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How Would You Fix Killer Stress?
Inspired by Trickstaaaaa's post, I want to ask the community, how would you fix the problem of the stress that comes with playing killer?
I'm sure most of us are well aware that playing killer is no walk in the park, especially when compared to the survivor experience. More often than not, a single mistake on the killer's part could cost what would've been a victory, having to then rely on a survivor's own mistake which can be hard due to second-chance perks (E.G. Deadhard and Unbreakable).
What could be changed to rectify this? Should survivors be given more to worry about? Should their second-chance perks be nerfed? Or should the killer experience itself change? Would the mythical "Early Game Collapse" help?
Comments
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I don't think it's perks, it's mostly SWF's. SWF's cause 88% of my stress
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Not sure you can really get rid of the stress that comes with one lone person facing off against four others.
The greatest trick the devs could ever pull is convincing people killer is a "fun" game mode and not a job they should get paid to perform.
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Don’t think you deserve 4k every game, that’s all
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I don’t think you can tbh
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I have a question.
Most killers play to win right? So don't need some stress in order to win?
To me It doesn't really seem to make sense to win and be calm at the same time.
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Wasn't trying to imply such. Frankly I'm usually happy securing a 2k, and often I 3k and give hatch anyway when I do 4k.
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With the way the game is now, promoting swf groups, I guess its not much you can do about playing against them. My problems with killer don't really revolve around swf but with general mechanics that are too inconsistent for me not to notice. The biggest offender is Grabbing because the game doesn't want to register my grabs most of the time. I hate the fact that I can go in for a grab on somebody working on a gen or unhooking, see the animation start to play out, then just stop and I have to keep trying.
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the solution is to actually shift stress onto the survivors as a group rather than having everyone stressed individually. and the way to do that is to up the killer's pressure globally.
personally i'd go for a collapse that starts at the start of the game with the same rules as the endgame collapse. if anyone's dying or hooked, it's slowed down. if the killer can't actually down anyone in the case of the survivors just being way better, then at the very least, they have way less time to actually work and could still lose anyway.
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That latter point seems a tad ignorant. You're welcome to think that survivor is more stressful, most may disagree but you do you, but I think you're not accounting for why survivors DC more than killers. Sure, sometimes they are legitimate reasons, but in this context, usually when a survivor DCs, from my experience, it's because they tried being toxic and failed or wanted to deny the killer their kill, which to me seems to be less out of stress and more because they got butthurt.
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I'm telling you, give me killer dance emotes and I'll play even MORE killer than I already do! Who wouldn't love watching me dance like this with Doc?!?!?! It would be glorious!
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The best way to reduce the stress of playing killer would be restructuring the overall pace of the game somehow. Having a survivor down, healing, or on the hook at all times while chasing another is just way too important (assuming the survivor team collectively is trying to push gens). Otherwise, you'll quickly lose all your gens committing to a bad chase.
This also makes the first chase the most important one in the game, as a long chase with a good amount of pallets thrown and a good Dead Hard can make your gen count go from the beginning 5 to 2 remaining.
The early game collapse idea could have been a possible solution to this problem but early game stalling mechanics could also swing the optimal way to play to be stealth for the first x minutes of the game, which would be incredibly boring.
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Online bots.
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Getting rid of fast-paced trials would help a lot. However, I don't have even the slightest idea of how exactly this should be done.
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Either reduce the amount of second chances survivors get or remove killer reliance on survivor mistakes.
If the killer needs survivors to screw up repeatedly to win, survivors shouldn't get so many second chances. They have an entire team to cover for them, why do they need to be able to loop the killer near indefinitely? How the hell is that fair?
If the killer is ever going to be the "power role" that was promised, their skill needs to matter just as much as the survivors'.
I remember a game like this one. It was basically a rip off, with some changes. It was actually a Roblox game, and was unique for being possible the only Roblox game better than the original. It was called "Before the Dawn," if you're curious. I might do a separate post on this, actually.
If the killer saw you, you didn't try to be offensive in any way. You just ran. Even if you had shotguns and baseball bats and metal folding chairs that gave you vampirism for some reason and shields and night vision goggles and camera drones and beartraps, the killer was scary.
Why? Because you absolutely could not face them one-on-one. There was no looping or similar mechanic, although you had many ways to tank damage, or stun, blind, track, block, and move the killer on command. But if he got close enough to hurt you, you prayed your fancy gear and the ten odd friends you brought with you could save you.
