Anti-tunnel and anti-camp: Two baseline mechanism suggestions
I might have something good here, let me know what you think...
Let's start with the simpler one: Anti-tunnel.
New Baseline Function: Desperation
A survivor that is pulled off a hook immediately gains Desperation for 60 seconds. This effect is removed when the survivor performs a Conspicuous Action.
If a desperate survivor is picked up by a killer, they get an extremely easy skill check. Hitting this skill check stuns the killer for five seconds, freeing the survivor and removing Desperation.
Desperation is removed if all five gens are completed.
Changed: Decisive Strike
Old: After being unhooked or unhooking yourself, getting picked up by the killer in the next 60 seconds will give you a skill check. Hitting this skill check stuns the killer for three seconds. Deactivated by conspicuous actions.
New: Desperate Strike now also Disrupts the killer for 10 seconds, after the stun ends.
Changed: Off The Record
Old: For the next 60/70/80 seconds after being unhooked, your grunts of pain are suppressed, your aura can't be read, and you gain endurance. Disabled upon performing a conspicuous action.
New: While under the effect of Desperation, the survivor's aura cannot be read, they do not leave pools of blood or scratch marks, their footsteps are reduced, and their grunts of pain are suppressed.
New Status Effect: Disrupted
A disrupted killer cannot activate their powers. This only applies to on-demand effects, and does not apply to effects that aren't directly triggered by the killer themselves.
For example: Any of Trapper's pre-deployed traps will work, but he can't place new ones. Hag's traps will trigger and give intel, but she can't teleport to them. Any lingering smoke from a Clown bottle will still affect targets, but he cannot toss new ones.
Design notes: Anti-tunnel
The problem with tunnelling is that any kind of incentive on the other side would have to match how brutally effective tunnelling is, and I suspect the only way to do that is by removing effectively all agency from the survivors. I'm much more in favour of actually targeting tunnelling itself to get that method out of the way and improve balance from there. Decisive Strike was a very healthy perk in that regard once the excesses had been cut off. It was very unrewarding to use offensively against a killer that was wary of the perk's existence.
In this regard, making it a baseline improves this design point. With ALL survivors -always- having DS, killers can arm themselves against it, and learn to recognise baits. It's also entirely possible to introduce a means to bluntly tell the killer, via a status icon, if a survivor has Desperation or not, similar to the way the obsession is marked.
The new disruption effect is meant to target power-reliant killers more than 'M1' chasers. The Disruption effect would not hurt Trapper nearly as much as it would hurt Nurse or Blight, for example. In fact, this would be crippling for the Nurse specifically, since she physically -cannot- chase without her power.
Additionally, I have moved the deactivation requirement from 'End-game collapse' to 'All five gens are done'. We don't want 99'ing gates to re-enable the 'free escape'.
As for OTR: While DS was well-tailored to its task and carried innate vulnerabilities that made it almost impossible to use offensively, OTR is riddled with holes in its design. Apart from facecamping king Bubba being able to chew through Endurance like nobody's business, the fact that Endurance doesn't stack (Which is absolutely fair in and of itself) also means that if the killer tunnels hard enough, he can disable OTR from the get-go, causing the anti-tunnel perk to be vulnerable to tunnelling. That doesn't make sense.
Additionally, while trying to use DS offensively would result in a downed survivor that the killer can punish by leaving them on the ground to waste their time, OTR doesn't carry this failsafe. An OTR bodyblock will still see the survivor up and running and contributing. This essentially means that from a gameplay perspective, OTR is worse for both the killers and the survivors.
With OTR's original focus being on information denial, I figured it'd be far more interesting if the perk went HARD on that theme and presented itself as a more high-risk, high-reward anti-tunnel option, by giving the killer the hardest possible type of chase. No intel, whatsoever. Just your own eyes and intuition, the game won't help you one lick if you're trying to tunnel into an OTR. This might cause a survivor to break the chase and shake the killer, offering a far more substantial reward than DS's disruption effect.
Now, for the other problem.
Camping.
New Baseline Function: Frustration
If a killer or an off-handed killer power (Hag trap, Trapper trap, Victor, Portal) is within X meters of a hooked survivor, the Entity can grow frustrated with the killer's obsession with the hooked target.
For every survivor working on a generator, the hook timer is slowed by 5% per survivor. This means one repairing survivor slows it by 5%, two slow it by 20%, and three slow it by 45%.
This effect ramps up over time, building up to full strength over 20 seconds. Once the conditions for Frustration are no longer met, the effect winds down at the same rate.
Design Notes: Anti-Camping
So the slowed hook timer has been suggested multiple times and is often met with the same rebuttal: Survivors could abuse it. With two survivors standing on either side of the area around the hook, the killer would be forced to give a free rescue or risk the anti-camp stalling his kill out for eternity.
