Base Kit perks for killer when?

You will come to find that regardless of how much attention they show to killers, survivors will always become stronger more quickly than will killers. I don't think it's that they pay special attention to survivors, necessarily, but that we get new killers with a new power every quarter. Survivors get new characters, but they're basically just skins. So, to show them the same love, they get different kinds of changes that can look like disparities.

Although, I'm not saying disparities in balancing don't exist... because they can, and do. Like, I saw 6.1 as bringing killers closer to being as powerful as survivors, but did not make them more powerful. But, I think giving killers basekit buffs too often can make the game unfair because some killers benefit more than others from those changes. Balancing basekit buffs to survivor are more straight forward, I think.

To support my point about 6.1 being about corrections rather than simply buffs, consider changes in population from November of 2021 to May of 2022, when they lost almost half of their players. Many killer mains quit because after boons were introduced and some map reworks were completed, the game was just miserable. Many killers were just tunneling and facecamping, which was making survivors quit. The imbalances had been going on and compounding since ghostface's release. Most survivor nerfs, like to syringe and toolboxes were to make room for new perks that provided similar if not more powerful effects.

yeah, thats usually how it goes

fun to finally have something different

It's not about perks for free it is more about improving the game by providing stuff that is currently only available in the form of perks...

What difference does that make? Think about what happens when you get your will and we add "stuff that is currently only availabe in the form of perks" and make it base kit. You still basically have a 5th perk by default. Next step would be survivors asking for something in return (and with good reason in that regard). Then killers would ask for the next thing because another issue occurs more commonly as survivors will find a way to benefit from their base kit changes in unforseen ways and the cycle repeats.

The point is when there is something unwanted or unhealthy in the game design it needs improvement... And just because a mild form of improving the situation is already provided in the form of a perk does not mean it should stay that way... What did killers get for removing old facecamping where you could literally stand in the hook and block the unhook prompt? What did survivors get when the killers got the ability to kick gens? You should not look at it as a fifth perk slot when it is mainly about game health... If you think camping and tunneling and slugging are unhealthy game mechanics that you don't want in your game at all you need to be able to do something about it and if you think a perk is not enough for that matter what else are you gonna do but make it basekit? I mean sure if it also buffs the other side in a certain way... that is not the result of the killer or survivor still doing the unwanted thing... then we could balance around the game in the changed state...

When the benefit is that it counters an unhealthy gameplay mechanic... That neither the players nor the developers want in their game what exactly is the issue then?

The way of implementing a perk as basekit is only one way to deal with the problem...

For infinite windows you could either remove them entirely or just give killers bamboozle or some other perk that blocks the window... That's the reason entity blocker got introduced, but it never was a perk... So just because something was a perk at first and got introduced as base mechanic later does not mean it is not a balance change anyway...

The same goes for bt basekit... They wanted survivors to not get downed straight after unhooking just because their teammate did not bring bt as it is an unfun gameplay mechanic... So there were several options:

• Remove collision of the survivor that just got unhooked and make them unhittable for a specific amount of time (so they cannot bodyblock for someone else but can reach a safe tile
• Give them BT basekit... (way easier to implement, so I guess that's why they went for it, but has the downside of survivors being able to bodyblock and tank a hit... But at that point you don't have to feel bad for going for them again)
• Probably a lot of other things people thought would be a good idea that I did not hear of though

If people want stuff to be basekit that is healthy for the gameplay or want some mechanics basekit that are not implemented as a perk yet... Where is the difference for you? Why does it matter if it is already a perk? When it being a perk is just not enough for the cause... It just should not be required to run a specific perk constantly just so you don't have to face some things...

Top 5% mmr.

Completely unplayable. mhm.

I'm confused as to your reasoning. Why would Killers as a whole need basekit perks instead of buffs to individual Killers like Trapper? Individual Killers may have it rough but Killers, as a whole, are in a good spot.

Also a good point.... But it would seem odd to only give trapper Corrupt... And I don't really know what to do otherwise to give him time to setup his traps without 3-4 gens popping immediatly... Being able to grab traps from lockers would be a good start though... So at least you don't need to run around the entire map. Maybe just give every killer a form of corrupt that blocks every gen until they enter the first chase/loose a health state by any means or something like that? Killers that have to setup would greatly benefit and good chase killers would basically immediatly loose that advantage... This idea was known as early game collapse or something like that... And the Devs didn't go through with it sadly...

"Are you honestly comparing the entity blocking windows after 3 vaults and Bamboozle?"

I'm just saying they somewhat have the same purpose... To deal with strong windows... Sure bamboozle is way more strict than the entity blocker and I never said it is the same, I just meant that they exist because of the same issue. I don't think you should generalize it like that... Just because something is a perk does not mean it is necessarily a bad idea to implement it as basekit... That depends on the strenght of the perk and the weakness it has... But just because it is a perk it cannot be basekit is just a bad argument and does not take the concrete cirumstances into account.

