HillyBilly & Deathslinger Should Be Reverted

Neither needs to be reverted, both need to be improved. Billy's addon nerfs were far too harsh, what he needs is another addon pass to make them all more useful, not just being reverted back to having unfair/busted addon combinations.

Same with Deathslinger. The changes they made were necessary (with the possible exception of the TR increase, I'm still not sold on that one), the problem is that he already had a pretty weak design so removing his stupid cheese strats just leaves him feeling clunky, and the buffs he got in the same update weren't quite enough.

Move forward, not back.

I'm not sure I see how. Overheat is a nothing mechanic, you'd have to be holding your chainsaw for ages or zooming across the entirety of Red Forest to actually max it out- playing Billy normally means extremely slight adjustments for the Overheat mechanic.

Contrast that to the addon nerfs, which left him with basically nothing good to use. He has some mediocre ones, but nothing particularly impactful or worth running. Considering how good some of his addons used to be, that's a far more dramatic impact on his strength as a killer than a mechanic you have to go out of your way to actually notice.

Oh, well, I'm glad that you gave an advance counter, but let me still make the (correct) observation anyway: Hurr durr, this is not a shooter game.

The reason quickscoping works in shooters is that it's symmetrical and you can quickscope back to kill the other guy. DBD doesn't work like that. Quickscoping in this game is a cheap, uninteractive, boring mechanic that forces survivors into a lose/lose scenario. "Other" shooters (by which you mean, shooters, as this isn't one) are literally irrelevant, and I do not use the word "literally" cheaply or incorrectly here.

Bypassing completely unnecessary personal attacks on the dev team, let's take a look at your actual points. The thing is, I actually agree with them- Slinger is too clunky and slow to play as, and that's something they should be looking to fix! Nobody in this thread, myself included, is arguing that Slinger's current state is fine, what's being argued - correctly - is that reverting the changes they made specifically is a bad response. They made the changes for a reason, they should be moving forward and not back. Period.

Also let's not forget that Deathslinger gives survivors a chance to prevent a down from a successful hit with the chain mechanic. The whole "quickscoping is unhealthy" only matters if you look solely at a single part of Deathslinger's kit and completely ignore everything else about his kit.

You're almost there- quickscope is what made fake-ADS possible. At least now you actually have time to properly dodge once he commits, instead of being forced to choose between making the shot super easy or losing distance by dodging early.

Both fake-ADS and quickscoping were part and parcel of the same issue, it's them in combination that was the problem. Both needed to go, there's really no way around that.

As for your other points, why do people think I'm going to argue that Slinger is in a bad spot right now? I agree. He's not really got a niche right now because the niche of simply liking the reel mechanic is going to be hampered by the fact that he's pretty clunky. That doesn't change anything, it's just... repeating that there's a problem? Which we all agree on? Seriously, I'm not being sarcastic or trying to be an ass here, I'd love to know what I'm missing here, because from my perspective it really seems like the argument is "the only people who liked playing him were the ones who used the obnoxious and cheap lose/lose tactic so we should just give it back to them", and that's a very very underwhelming argument.

Once again: Forward, not back.

They did do that- or, they did the more effective thing, which was to give him a cooldown after lowering the gun before he can raise it or swing for an M1. That was by far the smartest thing they did in that batch of changes to him, alongside removing the ability to quickscope. The problem is now that his aim speed is too low- not the speed to raise, though that could be looked at, but rather his camera speed while he's scoped is pretty abysmal, I'd look at changing that.

I'm not sure how fake-ADS could still be done, outside of the far more tame faking once or twice to bait DH or something. He literally can't do the fake-ADS strat anymore because of the removal of the quickscope and the fact that there's a cooldown before he can swing- we're not talking literally about faking the animation, we're talking about the strat where he'd fake the ADS repeatedly while advancing on a survivor because they either made the quickscope he could do very easy to land by running straight, or they'd zigzag and lose a lot of distance, at which point he'd just keep faking until they either ran straight or he was close enough to swing.

He can't do that anymore, it can't possibly be used more now.

Believe me a declaration of game balance incompetence or game designer ignorance is far from a personal assault let's get that out of the way. Putting Infuses on dev incompetence criticism based on a longed storied history of mistakes.

Next you can quickscope back to kill your opponent is flat out incorrect if there equiped with medium to short range load out they lose the ability to meaningfully fire back. There are plenty of games where hostiles are not killable and your counter measures involve better pathing. Assuming an asymetrical game cannot do this is jarring and absurd.

Often developers go a direction with design that is terrible and unnecessary. Deathslinger is a high skill ranged killer if a person can transform a quickscope into a hit it is not only earned its good design. It creates actual reward for time invested learning the character. The opposing survivor skill of pathing through difficult terrain to force more precise shots is in itself a skill. Billy isn't a push forward design either. Overheat is unnecessary and removal of deathslingers quick scope is flat out wrong.

