Boons, Twins and Perfect Healing: This Is Getting Silly Now
Twins have never been a perfect Killer. They're clunky, over-reliant on slugging due to picking up Survivors being unnecessarily time consuming and Victor being left under hooks is something that should never have left the PTB.
The last two releases have been... let's say, unkind to them. Circle of Healing has made playing Twins pretty damn difficult, since they are very reliant on the Survivors staying injured for Victor to be a threat and being able to heal yourself without a medkit in 16 seconds kind of ruins that game plan, especially since it also affects healing downed survivors and stacks with other speed boosts like medkits and WGLF. This is especially pertinent since Victor can't interact with the totems himself.
But the new Boon perk, Exponential, really puts the nail in the coffin. With that Boon active, a Survivor can recover from the dying state in 15 seconds and pick themselves up without a teammate. Against most Killers, that's an annoyance but not a significant problem, not a game-breaker like Circle of Healing. But against Twins... you quite literally cannot beat it if the Survivors bring more than one.
If you down someone with Victor, you have a 5 second post-hit fatigue, followed by a 3-second fatigue that you get on switching to Charlotte (8s of fatigue time in total). In that time, a Survivor who goes down in an Exponential totem AOE has already recovered half their progress bar (more if they brought Unbreakable). This means you have 7 seconds to get to the downed Survivor with Charlotte if you want to pick them up, which as a 115% Killer isn't easy.
Assuming totally flat terrain in a straight line, the Survivor gets to pick themselves up for free if Charlotte is further than 32m away from them when they went down. If Charlotte injured them with an M1 and then deployed Victor on the spot, all they have to do is hold Shift - W in a straight line for 7 seconds and their on-hit speed boost will mean that if Victor downs them, they can get back up before Charlotte can pick them up. Taking Victor's unbinding time of 1 second into account, Victor has 6 seconds to catch up to and down the Survivor before they get to the safe zone. You either have to down the Survivor in 6 seconds (while playing around Dead Hard) or they become completely indestructible.
EDIT: I FORGOT THE 2.5 SECOND WEAPON WIPE. You actually have only 3.5 seconds to down the Survivor! Fun!
If you're playing Twins and this happens to you, you may as well treat that chase as lost and go somewhere else because getting a down will be totally meaningless.
How do we fix this? Address their massive fatigue times.
Circle of Healing, Exponential, WGLF and the strength of healing in general has showcased the Twins' biggest point of failure: their overwhelmingly enormous fatigue times if you choose to switch from Victor to Charlotte after a down. If we can address this by making pickups more feasible, issues like this won't happen. Twins will feel more fluid to play and will be less pressured to slug so they'll be more fun to play against.
My suggested changes
-Remove the fatigue on switching to Charlotte. You don't get a fatigue after you get kicked, so you shouldn't get one for switching normally.
-Revert Victor's post-hit fatigue back to its pre-nerf state, removing the ability to move during the fatigue but making it 3 seconds in duration instead of 5.
-Allow the Killer to switch from Victor to Charlotte during Victor's post-hit cooldown (so he still goes through the animation, you're just controlling Charlotte while he does).
These three changes combined would mean that Twins who chose not to slug would be rewarded with having no fatigue times to prevent them from picking up a Survivor without making it any more effective to slug with Victor. And from this point, further changes could be made to things like Victor's respawn time and the non-functional anti-camp mechanism to make their gameplay healthier in other areas. But the top priority is making the Killer usable. And the only way to do that in a world of super speed healing and recovery is to cut their fatigues.
What do you think?
Comments
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Honestly, these changes are necessary in the live version of the game and would be necessary if Circle of Healing were somehow completely removed from the game- all the boon perks only cause problems by exacerbating already existing issues, and this is no exception.
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It's ironic, really
Twins in their lore were considered abominations
It seems BHVR seems to share the same sentiment. They've been completely shafted for several updates in a row now while being in a really rough state. Still both in the playing as and against department but certainly more in the former than the latter.
COH would've been the final nail in the coffin but it seems BHVR isn't quite done adding nails yet.
I hope to see some Twins changes soon, I hope to give them a try myself once they are in a better state to play.
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I'll say this now, the week between the Hatch nerf that neutered Keys and Circle of Healing being taken off killswitch was the most fun I've ever had playing DBD, and thanks to a couple of dumb new perks my enthusiasm to play the game has never been lower.