With Frustration, the system gets married to the one thing that gets brought up as a counter to camping: Just rush gens. So now, doing exactly that will directly weaken camping.
While it would technically be possible to pull off the stand-off style exploit, it would not benefit the survivors. Taking two survivors to produce this effect would cost 66% of their effective repair speed, while offering only a 5% hook timer increase, thus being completely non-viable as a bully tactic. Using only one survivor would cost 33% for a 20% hook timer increase, still a net loss for the survivors. It's only early camping, with all survivors diligently working on gens, that is utterly demolished by this effect.
This doesn't give free saves, and if a killer camps in a three-gen, they can effectively deny the Frustration mechanism.
Off-handed powers are also counted for the purpose of this mechanism, since it is possible for some killers to effectively camp without being near the hook, and I wanted that to be punished too. Hag can easily afford to stay out of range for example, and just TP in when a trap gets triggered, effectively face-camping from a distance.
Visualisation of this effect can be leveraged to give the killer better intel to tell them when their happy camping is just not working, such as showing which degree of Frustration is in effect.
These are my suggestions, let me know what you think.
Comments
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This got snowed in really fast, so I'm just gonna give it a bump and see if there'll be any response.
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Ok as someone who hates both tunneling and camping I can tell you right now these won't fly. First what you're talking about is a built in DS. That's a no-go right from the start. Because if you have a killer who has to worry about DS every single time he hooks someone this game will suck for killers. And no one in the world will accept that as a genuine suggestion.
Now as far as gen speeding up goes, we've talked about it for some time, it's not a thing that would incentivise the killer to leave the hook or to stop tunneling. Yes some people might get out, but for the vast majority it will still result in at least 1 death which makes it not worth doing.
Now if you want to know what I suggested and they still should do is I suggested they make every hook work like cage of atonement. Where you hook someone, they disappear into a random location of the map that the killer doesn't see, and then when the other survivors unhook them the killer sees the explosion. And in tandem removing all anti-camping/tunneling perks, as they will no longer be necessary.
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Ok as someone who hates both tunneling and camping I can tell you right now these won't fly. First what you're talking about is a built in DS. That's a no-go right from the start. Because if you have a killer who has to worry about DS every single time he hooks someone this game will suck for killers. And no one in the world will accept that as a genuine suggestion.
This would physically be no different from what DS used to be before the last patch, minus the end-game activation. It wasn't a problem then, why would it be a problem now?
Now as far as gen speeding up goes, we've talked about it for some time, it's not a thing that would incentivise the killer to leave the hook or to stop tunneling. Yes some people might get out, but for the vast majority it will still result in at least 1 death which makes it not worth doing.
Now if you want to know what I suggested and they still should do is I suggested they make every hook work like cage of atonement. Where you hook someone, they disappear into a random location of the map that the killer doesn't see, and then when the other survivors unhook them the killer sees the explosion. And in tandem removing all anti-camping/tunneling perks, as they will no longer be necessary.
Unfortunately, I don't agree with the random hook assignment either. It'd be unfair if the killer hooks a survivor and they randomly get moved to a hook right by a generator that another survivor is working on. The killer would instantly lose all accumulated pressure just on pure chance, and it might turn the game near unwinnable off a dice roll.
And I'm not sure why you brought up gen speeding up. That's not in this suggestion.
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You made an incorrect assumption there, it was a big problem. And if you asked killers DS was such a huge problem that they literally had to plan games around it.
As far as CoA goes, it wouldn't turn the game unwinnable at all. As it stands right now if a killer is playing without camping or tunneling he's playing exactly the same way as he would with CoA except now it would be better for him, because now he might get a chance of getting 2 survivors in 1 spot instead of just 1. So it literally gets rid of camping and tunneling and doesn't hurt the killer pressure. The only person that would see it as a problem is a killer who camps and tunnels because it takes those abilities away. Which is not pressure, it's just garbage. And 2 of the main reasons why this game sucks so much.
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Ok what can stop a recently hooked survivor from just running and activating all hags traps, deactivating trapppers traps, sealing demos portals etc since they are not conspicuous actions and the survivor is ending all killer set-up while being at zero risk.
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Nothing. Also the new meta will be slugging.
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How about this:
After being unhooked the survivor gains the endurance status effect with thirty tokens. Each attack that would put the survivor into the dying state consumes a token and the survivor gets a speed boost. Never deactivated.
There. Tunneling is eliminated and you have the game you seem to want.
Oh camping. Uhhhh.....
