death of the deathslinger

Never liked him.

Only played him to get his Adept.

Like Oni, Deathslinger doesn't usually garner great results for me.

It feels like M&A is now a must have on him. It's absolutely ridiculous.

tbh they believed wraith was a "wee bit overpowered" so...

You act like he's the only Killer in the game who could do that. Fun fact, Plague, PH, Nemesis, and Ghostface can all hit you when you're outside their terror radius with the right setup (usually undetectable perks). Ghostface doesn't even need any perks or addons to do it. Actually, now that I think about it Huntress doesn't either since she has functionally infinite range. 40m long shots aren't easy and are helped immensely by Aura Reading but they are possible at base and your only warning is the soft metallic sound she makes when she's got a fully charged hatchet.

@Mister_xD

"The counterplay is to avoid engaging or being seen at all by the killer all game" is not a realistic strategy. I'm confident you understand this about Dead By Daylight.

i didnt say that though.

i said you should avoid chases as much as possible, meaning you shouldnt unnecessarily harass the Killer when they got nothing to do (as you would do with Killers like Trapper or Hag), to play stealthy so his search times are as long as possible and be efficient on gens, because he cant cover the map quickly to apply pressure.

i never said anything ridiculous like "just never get spotted", those are your words, not mine.

EDIT: had "chases" twice in the first sentence, idk why. so i removed one.

As a former Deathslinger main, the major reason most players didn't know how to counter him was because no one played him. It was less that 6% pick up rate from all Killers.

I will always agree he needed changes, but this was just overkill. They took the few things that made him unique and gave him nothing in return.

I loved Deathslinger before. I still play him. I don't think he's unplayable now, but I'd be lying if I said that I have more fun with him now than before. I just have to relearn how to play him.

But I have friends who say all the time they hated playing against the old Deathslinger, and it seems like it was a prevailing view among survivor players. I didn't feel that way, personally. I was still able to dodge Deathslinger shots as survivor. But to each their own.

I also feel like "Save the Best for Last" is basically an essential perk on him at this point since his cooldown for pulling up and down his sights feels really slow, so need to save as much time as possible.

you are right, being found and chased eventually is pretty much inevitable.

What i was trying to say with my original comment is, that you shouldnt be one of these guys that stay within a short distance towards the killer clicking their flashlight because they wanna loop him all game - he used to absolutely destroy this playstyle, so instead of doing that what you actually want to do is to stay hidden for as long as possible to minimize the amount of chases he can get going, while being efficient on gens. maybe i worded it a bit poorly though, my apologies for that.

and yeah, you are also right when you say that he had essentially no counterplay on a short range towards him, so if you ended up there (which would inevitably be the case at some point), all you can realistically do is to hope he doesnt hit his next shot, meaning at that range you are entirely at his mercy.

However, another thing to sort of keep in mind here is, that another factor of "in chase counterplay" would be to keep your distance towards him. Not to loop him like you would with other Killers, but playing every tile safe, keeping as many LoS blockers inbetween you two as you can and staying as far away from him as possible - because even just at a medium distance, his shots become a lot more managable (meaning he will not be shooting at you at random times anymore, but rather try to hit you when you are in a position you can not dodge in, e.g. vaulting a window or running through a doorway / pallet, which means you can preemtively dodge and watch him shoot the empty doorway, losing him tons of time on the reload) - at a long distance you can outright dodge them like a hatchet. That way you can delay the inevitable long enough to buy your team precious time on gens, meaning in combination with the first strat against him he now takes long to find people, to cross the map and to get any earlygame downs (at some point the tiles will be used up, though the "holding W" strat is still extremely strong against him here, yet somewhat countered by his stealth ability, if you positioned yourself poorly to allow for an ambush).

this is correct.

however, this is also what i think is a fundamentally flawed balance goal.

i genuinely do not believe Survivors should have counterplay to everything the Killer does. I know that makes for "fun and interactive" chases, but then we are stuck at a huge problem: this game is going to be incredibly unbalanced, in the Survivors favor (we can not make this a 1v1 game and simultaneously have one player go up against four at the same time)

we can not balance this game around fair 1v1 interactions, this goes straight against the nature of this game, that being a 1v4 asymetrical game, meaning one player picks the power role which is supposed to dominate every 1v1 interaction with the opposing team, forcing those 4 to work together to overcome the "impossible" odds.

This is what old Daddy Slinger did extremely well - while also being incredibly well balanced (unlike a Spirit or Nurse, who also do this but at the same time have insane map pressure, meaning they can very easily take on the 1v4 team as well).

i think this game has one overwhelmingly big issue. That issue isnt any specific Perk, loadout, character, bug, playstyle, etc.

Instead, i think this issue is Survivor objectives.

and not in the way one would expect me to say it (regarding their completion time), thats a completely different topic.

No, i think the main issue this game has is, that the main Survivor objective is just incredibly boring. all you do is hold M1 while sitting still and occasionally hitting space. its boring, its not interactive and i cant blame people for not wanting to do that all the time.

This leads to Survivors, who obviously play this game for fun, looking for something more fun and exciting to do - and the only option that isnt "hold M1 while sitting still next to something" right now is the interaction with the Killer. In other words, many only play this game to be chased - thats whats fun, thats what they want to do. And i think the Devs realized that as well, so to cater to the larger audience they tried improving this aspect of the game for them more and more, to ensure they can get the maximum excitement and fun out of it.

However, this comes with downsides. As mentioned previously, the Killer is supposed to always hold an upper hand in a chase against the Survivors - but for Survivors that would be a boring experience, because they got downed quickly without much say in the matter and then put on a hook, just to return to more boring M1 holding. This lead to the Devs continuously adjusting a Killers ability to 1v1 a Survivor to the point where we are at right now: with a good 95% of the Killers being literally unplayable in high MMR gameplay, because Survivors have so many options to dodge and evade their attacks and powers, that downing one takes so long that the game is essentially over after that one hook, meaning if you want to kill someone you have to hardcore focus them out of the game. The Killer is at an overwhelming disatvantage from the very start, simply because he cant win a fair and balanced 1v1 against 4 people at the same time.

this leads to chases taking up way too much time, time that the other 3 players are gonna spend on their boring objective, meaning to the Killer it feels like before they got any real chance to do anything, 3 gens pop and the game is over.

There is more to this, but i think this post is long enough already - i hope i made my point clear.

long story short, the root of all of this is a boring Survivor objective.

So instead of continuing this needless nerfing of Killer 1v1 abilities, instead what the Devs should be working on is new, much more enjoyable and interactive Survivor objectives to replace gens with, so they no longer rely on Killers chasing them to feel any sort of enjoyment - in fact, it would even be beneficial to this game if being chased by the Killer was the less enjoyable interaction, so Survivors actually want to do what they are supposed to, that being trying to avoid any unnecessary Killer contact and seeing the Killer as an obstacle that is standing in their way which they will need to overcome.

honestly, if you think about it he has a valid point of critisism there (the "fun" argument i mean) - in the current state of the game at least.

as i explained in the last paragraph of my monster post above, i dont think the issue here is really with Slinger though, but with the way the game is currently structured for Survivors itself, which lead to many thinking Slingers close range oppressiveness was a problematic thing in the first place.

so he isnt really wrong with what he is saying, its just that i think what the Devs did and what he is defending is not the right solution for that problem at all.

EDIT: i shouldnt be writing while tired. forgot a "not" in the last sentence, so i accidentally said the opposite of what i intended to say. whoops.