So new players are basically doomed?

It's all about the Benjamins.

this game is pay to win after all what do you expect? XD

Lmao

Surge was the only free gen regression perk and is great on Wraith and Trapper. Fearmonger is pretty strong too, especially against other beginner players who favour the aura perks.

Better Together is great for letting other newbies find the gen you're working on (especially important on those confusing indoor maps). Fixated is great for teaching you about the scratch marks mechanic. Babysitter is a decent anti-tunneling perk. And the healing perks are invaluable because getting a heal from your teammates off hook is unlikely.

My current Survivor build is 100% free perks and I have 800+ hours in the game, so no it's not a terrible loss. But it does significantly reduce the number of decent perks for new players to start out with (especially for new Killers).

I think BHVR should just make Spark of Madness or Curtain Call part of the base game for everyone. Would make getting started a bit easier for new players, imho. And think of all the extra Feng skins they would sell.

Try a large hit. Surge/Jolt is a really good perk assuming you're on a M1 Killer. Meanwhile the next best regression perks available for free are Huntress Lullaby and Thana... which are pretty terrible and requires new players to prestige their Huntress/Nurse to use them on anyone else. AND using Thrill of the Hunt to protect Lullaby doesn't even really work anymore because they binned the notification part of it.

It's bad. It's real bad.

Edit: Actually with how bad Thana and Lullaby are now... Unnerving Presence might actually be a better option. Which is not something I thought I'd ever say.

They are not "doomed" but as newcomers they have a lot to learn.

Base content could include the first 10 chapters so that people can have more characters / perks to choose from. Not sure why they don't do this since cosmetics are still being purchased.

I survived just fine in 2017 when the grind was 5x the amount it is now with a vastly shorter perk selection.

New Players just need to persevere.

Would be nice to see some changes to the general perks in general. Either add more or update them. Most of them are absolutely useless, and when you think about various perk types... it's no wonder newbies flock to NOED. NOED and Unrelenting are literally the ONLY chase perks.

New players are fine.

There is plenty you can do with base teachable perks combined with general perks.

It is more than enough to carry you through your first trials, before you can grind everything.

I think they should make all original Base perks free at Tier 1 for all new players at this point.

If you buy this game and have to start fresh right now the grind is - even with the rework - insane imo.

No players need gen regression perks, but new players 'need' them the least. They aren't at the point where survivors are taking long enough in chase or sticking to generators enough for regression to even do that much for them, at least when it comes to genuine newbies vs newbies games.

Also, a lot of the base perks are perfectly useful for beginners, including the base teachables. They've got tracking perks galore, a few utility perks, a few chase perks... basically all they don't have is regression, which isn't that big of a deal for new players.

In fact, I'd argue learning to play without regression is probably better for new players. They might learn how to actually get work done with good play instead of relying on perks.

Still, it does suck to lose a few utility perks, especially on the survivor side. Those perks were useful, especially for newer players, and losing them is a bit of a shame. Not "basically doomed" by a huge margin, but it is a shame.

I agree and is a shame to lose them from that category. ST perks are a special case of their own since they've been both (at least in my time) and it's the only licensed chapter we've lost and had perks on both sides go from Unlockables -> General -> back to Unlockables. Which, may very well be the precedent we see going forward if that situation were to happen again down the line with another license.

Newbie killer build:

• