Is there counterplay to freddy that isn't disadvantageous to survivors?
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Recently I made a thread about what defines counterplay for me, asking for what defines good counterplay for others.
One of the reasons was that I've been wrecking my head if there is any actual counterplay to Freddy that isn't disadvantageous to survivors.
Like, with killers like Deathslinger, who's continuously tooted to have no counterplay, you do have the means to counter him in ways that hinder him (like going round in pairs to break the chain easier etc resulting in a stun for him and the reload time, while going in pairs also reduces repair time for survivors)
Spirit has inconsistent counterplay, but there is some that hinders her while giving survivors some benefit timewise.
But freddy? try as I may, I can't think of any.
Once you are asleep, you suffer from Oblivious, there's no way to avoid the snares (which are infinite iirc? correct me if i'm wrong), he can teleport willy-nilly etc.
Now, sure 'waking up' is a kind of counterplay, but not beneficial to the survivors, but to freddy.
missing a gen gives away your position AND skillchecks are random.
finding the alarmclock takes away precious time and you have to avoid freddy.
getting woken up requires another survivor to be awake.
I really can't think of any genuine counterplay, as there's not much to actually 'counter' him. it all seems to work to his benefit.
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I would just keep failing skill checks. If you are never asleep, he is just an M1 killer.
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As I said, yes 'waking up' at first glance is counterplay, but to do so, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage:
giving away your location, staying stationary in one spot, going round potentially snared locations etc. And remember once he hits you, you're back asleep, and back to the same setbacks.
I think this is the reason he has such a high pick & kill rates, as there isn't that much he can do
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Tbh that's how it works with most other killers that allow you to weaken their power. With demo you need to waste time breaking portals, with trapper waste time looking and disabling traps etc.
Most of the time you just need to tank their power, with freddy it's the same as clown, you can't really evade his gas if he uses it properly as you can't evade the snares when you're already asleep.
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It's a shame, technician was almost an amazing freddy counterpick. But then they added that silly negative to it
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I don't think you can compare these:
Demo's portals you can actually ignore. They don't do much to hinder survivors unless you run straight over them. Trapper has to go and reset the traps. You can tank clown, sure, but you can't actually weaken freddy.
It's as if in a match against clown you'd get intoxicated automatically after a while.
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The only thing I think the devs could do to make playing against Freddy more bearable and not neuter him is to add another clock to the map to make it less frustrating to wake up and not have to run across the entire world.
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Good demo with perfectly spread portals (that aren't getting broken) is twice as mobile as freddy is and mobility is generally accepted as very powerfull so yes you can ignore them but they will hinder your progress a lot as you're giving demo a lot of free uncontested mobility.
Trapper's traps injure and possibly instadown you so ofc they can't be as freely spammable as freddy's snares that only slightly hinder your movement, also trappers is really old and will most likely get some further buffs the the future as his current form is considered as pretty weak.
If freddy decides to chase someone who is freshly awoken and that survior is really good looper then he's going to have a bad time as without his dream world he's just powerless M1 killer. Freddy is much weaken when you're awake so you do weaken him by waking up as it makes everything he does harder at the cost of you wasting a bit of your time.
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A good demo. 'good' being the keyword here. you don't have to be a 'good' freddy to have all these advantages from his powers. That's my train of thought.
Bringing up deathslinger again: a lot of people complain about him that 'hoping he makes a mistake' isn't counterplay, so saying 'hoping freddy decides to engage in a chase etc, aka make a mistake' shouldn't count as counter either
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Fair enough, still freddy beiing easy to use while also beiing strong killer isn't anything bad or nerf worthy. Noting wrong with having good easy to use killers as is nothing wrong with having extremely strong & extremely hard to play killers such as nurse.
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Hold W. Not Freddy-specific, but it works wonders, since his power is in the loop and without a loop he's a basic killer. Waking up is also useful, but you shouldn't go out of your way for it or you might throw the game, similarly to doing totems.
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It's boring, but stealth is one of the best counterplays. Of course, freddy does have a better time spotting blendettes, because survivors in the dream world kind of "glow", but if you know how to hide well, you can waste a lot of his time.
And if he finds you, @MadLordJack is right. Shift+W.
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Doesn't matter.The game will always pick the clock that is the furthest away from you
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Stealth isn't really counterplay though.
It will also extremely hurt your team if you avoid the chases with him all the time.
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Have to agree there, beats me why they decided to include an overcharge debuff in technician.
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Freddy is pay to win and is unbeatable if he has more than 1.000 hours in this game.
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stealth can be counterplay in some cases (as in stealth and mislead the killer, so... stealth chase?), but not really here.
