Rebalanced Survivors

There's a few good ideas in here, but I'm sorry, most of these changes would be god awful if they were to be implemented. I have no idea how you'd enforce the one survivor only mechanic (if it's even possible) and a lot of perk nerfs here would absolutely screw over solo players (BT, unbreakable are two of the worst ideas here). Even worse is that increasing gen speeds by a third massively incentivises camping (increased repair speeds wouldn't be enough to offset the benefit) which is one of the least fun things to deal with. A 30% buff is pointless if you're the last one alive anyway since you'd be playing for hatch at that point. Increasing hex totem cleansing to 30 seconds and dull totems strengthens NOED considerably while also giving an unneeded buff to mobility killers running ruin / undying.

I'll bookmark this post for later since there's a lot to cover and I can't do it justice in a short post. However, a lot of these reworks don't make sense to me and do very little to fix the issues that killers / soloq players have.

Okay, I am going to stop here immediately: This is demented. This is a supermassive buff to the absolute worst designed perk in the entire game, because there would literally be no reason not to run NOED on every killer literally all the time since it costs the survivors a FULL FIVE MINUTES or gets the killer free kills.

This is also just the worst idea design-wise since it would consist of someone holding LMB for 60 seconds straight, doing nothing else. It's disturbingly boring and without addressing the fact that progress is reset when the action is interrupted, this is a set-up for a gameplay experience that will undoubtedly be characterised as 'cancerous'. Imagine being over halfway done, having spent the last half minute not doing anything of note and then someone goes down nearby and Infectious Fright resets your progress. You'd quit on the spot and NO ONE would be able to disagree with you.

And while I'm here, there's another big disagreement:

This is the exact opposite of what the game could benefit from. Solo speeds being reduced makes sense, because currently there is the issue of '3 gens on 1st hook', but you don't fix this by just making -everything- take longer, -all the time-. This is just making the game last way longer which pushes a delicate balance about a mile and a half in favour of the killer. Instead of games being a coin toss and pretty much down to player skill, it'll turn into a 4K standard unless the killer just isn't trying. Heck, you could just Bloodlust out every chase and you would probably not even come close to losing. Especially if you're bringing Pop.

And it's specifically down to this aspect. The perfect way to help the game out as it is, is likely to be a solo gen speed slow-down in exchange for a co-op gen speed buff. The reason for this is because it makes for more strategic considerations on the part of the survivors. If they all split up, they're safer, but if they work together, they're faster. If they work together, though, and the killer finds their gen, that's to the benefit of the killer, so faster also means riskier. And if the killer hooks someone, they don't just lose that survivor for the time they spend on the hook, but they also lose the co-op bonus that survivor can provide, meaning the killer gets more value out of a hook than they currently do.

So in short: Less punishing of gen co-opping improves gameplay for survivors while buffing killers slightly.

You know what? I'm gonna go through it while I'm here.

No. This makes the end-game collapse a nightmare for the killer for no real reason.

It's essentially Dead Hard in triplicate, and considering how frustrating Dead Hard is already considered to be, I don't think this is good for the game's health. Additionally, the wooden plank or iron pipe are just way too powerful. Access to killer stuns is rare for a reason.

And among these you proceed to list Resilience, Self-Care, Balanced Landing, Rookie Spirit, and most baffling of all, Small Game and -Spine Chill-.

The single best defensive intel perk in the game you want to remove for being 'ineffective'? You want to ditch the best totem-hunter perk in the game on the side?

I mean, I get that Resilience, Self-Care, Balanced Landing and Rookie Spirit are underwhelming at times, but have you ever ran Self-Care with Botany and Desperate Measures? It's hilarious, you can heal yourself faster than others can heal you. I once took three hits for another survivor, all in the same chase, purely because I was able to heal that damn fast on my field medic build.

Resilience is a fair pick if you have means of -staying- injured. It's infamous for being the meme pick alongside No Mither, but it stops being a meme pick when you pair it with For the People, where you not only cut out time spent on healing but then also proceed to do gens faster.

Balanced Landing is still a serviceable perk even if it doesn't compare to other exhaustion perks. But that's other exhaustion perks. It still blows about 60-70% of the roster out of the water.

Rookie Spirit is a surprisingly fair intel perk, feeding you info on the whereabouts of other survivors, the state of their gens, their gens' locations, and if there's no Ruin, the killer's location. It should absolutely stay.

On top of that, there's no reason to remove those perks. If they're weak, buff them, don't just delete them.

Then on to the perk changes.

No reason to nerf it down to 3 seconds, it has the most stringent activation condition.

