Survivors Need Time to Adjust
I complained about how miserable the game has felt yesterday and the general consensus was "just keep trying, it'll eventually get better" and... Well, yeah.
The old Survivor meta was essentially having their hands held at being able to extend chases and having multiple chances to escape the trial, while Killer (unless against boosted Survivors and the Killer is just really good) needed to stay afloat most of the time by bringing perks to slow down generator progress. I personally tried to avoid multiple second chance perks (most of my Survivor builds were really built around their teachables; Dwight my main was built around what challenges I had to do.) Essentially, the meta was for Survivors to reduce mistakes and stay alive while the meta for Killers was to prevent progression. Which y'know, makes sense imo, that's their ultimate goal.
Unfortunately as this update has shown, a good chunk of Survivor players have used and relied on this meta so much that they generally stopped caring about looping or hiding properly and just used the perks as a scapegoat. Now that this meta is gone, Survivors are struggling and that's totally fine. It isn't just the perks of course, the whole baseline changes of Killer has made Survivor gameplay tremendously more difficult than it was before. Survivors no longer have their hands held.
Are the Killers hands being held? I don't know. Right now Killers have their meta seemingly planned out; I think a general meta consensus is Save the Best for Last, Brutal Strength, Overcharge and Call of Brine. I've seen that combination in approx. 40% of my games, the others were slight variations with Call of Brine and/or Overcharge being in 80% of my games.
There is no Survivor meta yet. No one knows what is their best chance of survival and no one has given me a good consensus on what is the meta for Survivors. A bunch of Endurance/Unhooking/Speed Boost perks? Sprint Burst and Overcome seems popular now.
So I still feel valid in believing that Survivor has become tremendously difficult as of right now, but I think if we just get accustomed to the changes, Survivors can manage to figure a way to make their games just a bit better.
What do you guys think?
Comments
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I disagree.
My build is still the same and I still play solo q. what am I supposed to adjust to?
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Well, what is your build?
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Bond, Kindred, Inner Strength and Lithe. Again, what am I supposed to adjust on? Should I just adjust to the 20 hours megs i'm getting in my lobby when I have almost 6k hours?
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That means that your build was not even affected by the changes. The point of my post was about the meta changes and how Survivors are trying to find new metas and getting accustomed to new builds and strategies.
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Exactly my build didnt even change and the game is still way worse for solo q.
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Adjust to what? Survs perks are bad as hell. 75% increase in gen working when you’re the last surv? 1% of increase gen speed? See other survs scratch marks?
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Adjust to the new perk changes/meta changes. I thought I had made myself clear in the post but apparently not.
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Give it a week of change tantrum and it'll settle like everything else.
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I hope so. I haven't seen a change tantrum this massive since Boons though, and they had a reason to.
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I agree.
Survivors now have to go back to the drawing board and really evaluate what tools to bring, as a lot of the perks people got comfortable with are now much much less usable. Maybe it's a crutch they got used to like Dead Hard, but there are also plenty of other tools that got shaken up. Combined with more of an emphasis on looping efficiently instead of burning through resources, it definitely means a lot of survivor tactics and tools are up in the air.
I fully believe that people will get used to this shakeup after a little while, once they've experimented with builds and adjusted to the chase changes. I'm not saying anyone is a bad survivor player, I'm saying they got used to being good at the previous state of the game, and their approach just needs to catch up a little.
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The issue is that these changes would have worked had they addressed the biggest problems which were tunneling and camping. But they didn't. They claimed they did but even in beta absolutely everyone told them repeatedly that their "solutions" to those things didn't work. They didn't work as intended. And as a result this entire meta is killers being much more powerful. I play solo Q on both sides, and let me tell you the killers feel MUCH stronger now, and the survivors are getting creamed easily, it's not even close to balanced. At least not as closed to balanced as it was before this patch.
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Meme answer: Drop a discord link in every pregame lobby to a group call. Tell that 20 hour meg what to do. The big power move.
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Oh amongst all the tantrum will be some genuine objective feedback but its a rational needle in an emotional tantrum haystack at the moment.
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I don't think there's emphasis enough on the fact that the meta has been the same for 6 years. I'm not saying all survivors relied on crutch meta perks like dead hard, but quite a few did and their world was turned upside down. I don't even think some survivors learned to loop in the first place based on the games I've played.
In chase quite a few seemed a little lost with what to do in chase. Literally lost now that things don't work the same way. You can't hold w the same way and you can't make a mistake and get out free anymore.
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Oh for sure. Killers have been camping and tunneling much more often now because they basically have every reason to. It makes me wish that they didn't change the way Endurance works so that way Survivors can last longer during a tunnel situation like that. But I don't think that's a very popular opinion and I know why that wouldn't be a good idea as well.
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It's not even about any 1 perk, it's just the fact that they actively go out of their way to NEVER punish killers for tunneling and camping. They design this game specifically to incentivize them to keep doing it. So of course they're going to do it. And this has been a standing issue from the very beginning, if you look through the update timeline the "balance" of this game just comes down to how well 1 side can avoid tunneling and camping or the other side can tunnel and camp.
And also there have always been 3 main complaints about this game.