But the thing was, DbD killers are actually stronger than BtD killers. For example, there was no perk system, and no way to force generators to regress, maps were so big they were basically impossible to pressure, and in general the powers were way weaker than DbD killer powers (IE, the Hunter was basically old Wraith running Bone Clapper and All Seeing - Blood, but he couldn't turn aura reading off, eliminating his depth perception, and instead of moving faster, he was actually slower while cloaked). Although notably the red stain wasn't a thing.
Plus, there were no scratch marks, and survivors could hold their breath to basically activate Iron Will, and survivors had an actual health bar that even the heaviest hitters needed five hits to take them down even if they were running the lowest HP possible, in addition to passive regen. Plus, there could be up to twenty one survivors in a match.
But here's the thing: chases basically had a hard cap. You had a stamina bar, and running, jumping, and holding your breath drained it. The lower your health was, the slower you moved, to the point were you could end up crawling on the ground leaving trails of blood behind you. If your HP went to zero, you would just collapse onto the ground, and had to be revived within 45 seconds or you were out. There were no hooks; the killer just slugged. That was just how the game worked.
No lockers, no jukes, no windows. Stealth was the name of the game, but I've seen offensive tactics work. For a bit. But nothing like Dead by Daylight, where survivor mistakes can be recovered from with minimal effort even if they're literally just bullying the killer to death.
Matches were capped at six minutes (match starts at midnight, ends at 6:00 AM), and by default the killer won if no one escaped during that time. But who actually "won" didn't matter, since you got points (the currency) for actions you did. As a survivor, you could easily be killed and get as much points and xp as you would have gotten if you just escaped.
It was a hell of a lot of fun for both sides, and bullying was almost a non-factor. Camping still existed, but it was incredibly easy to tell if that was going on because of all of the "bleeding out" markers clumped together. There were still some broken things in the game, mostly Dark Devil Chainiac, a killer skin that allowed you to make melee attacks from further than anyone else could, but overall it was an awesome game.
It was so good, you would almost forget it was a free to play Roblox game if it didn't remind you every single second.
Those are some fun memories.
The reason I went on that tangent is just to say that the best possible way to make the killer role feel good is to make it less punishing, and make survivor less forgiving. I mean, the game punishes survivors for getting a hit with... resetting the chase. And letting them use DH, and making them silent if they run Iron Will. I get the concept of risk-reward, but this isn't risk-reward. This is rewarding survivors for screwing up, and punishing killers for doing everything right.
That doesn't seem right.
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Create an offline mode so they can practice killers they aren't that good at before they get thrown to the red rank wolves lol.
15 -
Stop playing killer.
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By fixing survivor objectives. Survivors only have a single objective, two is you include totems which let's be honest most aren't looking for totems and if they do its usually along the way while doing gens.
If you relieved gen pressure from the killer by adding new survivor objectives then it'll be less stressful for the killer and could be more entertaining for the survivor.
As for what kind of objectives, I'm not sure.
Or you could add killer buffs as they complete their own objectives. Maybe hooking every survivor once will give all killers a bit more haste for like 30 seconds.
And successfully regressing 10 generators will give all killers extra regression speed on gens for 60 seconds.
These sound like perk ideas but I feel like giving killers objectives and rewarding them being complete will give the player a more focused and less stressful time. They can even have objective tallys so the killer can see how close they are to completing them and getting that buff. I dont see why all killers shouldn't be rewarded for successfully hooking all four survivors and regressing gens? It means they are playing fair with no tunneling and successful policing gens.
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Give me and the Killer I’m playing an option to smoke one and just relax. Let the survivors play gen simulator the game while me and my killer are in the barn in Coldwind talking about life while eating Doritos
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Make the game literally function without huge gamebreaking bugs, including massive fixes to server stability. Sorted. Suddenly, both sides have a better time.
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While I agree survivor is generally more stressful outside of heavily communicative 4 man SWF groups, (which are incredibly rare let's be honest) I find lately that killers are DCing a bit more often than survivors, although it's usually as survivors are leaving and they're babyraging that they lost a game (maybe 2 hooks on each survivor) where noone was toxic and they may have even done pretty well.
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I would stop balancing the game around rank 20s and require every person on the design team to play killer at r1.
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While I strongly agree that survivor objectives is the main source of killer stress, I believe increasing gen times will only make survivor more boring.
I would propose instead of increasing gen times, give survivor's a secondary objective prior to gens. For example every 25% progress gens overheat and become too hot to interact with so survivor's have to find a bottle of oil to pour into the gen to cool it off, than it becomes intractable again. At the same time I believe this will shift the killer meta and give other perks a chance to shine.