This is the exact opposite of Babysitter's intent. It's supposed to make the unhooker the obvious, appealing target. If you give them endurance, you do the exact opposite and force the killer to go for the person you're babysitting.

You know how the Babysitter gets to see the killer's aura? Just extend that courtesy to the person being unhooked to help the perk do its job.

Perk to perk countering creates an unhealthy environment. This is Dead by Daylight, not Rock-Paper-Scissors. You'd have a better chance with it blocking all aura reading universally, but I'm not sure BtB even needs it.

At this point, does it even do anything anymore? This is the wrong nerf, it just needs to disallow body-blocking.

Appreciate the attempt, but this perk is unbuffable. Any push that makes it at all reliable in escaping the killer's grasp would push it from weak to game-breaking.

Meh. Slight improvement I suppose.

No, it should not go back to what it was. It should not be a free 'hop off the killer's shoulder'. It should stay as an anti-tunnelling perk and it should be focused on that purpose and nothing else.

Also, this:

Is untenable. Do you load into the lobby and then just get told to swap? How does the game determine which of the survivors that have it equipped gets to keep the free escape?

Actually a good suggestion but there's some clunk to work through because if your second phase does not go into struggle, that's just giving the killer a big ol' red flag that you're about to jump off. But some way to make it work during second hook state would be an absolutely fair buff to this otherwise insanely unreliable perk.

Basically the same as the Bite the Bullet thing: This is Rochambeau-ing the game.

This really wouldn't help it be more reliable at all, it's already impossible to use and putting it ahead of you wouldn't really help because you'd be more likely to blind yourself than the killer.

Also:

Seems pointless, since producing that quantity of Flashbangs probably requires all five players in the lobby to be in on the joke, so the only ones hurt by the crash are those who -want- to get crashed.

You can't put a cooldown on a continuous effect, that's how you wind up with Saboteur's mess. What if you stop recovering for half a second, does that disable the perk? What if the killer picks you up immediately, does it just go on cooldown without doing anything?

For the time being, I think Flip-flop should stay as is, because it's in a similar state to Breakout.

Worst exhaustion perk gets a nerf slapped onto it, okay.

Another really bad perk gets a bizarre nerf. If someone's running Hope, they are banking hard on that combo and deserve to use it in the specific circumstance that they are in a chase after gen 5.

I was going to start off with 'these action speeds are pointless because you should already be leaving', but honestly? Left Behind is a bad perk and while this re-design certainly wouldn't make it a strong pick, it'd make it a content-generating machine and I'm here for it.

Wasn't this the utterly busted form it used to be in?

So you don't make noise and can't get your aura read for the first 240 seconds of the trial? That's probably mostly going to end up running when you don't need it, only to toggle off when the game actually gets going.

That is absolutely horrifying. Two survivors working on a gen and getting 10% per second on top of their normal speed? Or 20% per second if they're both using it, I suppose.

Issue with Smash Hit isn't that it doesn't stun the killer long enough, it's that pallet stuns are insanely unreliable. And some killers' playstyles make them naturally unlikely to be stunned. (Twins, Huntress, Nurse, Deathslinger, Pyramid Head)

It's already a hex counter and it really shouldn't go the same Rock-paper-scissors way. Additionally, again, 'only one survivor' isn't tenable.

Best exhaustion perk gets big buff, why?

Although I suppose it's no longer the best exhaustion perk considering Dead Hard was made baseline and that free perk slot is quite the incentive.

No reason to have Unbreakable stop functioning after Soul Guard. It's two perk slots for the effect of one, it's hardly game-breaking.

And, uh...

You wouldn't need to fix this problem if you didn't make DS unconditional to begin with. UB is fine as a supporting perk to DS in its current state.

Appreciate the gesture but it's overall going to be irrelevant because you're not getting that many stacks unless you are hard-core farming your teammates.

Instead, WGLF should have a better focus on Altruism by also awarding tokens for healing progress on allies, and other perks should be added to grant BP tokens on other activities, such as a perk to grant bonus BP per X seconds of chase, or per X% of gen progress. All mutually exclusive, of course.

This is kind of the issue though, since buffing the direct competition to the point of rendering Balanced Landing obsolete is not exactly good balance.

That's just... No, that's a severe underestimation of Spine Chill's value. Knowing when the killer is coming for you is a huge benefit, especially if you pair it with Fixated so you can clear out before they get to you.

I don't think any killer will sign off on a potential +15% repair speed perk in a single slot, and I would personally not sign off on imposing a cooldown on Spine Chill.