If the killer is within 40 meters of the hook for longer than three seconds the entity picks them up and puts them in time out for five minutes. Time out is a big cage in the middle of the map so that survivors may visit and bag and point at the rightfully shamed killer player. While in time out blood points drain from the killer's account at a rate of 100/s.
There. I've solved all of the games problems for forever.
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I actually like the desperation feature becuase ofc hehe I loved DS pre-nerf so having it be base-kit would be 100% welcomed for me.
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You made an incorrect assumption there, it was a big problem. And if you asked killers DS was such a huge problem that they literally had to plan games around it.
Do ask. Because I don't think many killers actually cared about DS outside of the EGC, with how counterable the perk is.
As far as CoA goes, it wouldn't turn the game unwinnable at all. As it stands right now if a killer is playing without camping or tunneling he's playing exactly the same way as he would with CoA except now it would be better for him, because now he might get a chance of getting 2 survivors in 1 spot instead of just 1.
No, it's not quite. Yeah, you have two survivors in one spot, but you currently get that too if someone goes for the unhook. That's not necessarily a camping thing either, if the killer catches someone going for the unhook, it's entirely fair for them to target that survivor.
If you hook someone, if there's someone near you, they still have to contest you in some way. They have to be stealthy enough to slip past you unnoticed, and they need to carefully time it. They need to also have moved into position while you were getting the hook set up. That's time taken off of a gen, and that is part of the pressure you build up as killer.
That would be gone with randomised hooking. Once you slap a survivor onto a hook, they can immediately be freed by another survivor at almost no time loss, if you're unlucky enough. I don't think that kind of RNG is healthy for the game, and I think it'll lead to some very unfair losses for killers.
Well, according to Murgleis...
Ironically, you lead with 'Nothing', and then point out that, actually, it's slugging. Yes, you can go around and try to break the set-up, but that's one difference that makes me prefer the design of DS over OTR: The survivor pays up if they try to use it offensively. They cannot be hooked, but they can still be incapacitated.
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I play as killer half the time and talked to a lot of killers who were tier 1 they absolutely play around DS. Now as far as CoA is concerned you're not building up healthy pressure when you sit on a hook as a killer. You're camping, like there is no other word for it. That's what's you're doing if you sit on a hook as a killer. And that is exactly what CoA is designed to prevent, see you don't need that kind of pressure buildup, because by caging someone you're forcing the other survivors to get off a gen and go get them. But let's play those 2 scenarios out to their natural conclusion shall we?
Scenario #1: Survivors go for the unhook, if the killer sees them he gives chase, they get the survivor out of the cage, he retains his 5 second BT(which is the only BT still in the game at that point) and the killer either chases the survivor down who's hurt wasting some more time(but mildly tunneling) or he chases the unhooker and tries to go for the down. Now that is a very unlikely scenario as the way CoA works it doesn't just disappear across the map from everyone it typically lands near other survivors, so it's FAR more likely that they will get a straight unhook without ever being seen. And during this time the gens are either being done by the other 2 survivors, or more likely most will go for the unhook and only 1 is being done.
Scenario #2: Survivors ignore the caged and stay on gens, and the killer manages to find the cage. In that scenario you might say "well he's camping", but see he isn't. Camping only applies when you were NOT given the opportunity to unhook in the first place. And if you were, and you ignore it, YOU are the reason why the killer can camp, therefore you cannot blame him for camping if you ignored the survivor in the cage.
In either scenario gen pressure can stay on or be taken off just like it works right now based on your group. It wouldn't take away any pressure from the killer, because once he hooked someone he would immediately either start going gen to gen, or run across the map looking for the cages survivor, in either scenario it still plays out very similar to the game right now.
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I don't even need a drawn out explanation to say "no."
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I don't think you get what I'm talking about.
Current scenario, if the killer gets a hook, a survivor needs to go in for the rescue. Let's assume this survivor didn't stalk the killer and is working on a gen that is currently safe to pressure. They need to get off that gen, carefully approach the hook, get the unhook, and then make their way to a gen to resume working. That's going to cost, what, 20-30 seconds at best to get the unhook, and another 5-10 seconds to get back to a gen?
Now imagine the killer gets a hook, and the survivor is teleported to a hook next to a safe gen that is being worked on. That survivor now has to let go for only 5 seconds to get the unhook, and is then back on the gen in another 5 seconds.
Yes, it's a worst case scenario, but you have to account for those when you play with randomised mechanisms. A killer could get screwed over that badly, losing effectively 30 seconds of a gen -not- being worked on, on a whim.
You don't, but you also don't need to say anything if you're not going to contribute anything meaningful. You could've just scrolled on by if you're not interested in looking for a camping/tunnelling solution.
In fact, why'd you even click on this topic?
