The "Heal 2nd" Meta and Abysmal Map Design
I see it every other killer and survivor match. A survivor gets unhooked and rushes over to a generator that isn't regressing or an injured survivor keeps working on a gen when I run over to them. Doesn't matter how mobile or ranged the killer. They know (often with Windows of Opportunity) that there're several pallets and windows in their vicinity, and they can pre-run to any of them (often because the map has few line of sight blockers and can see the killer approaching before you hear their terror radius, or because the map is cluttered enough that there is no direct path to them). There isn't a significant risk to being injured. I'm skeptical of the upcoming Abbatoir and Cowshed refreshes.
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I do not believe it is about pallets or vaults but more like genrushing. Many have Resilience. There was a time (after the healing nerf) when I decided to take "We'll Make It" and "Distortion" with me. Both became mandatory perks in my builds. But "We'll Make It" only last for so long after unhooking someone and it's pretty annoying when they just rush to the gens and don't want to be healed.
The community no longer wants long matches. It's all about winning / losing and not about having fun.
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That's been a thing since the beginning of the game. Once you hit a certain skill level, you stop caring about being injured and instead focus on gens, sometimes even running a build around it.
Most of the time, it's just not efficient to heal before doing a gen, even more so against certain killers like say Legion. Of course, it's also very situational.
I've lost games because no one healed when we had the chance and I've lost games from a healing loop. There's no real right or wrong there and it depends entirely on what's happening in the match.
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Resilience happens to synergise particularly well with the new perk Made For It, which you're probably seeing a lot of right now.
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on top of that we in a meta that take longer to heal do to sloppy and we coming off a nerf to medkits/coh. Survivors don't find it wroth healing as much when u can just proc adrenaline to do the job.
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I don't heal much because it's too slow to do so. You're more likely to win by just doing the gens instead. If you're adequately skilled then you don't need to heal constantly. Only baby survivors feel the need to heal every time they get unhooked.
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Survivors want to have fun => Killers camp and tunnel => Survivors sit on Generators all match => Killers want to have fun => Survivors complete the Generators way too fast => Killers camp and tunnel to keep up => Survivors want to have fun...
It's just the DBD Cycle... it's nothing new.
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But why do we have to dismiss it like, "it's just been this way"? Why can't we change that?
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Why does it need to be changed? If people want to play injured then they can.
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Sad how this meta returned
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Healing is always a trade off. You can afford to be selective about it if you aren't catastrophic in chase. And it's often a poor use of time out of context. Using teammate chase time to heal and using killer patrol time to try and work gens is completely backwards, but it's the standard gameplay loop most survivors fall into. Then it's jarring when survivors are smart about how they spend their time.
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Why would I spend 30+ seconds healing or finding someone to heal when I know the killer is chasing someone else? Especially if I have dead hard and also can see that the killer is chasing another survivor.
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I've been having alot of fun lately with my no-mither build.
No Mither, Resilience, Made For This, and Blood Pact.
No Mither - Endless Unbreakable, plus 75% reduced injured sound and no blood pools.
Resiliance - 9% Increased speed to basically everything.
Made for this - Free perminant 3% haste
Blood Pact - Always see the aura of the obsession. Very helpful if they are being chased, since i know exactly where the killer is.
So many killers want to run Sloppy Butcher and other anti-heal perks...so I just wont heal lol. I miss my 3 charge medkits and unlimited COH heals, but just slamming gens is even better.
Side note, Plague and legion games feel like a joke with this on. They arent easy games, but its cool having the perfect build for it. Haven't faced a Oni with it yet, but i have a feeling i know how it will go 😩
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lmao.
This is the 2018--->2020 cycle all over again huh.
Oh, I can't wait to watch it play out again.
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Simply put, you can't really change how people want to play the game.
Otherwise like its been mentioned before, a lot of players with more game sense will prioritize gens over healing. They're the main and pretty much only objective for survivors, unless something like Devour Hope is in play. And if the game came down to there only being 1 finished gen, but the killer has gotten 2+ hooks already, the smarter play is to focus on completing more gens so you can escape.
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what happen around that time? i don't know the dbd history
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No heal meta after a massive healing nerf which prompted numerous complaints about how Survivors only did gens.
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So what did BHVR do about it? It feels like killer mains want survivors to waste time with inefficient healing (not doing gens) but don’t want to expressly say this because it would sound unreasonable.
