Is Dead Dawg Really Killer Sided?
When it comes to maps in DBD, Dead Dawg Saloon is a map that's, for the most part, universally agreed to be a killer sided map. The primary reason for this being it's small size making for easy gen patrolling. Pretty often when I play on Dead Dawg though, I find myself questioning the sentiment that Dead Dawg is a very killer sided map.
Starting off, the map size. The small map size doesn't feel so much like it's a straight advantage to killer as a whole. What it feels more like is a way to level the playing field between movement based killers and non-movement based killers. The advantages of the small size kinda stops there though. If killers can get from gen to gen with relative ease, so can the survivors. There are some pretty long sightlines on the map too, so survivors have no difficulty finding where the gens are. The size also allows survivors to put off hook rescues for longer. A survivor can spend more time working on gens before going for rescue when the hook is just a brisk stroll away. The distance between pallets is never to huge either. Some of them aren't so great, but a solid handful are decently safe too.
This small size can also work to the disadvantage of a few specific killers. Survivors don't have to go very far to check The Pig's jigsaw boxes. They don't have to go very far to pick up the Lament Configuration. Pyramid Head's cages of atonement likely won't spawn very far from where a survivor is. You can disable a decent chunk of The Singularity's biopods at once with an EMP's radius.
Then there are the various loops and structures of Dead Dawg. Some of them can be kinda rough for killers, and some of the good structures are pretty close together. Main building and killer shack are just a stone's throw from each other. Killer shack is killer shack, and main structure has two strong windows and some decent pallets nearby. There are at least 4 pallets I can think of that are stuck in the middle of two long walls, which are pretty decent pallets. The Jungle Gyms in front of the saloon are no pushover either, survivor who know what they're doing can run you for a while at those, especially if you haven't broken the walls in them.
Speaking of breakable walls, this map has a lot of them, with quite a few being mandatory to break. The time that the maps small size would save you in the early game is instead spent breaking these walls.
So yeah, what do you all think? Is Dead Dawg really the haven for killers that many people say it is?
Comments
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I think Dead Dawg is one of most killer sided map. I genuinely don't remember ever not getting at least a 3k on this map unless I was against some really cracked survivors that would have beaten me much quicker on any other map. I also don't remember escaping much on it against decent killers as survivor.
Main building and shack are pretty close but that's only because everything is pretty close, they're not easy to chain in chase and the shack is probably the weakest in the game because of the breakable wall. Same goes for the main building, only good survivors can loop a decent killer there once the correct walls are broken.
The arguments I've seen of people saying it's not killer sided are that good survivors can loop this and that and make it very difficult for the killer to catch them, but that's true of every map (and quite normal in my opinion, a really good survivor shouldn't be easy to catch).
In any case I'm always happy to get it when I'm playing killer.
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The killer sided-ness comes, imo, from killer perks, especially of the exposed and ren-regression type. You'll pretty much always make a scourge hook, the detour to eruption, pop, CoB etc. a gen is always rather short and jolt usually hits more than one gen - and if survivors are exposed they will rarely make enough distance initially to outrun exposed and the map is too small to reasonably out-hide exposed while also progressing the objective in any meaningful way; you will find them.
Plus, guarding hooks and interrupting resets is insanely easy as well -- and while you talk about Pheads cages spawning close to other survs; chances are you too can see the cage (or don't see it and thus deduce its location) and have a very easy time tunneling the just uncaged surv since they don't have any of the unhook benefits. With extra range it's even possible that a Phead M2s someone the moment they get uncaged.
While main is rather safe for survs, gallows is usually unsafe. - And while houses has a lot of walls, some of which need to be broken and thus make a good location to take a killer there are also 3-4 gens in those structures so you'll probably run the killer into one of your teamies, halting gen progression and potentially giving a free hit, depending on how aware the teamie/killer is.
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As a killer main, I deeply hate this map, I think it's one of the worst existing ones for me.
First, survivors get a free generator, it's practically impossible to defend the generator in the saloon (same as the generator in the Garden of Joy house) it's just a waste of time to fight for that generator. The main building is TOO strong, too many escape routes, safe windows, strong pallets and outside there are other quite strong pallets. The part of the buildings with the walls to break is a big waste of time even if, allow, some mind gaming.
Generator spawning is also a big deal. Of course, sometimes a very close 3 gen cluster happens but, sometimes, some gen are on elevated platforms as spawns and offer immediate escape routes and can be repaired very easily
The only thing I like about this map is the shack with the breakable door. All killer shack should look like this and, I think, this is the real reason why the map is considered by many "killer friendly"
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It's really not. People just latch on calling it killer sided, because of all the maps in the game it's one of the fairer maps.
It's a small map that spawns a corner of the map with a couple of pallets.