I think Bond and Kindred are good ideas as they will simply bring SoloQ and SWF closer together and that is more like balancing and less of a buff to survivor in general as SWF with coms already have that kind of information. And I think that it is a good thing that the community is loud about what functions they wish to be in the game... Like before don't look at the perk itself but look at what benefit they want... They want aura reading so they can play efficient in a way that players with communications already can... As it is rather frustrating when several people go for the same thing even though one person would have been enough if you only knew earlier... To serve that purpose they are, as far as I know, implementing UI information what the survivors are doing... Serves the purpose somewhat fine I think. We need to consider the underlying problem and not just the perk...

Stbfl does not really serve a purpose that counteracts a bad game design choice... It just shortens chases... So I don't really think it should be basekit... Just like Enduring should not be base... Some perks try to negate bad game design choices and others don't that's why I want to look closely what the issue is and not just ignore something because it exists as a perk already.

As for the corrupt intervention base I already suggested some form of early game collapse... As this would fit the purpose of setup killers without making strong chase killers ridiculously overpowered. Once again Corrupt Intervention helps killers that have a slow start and need to setup first and don't want survivors to instantly get on gens... I think on some killers it is either corrupt intervention or lethal pursuer depending on how much time you take for a down or if you need to setup... Corrupt Intervention: Myers, Hag, Trapper, Oni, Nemesis; Lethal Pursuer: Nurse, Blight and so on. And because of the differences in why they need the perk and I wanted the mechanic to have a downside of loosing it instantly once you started the first chase... (The perk in the sense of the early game collapse, not the kind of corrupt that is in the game right now)

Regression perks also don't really counter an inherent game design flaw... They're more to compensate the game going too fast on a subjective base. Although I do like the idea of some form of overcharge being added to a normal kick... Not the skill check but the increasing progression loss... It would not even be that much... Just to give the survivors an incentive to keep track of the gens progression more constantly... You see I would like to have the base mechanics to have some more depth instead of only having perks for that.

I feel like Windows of Opportunity is more like a getting to know the map kind of perk that you don't really have to rely on after some time... I would really like it to be a basic perk instead of being tied to a character just because newer players mostly use it and people who have more hours don't really need it anymore... But only then will probably aquire it... I don't necessarily want it basekit... But if it was to be basekit I would probably put it on a cooldown so you basically get a quick look around to where the nearest tile is when chase starts and from then on you need to be able to figure out where to go... But like I said... I think that could also be fine as it is...

"Also some perks synergize quite well with each other. Best example Kindred + Open Handed. This combination would be absolutely unfair if it didn't require 2 perks. There are quite a few equivalents on killer side as well and this will only increase as new perks are added to the game."

Would it though? You gain aura reading within 32 m of the hooked person... and see the other survivors... SWF in coms already has the ability to know the position of every survivor... I don't see how it would be absolutely unfair... I mean sure you could eventually loop a killer in that area and have constant aura reading on him... But this could be easily countered by just removing the aura reading for the survivor that is currently being chased... I don't see that perk combination as that problematic... Also if you loop the killer during that radius you basically make him proxy camp the hooked person, which is really not the optimal thing to do xD But feel free elaborate further on why it would be unfair.

For the basekit unbreakable... The way the whole thing presented itself on the ptb was somewhat questionable... But I also see it as a problem when a survivor gets slugged for quite some time... I mean sure you can just tab out and do something else while the killer tries to get his 4k ... But that is at the risk of griefing your teammate who might be there to pick you up... So actually having something t do while getting slugged seems like an ok thing to... The Option to counter slugging in that form should also take into account going down under pallets and so on, I think we can agree on that part at least... But I also think that there should be something for the slugged survivor to do while he is waiting the 4 or 5 minutes? or whatever it is it takes to bleed out... I mean... that's just unfun to stay on the ground with more and more crows and basically nothing you can do... If you're in that position you just know it sucks, but as it is there is not much you can do about it... Oh and the constant 22 seconds pick up was way too much of an increase... But you also don't get slugged every game... So it would probably not be a problem overall... I don't like it in that form. But what do you think would be a good countermeasure for being slugged for quite some time?

Top 5% includes the megheads. Let's talk about the actual top MMR survivors:

Lets just face it, killers are screwed, at least the weak ones

The solos actually do gens faster from my experience. And with reassurance anything is possible on any survivor team.

Im referring to the weak killers in a high level setting.

The vast majority of players in this game is just not that good therefore weaker killers still work even if your killer mmr is high... Also mmr does not mean much as the range of mmr at which you can get a match gets larger the longer the queue time is...

The main focus here is if killer mains begin to believe the game has swung to far in favour of survivor player they will switch from killer to survivor or simply quit the game a situation we were in recently before the devs balanced the problems that existed imo.So if you want to return to games where survivors wait an eternity to play games due to lack of killers or play against killers with a reduced ability keep weighing the game in favour of survivors and again watch the exodus of killers we all saw it happen before.

1st you cannot know how high your mmr is.... 2nd it does not really matter since matchmaking cannot match people with high mmr with other people with the same high mmr... Therefore after some minutes you will just get matched with a whole lot of people who have lower mmr... Even if you have 3000 mmr you will still get matched with people that are around 1600 - + 300 or so

So in the end mmr is irrelevant...

