Legion and Thanaphobia

Soloq issue then. Idk how people don't know the basic counter to legion with thanat.

IMO Thanataphobia needs to be reworked for this exact reason.

I hate how it gives a sizeable debuff for injured teamamtes (ok) but then it's completely useless when they die? Isn't this supposed to be the perk about being afraid of DYING? And yet the closer survivors come to death, the less actually afraid of it they are.

It should probably be a perk that slows down survivors action speeds depending on the severity of teammate's conditions. Like - Injured teammates confer a 3% debuff, Dying confers a 6% debuff, Hooked confers a 9% debuff, Dead confers a permanent 12% debuff.

At that rate, instead of gaining maximum value for 4 injured teammates, the greatest value is when survivors are at their worst. 1 dead survivor and another on the hook as the other 2 are injured? Fear of Death. 27% speed debuff.

But this also means that getting everyone injured with the Legion or Plague isn't an automatic 1/5 speed slowdown. Instead of 20% for everyone injured, it's only 12% - 15% when you 5th hit and put someone into the Dying state and 18% while they're hanging and everyone else is spread out.

Legion isn't the problem, it's that Thantaphobia is a little wonky.

5% slowdown per injury is nice, but not super strong. Punishing a killer for getting kills is a bit strange and kinda goes against the theme. Might as well get two birds with one stone.

First counter to legion.Spread out and dont heal unless you are bad at looping.

Without a doubt.

Kind of the point, though.

I think you're on the right track - but I'm not sure if you're aware of the implications of what those numbers mean.

Playing into that degree of '33% repairing decrease' is far more attractive than juggling injured survivors for this exact reason.

The problem with Thanatophobia is it's an anti-snowball perk in just about every way - but it becomes absolutely unbearable in the hands of a select minority of killers. (So we're on the same page! But here's part of the problem therein)

In the hands of the Plague, it's a hostage situation where in order to counter the plague, you have to sit and deal with a hefty 20% debuff on your actions - or you must provide her with one of the most powerful abilities in the game. If survivors refuse to give the Plague her power, they have 16 seconds of additional repair time added to each generator, which is why it is far more powerful of a perk on her than on a killer like Ghostface or Cannibal, because the Plague can use this perk to add up to 80 seconds of repair to the survivors in the match, threatening reprisal with her powerful Corrupt Purge if they capitulate.

Considering the proposed change of a 'Snowball' Thanata rework... While granting a stronger debuff on kills, it is not as if it has any additional oppression than otherwise. While the potential debuff of having >10% heaped on top of losing a teammate may seem sanguine, it is a considerable tradeoff to have much, MUCH greater speed when the entire team is alive.

And while you are generally correct that killing a survivor negates 25% of the team's effective repair speed, that's numbers and not completely accurate. A hooked survivor doesn't negate 25% of the team's repair - it negates 50%, as someone must come to the rescue. A downed survivor can negate even more than 50% in some cases. Chasing a survivor removes 25% generator speed, so does healing. Do survivor perks that prolong chases like Dead Hard reduce the team's effective repair by 25% for longer?

The entire match is a tug of war between time and repair efficiency.

It's just beside the point. Overall, survivors tend to die midway through the game, or towards the end. If you're trying to repair 3 generators with 2 people dead - ~20% reduced repair speed isn't what's keeping you from a long and prosperous life of escaping.

There are a lot of mathematic sides to the game - but a dead survivor, in no way, reduces the effective action speed any more than normal gameplay parameters already align with. All 4 players on one generator reduce their repair efficiency by 45%. That's more than a dead survivor with a Snowball-centered Thanataphobia. It's just not a relatively solid basis to engineer a counterargument. Effective repair speed of the team at any point in time is no solid metric for the viability of the match itself, nor the status of the survivors within.

Example: Survivor loops the killer while another mends and then heals themselves with self care over the course of 45 seconds. The survivor team's repair efficiency is reduced by 50%. Thanatophobia, as is, increases this inefficiency to 60%, right? What if it was only 56%? What if the heal was faster and repair speed was only hindered by 50% for a short while and returned to 75% quickly? Are we breaking the game - or is this a normal match that has been played for 6 years?