However, the corner that is weaker is always the same. Meanwhile the rest of the map has chainable strong tiles and an excellent main building. It's a fairly consistent map to run killers on, because the amount of rng at play is very minimal. Not to mention how some gens are practically free for the survivor when it comes down to a 3 gen situation.
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I always felt that its conditionally killer sided.
Main building - survivor sided, decent looping potential, line of sight blocks, moderately difficult for M1 killers , okay for anti-loop killers & trap killers, multiple exhaustion procs for survivors (head on, balanced, lithe), and a high priority gen with good line of sight to pre run.
Killer shack - relatively balanced, connects into 3ish pallet loops (some safe some not), breakable wall to make more killer sided, possible centralized basement.
Maze tiles opposite shack - highly survivor sided, a lot of line of sight blockers, pallet loops into pallet loops (most safe some not), a lot of breakable walls to go through to make it slightly killer friendly.
Back corner - killer sided, few pallets, mostly unsafe, easy to make dead zone, gen offset from others (survivor sided if left to break 3 gen, killer sided if done early game).
Overall assessment - Killer dependent , SWF advantage overall, macro play required from both sides, killer needs to be selective about chases, survivors need to prioritize high value gens in early game.
Just my observations from playing both sides.
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If survivors keep the gen in the main building for the end, then the map isn´t killer sided at all. The gen is extremely safe and survivors can loop the killer for a very long time around that building.
The only thing that can put survivors in danger on that map is other survivors, which do that gen first, because its safe. A surprisingly high amount of survivors tend to play suboptimal by completing the safest gens first and keeping the more dangerous ones for the end.
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It is killer sided in my opinion, the very small size leads to all kind of frustrating issues:
Doctor blasting 4 gens at once.
Plague infecting all gens in less than a minute.
Huntress can watch several gens standing on main.
Skull merchant 3- gen is even worse than usual.
Same for the knight.
The gates appearing right next to each other.
There must be like 10 pallets max and some of them are really unsafe.
Terror radius builds are a nightmare.
3 gens spawning in the middle of the street.
The Gallow has a fixed gen that is really unsafe.
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Smaller maps mean less time on generators as well. The town is very strong loops back to back. The main building has several looping iterations that are strong. Kill shack is planted right in the middle of the map. And the desert area has three to four safe pallets.
Yes, a killer can exhaust the resources in a couple of areas. But survivors can absolutely, and often do, dominate this map.
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It's oddly balanced in our opinion (though we personally hate it aside from aesthetics). The main building is super safe if survivors know how to run it while it and the "town" needs prepped by everyone but nurse unless they want to spend a lot longer in chases. That said after everything is done it's a small open map with few safe place to loop except the saloon.
It's survivor sided that becomes killer sided like the game. Only easier to make it that way.
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Killer sided if main building generator and hangman generator are done at first (it happens very frequently) if one of that generators, specially the main building one, is left as one of the last three gens when there are only one remaining the map is survivor sided. In other words, the map being killer or survivor sided depends on the survivors and which generators they repair at first. The generator in main building is one of the hardest to defend in the entire game.
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Dead Dawg has some things that are horrible for killers but also some redeeming qualities that can make it a very favorable map for killers if played right. The main building should be avoided at all costs. It is a huge time waster and cannot be disarmed. There is also the possibility of spawning some nasty set ups next to it.
But it has a pretty weak shack (breakable wall mostly disarms it) and despite how it might look, the map is actually pretty small and there are a lot of areas, that you don't have to care about. Some places only have very few pallets and it really hurts once they are gone. There are also thick grass for Trapper and Hag, good 3 gens for pretty much any killer, very consistent and manageable collisions for Blight and Billy, chances to break line of sight for stealth killers, favorable basement spawns for any killer, mostly mindgameable pallets for M1 killers and 1 very unsafe gen against ranged killers at the gallows. All in all, Dead Dawg Saloon can work in your favor, if you are able to play to its strengths.
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I can't stand that map on either side
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Pretty killer-sided if you dont let yourself get looped around the Main Building. Best is to ignore it entirely, if the Survivors are doing the Gen in the Saloon, they can do it.
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It's way too easy to defend generators on the map and most of the time you can secure a 3 gen no matter what part of the map you're on since you're always passing by generators near the center when patrolling. You have to somehow get into a really long extended chase to lose a gen in the middle roads or just get the worst RNG in the map where everything spawns out of sight.
One thing I'd like for the map is for a new tile to be added on the corner that's almost always a dead zone and for generators to be moved around a bit. I'd like the gallows and saloon ones to stay where they're at though.
That being said - I love the visuals of the map and want another map from the realm to be added but doubt I'll ever see one.
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This.
