I am profoundly disappointed.

I don't care about DMS when it's not on Artist. It's good, but there's counterplay against the killers it's especially good on. Doc, you let go of the gen before the hook and anticipate the shock and then he can't use it again for a minute; Freddy, you tough it out with Class Photo and assume he's faking until/unless he shows up. Same with a fast killer like Blight or Billy that races across the map - don't get spooked, tough it out unless they're aiming for you. And for nearly everyone else, it's just going to be another above-average gen delay perk.

Artist's counterplay is "hardcore hide all game, skittering back into the bushes at even the hint of a terror radius, but also team-pile on gens like a mofo and BT-bodyblock unhooks with DS" or just "lol don't get caught."

Lucky Break is a tricky perk, but it's not a 30-minute match perk.

So I've thought about this one for a while, and ultimately, I can't fault that. There's nothing I can objectively quantify about how I think something like Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer Blight or Infectious/Starstruck Nurse is fair, but this isn't. All of those killer/perk synergies have counterplay, but so does Basement Bubba and Dead Man's Switch Artist. It all comes down to my personal opinion on what's reasonable to expect players to do and what isn't, and that's a worthless foundation for an argument.

I think my reasons for railing against DMS Artist are very similar to my reasons for hating Boil Over - they're too easy to pull off for their reward, they encourage a cheese strat over interactive or dynamic gameplay, and they stretch games out well past the point of anyone having fun with them. Both of them hinge on just flat out not letting the other team do their objective for obnoxiously long periods of time.

Though that brings up the question of Franklins/Hoarder Pinhead, because he was/is also a stall killer who'd drag matches out to death. I think the issue here is that Pinhead forever-hunt strategies live or die based on whether he's facing comms and they are not universally effective. While they certainly help him, I don't think the issue was actually Franklins or Hoarder - it was that it's stupidly hard to end a chain hunt once it gets going because the chains continue to harass the box holder, and that build made it so that you had to solve the box as soon as you picked it up or you'd get interrupted. All Franklins/Hoarder truly did was prevent a survivor from holding the box hostage and force them to time picking it up well. The fiddliness in actually solving the box, along with the box time addons, was what caused the strategy to work as well as it did. All of that said - I'm quite likely very wrong about this. I was on hiatus when Pinhead was first released and you actually faced him more than once in a blue moon, so I don't think I'm the best person to speak on this topic or how fair/busted that strat was/what was actually the lynchpin versus what was incidental.

As for DMS not being used in a week - yes and no? The difference between Boil Over and DMS is that Boil Over isn't a good perk. If you're not controlling the map and you're not running to areas the killer has to drop and doesn't have a hook right there anyway, it's a waste of a perk slot that will help you once every couple dozen matches. DMS is actually a good perk (albeit probably not meta), and alongside being a good perk, it opened up another powerful cheese strategy ala Basement Bubba. Less instadeath if you get caught, more that the Artist can just keep stalling the game over and over and over again and win through attrition unless survivors counter it with a specific strategy that takes ages or are good enough runners that her facecamp palooza kicks in too late (whereupon the team can sacrifice the facecamped player or grab then at the very last second of the second stage to avoid a second DMS.) Which is tricky, because Artist is an anti-loop killer.

And historically, low-effort strategies that have high returns attract players. Trolling rarely wins you games, but cheesing does. So if DMS facecamp Artist works, we'll be seeing her around.

I'm definitely skeptical that DMS will have a lasting place in the meta compared to, say, Pain Resonance, and it'll probably go the way of Lucky Break when it comes to killers who aren't Freddy/Doc/Artist. Artist is where I'm worried. I could be wrong. On its head, it does seem like it requires a little more skill than Basement Bubba, and it will also take longer, so there's a chance it just won't corner his market and widely appeal to the players that are interested in playing joyless slogs for 4ks. One hopes.

Overall, I'm just really unhappy that they've failed to take any action on any feedback beyond "we're not buffing Solvent Jug then" and that their stance on massive design oversights seems to be "lol, let's just go ahead with it and see what happens."