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Finding it Tough to Learn Killer against high Rank SWF

So, I started playing this game due to a friend getting me into it and we played survivor (without communication). I've made it to red ranks, but my friend doesn't play anymore and I just can't stomach Solo survivor much more. Everyone on forums told me that the camping and tunneling are tools of baby Killers and "it's rare at red ranks".

Whelp, then I got to red ranks, and it was worse. I'm lucky if I get a single match out of 10 where the Killer isn't camping/tunneling, or random survivors don't immediately disconnect/hook suicide- and I'm left to die on my first hook way more than anyone should be for no good reason. So I gave this up, and I started playing Killer.

So here is my issue; I'm a rank 13 Killer atm, and I am constantly matched with at least 3 man SWF, and every Lobby is either a rainbow lobby, or primarily red/purple ranks. I am never paired with survivors at MY rank. And between them being much higher rank than me, AND SWF on top of it- I'm lucky if I get 1-2 kills per match. I play Spirit, but mostly Plague.

I'm finding it really frustrating because yeah it's a game, yes I need to to learn so I can be better, but it's super demoralizing to have a red rank survivor team when I'm yellow, inundating me with flashlights and mocking me at every turn. I don't think there is any way I can be fairly matched, because I think Behaviour caters to the SWF as their bread and butter.

Atm I'm running Discordance, Nurse's Calling, Blood Warden and No Ed on Spirit.

On Plague, I have Corrupt Intervention, Discordance, Blood Warden and Surge.


I find my biggest problems come from not being used to first person navigating. I get a LOT of first hits, but after that I have difficulty tracking the survivors because it seems scratch marks are everywhere- I'm also maybe too cautious to engage in a chase for too long. I know SWF usually have a good looper and they click their damn flashlight at me to bait me to follow them.

Idk, any advice? I'm ready to just give up the game because nothing is fun anymore. It seems the only way to enjoy it is if I somehow found a SWF group- but my friends tried the game and gave up.

There are a lot of bitter people on the forum, so I'm just going to put it out there that I'm asking for advice in good faith. If I can't get even get that from here, then I'm just done with this game because it's pointless misery lol.

Comments

  • twocansofbean
    twocansofbean Member Posts: 200

    No mean to disrespect but if you think you're facing a team of SWF as often as you are. You're not they were just better.

    But a the same time if you're on pc with a graphics there's a way to turn on your brightness setting for DBD. It makes the killer experience 10 times better. Tbh take the flash light users in stride they actually waste their teams time trying to bait you. I have pstd against flash light users but if you know they're there they are always wasting time. Swap no ed for sloppy butcher.

    Um tbh if you're getting tunneled that much as survivor I gotta say you probably aren't at red rank level. Which is the sad part about the survivor experience. You can rank up by just doing basic objectives. The times I've tunneled recently as killer I more often happen to stumble upon them from often than not and they always are the worst rank out of everyone. Even when ranking up I've noticed the higher ranks generally always get out more. Not cause they are better loopers, but cause they chose paths I won't be at. I patrol gens randomly as wraith and they seem to know about the places I won't go to.

  • gentacle
    gentacle Member Posts: 260

    Hi gamer. I started up in January without knowing anything about the game (after getting sick of another game I was playing being infested with cheaters) so I know exactly how you feel with regards to being frustrated as new killers get shoved into the deep end pretty fast.

    I have a background in first person shooters so playing the killer perspective came a lot more naturally to me than it might for you so feel free to take these thoughts with a grain of salt:


    1. Playing killer is a time management simulator. You always want to choose the best time to cost ratio possible. This is why slugging and tunneling are effective tools and you shouldn't be dissuaded from using them. Ignoring time spent finding them or perks/items brought into the game or whatever, 4 survivors on 4 generators can get 4 of them done in 80 seconds. If they brought toolboxes or certain perks these generators are now done even faster. If they have a key, the hatch is now open. They can escape from the game on you in under 2 minutes if you don't find one and create pressure.
    2. Creating pressure is done by your choice of perks and killer. There's a reason Spirit/Nurse are considered extremely viable at all levels of play: mobility and the ability to give up perk lethality for perks that stall time. A typical build you might see these days is Corrupt/Pop/Ruin/BBQ. Or ruin/undying/tinkerer/pop. etc. Sometimes you'll see lethality builds like infectious fright/agitation/starstruck on them or undying/ruin/devour hope/etc. The important thing is to figure out your personal win condition and build your game's pressure around it. I personally avoid hex builds because I don't like to be dependent on RNG (and survivors seem to just know where the hexes are whenever I do experiment).
    3. Playing killer effectively is also a massive timesink. If you don't have BBQ, get BBQ. It's a decent information perk that generally lets you know where to go after a hook but also having the opportunity to double the amount of bloodpoints earned from a game is huge as Killers are a huge bloodpoint sink. With BBQ and survivor pudding a perfect game can net you something stupid like 96k bloodpoints.
    4. Going back to number 1, you don't have to be ethical with survivors. No one can tell you how to play the game. It's not real and a lot of the "survivors rulebook for killers" attitude that pervades the community is there because it's easy to demoralize one person into losing. Slug, tunnel, camp, be extra mean and vicious. A tilted survivor is a dead survivor (unless they have a bunch of second chance perks haha). Hell use Stridor on spirit. It's incredibly mean and effective.
    5. Versus SWFs I generally have two rules: if someone's leading me away from an area, I probably want to investigate in the exact opposite direction. And if someone's clicking a flashlight at me, there's someone nearby they're trying to protect. Try not to do what survivors want.

    BBQ/Corr/2 extra perks are a wonderful base for learning how to play versus survivors especially swfs imho. Corr forces them out of their spawn area 95% of the time and gives you a general idea of where they're starting from i.e. if you spawn on the south side of the map and everything north of you has white generators, they probably started over there. If you start from the middle, then it's less reliable. Mobility on a killer is also super important. Playing trapper will teach you how to M1 but it won't actually win you games. Learning how to 3 gen and guard an area is not as good of a skill as learning how to be super aggressive with keys being as they are.


    Other than that seeing as I don't know how you play I can't give you pointers on performance. Hopefully these tips/ideas help you out some. 8)

  • CluelessWanderer
    CluelessWanderer Member Posts: 939
    edited May 2021

    -I'm playing on PS4

    • Trust me, it was not an easy grind thru Solo survivor to get to red ranks. I said "camping/tunneling" broadly. I didn't say I was the one experiencing this every match. The thing with Solo, that if 2 of your team mates get camped/tunneled, you're kind of screwed. They WILL d/c or hook suicide. But sure! I'm totes lying bout my rank in an online game forum. Thanks for your help!


  • CluelessWanderer
    CluelessWanderer Member Posts: 939

    Really helpful. Thanks so much for taking the time to write that out. I do have Bubba, but I'm still leveling him up to make BBQ teachable.

  • Limitless_Pondering
    Limitless_Pondering Member Posts: 11

    The learning curve is rough for new players and can be frustrating. I bought the game about 1 year ago — a few days before the Silent Hill chapter was released — and what has helped me the most these past couple of months is watching streamers in my free time, as well as guides on Youtube. Although I don't have as many hours as a lot of the veterans on this forum, in my opinion, the most important thing to master in this game is how to properly run tiles. This goes for both survivor and killer (more so for killer since survivors who struggle looping can still escape if their team is efficient on gens). For example, at a jungle gym, as a survivor, you'll want to maximize the tile by utilizing the window before using the pallet to extend the chase and waste as much time as possible. If your the killer, on the other hand, you want to deny the window or at least force a slow or medium vault. You do this by running it counterclockwise. You can also hide your red stain in certain areas to get the survivor to hesitate for a few seconds. It's a little hard to explain unless you see it visually, so I'll just attach some guides that helped me when I was first starting as they provide much better insight.