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I'll say this now: the week between the Key/Hatch change and Circle of Healing coming in off killswitch was the most fun I've ever had playing DBD, and now a couple of really really dumb perks have utterly crushed my enthusiasm for playing the game. It's as low as it's ever been.
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No doubt, these perks are making the game worse in their current state, but it's not as though the Twins' gargantuan cooldowns for downing anyone with Victor would be okay if the boons had never been added, y'know?
These just highlight that problem even further.
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You're right, of course. Boons providing superpowered versions of existing gameplay mechanics that happen to ruin Twins' day has really showed where the Killers' issues lie.
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It's really a shame, too- I actually bought the Twins relatively recently and had a blast learning them, but my god am I hesitant to pick them back up again right now.
(Big fan of your work, by the way, the Lemony Snicket homage in the Twins guide series made me really happy)
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Yeah after COH, the DH "fix" being a massive nerf to twins due to how it screws Victor over, and this new boon, I genuinely feel Twins are in the bottom 10 now when they were in the top 10 all of 6 months ago. But people just cheer about it because "haha we don't like twins. Who cares about the people who did like them?"
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honestly, I think Twins need some sort of passive "you don't get to get back up" mechanic, or stunning and swapping shouldn't take any time.
with boons, the main issue is the fun playstyle of "hit and run" doesn't work if the hit doesn't matter.
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DBD's maps and the general pace of the game are not balanced around Killers being able to take every chase to wherever the Survivor wants to go. If god setups didn't exist and maps weren't so big you had to play for a 3 gen a lot of the time, "hit and run" playstyles wouldn't be necessary because you'd be able to commit to chases. That's not the world we live in right now.
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Victor should also be able to to more. He is a 1/2 of a killer, as he can be blinded. He should be able to kick gens and close hatch at the very least.
Give Charlotte a slight speed boost when not carrying Victor. This can slightly help getting to the downed survivor and maybe make tiny fingernail basekit. It feels very nice to use and a great add on to use in chases.
Would be nice if you pounce at Charlotte when controlling Victor, you instantly regain Victor and switch to Charlotte at the same time. I don’t think it would happen though.
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3-gen strategies don't even work anymore with boons. They can just take a hit and then go heal in 6 seconds or faster and win the war of attrition. The best way to get 2 kills at high MMR now is just to hard tunnel someone out and then kill someone in the EGC. You cannot get more than 1 kill trying to play fair with the way the game is now at high MMR
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It's been dicey as her lately I'll admit, but I don't really do the down people/slug with Victor playstyle so it hasn't been as damning for my matches as described. But 1000% agree about the long ass fatigue times and would love for them to take another look at it because with everything new recently being added it's gotten a bit much.
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Is there any other killer that is punished for using their power correctly like Twins are?
Serious question
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Slugging is boring. Just hook people and find more fun and better ways to play. Slugging is not a requirement because a killer isn't as strong as you want them to be
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But Twins get punished even if they aren't slugging
Like 8 seconds worth of cooldowns just to down 1 person as Victor then swap back. Something like that?
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You have a speedy gremlin who moves pretty much the same speed as Billy using a chainsaw who also acts as a tracking device on a survivor after you down them AND let's you know if another survivor is close. Literally one of the lowest skill ceiling killers in the game.
On release, the majority of Twins players literally camped hooks and sent Victor to do the killing because they take no skill to use. And that was before BT got buffed to not care about Terror Radius
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fair points. but, one can still dream.
also, hi pixel.
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"Just hook people"
I've just described that a new perk means you cannot down a Survivor long enough to hook them. You can do literally everything in your power to pick them up and hook them and it won't do anything because they can get up before you get to them. They can run in a straight line away from you and waste enough time that they can deny you a hook by picking themselves up faster than you can pick them up. That's my entire point.
"Just hook them" how, exactly? You deadass do not have time to pick them up before they pick themselves up with this new perk. That's not a choice.
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Thanks to the big man otz, we have a vid to demonstrate
In the time it took Charlotte (who was in the same building as jake) to walk over and pick him up, he had almost recovered to 50% and that's only with unbreakable. Can you imagine this but with Charlotte at more of a distance + with the new boon perk and so on
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"The new perk means you cannot down a survivor long enough to hook them"
What are you on about?