And W is map dependent (though it is for every killer). if you are unlucky (though this does require an a bit more experienced freddy) you might fall asleep during the chase and run straight into a snare
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I find routing is best for dealing with Freddy rather than looping. If your asleep and you loop a pallet Freddy will just snare you. If you keep running from gym to gym his traps won't do anything unless you come back. Unless he rigged the place up before the chase. Not a great solution but it works. I looped a Freddy on his own map for a good amount of time this way. Running from houses to the school ect. Remember your not suppose to be able to lose the killer every chase. If he downs you that doesn't mean he is OP. Your goal is to waste as much time as possible for your team to finish the gens. If you loop him for a few minutes and no gens got repaired that's your teams fault.
Another tip is if your asleep and Freddy is no where near you or he is chasing someone else, set off all his snares. Yes it will reveal you but those snares will have to be replanted.
His teleport actually has a pretty long CD unless everyone is asleep. When being chased by Freddy be sure to pass a glance back at him to make sure he isn't teleporting to a gen that happens to be where you are running too. Or try to loop him to places where the gens were completed.
I'm against changing Freddy because I remember when he came out and how weak he was after survivors learned how to counter him. He was the weakest killer in the game until Legion got here. Now he is at least A rank IMO. Going from the bottom to near top is a vast improvement. The only thing I would change about him is make BT work off proximity to the hook rather than TR. Your oblivious when your asleep so BT doesn't work unless your awake.
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Trust me, there is loads of counterplay. Drop pallets early if he does the thing where he places a snare on either side, otherwise he guaranteed gets you. If he fakes teleport to a gen, just let go and hide or run until you know if he faked it out or not. If you're asleep and it's that bad, wake up through one of the ways.
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Waking up should be a priority for each survivor in the dream world he teleports 15% faster which stacks to 60%! He's a bit like the hag when it comes to snares and fake pallets. When he's busy I destroy snares or throw fake pallets on purpose. Especially in solo this will help your team.
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Deathslinger not having counterplay..?
That one is obviously false.
His ranged attack is 100% counterable. I'm just gonna leave that here.
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There's no counterplay to all-seeing map-wide presence that debilitates you. Just surrender your soul. If you look up the definition of Pay to Win, his picture is there for an example.
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I'm of the opinion that waking up from clocks should be a 90 second cooldown before sleep to actually incentivise it. And skill checks should be 60 seconds.
Considering the fact that 90% of the time it chooses the farthest clock you end up wasting more time than you save. And failing skill checks is risky as he can instantly teleport to your gen anyway.
Freddy gets rewarded too much for nothing.
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That’s the trade off with Freddy.
It’s either stall the game by waking up via a team mate or clock (or blow a skill check. don’t know WHY survivors still do this), or put up with Snares/Pallets and increased teleport frequency (6 second reduction on cooldown for each sleeping survivor).
They knew that getting rid of Freddy’s direct debuff wouldn’t go down well in the rework with old Freddy mains, so they built game stall into his counterplay.
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This is EXACTLY why I prefer using pallets rather than Snares. It’s surprising that no matter HOW good the survivors are, they’ll still sometimes run to a Dream pallet that they should know is fake, but because “run to pallet” is so ingrained, they don’t realise they’re mistake till it’s too late.
Plus dream pallets leads to a LOT of quickly wasted real pallets.
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I think the main problem is that waking up can be pretty time-intensive and that it is extremely easy to immediately be put back to sleep by Freddy (sometimes completely wasting all that time). Skillchecks obviously come with a regression penalty and give Freddy info, Waking Up gets slower and slower each time until it's too slow to be worth doing, and the Alarm Clocks usually spawn on the opposite side of the map from where you feel asleep. Freddy's Sleep status / Dreamworld is literally a more consistent version of Plague's Sickness / Fountains and Pig's RBTs / Jigsaw Boxes (even if it doesn't give him a ranged attack or a potential kill).
The other issue is that his powers cost him so little time to use for how surprisingly effective they are. He can place snares/pallets while moving at full speed and doesn't slow down at any point during the interaction (no other trap-using character in DbD gets this benefit). He also gets a great teleport with a pretty brief cooldown (I think it's ~45 seconds at base) which can be reduced by up to 60% (15% per sleeping survivor).
Additionally, Freddy also gets a mostly-better version of Wraith's cloak and Spirit's passive phasing with his "intermittent visibility" mechanic at no extra charge. Actually he gets a whole lot of miscellaneous benefits/bonuses for free, it's a little silly really.
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To be clear, I don't actually want Freddy to get hard nerfed back into being a terrible killer; I think it's good that he's strong and a pretty real threat now. I just wish his abilities felt more exciting to play with/against and less like "it's DbD, but slower and also no-one can see anything".
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You don't seem to understand freddy very well
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Get good and stop whining. DS and Unbreakable
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I feel a similar way. I stopped playing him long ago as his new playstyle just didn't interest me even if it was stronger. The thing about Freddy a small amount of other killers like him is that they re inforce the gen rush meta further. Which is something that I thought we wanted to move away from.
