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How is the DMS combo healthier than Merciless Storm?

Yung_Slug
Yung_Slug Member Posts: 2,238
in Feedback and Suggestions

The new patch brought changes so baffling it resurrected me from the dead. I'm not going to parrot things I've already heard but I do have one question that I honestly can't wrap my head around.


How is Pain Resonance + Dead Man's Switch better for the game in the eyes of BHVR than Pain Resonance + Merciless Storm? In what situation is this the case.


Let me analyze these combos, assuming "new" pain resonance with DMS and the previous pain resonance with MS. I will call these combos PRDMS and PRMS, respectively.


To activate PRDMS, all you need to do is hook a survivor at a scourge hook. The gen with the most progress will lose 15% progress, and if anyone is working on the generator at the time, the gen is blocked for 30 seconds and will begin regressing when it is unblocked. You also learn the location of the generator when it is blocked. This combo can apply to the same generator multiple times in a match.

Compare this to PRMS. To activate it, you need to hook a survivor at a scourge hook while the gen with the most progress is at least 90% done but not finished. The gen will lose 15% progress regardless, but if Merciless Storm is currently activate AND the survivor either fails a skill check (incurring another 10%) or simply walks away from the gen afterward (no further progression loss), the gen will be blocked for 20 seconds and you will learn its location. Merciless Storm can only affect one gen per match.


Both of these combos can be negated by the survivors, unless the killer chases them off the gen, but doesn't one seem so much easier and less situational than the other? If these combos are strong or annoying, why bring back the former? I thought this patch was supposed to change the meta, what happened to that?

One more thing that annoys me about this. DMS was a decent perk by itself. Now that it's nerfed and gives you information that PR no longer does, you are heavily incentivized to always use the other perk when you use one of them.

Meanwhile, Merciless Storm has always been pretty underwhelming in most builds. It found a nice combo with the new Pain Resonance which I heavily doubt was being overused like PRDMS. But now that's gone, and I feel like BHVR is trying to tell us that they want us to use PRDMS more and don't want us to bother using Merciless Storm. That seems to contradict everything they've been doing in the last update, so why?

If anyone can give me a good answer I will be greatly appreciative. I have no idea what they were thinking with this.

Comments

  • Marik1987
    Marik1987 Member Posts: 1,700

    The new PR/DMS sucks heavily. 30secs means nothing.

  • jesterkind
    jesterkind Member Posts: 9,559
    edited August 2022

    I don't work for BHVR (and I'm also not a huge fan of this combo being brought back) but I would wager that the reasoning behind PR/DMS being healthier than PR/MS is half that they nerfed the more obnoxious portions of the former, and half that the counterplay for the former is a little more robust now because of it.

    Since PR no longer gives you information, if you let go of the generator you're working on as someone's hooked just in case it's a scourge hook, the killer won't know to run towards that generator and guarantee DMS value anymore, without other info tools. So, the combo is at least no longer a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation for survivors on its own.

    It's still kind of obnoxious and I'd still rather have seen another change, but I can see the logic. Letting go of generators as people are hooked is probably seen internally as a preferable gameplay situation to hitting Merciless Storm skillchecks for way longer than intended.