Even if we entertain the quickscopes got to go. It might not be a play style a player likes but you shouldn't horribly mangle the killers design before having measures in place to actually fix the killer. How can you stand by these decisions to mangle a killers design if you know its gonna take months (if we're lucky) years (if its similar to Freddy or dses true rework). It ignorant and irresponsible. It straight borders on vandalism of a players property. But it's OK in two years time he will be back to functioning as an enjoyable killer.

Creating guarranted hits is inevitably going to happen regardless of which killer you play. Trap based killers create scenarios where your damaned if you do and damned if you don't. Blight has tiles and zone's where your agency as a survivour is nonexistent its the push and pull to force and maneuver away from these positions that is the heart of dbds higher skill play or what it should be. You are rewarded as killer for creating these opportunities.

But usually the counterplay for traps is to disarm them. In deathslinger case he is a 110 killer putting distance between you and him is the point. If you don't leverage the vaults and pallets to push for increasing distance that's a falling of the survivor.

If you traditionally loop Slinger your giving him guaranteed hits. Pallets, vaults are intended to give you that distance. If you give the ranged killer a skill that can be dodged and reacted to they won't function as a killer past certain skill brackets. It could be perfectly fine with an increased cooldown on his gun drop down animation to prevent zoning (which he still does look at otzs lore based Slinger for proof of such). But if he is pulling up his gun to use his power it should be snappy and clean.

Plenty of designs in games are walked back. Because building on bad decision is building on bad foundation that regardless of how well the other components are designed will not save the mechanic. That's why they went about ripping out the foundation of Freddie power design. You can argue its still not exciting which is fair but it certainly more practical then building on a concept that is inherently terrible.

In regards to stay on topic or as some call it "what aboutism" taking concepts and existing history in game design as a source is important regardless of your genre. Though the language is different there are still key game design philosophies. A moba, a shooter, a fighting game still has design perspective dbd would benefit from to compartmentalise them as separate subjects with no crossover whatsoever is foolish.

I'm suggesting we go the direction of reverting the quicks scope and further increasing his gun drop animation. It effectively kills the zoning argument as now rasing a gun has a cost if you aren't going to shoot. This is a revert no matter how you see it as it is reintroducing quickscoping but taking the real culprit of survivors issues the free zoning.

Even then he still needs help but there thousands of ideas that could help slinger out. A bounty hunting system with trial spanning effects would be my preference.

yeah, i think at this point its pretty commonly accepted that PTBs arent actually PTBs, but just a preview of whats guaranteed to happen anyway, regardless of feedback.

at most they have a smaller numerical change go through from PTB to live servers, as they did with Slingers ADS movementspeed Add Ons.

yeah this right here is just BHVR at its peak.

everyone (rightfully) complains about how bad Deathslingers just spam ADS to deny them actions, slowly zoning them out until they are in M1 range, which is the opposite of skillfully gameplay - so their solution is to literally remove everything skillfull, fun or unique from the Killer and turn him into something that relies entirely on slowly zoning people out.

ugh

agreed. however, the annoying part of this nerf is how incrdibly unnecessary it was.

like, seriously, they literally went and "fixed an issue" that never even existed.

there was nothing about his 24m TR that was too strong or unfair in the slightest. was it TECHNICALLY speaking possible for him to shoot you without you having a heartbeat? yeah. but a ton of things had to come together for him to be able to do something like that - most of which you, as the Survivor, had a direct influence over.

in other words, if you got surprise shot from outside of his TR, then 9 out of 10 times that can be directly linked to your own misplay.

some people just want to turn their brain off when playing Survivor and then complain when that backfires on them - which lead to this change.

this change is extremely annoying to me, because, realistically speaking, here is what it does:

1) you no longer need to think about your positioning against this Killer

2) you no longer need to keep track of him to avoid ambushes

3) you can just go and hold W the second you hear his TR approaching and by the time he catches up to you with his slow movementspeed, the game is essentially over.

literally the only effects it has is to make it easier to just turn your brain off against this Killer and still do well.

we all have.

Quick scopes were what made this Killer appealing, its what made him fun to use. I'd even go as far as to saying that quick scopes were what made the Deathslinger the Deathslinger.

by removing them, BHVR didnt just nerf this Killer. they completely removed his entire identity.

If i see a Deathslinger nowadays, i always just ask myself "why wouldnt they just pick Huntress?", because thats all he is now - a worse version of Huntress.

the Deathslinger changes show me one thing very clear:

BHVR either has absolutely no idea how to balance this game, or they genuinely have given up on it.

the more they double down on them, the more i lose hope for the future of this game.

i didnt quit the game because of the Deathslinger nerfs (i quit because they thought a casual party game needed an MMR system & the DDOS and cheater issues), but the Deathslinger nerfs have done an excellent job at making sure i stay away from it.

THIS 100%

If only the devs ever read this...