Killer vs. Survivor Skill
Recently I discussed how to measure survivor and killer skill against each other and how you can know, if you played better than your opponent or vice versa with a friend. This really made me realise how hard that actually is in DBD's case.
For survivors there is skill in looping (obviously), decisions throughout the match, coordination (in solo and in SWF), hitting great skill checks, positioning, tracking the killer and of course killer specific counterplay. For killers it's more about how good you are in chase, specifically how good you can use your killer's power or how good you are at mind gaming, your inner sense of time and map awareness, decisions, tracking survivors, keeping track of survivor movements and positions, outplaying specific perks or items and adapting to different situations. I do not claim that this list complete so if you have anything to add, feel free to do so.
While there are parallels, all of these skill components largely differ depending on which side you play. This also means that you cannot measure both with the same metric. The killer spends most of their time in a match chasing survivors, while each individual survivor spends more time outside of it. So it makes sense that a killer's skill is largely defined by how good they are at chasing survivors. For survivors however there is much more to it then chases. In my opinion for survivors the most crucial thing is coordination. A group of individually inexperienced survivors can still be very strong, if they communicate with each other.
As you can see, it's really not as simple as "Whoever plays better should win." in DBD. That inherently comes with nature of this game. DBD is an asymmetrical game after all. But it still makes sense for us to measure our skills against each other. After all, who doesn't love a good competition every now and then? The only question is: "How do we measure and compare survivor vs. killer skill?" I believe this is widely subjective, so I'd really like to hear your opinions on that topic.
Comments
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It seems to me like you have a pretty good handle on the topic already. But I can give you a pretty specific example of how I gauge how good a survivor is when I play as killer. Since most maps have a killer shack, I think that is a pretty good measuring stick. So when running around the shack, I will follow the survivor to the door but unless I'm 100% sure I'll get the hit at or before the window, I'll show my red light at the door and back up to try and get the hit outside the window if the survivor vaults. If the survivor is able to not fall for that mind game then I know it's going to be a tough chase (and will likely drop chase to find a weaker survivor).
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Killer is 80% macro 20% micro.
Survivor is 80% micro 20% macro.
Given this it's very hard to compare the two but they can still be compared.
Realistically a killer that fails at macro should lose often, likewise a survivor bad at micro should lose often as well.
In order to be a high level player, you need to be good at both. But even being good at one aspect means you should still win games.
That's why I never understand why people say one side or the other is impossible to do win on. It just feels like an admission of being bad at the game.
Most of my swf isn't godlike at looping, but I've managed to teach them really good macro which makes up for it, so if the killer ever tunnels me or chases me a lot we win like 65-70% of our games. However if they get tunneled we usually only get a 2 out at best.
When I play killer, even if I'm bad at the killer, I still win most of my games purely through being decent at gen or hook defense.
As for which is harder, I'd say Killer purely because 4 brains vs 1.
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To be honest I don't think survivor is 80% micro. If you gave me 4 decent loopers vs 4 people who do gens and play stealthy, I think the second team would have a better hand at winning. At to that the fact that doing certain gens first can make the game easier to win. Winning against a 3-gen strat requires mostly macro from survivors imo. I also think this is why there are survivors who cry about the game becoming unfun and getting ruined for them, because BHVR seems to nerfing aspects of survivor that might be reliant more on micro skills and making the game better for macro strategies (SWF being the best tool for the best macro).
Also certain killers such as Nurse, Blight and Wesker (the first 3 that came to mind) have a lot of micro incorporated in their playstyle. If they're extremelly good at micro, they han do some crazy stuff, because their macro is more lenient (the all have ways to close distance between gens).
A killer like Knight definitely has to rely on macro a lot more than on micro.
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