Why buffs when nurse performed at roughly 60% killrate on the top 5% of killer players against people in normal matchmaking... If 60% killrate is the goal that has been set that is...

The point is for which group of players are you gonna balance the game? Because you cannot balance it for bad, mediocre, good and comp players at the same time... So if you ask me if I would rather balance 99.9% of the things people encounter in the game than the really rare 0.1% thing that an ordinary player will encounter rougly once every 300-400 hours of pure playtime...

Let me give you a more serious and better example ... Bad players have no clue how to play nurse and struggle with mechanically demanding killers... If we were to balance it for them those killers would need a lower skillfloor or major buffs... The lower skillfloor would be a better options since it would not influence the performance of the killer for better players who already know what they are doing on this certain killer ... But the concept of the killer itself is maybe not changeable in a way that allows to lower the skillfloor... Nurse for example already has an addon that makes it easiert ot hit blinks, besides that I would not really know what else to change to make her easier to play... There is a similar addon for Blight but it does not really work as it is supposed to as it ignores slippery collision and so on... The point is if you want to use Blights rushes in chase and not just for mobility there is not really much you could do to change the way he works without buffing him, the same goes for Billy and Curving... So for the example of blight... if we make him easier it might help bad players but since the change would probably buff him overall he might now be too opressive versus mediocre players...

Let's take a closer look at the blight example... He has an addon that shows the bump target... But it does not take into account the weird collision some objects have and does not show if they are slippery or not... Learning which tiles you can bump into is a major part of getting really good at blight... And he would be way easier to play or even perform really well with if the addon would display that properly... But then again by keeping him as strong as he is but removing a major part of the hardship you have to go through to become so good at him might make him really oppressive... You did not even buff him directly by doing that and you could still say by having it as an addon he cannot use two really good addons... But you still made it possible for potentially worse players to perform really well on him even though they are not really good at the game, but the addon makes the killer just really easy (hypothetically if it was like that)... And that is the whole question of balancing... Who are you balancing for? Because a change that might be balanced for a specific group of players will be really opressive for others... And that's why the focus should be on the majority of players which are rather average in terms of skill... We cannot really balance for comp because then survivor would either need a huge nerf or probably around 20 killers would need a major buff and the results of those changes would be all over the place... This is not like Starcraft 2 or Dota or Lol where you can just balance for the pros and the rest will work out for itself... Those games have proper matchmaking that matches players of equal skill... And everyone has technically the same tools to work with... It's just completely different than an asymmetrical game and needs to be looked at differently ...

Since comp survivors can win against comp spirits blights or nurses under specific rules and limitations for both sides... Imagine every killer in the game would be as rough to go against strenght wise than those 3 ... The game would be really miserable for everyone that is not a comp player and we cannot really want that... But at the same time completely broken stuff like MDR, tombstone piece and so on should still not be kept in the game... The ocasional comp squad is not an addon or offering that you can just remove without any effects on the rest of the game... If you would want to nerf comp squads you would need to nerf survivors or buff killers as said before... It is just not that easy... And you really need to choose your goals... Because a balanced game is not necessarily balanced at all skill levels and probably can not be as it is asymmetrical...

The whole problem with "top mmr killers" is that the matchmaking works in a way that it prioritises queue time over balance... Because if it did not you would have like 2 hour queues... I think it was Dowsey who experienced that when they first introduced the mmr... His mmr was apparently so high that there were no players found in the range to match them together... So nowadays even though his mmr on twins would be probably at around the same level (I'd assume) he will find a game in like 5-10 minutes max... They changed the system to have a wider area of groups of players with lower or higher mmr that are considered a match to get better queue times... And this leads us to the whole problem I mentioned before... Comp Squads and really really good players are so rare that they would never find games against equally strong killers... With the changed matchmaking conditions however those guys can get matched against your average killer player and they will demolish him... the same goes the other way around... Really good killer players with several thousand hours will also get the average survivors mostly... Because the average players just make up the majority of the player base... And the survivors will have a really rough time... What do you do about that? Change matchmaking back and require it to have a stricter form of matchmaking? They even lowered it again inbetween because some people complained about little killer variety... they only got nurse blight and spirit all day long... And now matchmaking just throws you in with some random guys after like 5-10 min when the matchmaking considers your search time too long so you don't have to wait forever...

I would like to have an honest discussion about what could be a solution to this issue... Because I have no clue... On the one hand hours long queues would be really annoying... people who play survivor would probably die on purpose every game just to keep their queue times low and killer players might get their 8 hooks and let everyone go because they ccannot be asked to wait hours for a match... Or they would just stop playing machtmaking and only play against friends, or just don't play anymore... Nobody ain't got that much time to just sit around for 2 hours and do nothing but wait... But at the same time i fully understand the frustration of players that just got demolished by someone they felt like they could not do anything about...

And in conclusion that's exactly why I said comp squads or really really good players are rare... So the best thing you can do is take the 5 minute loss and move on... Because there is nothing else you can do... At least as far as I can think of a proper solution. But hey if you know something feel free to explain..