I don't think looping is the problem, I think the problem comes from the fact that killers have to hope and pray that survivor's make a mistake or that they are out positioned to win the chase, instead of being rewarded for playing well (let's exclude Sally and Rin from this).
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Getting gud seems like a good start
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Killing people is stressful. If it were easy, more people would do it.
Likely Unpopular Opinion: In this lovely community we want playing killer to be just stressful enough that about 80% of players DON'T want to play it regularly.
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Killers need to just get better at their role.
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I disagree both are stressful but there is far more pressure on the killer to do well. The reason Survivors DC is because they're upset that the game isn't going the way the want.
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Give every killer a means of map mobility. Then make all survivors spawn together.
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Get Gas for 10s gives u ability to do Gen for 30s. A Gen time from 80s down to 60s. (Which mean the total time for a Gen is still 80s)
Killer hits a survivor will deplete their Gas. They have to get Gas again in order to do Gen.
=> Gen rush is no more
With this mechanic, it profits more to hit multiple survivors rather than tunnel one once they injured.
Have DS as basekit, active twice (once after each hook), and disable when Gates are powered
=> Tunnel is no more
Make hooks work like cage, they spawn to another place if killer is close
=> Camping is no more
Yellow Mori as basekit
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Killer stopped being stressful for me like a month into playing. Most survivors are potatoes and rank means nothing so the most that's going to happen if I lose is I'll chuckle a bit at them trying to mock me in pgc then move on to another match. Try setting goals other than getting 4k's every game, that's too unrealistic (not because you're bad, but that sorta win is not always up to you, map rng, survivor items and your killer's limitations are not under your control and must be taken into account). I personally feel like I've done a decent job once I get 4 barbecue stacks. Then I just have to make as many bp as possible because they'll be doubled. My win.
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Move the game away from being survivor favored most of the time.
As others have said the easiest way to start doing this would be to make gens take longer, decent survivors do their objective way too fast compared to killers.
There's technically other options but unless you want full chases to only last like 20-30 seconds max or hook states to go from 3 to 2 or something to make killer speeds closer to survivor objective speeds, there's not much else to do imo.
Its either speed up killers or make survivors take longer. The speed difference is the most contributing factor to why killer feels so much more stressful and why they are generally weaker in most cases. The main contributing factors the the speed difference are gen speeds and loop/map design being in the survivors favor in the majority of cases making chases too long for how fast gens get done. That's why the best killers are ones that can both end cases fast and get on top of gens fast.
2 -
Maybe injured survivors could go at 95% speed maybe that would help, and incentives healing, so we could have another optional objective. Either we play slower or heal up. That could be a way they could add a new optional mission sort of.
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What rank are you because in red ranks most survivors are somewhat decent. Below red ranks I agree with you.
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A 5% penalty is barely anything. Additionally the problem isn't usually the injured survivor, its the other 3. In just your first chase, 3 gens will pop from the other healthy survivors, the one you're chasing isn't doing gens.
Unless you're going to make the penalty massive along with making healing take longer, I don't think this solution will do much unfortunately.
Remember in the current state of the game, the survivors can do 3/5 of their objective by the time the killer gates 1/12. Against just a decent survivor team most killers will get like, 3-4 hooks. The difference in speed is staggering when the survivors are just decent.
The only thing helping killers is the number of potatoes in the game because survivor isn't hard at all to be decent in, and that's all you need to make most killers unviable.
Their main objective takes no skill, meanwhile killers have to work for progress on theirs and the survivor objective goes way faster. There's no difference between an ok survivor and a good survivor on a gen, they all do it in the same amount of time.
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I have like, 300h in the game. Not saying I'm good, actually the exact opposite: it doesn't take skill to get to red ranks, it's really just about how much time you put into the game every month, now time put into the game does have some sort of correlation with experience but if you can't apply that it's just no good, and that seems to be the case with a lot of survivors in red ranks. Sometimes you DO get the very good survivor, I like to leave them for when the match is under control. If ALL survivors are just a lot better than me then I have no problem with taking an L here and there. Happens and, again, rank doesn't mean anything so I don't care about what number is shown besides my name.
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Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times Gen Times.....and....
Generator Times.
Thats it...thats all my stress in this game thats it. It IS THE PRIMARY REASON I have not picked up and had fun with other killers who didn't have gen pressure built in. And its the only reason I won't play any other themed builds that don't do ANYTHING other than slow down gen times.....
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Survivor is far easier honestly. I play both at red ranks and it much easier to survive and/or pip than for killer to get a 4k and/or pip.