1) Gen rushing
2) Tunneling
3) Camping
Notice how #1 has been addressed, but #2 and #3 have not. Why? Because the #1 was a survivor benefit, and #2 and #3 were killer benefits.
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I could very well be an outlier, but I play both sides and think that survivors got off easy this update.
The two "meta perks" that got nerfed were Dead Hard and Decisive Strike. Unbreakable was untouched, Lithe and Sprint Burst are still fine. No crazy new objective was added and Corrupt and Ruin both are less effective than before. Heck, survivors now all have a basekit endurance effect at the hook & a haste effect!
I understand that a lot of folks are having trouble adapting and I have some friendly advice. If you're struggling to get generators done, bring Prove Thyself. If you can hit 3-4 Great Skillchecks per generator you negate the extra ten seconds that was added to each generator.
In the face of the Dead Hard nerf I encourage survivors to pair up around the map. Have a buddy system so that heals are easier to get and in a pinch they can bodyblock for you. In SoloQ this is harder, but not impossible. You can bring perks like Bond or Aftercare to track teammates. Heck, Empathic Connection or Blood Bond work as well. Or if you don't have a slot to spare you can watch the skies for crows flying straight up. If you see a crow fly up and don't hear some ominous music get loader in that direction then you've essentially seen a teammate.
The only exception to buddying up is about certain killers. Obviously don't try and bodyblock Bubba's Chainsaw or a Tier III Myers.
I encourage everyone to take some time and just give the changes a try. They're not nearly as catastrophic as some of us are making them out to be.
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So how do I, as a Solo Q player who cannot communicate with my team mates, who will who have their own ideas, "create a buddy system" that is understood and followed thru with?
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I think something you could try is Bond, Situational Awareness (Better Together), Empathic Connection perhaps and Prove Thyself, letting people know where you are and to help cooperate on generators.
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Pre-Solo Q nerf patch I always ran Blastmine. If you know this perk, it's a superior "Netter Together" and highlights the gen you're working on. I also run EMpathy all the time.
The escape rates pre=patch were pretty abysmal. Now they're non-existent. They need some kind of info system for Solo Q and to stop catering exclusively to Killers and SWF imo
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"The old Survivor meta was essentially having their hands held at being able to extend chases and having multiple chances to escape the trial, while Killer (unless against boosted Survivors and the Killer is just really good) needed to stay afloat most of the time by bringing perks to slow down generator progress"
"a good chunk of Survivor players have used and relied on this meta so much that they generally stopped caring about looping or hiding properly and just used the perks as a scapegoat. Now that this meta is gone, Survivors are struggling and that's totally fine"
All of this is very true. Survivors are upset that their easy wins that took all options away from the killer are gone. They cant loop a super long time with DH - good. They can't DS the killer on their first hook at the end game collapse - good.
"So I still feel valid in believing that Survivor has become tremendously difficult as of right now"
In one sense if you played killer at high MMR you were training to run a marathon up hill. Meanwhile the survivors were being carried by meta perks/broken mechanics were on top of the mountain riding down the opposite side in a cart with wheels. But suddenly the patch came along and made all those carts come to a full stop; in the process it made the survivors start rolling and scraping down that same hill.
Survivors who understand the game mechanics well can still loop. Those who were having their hand held to victory are floundering.
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I just stalk another survivor tbh. I run Blood Bond and once I proc it I let the obsession take the reigns. I stick to them like glue for the haste and help them out like a blood brother. Occasionally I have to split off to go for a hook save, but sticking to them isn't too hard.
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Gens are much slower now there is no adapting to that unless you like playing gen simulator. Just lost match where we gor last gen to 95% but blight managed to bring survivor close to it and then slugged rest of us quickly who tried to do gen one survivors was death at that point well before we would won that match or at least 2 would escaped and probably with old dh and ds we would gotten 4 man escape. Killers got huge buff now even bad killers win matches they would previously lost.
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Gens are a maximum of ten seconds longer now with no slowdown in play, that's not something you're realistically going to notice in the vast majority of situations.
Not to mention that you can absolutely adapt to it by bringing generator speed builds, of course.
As for that match in your example, that sounds like a pretty close game that was only lost because one of your teammates misplayed, not a crushing loss you couldn't have avoided.
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12.5% increase is an increase of 12.5%. Framing it (which is what you do) as something not noticed or felt or whatever else is disingenuous.
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adjust to what??
same game but worse :p
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There's a reason every 4v1 game I've played besides this one has a map that shows where other teammates are.
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While it is absolutely possible to frame changes like this in disingenuous ways, what makes it disingenuous is framing it in anything other than real terms.
In real terms - IE, what the charge number translates to - it's ten extra seconds per generator. That's cumulative seconds, too, not consecutive, the number lowers if more than one person works on a particular generator. I don't think it's a far leap to say that a maximum of ten extra seconds isn't something you're going to actively notice while you're repairing, especially since it's often lower than that since at least the last generator often has multiple people working on it.
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Same with Boil Over when it was buffed the first time. Then survivors complained after they nerfed it. It's still useful, just not OP. I think that's the dev's overall goal... To remove OP perks and meta in general. It's honestly a great strategy and the best way to balance a game.
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Well we all misplayed bit but that what happens in soloQ in swf we would got 3-4 man out of that game so yeah.
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