- They'd have to literally be across the map for you to not be able to reach them in time.
- They also have to be in range of a boon totem with the effect. If they aren't when they go down, the perk is useless.
- A majority of the time when a survivor goes down, the killer is within 8 seconds or less of that survivor.
The situation you're describing is so circumstantial that it practically would never happen
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Are my maths wrong? They get hit by Charlotte, run towards their boon and unless you can catch up and down them in 3.5 seconds they're safe because by the time you can even move to start picking them up they're already halfway recovered.
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Where are you getting 3.5 seconds from? Does the new perk allow them to fully recover from the Dying State in 3.5 seconds? Where's the math on that?
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Tbh i think you should instantly switch to Charlotte upon downing a survivor, with no wake up required
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They can recover from the dying state in 15 seconds.
Because of your 8 second fatigue, you only actually have 7 seconds to get to them before they get up (since they can start recovering as soon as you down them).
Charlotte can cover 32m in 7 seconds. If you're more than 32m away from Charlotte, that mean she can't pick you up before you pick yourself up.
A Survivor gets 18m of distance for free when Charlotte hits them with an M1 and unbinds Victor, travelling 18m during the 3.5 seconds of animations (2.5 for wiping the weapon, 1 second for unbinding).
This means when Victor is controlled, the Survivor has to cover 14m of distance to get to that 32m safe zone (Because they're 18m away from Charlotte and Victor already).
A Survivor can travel 14m in 3.5 seconds, meaning that the Twins player has 3.5 seconds of Victor control to catch back up to the Survivor and down them before they get to that safe zone. If you wait any longer, they get 32m away from Charlotte and are therefore safe.
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Correct me if I'm wrong though but the typical way The Twins are used is:
-Send Victor to jump on someone's back.
-Chase with Charlotte while they pull Victor off.
So if you down them with Charlotte, you don't have to catch up to their body because you're already standing over them.
Now even if you do need to pull out Victor again for the 2nd hit on an injured survivor, they aren't going to get a speed boost from being hit so they're not going to be that far away.
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If you play that way with Twins, you're going to lose every game you play against even a slightly coordinated team, because if Victor jumps on someone's back they just run away from Charlotte across the map with the speed boost (while Charlotte is standing still) and take him hostage, meaning you have no power for over half a minute and your only injured Survivor has just zoomed away from you while the other 3 are sitting on gens. If you play them that way you're just playing a worse Legion, because you're taking chases as an M1 Killer after only injuring one person, compared to Legion who can injure all four.
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I mean, the obvious answer is to let victor carry and hook survivors. :P
For real though, that would solve the problem...
I can just imagine him dragging away survivors and putting them on little victor hooks that they could just leave, but they choose to be polite.
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I really don't know what BHVR are thinking sometimes.
Twins were pretty balanced for the most part, but like Pinhead, Wraith, Deathslinger, Freddy and others, rather than nerfing the one problematic aspect of them (camping Victor) they gutted them. Then usually went back and fixed that thing later, leaving them to wallow in uselessness.
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Fan:Can we get rid of insta billy
Dev: what gut billy completely no problem
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That's not how you play Twins. Twins have been made far less viable in recent updates, but the previous way was to do the bulk of your chasing with Victor and to hunt already injured survivors, so you could down without penalties and maintain your momentum. As has already been said, attacking a healthy survivor accomplishes very little unless the survivor is confused, or in a total dead zone and Charlotte is also nearby. You get a health state, but the survivor has no penalties to looping you and they can deny you your power for a minute by refusing to crush Victor. Charlotte unfortunately saw her best use bonking survivors around hooks, since you generally wanted to switch to Victor whenever possible and that often translated to 'as soon as Charlotte was done carrying someone to a hook.'
5-second stun for successful hits hurt Victor (if survivors are in pairs, they will be able to kick you and start healing their buddy, and that's the counterplay), Circle of Healing makes it so that survivors are rarely roaming the map injured, and now you can't even get to the downed survivor fast enough to pick them up because Charlotte will typically not be near Victor, considering you're using him to chase and are more or less going to follow survivors wherever they take you.
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So are we saying that the perk's effect will be available:
- Near very single down?
- Anytime anyone goes down?
