DS Buff

DS does need a buff imo. If the devs don't want to increase the stun duration back to 5 seconds, then here's my suggestion:

-> keep the stun duration at 3 seconds, but disable the killer from using their power for 5-7 seconds. That way, the killer can still recover fast from the stun and start following the survivor, but they cannot use their power. A trapper or a pig wouldn't even use their power normally in this situation, because M1 is the better choice. However, disabling a Nurse, Huntress, Blight or Wesker from using their power immediately means that they can still go after the survivor and not lose much distance, but not immediately down the survivor again due to their insane mobility or range of attack.

I feel like this change would make DS almost as useful against Nurse etc. as it is against a Trapper.

DS baseline 5 seconds.

Perk gives a second use.

Right after nerf Otz made a video. Almost all killers were able to redown survivor in 5s after the stun. DS is a joke now. That's why people don't bring it.

Remove drop animation so you have indeed 3s head start instead of effectively 1.8s and people will use it again. Or prolong duration back to 5s. Or give survivors 150% movement sprint for 3s (which means 1.8s).

Then people will stop making sooooo many threads saying tunneling is rampart and there's no real protection against it.

I mean - it's sad that the strategy needs perk to have at least somewhat useable counter - so devs solved it by removing counter in perk form and called it a day (and surprise surprise - tunneling is suddenly at all-time-high).

I doubt this claim.

There's very clear spike of threads about need to buff DS from patch 6.1 saying how tunneling is THE problem in the game. Some threads don't mention DS, but still talk about tunneling - way more then before this patch. That's the proof of the claim.

What video of Otz is that?

I did. The perk almost always buys like 5-10s at most. The best thing how to utilize it is actually just as a bleedout reset thingy - in this case if I actually eat DH, then it provided some value. Meaning the perk IS TRASH. It can't do anything reasonable on it's own. You need 2 perks that are both suboptimal now to get any value. And THAT is the reason why people don't bring it (not as you said that there's minor inconvenience).

10s is upper bound. For a perk that can do exactly nothing in game. Is useless against high-tier killers. And at reasonable best buys 10s. Also it's a perk that's a bandaid for tunneling - and at best it still just buys you those 10s. But it doesn't matter if killer decides to tunnel anyone else from your team instead. So it's very likely it does nothing in whole game.

Nope. That doesn't sound like reasonable perk.

The problem that DS was feared is because people have stopped using it, the changes were marginal, they just stopped making it easy to abuse and then everyone dropped it like candywrapper.

All I am saying is, that THIS IS NOT TRUE. People stopped using it, because the perk is now really bad at it's only job. It's very conditional and even if stars align, it still provides very little value. The perk should be either very conditional (like adrenaline) or it should provide you little value (like bond). Or some mix of those 2. It should never be weak AND conditional. Otherwise you are asking for more "Red herring" or "Territorial imperative" perks...

Well. You clearly play just one side then.

I play both sides and I see that a, using DS does not help anything, because those 10s that it can possibly prolong chase are insignificant and hard tunneler will just not mind it at all

b, people indeed stopped abusing it. But let's be honest. DS into headon was VERY rare already. It was like 1 in 100 games or even less. Most people didn't even had a chance to use the perk against me, because I generally don't tunnel so the perk rarely did anything (but sure enough, from time to time it was used aggresively) - if you were able to guess, then that was also free pressure (1 less person on a gen and 1 person that needed to pick up DS abuser).

Fixing something that happens 1 in 100 games to break something that happens in ~50% of games (I don't care if you argue 20% or 80% - it's still 10's of percents) is just stupid. I will even agree with you that DS into headon was broken. But to leave DS in current state without anything else is just.... Not a good thing to do.

And it was already said a few times already - there are other possible solutions that would fix the issue - instead of changing DS timer, a, remove stun animation where survivor is locked b, add speed boost c, drain M2 tokens or block M2 "key" for several seconds. d, some (mild - it should give you advantage instead of being new win condition for easy risk-free abuse) combination of those things e, anything else nobody mentioned or I just overlooked.

It's just current state is not really acceptable and it shows by killer's behavior.

survivors often used 5 second ds to attack rather than defend

5 seconds was only because at the beginning the killer perks worked on ds

+ survivors now have basic protection and if in 10 seconds boost you did not manage to reach the pallet / window, then you definitely made a mistake

2 more seconds would help a lot for the tunneled survivor to get more distance, plus you can still head on with 3 seconds ds. Imo it shouldn't work in endgame but it should add the 5 seconds back

it's good you don't help balancing cause if you think a perk slot is the ONLY thing you should look at...

Of course an extremely situational one time use perk should buy more time than SB. And, currently, SB buys more time than DS, hands down.

There's no reason to fear DS when you are a mobility or ranged killer, it literally only gives the survivor 2 seconds to run, completely laughable

And even if 5 seconds won't deter them, it still allows the survivor to actually get somewhere