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Circle of healing dropped essentially
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If you don't push gens, often you will use. Healing is not progressing the game.
It's risky sure but after sloppy buff/healing nerfs you either need a syringe or other teammate to waste time healing you. Thats two people of gens at least.
I notice if we get injured often by high mobility killers and spend time healing game is usually going south.
So it's not really that there is no risk in being injured, especially with dh nerf. It is a risk but you have to push through it sometimes and we have resilience at least.
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They adjusted some med-kit add-ons, nerfed Toolboxes, nerfed Keys and dropped a lot of decent healing perks like Inner Strength, CoH etc etc
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I just don't think staying injured is risky enough -- this is where map design comes in. Dead zones practically don't exist anymore (with new maps and BHVR tweaking maps too), and high(er than necessary) pallet generation means you'll waste a lot of killers' time in chase (if you're not pre-dropping everything).
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Well, keys are essentially valueless now, toolboxes aren’t very strong (just BNP-situationally), and I can’t really think of any healing perk ideas that wouldn’t just be reiterations of what already exists. So all they can really do is buff healing.
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Perks that add a partial heal for other actions, like maybe totem actions, or opening a chest (to synergize with pharmacy) could have potential... But not with hemmhorage in it's current state. It currently hard counters those effects and sloppy butcher is too prevalent to allow those kinds of perks to be useful in any capacity. Resurgence and reactive healing are already completely useless because of that effect.
But that type of perk has some design space they could work in: anything that encourages the survivor to do something as a side objective and give them a partial heal as an incentive.
I'm not even sure what they could do with hemmhorage tbh. It was strictly a ######### tracking effect before, and anything else it could do with the theme of bleeding out would be either barely useful (like the extra blood pools) or crazy powerful (like a slugged survivor bleeding out faster).
Maybe making cries of pain slightly louder while injured or dying would be ok, but that seems like a stretch too.
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It is quite crazy how close strong loops and pallets are to each other. I get that chaining loops takes some skill, but if you throw on windows then even that’s quite brainless.
As someone else mentioned, the game has moved towards very quick matches now. I personally don’t understand people who enjoy this but each to their own. As killer, most survivors are now running some combo of windows, adrenaline, resilience, made for this, hope and prove. With the other exhaustion perks all making frequent appearances. Good luck to your average killer keeping up with that.
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The healing perks that reward survivors with healing half-measures for completing secondary activities don’t see much use now. Unless the perk fully heals a survivor who avoids their objective (gens), I don’t think they’ll be picked.
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The problem is tricky because of how different elements of the game play together. If a killer is able to wipe a set of survivors within a certain time (on average), and that average time is close to the average time 5 gens take to complete when factoring in interruptions due to chase, speed up/slow down perks, etc, then there really isn’t much wiggle room to do a lot of non-gen related tasks.
Slow down gen progression to stretch games out and you give killers an advantage, and survivors more of a reason to not waste time healing. If you speed up gen progression to give that wiggle room, now you’ve given survivors an advantage because they can still ignore healing but can do gens faster.
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Was that at lower ranks? I remember back then it was Nurse, Spirit, and Billy meta. Survivors were getting so fed up with Spirit that it was becoming common that survivor mains were deranking to green/purple ranks to stop seeing Spirit all the time.
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Healing is nerfed
now killers are complaining that survivors are not healing
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what they really want is you to not touch gens. and if you do touch gens, you are gen rushing.
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you're missing the point 🙄
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i think his point was perfectly stated!
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Add a small basekit thana effect. Say 3% per injured survivor. Incentivises survivors to heal and rewards killers for spreading pressure.
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Why?
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I don't really see it as a problem now. Before, the no heal meta was a thing because of how strong ds, dead hard, and other meta perks at the time were when paired together. Those things have been nerfed pretty heavily. Ds is basically a non-perk at this point, and dead hard is pretty niche.
but like everything in this game, the biggest problem has a always been perk stacking and maps. I don't really see them doing anything about it... well, except nerfing perks so they need to be stacked to be useful.
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That would actually punish killers who are good at tracking down survivors. If the team is constantly getting injured, no amount of gen slow down would make it worth healing unless you take it to absurd levels. Just eating the 3% would still be the better play.
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No matter what gets nerfed or changed. Killer mains are still going to tunnel, camp, slug, etc. And there will always be a new reason. It's just what this game is. Yesterday it was dead hard and med kits. This week it's doing gens over healing. Next week it will be something else.
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