- Everybody will have that exact build?
Only dumb killers would fall for it, and it is obvious that people who wanna use PS place themselves just right. I've played Twins and if that was a REAL scenario, I would first of all hear the boon totem ( as it is so obvious through the survivor sound). The door is blocked, so I would move Victor away from that room and block the door with Charlotte to block Jake in. So he can go ahead and get up, he won't be able to get out either way.
It is very easy to frame a 'demonstration' when in reality it doesn't always work out that way and isn't guaranteed.
Boon totems in effect could have been on the opposite side of that downed survivor, let alone a pallet being nearby. This is why power struggle is a very weak perk. So saying it is too strong because you have to pair it up with 2 other perks is insane to me.
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At this point I feel like the Twins are in dire need of a complete rework, the slugging aspect has to go but it's replacement should be powerful in it's own right. I don't have the greatest of ideas but instead of Victor being able to down people he works like how the Jocket from Left 4 Dead 2 does. Whenever Victor is on somebody's back he'll attempt to wressle control away from the survivor by forcing them to wiggle around like how a survivor struggles when being carried by the killer. The longer he stays on the more severe the wiggling will be and at a certain point if Victor crashes survivors into walls they get hindered for a second or two. But they need something to make them more like a hunter and scouter sorta deal I guess.
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Boons should just be like Hexes, once they get snuffed you lose the perk for the rest of the game. Either that or they should let killers reignite their Hexes too.
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Ah yes victor (6.0 m/s) and billy (9.2 m/s) = same speed. Either way in your post above that... Did you realize a long range victor down is considered a slug since you have to go walk up to them and pick them up? Not to mention the almost 10 second fatigue since they thought a 5 second fatigue on top of the switch fatigue was a good idea. So the Unbreaka-boon literally just invalidated that down because you already sent victor out to hunt someone with charlotte next to a gen or other slug to down someone not even 32 meters away. So you get the down hook the first slug, get to the 2nd and they're already gone. Yeah lets punish a killer for playing optimally great idea.
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Git gud.
But more on a serious note, yeah Twins got gutted aswell as Oni to a lesser degree. Since Boons are just better version of already existing Perks, I can't wait for Boon: DS or Boon: DH. It'll be some much fun
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Basic attack cooldown is actually 3 seconds, you should know. So an extra 2 metres of distance a survivor can gain.
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Bit off topic but twins have got 1 cosmetic over about a year :(
BHVR is quite literally sweeping them under the rug
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I've made the same comparison myself! The Twins have been largely ignored or just hammered with nerfs since their release. Clunky animations, terrible balance changes, glaring issues with their power, and one whole new cosmetic when they have been out for almost a year. Pretty good job so far.
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Look I'll be honest and I don't mean any disrespect honestly, but I HATEEEEEEE the twins with all my might and imo they are the worst thing to happen to this game, just for me personally I mean.
HOWEVER, their current state isn't fair for people who wanna main them or just play them for fun.
I just cannot ever agree with ever buffing them cause I don't agree with the playstyle at all and most twins players are just twats tbh, from my experience.
(I know not all are like that! But I've encountered literally one twins player that played well and fair without all the intense slugging and camping. Which was at high ranks and I respected them majorly)
I will add in, I actually had to play as twins to use up cakes back during the anniversary event. I played them for a few hours straight which furthermore made me despise them. I will admit though they felt awful to play performance wise; then again this was when console optimization was at it's worst so that added to it probably.
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BHVR really wants this killer dead unfortunately. Their latest stats were the first ones to not include the pick rate of killers along with the kill rate, so it's safe to assume they want people to forget and not play killers like Twins, Billy and Deathslinger.
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*Ghostface turns to you with a noose around his neck*
"First time?"
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I'm always down for punishing boring gameplay (which is what slugging is) so.... meh. Couldn't care less
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So you do realize that 24 meters is a long range and they nerfed the radius where you could hear boons as killer right? Also you say anything that reduces slugging is good... maybe not give survivors a ridiculous perk like that and change core gameplay mechanics because if you've ever played to win as killer in high mmr you know you need to use every trick in the book to at least get 2 kills. Also the boon severely placebos snowballing in general because you have to go spend time snuffing the boon after the first down then continue chasing the 2nd survivor which is already half way across the map.
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