Sacrificing a player on a scourge hook and following up with a Pop Goes The Weasel has been in the game for awhile now, and it resets the survivor's ability to repair gens far, far, FAR more aggressively than a paltry 12% debuff would. 12% is effectively ~10 seconds or so of repair time. 20% is 16. Is it better to add 16 seconds to generator repair for 3 survivors (1 chase 3 repairing) , or less than 10 seconds for 2? (1 dead 2 repairing) Pop and PR regress steal ~40% of a generator's progress - that's 32 seconds on every hook. 8 hooks, these two perks are going to eat up 256 seconds worth of progress. That's over 4 MINUTES! But Pop is considered balanced, right? Even on the moderate side, if it were nerfed, it would still easily steal a minute or two of generator progress from survivors. It is quaint to suggest that contributing a ~10 second debuff when repairing a generator from 0 to 100 is as oppressive a perk as one that can just as easily blow away twice that amount without issue.

Example:

It takes 3 hooks to kill someone in most circumstances, right? That's 30 seconds of injured chases between hooks, ~30 seconds on the hook for both states, perhaps 15 seconds in the Dying state all three times. You have a grand total of 90 seconds injured, 45 seconds Dying, and 60 seconds hooked. 90 seconds of 3% debuff, 45 seconds of 6%, 60 seconds of 9%. Total of 195 seconds unhealthy.

With the original Thanatophobia, survivors would have a cumulative debuff of 195 x 0.05 = 9.75 seconds of progress sapped from them.

With a snowball Thanatophobia, survivors would have a cumulative debuff of (90 x 0.03) + (45 x 0.06) + (60 x 0.09) = 10.8 seconds sapped from repairing survivors.

That's 1 second of faster repair time over the course of 3 minutes, and between hook stages.

If looking at time between hook stages (135 seconds) you'd see a massive difference.

Current: 6.75 seconds of progress sapped. Proposed: 5.4 seconds of progress sapped.

That's more than 1 second saved over the course of two minutes! Wow! But then you remember that Pop Goes The Weasel exists, and those same 3 hooks just gave the killer 60 seconds worth of generator progress back.

Proposed differences between old Thanatophobia and new Thanatophobia have variances of less than 1 second in perceived value in a tunneling scenario - while Pop Goes The Weasel can contribute more than 6 times the current slowdown.

You see my point? The math is there, it's just deceptive at first glance. You gotta go a bit deeper.

If survivors go on to repair 3 full generators after the first death, the perk is only granting the killer around 28 seconds worth of time - which is a bit more than a single Pop-Goes-The-Weasel proc over the course of 3 entire generators.

While killers like Legion or Plague that can injure survivors before the first generator is finished will see full injuries sustained throughout the entire match.

A full injured team with Thanata currently: Killer gains 80 seconds of time just because everyone is injured.

Proposed: only 48.

This means that a fully injured team will have nearly half the original debuff, gaining 32 seconds of repair time over the course of the match, while that same 32 seconds can be placed in jeopardy when a survivor dies.

If we put the scenarios together, the original will sap 40 seconds from the survivor team until a survivor dies, from there it saps 30 seconds until the final generator is completed and the killer gets their second sacrifice of the trial. ~70 seconds total.

Proposed: injured team has a bit over 24 seconds sapped from them until their friend dies during the third generator's repair, after their death, the survivors must repair about 42 additional seconds worth of repair progress. ~70 seconds total.

Between the 'Unhealthy = -0.05' to 'injured=-0.03|Dying=-0.06|Hooked=-0.09|Deceased=-0.12' systems, there's a negligible variance throughout the course of this match. The difference between is that the former was more impactful at the beginning of the match and fell off, while the latter gave survivors much more breathing room at the beginning and gained momentum.

In addition, the numbers can easily be tweaked. I have no problem with someone pointing out that 12% may be a bit much and that 9% is plenty fair, or that Hooked/Dying/Dead should share the same debuff and the system should be changed to 'Injured = 2%' and the rest should be 8... or anything of that sort. Numbers can be changed - it's the intention that we are truly discussing.

By transplanting the time survivors have towards the end of the match, the perk can become much more attractive for both sides, offer counterplay for survivors - while also incentivizing killers to play with the late game in mind; using Thanatophobia as more of an end-game threat with a small early game presence rather than a powerhouse early game perk that falls off the better you perform, unlike other - far more attractive perks that offer relatively fewer opportunities to counter or dilute.