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I get what you're saying, and you're right it will take some time off the pressure end, but a time reduction is a small price to pay for no camping and tunneling. And if worst comes to worst and they really feel it's a HUGE time difference they can up the gen time again. But honestly I don't think it will be enough to offset it.
I played against a nurse today that made it abundantly clear how bad this game became. Check this out she was running COULROPHOBIA and THANTOPHOBIA, and this was at the meat plant. So imagine this, at no point in time are you actually far enough out of range of her for her abilities not to be a problem. Now with SELF-CARE and BOTANY, it still takes over a minute to heal with those 2 killer perks on. SELF-CARE is only 35% speed now but with BOTANY its 85% now which is not bad, but the true benefit is the 50% increased speed to your teammates, however with just those 2 perks the healing was reduced so heavily that it was almost impossible to heal them up. And then she also had DISTRESSING and SLOPPY BUTCHER on.
So picture this. She hits you, now the entire team is slowed on gens and healing. And you're bleeding, but now when people go to heal you, they get a 50% faster skill check, that they miss a good deal of the time. When they miss it because of SLOPPY BUTCHER you bleed and lose more healing. And because of DISTRESSING combined with COULROPHOBIA you are always in her terror radius, so you get people who bleed out none stop, and the healing is so slow via getting healed by another person that it's not even worth doing, it would be faster to do a gen.
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Desperation: basekit DS. Not a big fan of it
OTF: not a fan of this perk anyways.
Disrupted: disabling killer powers? I don't think I need to explain why I wouldn't agree with that point.
Frustration: slowing the hook if a killers power is close to the hook and survs are doing gens? Also, don't need to say much, but no. That's eliminates some killers way of actually getting pressure.
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Can we get some anti-bully squad stuff for killer then too? Or you all can just learn to counter tunneling and camping since there are tutorials and streamers out there who have literally shared tactics to counter these things.
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I get what you're saying, and you're right it will take some time off the pressure end, but a time reduction is a small price to pay for no camping and tunneling. And if worst comes to worst and they really feel it's a HUGE time difference they can up the gen time again. But honestly I don't think it will be enough to offset it.
The problem is that you're dealing with huge swings in scenarios. If the survivor is teleported to some corner of the map where no other survivor is currently present, that is a massive benefit to the killer. If the survivor is teleported to another survivor, that's a massive benefit to the survivors. The value of a hook becomes an RNG problem, and that can't be dealt with outside of RNG amelioration, but at that point you'd have to introduce a logic to it that can be exploited.
Desperation: basekit DS. Not a big fan of it
But why not? By the end of its lifespan, DS was almost perfectly tailored to the purpose of being an anti-tunnel perk. The only thing getting in the way of it truly being a fair anti-tunnel effect was the EGC activation, but that's already been trimmed out. At that point, anyone that complains about DS is someone that hardcore played into the perk's one and only function and has no one but themselves to blame.
Disrupted: disabling killer powers? I don't think I need to explain why I wouldn't agree with that point.
I think you do need to explain. Again, this is tied to DS, a perk that ONLY activates under a very specific circumstance that requires a LOT of killer input. If this perk bothers you, just don't hit spacebar on someone that was unhooked in the last minute.
Besides, the only one that Disruption would really cripple is Nurse. All the others just turn into M1s, no different from a Trapper who hasn't set anything up.
Frustration: slowing the hook if a killers power is close to the hook and survs are doing gens? Also, don't need to say much, but no. That's eliminates some killers way of actually getting pressure.
You're not getting pressure if the survs are ignoring the hooked target anyway. Just don't facecamp, and don't proxy camp. Which is the point of this suggestion.
Can we get some anti-bully squad stuff for killer then too?
Absolutely fine with anti-bully squad measures being implemented too. Innate lightborn for X seconds after being blinded for example, to get rid of flashlight stacking.
Or you all can just learn to counter tunneling and camping since there are tutorials and streamers out there who have literally shared tactics to counter these things.
Only thing you linked that is relevant to this is Scott's video, and his video's just for tips about builds that may be able to help you if you can get an unhook. That's a really flimsy counter tactic against a strategy that is specifically intended to deny unhooks.
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I'm ok with it being an RNG issue, with RNG you're a hit and miss, and that's fine, because in a hit and miss its 50/50. However right now there's a 100% chance that if a killer wants to tunnel and camp they can and will. I'd rather have the 50/50.
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Oh, I'm not concerned about the impact on camping killers. I'm concerned about the impact on non-camping killers! I don't want them to get nerfed by the countermeasures.
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I'm not concerned about them at all, because if they're none camping, this honestly won't be a big change for them. Because I came at this from their perspective because its my perspective. For them, as soon as they hook they go elsewhere, so for them its really not a bad change.
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