But you shouldn't be needing to protect the unhooked survivor. That's the entire point of Babysitter, obscuring the unhooked survivor so the killer can only go after the babysitter. If the killer is smacking you while you're unhooking someone, Babysitter is pointless anyway, since the scratch mark removal doesn't help against a killer that has direct visual on you. The only use I see for this change to the perk is to make Babysitter/Borrowed Time into a more toxic strategy where the killer's attacks just get flat-out ignored on both the unhooker and the unhooked.

It'd be better if Babysitter got DS's anti-tunnelling condition: The Babysitter effect is extended from 8 to 30 seconds, but is cancelled out when the unhooked progresses the survivors' game.

It really isn't, it's one of the less offensive intel perks, honestly. And if you want counterplay to it, ironically, you can take Spine Chill to immediately alert you to the killer having it and acting on it.

That's terrible! So I can load in with a perk that, just because someone else also brought it, does NOTHING? So this perk is going to be unbelievably annoying to both the killers AND the survivors?

What follows is a five-step plan to figure out exactly how these perks are supposed to function that is going to take a lot of work to actually get through, far more than any perk has the right to task players with. Something about juggling obsessions? This is downright convoluted in an effort to fix a problem created by this very rework, when currently, neither Soul Guard nor Decisive Strike are problems anymore.

If it didn't have that big of a hitbox it'd be even more unreliable than it currently already is. It's immensely difficult to use, which is why it deserves to retain its output.

No one runs Hope because it is a terrible perk, and the only perks it could possibly be paired up with to build on this synergy you're talking about are Breakout (Even more conditional and really not an obstruction to the killer because it only activates when you have entirely different priorities. Or should have, anyway.) and Blood Pact, another extremely conditional perk.

If a survivor dumps two perk slots into hoping they can heal the obsession in the EGC and make a break for it, good for them. Also keep in mind that they counter-synergise unless both targets are running Hope.

It is okay for two perks combined to have a non-negligible effect.

Also, Trickster struggling to catch up to someone is a Trickster problem, not a Hope problem.

Not at the moment, multiple people can bring it, even though its effects don't stack. But then we're running into the same issue here, which is 'How does the game determine whose Prove Thyself actually does something'?

And a 10% gen progress burst on a great skill check is still VERY excessive. To put that figure into context: There's a bug with Stake Out that causes ALL great skill checks to get an additional 1% of progress and the devs are hesitant to leave it in as a buff to the perk because it might push gen speeds too much. 10% is practically nuclear.

Counterbalancing it by making skill checks nigh impossible to hit is just going to make the perk feel bad for the majority of players and will just end up creating more of a balancing issue, since top tier players will be able to finish gens much, MUCH faster than lower tier players, so where does that leave killer balance? Can't buff due to the low ranks, can't nerf due to high ranks.

Again, it's a problem that your rework of DS creates.

Let's make this game a little fairer for the Killer, but also a little more fun for the Survivor.

Because I play this game mostly solo as a Survivor since 2016 and it's pain in the ass sometimes, after I read all your changes I will just uninstall this game finally. So "little more fun" not gonna happen.

There are many, many, MANY terrible suggestions here but I want to focus on the Totems.

YOU WANT US TO SPEND AN ENTIRE MINUTE TO CLEANSE DULL TOTEMS!? You just buffed NOED massively, now for counterplay survivors must look around and then spend a collective total of 5 minutes.

But then Counterforce got buffed, you say. We shouldn't have to bring a perk each game to make the game playable, and even then we still spend a total of 2 and a half minutes on totems.

But then totems that have hexes take less time than dull totems! Yes, but it's still more than doubled the time we have currently, 14 seconds is fine to cleanse a totem especially since we have to do it in one action (in your post it never states that a totem has continued progress, so I'm interpreting it as if you accidentally let go of a totem while at the 40 second mark, you have to reset it and spend another minute there).

I'm sorry here, but this is terrible. No, not terrible, saying that is offensive to the word terrible. This alone will make me quit the game. Also, it can't even be speed up by 15% because for some reason you're removing 2 of the best perks in the game trying to claim it's because they're bad (Spine Chill and Resilience. I personally rank both of them in the top 10 best survivor perks.) I'm sorry if this came off not very well written, and that's mostly because I'm bad with words, but the totem speeds in these changes alone are so bad I'd quit the game immediately.

I kinda had to stop reading at "Retired Perks"

Resilience, Spine Chill, Self-Care, Dead Hard are not ineffective or filler. Stop that. Rookie Spirit is also borderline because I have gotten a lot of use out of this perk. But either you don't play survivor enough to know how effective and useful these perks are, or you just want strong perks out of the game because you're a killer main.

This person says spine chill and resilience aren't good perks. ok fam. lost any and all credibility.