Should Decisive Strike really get nerfed?

I've never once run it in the 4.5 years I've played this game with the exception of the one trial it took me to get Adept Laurie, and even then I didn't activate it. I find it the most despicable perk there is in the game and refuse to use it. I'm all for nerfing it.

Nevermind that it's basically 60 seconds of complete immunity at this point and activates even when the killer clearly wasn't tunnelling.

I don’t think it needs any change. If you’re a good killer, you’re gonna know better than tunneling players and if someone’s abusing it, you can outsmart them. End of story.

I do like the way the perk punished decent killers for "Tunneling" when they are not technically Tunneling! Especially when they can easily used the 60 seconds safety net to progress the Generator repair/totems, go for risky saves and plays in front of the Killer's face; especially in SWF teams with Stacking DS and many second chances perks like Borrowed Time, Unbreakable, etc.

These perk changes will now add a downside in which you cannot rely on it to win the game as quickly or as efficiently! Which in turn helps average killers play well; unless of course, they are straight up Tunneling you and not pressuring the other Survivors besides you!

I do not understand why Survivors Mains are defending such a strongest Second Chance Perk in the game! Especially when most of our meta killer perks have been nerf down!

(I played both sides equally, more towards Killer; as long Solo Survivor Queue times exist)

The problem with the perk isn't that too strong, but rather that it's too exploitable and over-used by some as means of invulnerability rather than anti-tunneling. The new nerf for DS still serves the same purpose it was originally intended to: prevent tunneling. If you have time to work on a gen or totem, you aren't exactly being tunneled, even more-so if another survivor gets downed and hooked during that time. With this however I do agree that part of DS's nerf could be altered; when active, the survivor should have to perform an action for a certain amount of time for DS to deactivate, as I can see some survivors touching a gen for a split second and potentially deactivating it when they are being tunneled.

It's a tough question; people like to complain about how DS can be "abused," but that relies on the assumption that it's an anti-tunnel perk, which it is not. If anything, getting decisive striked will encourage tunneling, for now you know that they don't have it anymore.

With that in mind, I don't think that there is anything gamebreakingly strong about DS; it's a one-time activation perk that can be countered by slugging, or just going for another survivor, which is perfectly in line for its second chance capabilities. Hell, you can go an entire match without having it even proc. 5 seconds is a bit long for a stun, but consider that even though it can ruin your momentum, any decent killer can chase them down and then down them again. Better than that, don't pick up recently hooked survivors.

However, the issue is that DS is stronger than many of its peers; it's as ubiquitous as BBQ and Chili, which makes it plain uninteresting. I would love to see people using power struggle instead of DS, mostly because it's so much more creative; you feel genuinely outplayed, since picking up DS left and right makes it feel "cheap." However, it's just not as reliable as DS, and so it won't be seen nearly as often. The same thing applies with flip flop vs. unbreakable. Getting up through flip-flop feels like an outplay, while unbreakable feels "cheap," even though the killers have to go out of their way to allow unbreakable by slugging.

This gets to the issue of meta perks getting on peoples' nerves because they feel "cheap", which then causes them to rationalize some sort of inane drivel of an excuse why X should be nerfed into the ground. That's generally why I believe all perks should be made equal; more diversity means that you can't call everything cheap.

This is coming from a killer main, by the way. For my personal view, I don't like DS, but I'm fine with it.

the main problem with ds is that it can be abused in ways where it's not even an anti-tunnel perk. and to top it off, all 4 survivors can use it in a match. the perk alone also demands respect to killers when theres an obsession in the team. as a killer, you dont know if one person has it or the whole team.

I don't really care for it as a killer main, I usually get 1 or 2 people with DS every once and a while but even then it's not a problem. If it was like a full team with DS every 2 games then I'd hate it but I'm really fine with how it ks.

DS cannot be played around because there are many people that run it with Unbreakable in purple-red ranks, so slugging wouldn't work sometimes. Anyone who has played DbD for a good while now should know this. If you wanna use STBFL or Dark Devotion but also have the ability to create new obsessions, run Nemesis if you have the Oni, or Furtive Chase if you have Ghostface (Nemesis is better IMO).