Perks aside. what is not balance in the game?

I would say...nothing.

Nothing at all.

I mean, let's look at what optimal survivor perks do, vs what optimal killer perks do.

Survivor meta is mostly about second chances, faster healing, and situational invulnerability from damage.

Killer meta is either snowballing so hard nothing else matters or running slowdown perks.

If survivor perks are based around trying to negate snowball tactics, and half of the killer perks are based around trying to slow the game down enough snowballing isn't needed, then that would suggest the fundamental balance issue is that generators finish so quickly there isn't time for anything else to happen or be enjoyed.

SWF. Number 1 thing that cause imbalance in Asymmetrical games.

maps

The biggest balance issues are probably

• Maps. There’s a reason certain map offerings are much more commonly used than others. Some maps still have very strong innate loops for survivors (Haddenfield and Badham being the main culprits probably). And some of the indoor maps make certain area effect perks and abilities more powerful.
• SWF groups. Four person swfs aren’t all that common, but they have a very noticeable impact on gameplay. Comms for the whole team are like having built in constant killer and survivor detection and a huge efficiency boost compared to solo survivors

I actually don’t think gen speeds are necessarily all that out of whack personally based on the assumption that the design goal is the most common match result is some survivors die and some live. In order for that to be the median results it means the exits need to be open most of the time when both sides are evenly matched. So it shouldn’t be surprising that even when a killer plays well the doors still get opened. Now if the median results are in the 0-2 kill range then that would be a balance issue with the gen speeds, but I haven’t seen data indicating that’s the case. (And a lot of anecdotes complaining about gen speeds seem to have the faulty assumption that gates should only be opened 50% of the time.)

RNG as well isn't balanced...

Can we discuss Killer Power's or is that not allowed in this discussion? @Anniehere

Maps, Solo Q, Killers. Everything other than perks.

Every RNG element of this game makes for a balancing nightmare, if you want a game to be balanced, you need to remove as much variable as you can so that every match result is as consistent as possible every time, which isn't the case for DBD:

Gens/ survivor spawn have the potential to be either godlike or god awful for both side.

Tile spawn also change the gameplay too much, like on some corn map where you can get shack into infinite junk pallet into long wall or shack into nothing into TL. Same map, different potential for looping.

Map luck, if you get red forest as a no mobility killer the odds are already against you before the match even start.

The power difference between an efficient soloQ and an efficient SWF with comms are miles apart.

If they are included in the discussion, Item for surv and addon for killer can change the whole gameas well as the killer power itself.

Totem spawn have the potential to render hex perk useless.

Nurse

Half the maps

Gen speeds

Legion

trickster

Map offerings

I could go on

Maps - Be that loop design and simply size. Very unbalanced.

SWF - Obvious reasons here. Even casual friends just chillen (which is usually the excuse that it's not a big deal) is essentially tripling their perk loadout. They don't need to be a death squad to completely break the games "balance".

NOTE: We also used to see old data on SWF rates across the board making the number look low, but the rates of SWF at high MMR are significantly higher. This should be obvious though as SWF will naturally increase your chances of winning drastically and pile them up at high MMR. So as if the game wasn't already unbalanced enough, if your a killer at high mmr you are forced to play against SWF almost every single match. I'm tracking my games and 80% of the matches are 3-4 man SWF. I ask post lobby (most are kind enough to tell me) and look at profiles for reference.

Objective times - 3-4min objective times for survivors compared to 10-20min objective times for killers. It's completely out of whack. Just in the time on average that it takes you to pick up, walk over, and hook a survivor you lose half an entire generator worth of time...each time...let that sink in. That's nothing you can out play, it's literally sunk time that every player is forced to commit.

Killer power level - Most of the killer roster are simply way, way under tuned to have a fair chance against equally good survivors. This kills match diversity for high mmr survivors and irritates killers that feel like they lose at the killer selection screen.

Perks - Since you didn't want to go into it I won't go into detail but there are a lot of extremely unbalanced perks that throw the game off as well. Just putting this so it's a known issue.

Items - Items are generally too strong, especially speaking of medkits here. Whether you bring medkits or toolboxes drastically increases the odds of your team winning. They obviously should improve your win rate, but it's a much more significant difference than it should be.

I would say maps, swf and objective times are the biggest issues though if we're trying to prioritize.

We used to debate about whether we think the game is supposedly "competitive" or just a casual party game. While it seemed the devs wanted the game "balanced" around just a casual party game (aka not balanced at all), the introduction of MMR seems to completely contradict this as MMR is something you implement into a competitive game.

So now we're currently left in this awkward state of kinda a casual game but kinda going for a competitive game with a foot halfway in both directions. The game doesn't seem to know what design philosophy it wants to be. The game lacks direction.

It comes down to time invested into this game... the human element

Playing this game is different then most... Time needed to get better with the Killer's power (which is why you will see players "main" certain Killers)

Something as simple as Huntress's hatches are easy to learn... But something like the Pig's isn't (I could say that it comes down to timing... but that is irrelevant) as simple to learn due to it being in multiple parts

Also Hag traps are easy to learn but hard to master (it comes down to placement... but again that's irrelevant)

Same can be said to counter Killer's power

And the more practice one player gets the better

Yea... that's true

But we probably have differing opinions on what unhealthy

I think survivor movement is the real problem in the game. The degree of movement options makes survivor way too unpredictable as killer and it feels more like a fighting game then a chasing game. So Killers have to make lightning fast predictions while survivors smash spins when they don't know what to do. So I would change survivor movement where they have more realistic movement and killerss have a better expectation of what a survivor can do in movement. I think anything that can be labeled as "Tech" needs to be patched out and make every option a survivor has intentional. For example: I would make it so a survivor has a stopping animation for when they slow down and manipulating movement by rapidly destroying your A and D keys doesn't maintain flow. I would replace this bizarre movement with step keys. So you would have a bit of acceleration to your movment, so a survivor takes like 1 second to get to max speed from walking. However if you hold "F" while running at max speed you can shift that momentum by pressing "A" or "D" into a Step animation that allows them to make a sort of leap to the side and they have to ramp back up to max speed after. A sort or dodge w/o the I frames. Think something like a Lane change you would see in like running games, and the cooldown is the movespeed. This would narrow their overall movement so that its more of an intentional outplay as opposed to being this braindead spin to win thing. This clearly makes it simpler for killers to understand survivors options (Especially when playing a ranged killer) so they can apply pressure more consistently in chase and have a better expectation of what a survivors movement will be. Killer movement is very stiff and akward and the plays a killer makes (especially at loops) are intentional and should pay off without having to stand still to follow this guy trying to get spin highlights for his YT channel.