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It’s not hard to wake up. You can play as Freddy and find out his weaknesses.
Change. Adapt. Survive.
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Do gens and don't waste time for trying to wake up.
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1 2 Freddy's coming for you 3 4 better lock your door😂
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Freddy is the most played killer for noob kilers for a reason. Easy mode. He can be AFK and survivors will still fall asleep and suffer slowdown from his addons. But then 90% of the time you will be facing baby killers playing freddy
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I always find its just his chase speed. I have acknowledged that to be successful against a good Freddy you need to stay out of sight. I enjoy setting off his snares when he's not around so it doesn't screw over a survivor that may engage with it during a chase. The clocks thing needs fixed for sure; it's hard having to travel across map to find one clock only to be out of dream world like 1.5 mins at most. Looping never really works against him. I never would have thought of technician, that's a good idea even with the new penalty.
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This is blatantly untrue though.
Why do so many people forget that Freddy has another thing on top of his "power" the snares/pallets? He can teleport. Being awake doesn't stop him from having pressure all over the map.
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Yeah but the clock that wakes you up is farthest from you, which means you'll be running across the map to wake yourself up when you could've been going for a save or doing gens. Its a lose lose situation.
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To say nothing of the fact that the "Counterplay" also benefits Freddy the longer the game goes, because it's harder and harder to wake up. I think they need to make survivors stay awake longer after they wake up to really incentivize doing so/make it worth it to hike across the map looking for an alarm clock. To say nothing of just, not being able to wake up because you're the obsession.
Have fun!
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thats the thing that makes him so boring to face:
there is no reliable counterplay. he got everything covered.
he doesnt really excel at anything, which stops him from being OP, but there is no weakness a survivor could exploit against him, which makes the games just seem boring and stale.
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Making Huntress waste her hatchets, making trapper have to go round having to reset his traps etc, that's counterplay where you have to work for your win.
But waking up against freddy? it takes massive time away from the survivor group. there ways aside the alarmclock give away your position. it takes longer and longer etc.
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hum?
So you said that you want to lose nothing to make a killer's ability totally useless ?
well it sounds very fair to me ,I mean why not?
let's just make killer's ability can't gain any advantage to them.
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you'd be cute if you'd have a trace of reading comprehension.
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Don't worry about being in the dream world. Without slowdown add ons, it really doesn't affect you other than his terror radius get's bigger. Between doing gen's, get your clock. When you unhook someone, let them wake you up. You get unhooked - wake everyone up.
Do not, and I repeat. Do not! Do not fail skill checks to get out of the dream world. That only helps Freddy. Freddy uses those notifications to track the positions of the survivors. If he is running other monitoring perks as well, you're basically giving him the ability to track all survivors all of the time for very little gain yourself.
If you're running from him, and see him placing a snare. Run to another loop. It takes him 2 seconds to setup, abuse that opening. When he teleporting to your gen, keep calm. Remember the direction he is in, if you see him in the distance then sneak away. If you don't then hide (in a good spot to hide, not right next to the gen). Running creates scratch marks, and then he will just track you.
Btw you could even ignore the add on's, they only add like 2-3 seconds longer on the gens.
Post edited by TheButcher on1 -
This really wasn't a "nerf" it was just meant to make the higher tiers better than the lower tiers. T3 functions basically the same way it use to, only T1-2 were really "nerfed"
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The only possible way to win against freddy is if he is a perkless noob. Perks makes him OP, his teleportation makes him OP, his instant snares with no cooldown makes him OP. He should have already been nerfed. The devs are sleeping on this one or either counting their money. To be honest, the devs have lost all touch with quality of life of survivor gameplay. I don't know how survivors do it.
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What makes Freddy top tier is the combination of excellent map mobility and a pretty solid anti-loop ability (against sleeping survivors at least). All the top killers have those two things in common - they can get around the map really quickly and they have something that helps them beat survivors in chases.
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This post tells me you are a killer main that believes anything less than a 4K every match is unbalanced. 75% winrate with possible hatches is grossly unbalanced.
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Your goal is wasting time before you go down. It isn't to not go down.
The counter play is standard looping but throwing the pallet early.
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Rush gens and play safe at pallets. Thats how you counterplay Freddy.
Í know some people will be like "But you cant trust your teamamtes in solo-queue". However that just shows that the SWF-solo imbalance is the core issue, not individual killers.
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You called me a survivor main so what's wrong with me calling you a "killer main"
If you are being honest and not playing the mob mentality, you will see that Object of Obession is fine and that stats do matter. Killrates are way too high. What isn't fine is extreme slowgen builds with aura reading.
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"All seeing" huh... Freddy lost that power with his buff. And if your referring to BBQ well that already has enough counters so use them.
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Snares activate: notification
Gen blowing up to wake up: notification
etc
all that while the survivors are likely having a negative status.
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