    As far as facing a SWF group, the only advice I can give is to always expect them to run the same perks (e.g., Borrowed Time, Decisive Strike, Unbreakable, Sprint Burst, Dead Hard) and be super altruistic. So two things to keep in mind might be: at the start of the match, if you run into a survivor for the first time and don't see them use an exhaustion perk like Sprint Burst or Balanced Landing, chances are they likely have Dead Hard. Once they've reached the injured state, walk up real close to them and wait it out before swinging. If you down a survivor and they manage to crawl under a pallet, don't instantly pick them up. Bait the pick-up by staring at the ground for about 3 seconds and look around. More often than not, their teammates are hiding nearby to come in for a pallet save. The same idea goes for flashlights: bait the pickup or face the wall. I know it's a lot to take in, but I hope this helps you at least a little bit. Best of luck.



  • Pulsar
    Pulsar Member Posts: 20,783

    I can boot up my stream to give some tips and tricks, if you like.

    I play Solo Survivor and Killer, and I've been around for about 3 years

  • Avignon
    Avignon Member Posts: 133

    mmmmm unfortunately the current meta really isn't helping your perk setup. People can troll and call em clutch but you kinda NEED Undying / Ruin or at least Pop Goes the Weasel. Gens go by sooooo fast even baby survivors who're to scared to "come help" will do alot of damage by just hugging a gen and not getting involved.

    I can see how the click baiting can be tilting, i do, but you have to keep in mind ONE person chasing you around with a flashlight is .... great you're playing 3v1, having MULTIPLE people chasing you around is just... christmas. After a while the sound of flashlights clicking fills you with joy instead of anger. Worse possible case is they are a swf and the clicker follows you around as you're patrolling and warns people but this can often backfire. A survivor preemptively letting go of a gen adds up to a good 30 - 60 seconds of lost progress over the course of a match vs oblivious people letting go at the last second. Also the flashlight people tend to be... suicidally altruistic.

    If a flashlighter is trying to protect someone, and you manage to down one person and got a protection hit on the dude with the flashlight, FAKE the pickup on the down survivor. Just walk over his corpse and stand still for a second or two with your back to the flashlight. 9 / 10 time the INJURED dude with the flashlight instead of gaining distance will turn back and try to get in front of you to blind you while your locked in the animation..... wack him. Or just turn around if he has 2 brain cells instead of 1 and is waiting nearby to see what you do.

    Killer is largely about macro play tbh, not the micro (chaseing). Something i screw up often myself and i'm trying to work is that i'll find a gen being done, see a survivor is heading to a strong loop and just go "ah, i won't chase that, ill get him later", a few "i'll get him later" ... later and i'm at a fairly strong 3gen, with 4 survivors alive (that's another thing, know that some gens are perfectly ok to give up on, you want your last 3 gens to be as close together as possible, if you keep bouncing between far away gens you'll be in a situation where it's impossible to defend the last gen due to sheer distance) that i WILL inevitably loose after 15 - 20 minutes of playing wack'a'mole because unless you're playing a killer with one shot potential or survivor screws up royally like smacking into a wall after a hit, you can't hold a 3gen against 4 people.

    If you find someone early as a GENERAL rule of thumb i'd say it's ok to chase untill 2 gens have poped wether that takes 90 seconds or 2-3 minutes. If you get a down in that time, great if not, it's not horrible assuming you've broken a good number of pallets around key spots like main building / shack. Find a GOOD hook if you can (this is also something killers ignore, they get a down and just hold W to the first hook they see, have a hook in a good spot like the center of the map or near a gen, is important) and now the balls in your court, IDEALLY you'll want to find a survivor, start a chase will the 3rd survivors goes to rescue. Now you have 3 people off gens. Look at the UI if 20-30 seconds have passed after the unhook and the person is still injured, break the chase, they've gone to pop a gen. If you see the hook person change heal, great, you have a little more time to chase, they've wasted time healing. Now it's a matter of rinse and repeat.