They seem to have this map design where they make most of the map suck for survivors, but give them such an OP main building that you literally should just immediately abandon chase if a survivor gets to it, thus creating these stupid long games. Better to nerf these main buildings and spread the "power" around the map of how strong the structures are, rather than having one single powerful structure.
Garden of joy is just special though, that entire map is just ridiculous and powerful structures tons and tons of pallets, and a main building that has a literal infinite against some killers, and a near infinite for everyone else that will cause you to lose the game if you chase a survivor exploiting it because it will take you a solid minute and a half to even land a single hit.
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If I remember correctly it has the second highest kill rate. We can debate the various points of the map that favor either side but in the end the results speak for themselves.
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This is my assessment as well. The overall size of the map is killer friendly, even slower ones, and it gets less and less safe as pallets are broken.
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This.
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Yes, it is
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If it's not killer sided, no map is. The gens are very easy to harrass, due to both their close proximty and how exposed most of them are. All of the loops and fillers are somewhere between mindgamable and unsafe, and are at worst one broken pallet or wall away from being unusable. Main building and shack are tricky, but even then aren't very safe with the right walls broken, and shack's window almost never chains into anything. It's an incredible map for meta perks like jolt, pain res, no way out, and corrupt. Even if you completely ignore the generators the last three are almost always holdable due to just how small the map is, made even smaller by its dead zones.
I do think that map wouldn't be that bad if it made better use of its space, in terms of both generators and safety. It should have a proper loop behind main, with possible gen spawns both there and to the non-shack side of main. I think it would make the map a lot more bareable for survivors.
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One thing to note on this. If the map kill rate was like 60%, that would be considered balance as the KR the devs are aiming for is 60%. You would need to hit 65% KR on a map for it to be truly killer sided.
I don't remember what the last stats were, but just saying that it being the 2nd highest kill rate map does not correlate to being killer sided if the kill rate of the map fall in line with the kill rate the devs are balancing for.
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60% isn’t balanced. The devs have expressed how they want the game to *slightly* favor killer, which is why they’re aiming for a 60% kill rate. Or, in other words, an average of 2.5-3Ks per match. A map where 60% of survivors who play it die isn’t balanced. It favors the killer. And that’s fine.
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If every map had around a 60% KR, then the game overall would be balanced as the goal is for killers to have around 60% KR.
Dead Dawg can be one of the better maps for killer without being killer sided.
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If every map had a kill rate of 60% the aggregate kill rate would be approximately 70-73%; much higher than the 60% BHVR is shooting for (and has) now. The 40% of survivors who escape their trials often do so on maps that favor survivors. Dead Dog favors killers and that’s OK. But it isn’t balanced, nor does it really need to be.
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There's 41 maps in the game. Here's the aggregate calculation if all maps have 60% kill rate.
60% x 41 = 2460%
100% 41 = 4100% (as the highest total)
2460 / 4100 = 60%
Would you look at that, if every map had 60% kill rate the total kill rate is 60%.
You're really just trying to reach to call an otherwise balanced map killer sided when the issue is that most maps simply favor the survivor.
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It killer sided if you avoid main building as killer. Chasig a survivor at main can often waste 20-30 seconds for an injure with no resources being used up and only being near one gen, meanwhile the rest of the map is full of weaker loops which have pallets/relavent breakable walls which do make the loop significantly weaker once broken. Due to the location of the gens and main building it isn't too hard to avoid it for the most part and taking a chase their can be alright if you think it'll be quick. By avoiding main you're removing the best loop for survivor, leaving them with mostly medicore loops and reduce the area you have to care about by about 20% for the downside of leaving a couple of chases and giving up one hard to defend gen because it's on the second floor. This isn't to say you need to 3 gen and camp out the entire camp but instead be selective about the chases you take.
I'd say it's killer sided as a result, as understanding this isn't hard, however I wouldn't say it's balanced/well designed as a result. The stratergy is to ignore one of the most unique parts of the map and play in an extremely small play area which leaves the survivors with few options. I didn't say 3 genning was need but the map can spawn with a very strong 3 gen only defended by a few pallets and weak connection to shack, the area behind killer shack. There are good things about this map, it's very pretty and the variations of old tiles which are stronger with breakable walls are unique and a good examples of well placed breakable walls which aren't necerassy to break but also aren't useless to break, but overall I'd say the map needs to be slightly bigger with a weaker main building to increase the play area and encourage people to engage with main.
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Its for sure one of the strongest killer maps. But I hate to play on it with both sides
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It's one of the most balanced maps in the game, but like all cases of 'balance' in this game, it's not because it can 'go either way' in any scenario, but because circumstances will skew it heavily to one side or the other.
It's easy to 3-gen, if survivors are careless.
Defending the main building will likely lose you multiple gens.
