map to use. On top of that, his traps are scattered all over the map at the beginning for some godforsaken reason. Then you have to pick them up, and telegraph for a ridiculous amount of time as you set them. And YOU can step in them, which early on means you'll likely be giving up a few grabs as you don't notice a trap you had previously placed, although this happens less and less of course.
Then the Huntress, she has a huge wind-up and grunt before each Hatchet is ready to throw, which also massively slows her down, and a fully charged hatchet makes a sound for the entire map to hear, and then you actually have to land the projectile, which can be relatively easy or amazingly frustrating depending on the map you're on.
You get it, I don't need to go over every single killer I've played, I just wanted to emphasize these facts. And remember, outside of Billy, and I guess Trapper if you're close enough to a trap, these are all generally for single health states.
So what's Oni's downside? Well, he has to get an initial hit to start the blood collection process, which isn't too difficult as he's 115. Anyone should be able to land a basic hit within a reasonable amount of time. Then he can start gobbling up blood orbs from the one he's injured and hopefully land a hit on another healthy survivor to speed up the process.
Once that's done, he becomes an absolute monster. He's like Billy if Billy took steroids for a year. Not only can he dash around the map with control that dwarfs Billy, he's got auto-aim like a mofo, I've had the game turn me 100+ degrees to hit people I wasn't even looking at. Sometimes this backfires and you hit a wall, but more often than not just getting near someone while dashing is a death sentence. He doesn't need to stop or throw a tantrum if he hits a wall, you can continue to turn or just stop and turn around to charge again.
So he gets those instant downs while able to cover the map in seconds with impressive control, but for some reason he also has a lethal M1 attack now, too, just hold the button for a split second and you've got a murder-lunge that would make Myers weep, that also insta-breaks pallets and has that same juicy auto-aim.
No red bars, no having to stare at the floor like a shamed bad boy who did a very bad thing, you have to collect your power, but you don't do it randomly, it happens from the damage you inflict on survivors. Which also happens to function as a powerful anti-stealth AND tracking tool since they're left at regular intervals. Someone injured working on a gen? You've got a blood pool for the rest of the match now. Come drink up any time.
I know this isn't news to anyone who's been playing the game for a while, and I'm not here to say Oni is some ultra-powerful unbeatable beast (although compared to other killers, my winrate/killrate has gone through the ROOF, his pressure is unbelievable) but dear god, when are the other poor killers gonna get an upgrade? I know a really great Nurse is going to wreck people, but the reason I think we don't see many Nurses is because dear god she's unfun to play, Oni is SUPER FUN to play, it's a joy just to move around the map with him! It's so hard to want to play as anyone else because he's got the fun and the power, while a lot of the other killers, even ones I find both fun and pretty damn powerful (Like Huntress when I'm having a good day aiming) just feel... lacking in comparison.
If every killer played like Oni in terms of raw fun (not mechanics) I think I'd have bought the entire roster of killers by now. Oh, and since I mentioned my level with Deathslinger earlier, in the same time I've gotten Oni to 50, probably would've been on like P3-10 or so by now if I had to give an estimate, but I don't prestige, so I dunno. I've played all of my games between rank 1-3, and so far he's the only killer I feel 100% comfortable entering match after match with 0 add-ons.
Comments
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There is a glaring issue that you have neglected to mention - You absolutely can deny Oni that initial hit, and is in fact how many of my Oni matches go.
All the survivors need to do, as with any other m1 killer, is drop pallets. In the majority of maps, even if they don't get the stun, they can make it to another pallet in the time it takes you to cirlce around and chase. No matter what, the Oni will get that first hit... But how much time will it cost?
I also want to say that who you find fun is just preference. I prefer Deathslinger to all of the other killers you mentioned, and I don't even play shooters.
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There are definitely things you can do to mitigate the first hit issue, perks like monitor and to a lesser extent corrupt can help you bump into survivors early to get your power going. It’s not a huge deal if one person keeps throwing pallets, you can always drop chase and try to find someone out of position
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That depends entirely on the map itself having a place for them to be badly positioned in, which is not the case far more often than it is.
Or you could just pray that the next one is a potato, but that's just an even bigger example of poor game design if that's the case.
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Oni was made and Is a killer viable for higher ranks..a short supply of those exist..and oni has weak points but you need to learn the killer first , he changes up the chase considerably unless your at an incredibly busted tile, hes a snow baller only having power in short bursts but used correctly they give him big strides to his goal
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I'm just the opposite. I do play something of a shooter, Overwatch. But my damage mains over there are hitscan (Soldier 76, McCree, and Ashe).
For the life of me, I cannot quick scope and hit crap in this game with Deathslinger (or Huntress). I don't know if it's the fact that he's akin to projectile, or what. In Overwatch, I have a hard time with projectile heroes like Hanzo, Genji, and Pharah, too. And have since the day it launched in 2016.
(Though do main Zenyatta and do beast with him for some odd reason.)
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It's probably the projectile speed. His harpoon moves at the same velocity as a fully wound hatchet, so ingrained quickscoping skills aren't that helpful unless you can relearn the timing.
Maybe it IS a good thing I don't play Siege any more...
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Yeah. Unfortunately, I have as many hours in Overwatch as many Vets do here in DbD, so my muscle memory makes playing Huntress and Deathslinger a damned chore.
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I think I've played about 120ish matches with him since I got him, all in red ranks, and I don't think I've ever been denied a first hit for a substantial enough amount of time to somehow ruin my match. Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but that's really all any of us have. Sure, sometimes it takes a bit longer, but then I Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift around the map and it doesn't go so well from there for the survivors.
I think being so used to the basic killers has made getting M1s a lot less of a strenuous task than it would otherwise be. The real scary part is the people who know how to bait the auto-aim in their favor. Still not sure what exactly they do, but it often ends up like they just turn to one side or the other very quickly and it forces me to hit a wall.
My point, though, wasn't that Oni has no weakness, it was more that the other killers feel almost unfinished in comparison. He has a good variety of bonuses to his power and the way he interacts with the world after interacting with the survivors is interesting. He feels like a real power role, whereas sometimes when I'm playing Trapper and someone falls into the perfect trap and then escapes on their first attempt when I'm like 3 seconds away and gets to a loop I'm just like... ugh. Feels like to get to the same kind of relative power level the Trapper would need to be able to literally throw his traps to locations, where they're set up automatically after a few seconds or something crazy like that.
My point also isn't that the base killers are super weak, either, obviously I've won plenty of games with them and even did my last 3 ranks to rank 1 on the Clown of all killers, so I don't think any killer is so weak they're broken, but it feels like Oni came from a different timeline or something where design philosophy for killers was different.
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