Survivor I honestly get bored most of the time since the neta has been the same for years now
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Even if it isn't just straight up gen times, ANY OTHER OBJECTIVE WOULD STILL BE A WELCOME CHANGE!!! Like dude I get it survivor can be boring when all you're doing is pressing M1. But I have yet to see the devs add any other worthwhile objectives. And when they inadvertantly come up with an interesting way to throw a side objective at the survivor via hex totems....THEY NERF IT.....so its like....The devs don't want to give killers more gen time, which is fine, because survivors don't wanna sit there even longer on gens, BUT AT THE SAME TIME, they aren't willing to add in interesting secondary objectives either so.....
Survivors are just gonna have to stay bored and keep holding M1 I dunno what to tell you. We been begging for extra stuff for you guys to do for ages. It keeps our job fun by having us focus on more objectives, and would likely keep survivor play fun by not having you sit and do the same M1 hold every damn game....But nope, everytime it comes up BHVR says no.... So I guess they like you guys standing in the same spot holding M1 I dunno....
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Limit the effectiveness of saves. Right now they completely undo the killers hard work if they slip up even a little, and by that I mean usually if they guess wrong and don't actually make any real mistakes.
If the stun duration was shortened but blinds and stuns could happen mid-animation, it would makes saves much less effective but much easier to pull off.
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Well there could be some general things like if 4 people are on a gen it could make a loud noise notification so those situations where you have a gen done before you see anyone because all 4 spawned there will be less likely
Other things like that early game mechanic the devs spoke about most of the stress comes from the early game but it just sticks through the game until you know that there's no chance anymore
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This.
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I wouldn't even want to "fix" that stress.
The fact that one's mistakes can lead to one's loss is a good thing. Killer is highly demanding like that.
What I would want, however is for the survivors' experience be similar. Each individual survivor should put in as much effort and have as much pressure on them as the killer does. The downtime survivor's have at gens being relatively safe and uninteractive contributes to that a lot.
It is incredibly frustrating to me when I play killer to know that while I am worrying constantly about outplaying my opponents in less than 10 seconds each time, multiple times, my opponents are progressing the game massively in their favor by holding a button on an inanimate object, far away from me. I dunno... that is legitimately the biggest problem I have with the game...
It's especially frustrating when I'm succeeding at outplaying my opponents over and over again in less than 10 seconds each time and they still get most if not all gens done. And it is exceedingly frustrating when they do get all gens done, and then they all try to save someone on the hook and then they all die instantly because they were literally incapable of outplaying me, they could only outgen me.
The fact that the game seems to be balanced around survivors who are not terribly competent is also a problem. Because survivors arent dumb. Survivors can be very sophisticated players that get to an incredibly high level of skill...the problem is the game has so many safeguards for survivors that aren't too competent, that those safeguards in the hands of survivors with high skill levels just become ridiculous... A similar thing can happen with a few things on the killer side but I don't think it ever reaches that level, and usually killers get power boosts for succeeding, not safeguards for their mistakes, with a few problematic exceptions.
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To answer the main question, stress is not controllable really. Its mostly completely subjective however there are ways to lower it, I mainly only stress over the balance really, thats why I have started to play nurse as she is the only killer I find viable without extreme luck on the killers side.
I mean I have said it before and I will say it again, if survivors want to be OP they can do so due to the fact that in the game the potential remains that gens can be done in a few minutes literally, survivors at base have 8 lives and can add additional lives via perks and items, loops are typically safe enough to force a killer to break pallet wasting more time in a chase and some loops have no counterplay due to how safe they are, Clutch perks allow extra time in chase many a times, survivors predominately can choose the map, ect.
Post edited by DerpyPlayz on1 -
We had a second objective with ruin/undying. Survivors hated it and the devs basically deleted it.
We will never ever get a second objective after that.
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The answer is to hire new designers. The current crew dont play killer at a high level so they’ll never understand
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Being injured should carry some kind of penalty either to chase or objective.
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Yes the killers that have about 2k hours just need to be better why didn't I think of that (HEY EVERY KILLER PLAYER JUST BE BETTER HE HAS THE SLUTION)
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Nah both shack and L T walls aren't as dangerous, they're just okay mostly, just start to mind game it.
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And that's what causes all the killer stress. Even good gen pressure isn't enough to stop gens from popping which means killers constantly have to be on their A game 100% of the time the entire match.
Survivors need a second objective, and one that isn't solely relying on the killer bringing in two perks.
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People get stressed playing this game?
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You dont, getting stressed over a game is like getting stressed while watching sports, it goes with each person character.
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