You'd have to consider the time spent before a survivor dies and correlate the increased debuffs with the lighter ones. If the majority of the time, survivors are all in the injured state and suffering a 12% debuff (~10 seconds to full repair a gen) and not the normal 20% (6 seconds more than the previous) how vital are those 6 seconds at the beginning of the game rather than after one person dies - or even two?

I'd like to do the math with you if you're interested - create some simulations and hypotheticals to bounce the numbers around and see how balanced it truly is. But, generally, the proposed change is transplanting the early game momentum with late game momentum. And - in many cases - survivors rely more heavily on a strong start and killers rely heavily on a strong ending. If you take 6 seconds away from a survivor's repair time at the beginning and place it on them at the end, is it truly broken?

Moreover, if you recall a previous point, if you have a lot of repair to go when this perk picks up, it's already the least of your worries.

If you're trying to stick the last generator and you have 1 ally on the hook, 1 dying on the ground, and another being carried to death hook while you're bleeding against your repair skill checks - your last concern should be "Man, the ~20% repair debuff is getting me killed!"

We're looking at killer specific synergies that break the perks. Which is why such a change is relevant.

It's important to remember that Thanatophobia is basically garbage on many killers.

Trapper can have 3 generators finish before he even gets a single down. In many matches - killers will have one or two injuries against a team and will rely on downing and hooking survivors to pull their allies away from generators. In many, many, many cases - the perk is going to have greatly stunted value. More than half of generator progress with have the perk running with one or two people being injured, Dying, or catching hang time. That wicked ~70 seconds of value can easily become ~35 seconds of value in most matches. For this reason, a snowball perk can become more relevant on 1v1 killers that can only dream of seeing this perk harbor its maximum yield, while also stunting its obscene effectiveness on killers like Legion that can extract its maximum value in mere seconds and force the match to continue the ~70 second additional repair time on top of their innate slowdown. Even so, removing the powerful base number will make it less of a threat to survivors at the beginning and a much greater concern as injuries mount and hooks take their toll later into the trial. Such a change will make the beginning of the match against any killer far more agreeable - making it high risk/moderate reward for most killers - an improvement over where it is currently.

However, killers that tunnel one survivor may accrue greater value than the base perk - but even having the survivor loop the killer injured is a better alternative to survivors than the OG one. Camping and tunneling won't let a killer snowball much more than already much if at all.

How are you going to make Thanatophobia less as powerful on "always injured" killers like Plague or Legion but also make it better than a C-tier-at-best perk for the majority of killers?

All in all, right now it's a "please heal" perk. It incentivizes survivors to spend time healing in order to avoid the perk's deleterious effects.

However, this "please heal" perk can become extremely unfun and nearly unfair to play against when paired against certain prospects such as Sloppy Butcher, Plague, Deathbound, etc.

It's in an awkward place because the "please heal" side of things has shifted away from healing being a massive investment - with B:CoH and other powerful healing perks and items, Thanataphobia is in a place where it's a mere nuisance for survivors in most matches and very unappealing for the majority of killers. However, in the hands of a select few killers that have the ability to keep survivors wounded reliably and easily - it can get out of hand.

It would be both more attractive to killer players and more generally fair for survivor players if it turned from a "please heal to avoid me" early game perk into a "Please play safe to avoid dying" momentum perk.

In no way would they ever make it stronger than Prove Thyself, which itself is a pretty disgusting perk if people pile on a gen. I know people say that piling up is inefficient, but a coordinated team with BNPs and PT... pretty gross. Plus if 3 people manage do 3 gens with PT, that's 3 gens done in 87 seconds versus 240 seconds all split up. But yeah, much more 'efficient' to do gens solo when there's a PT in play.

Legion and Thanaphobia is like peanut butter and jam both suck alone but together are good besides when I face legion I expect Thanatophobia on them because it's a good perk for them besides simple answer to counter it just bring self-care sure it's slow but it's self-care.

So you want encourage tunneling? I think survivors should be slower repairing gens when there is everyone alive and that excactly what thanatobia does.

Did I miss something?

The update to Legion just looked like QoL with no change to gameplay or counter play. Did people just forget how to counter Legion, or was the change that significant?

Yeah, I think it's just everyone has a different definition of bleak depending on their experience. If the two gens that got done were just me and my team is going down like flies, then I'll probably just start doing stuff to get myself more bloodpoints. Maybe loot a chest to give the item as a gift for the killer for mercy.