Leaving the saloon gen to last will likely make it impossible to defend the last three gens... unless you have a lucky 3-gen right by the saloon and you have Jolt.
So it can seem 'unfair' if a key play skews the game in your opponents favour, but in a way, it's better at rewarding skillful plays than most other maps.
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It is Killer-sided only in the sense that it doesn't put Survivors at an advantage or Killers at an disadvantage.
Gen regression builds used to dominate on it since it is relatively small, but with gen regression nerfed into the ground, it's a fair map.
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Yeah, it's pretty Killer-sided by all accounts.
Especially if you have half-decent macro.
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I don't know if the map is that killer-sided but the 3-gen in the corner behind shack is absolutely insane, probably the strongest in the game. You can win on this map just by camping there all match, it should be an automatic win unless the survivors are on comms. Some may argue that RPD's 3-gen is stronger but at least it depends on RNG (might even be fixed, from what I've seen) while Dead Dawg gives you a consistent 3-gen that you can camp from the start.
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Ofc its killer sided.
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Baring specific killers on specific maps there are NO killer sided maps. There are survivor sided maps and fair maps. The reason people might say a map is killer sided is because most maps are survivor sided and survivor sided maps are almost always zero interaction. What I mean by that is it's just vault the window/drop the pallet and boom, that's it, the killer either vaults behind them or breaks the pallet, there is no other option, thus when said survivor is on a fair map they comp drop their pallet but the killer walks around it and hits them, thus leading them to say it's a "killer sided" map when in reality they are just hard carried by stupid safe pallets that require no thinking at all besides "press SPACE to win."
"Killer sided" maps are not like this, some pallets require a stun to make a safe getaway, some you can go around easily if they are predropped from the wrong side, etc. I could go on but you get the idea. Map design has always been utter trash because they make them with no interaction in mind between survivor/killer, just comp drop that ######### and if you are killer you just kick it.
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I mean, 53% was the kill rate they released during prime CoH and DH god validation. Obviously the kill rate means far less if that was the case. Factoring in how much harder it is to get into survivor than killer 58-60% probably makes more since than 50. Even if mmr was perfect, survivor being far harder to learn without outside help will always skew the kill rates one way or another.
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If you stay at the center of the map, unless gen spawn is awful, you can defend up to 4 generator (technically 5, but I've never seen gens spawn like that) at a glance, especially if you're someone like Huntress, who has a clear shot for almost every angle of every generator visible from the center.
Not only that, but it's one of those maps where if RNG favours you, you can sit between both gates and flick your mouse really fast to camp both of them without needing to ever move until someone shows up.
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what
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It's fun that you wrote two large paragraphs and in neither of them you put anything relatable to dead dawg saloon.
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How many % kill rate is called a survivor map?
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Might be a killer map at 90% killrate. But it's still a survivor map cause SWF doesn't care(sarcasm my friend).
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I would like to know, because if
- there are 16 maps have 70% kill rate
- and 25 maps have 55% kill rate.
The average kill rate to all map would be 60%. Except the number of 55% kill rate for those 25 maps is certainly not survivor sided number.
If those 25 maps pushed up to 60% kill rate. Which mean the average kill rate to all map would be more than 60%. As @Ayodam was trying to explain.
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The map is blatantly killer sided. Super small, trash loops plus weaker shack.
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It has nothing to do with how hard it is to learn a role.
Its just far harder to get a 4-man-escape than 4 kills. If you are winning as killer you can slug for the 4k or even the hatch game is in favor for the killer.
But even if you are dominating as survivor there are many ways that the killer can secure one kill.
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16 maps with 70%? damn didn't know that. You gotta link. I legit wanna check out what maps
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The kill rate the devs are balancing for is around 60%. Anything around that kill rate would be considered balanced and I imagine the devs are looking at a range of values rather than a static 60%. Something like 58%-62% range.
Which would mean anything below that is survivor sided and anything above that is killer sided.
I said that if ALL maps had a 60% Kill Rate, all maps would be balanced. All means ALL. Not only ones currently below 60%.
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I heard that RNG gives you maps with the least win if you get constantly winning. Forcing to lose.
There is no way you can make all maps that give Trapper equally 60% kill rate, as well as giving Blight 60%.
Everything are just generis numbers. Accept there are maps that killer sided, and maps that survivor sided
Because if
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Or maybe you guys can accept that maps can be balanced and not favor one side or the other. But I guess that would be asking a lot from people who clearly just want to paint every black and white.
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Yes.
I've had like 6 solo que teammates prove to me this is the case, killer can easily pressure the 5 gen that usually spawns especially with one of the street hooks, often the gens are close enough to hooks that a ranged killer can keep decent pressure without having to move
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Unpopular opinion but I believe it's a balanced map for both sides
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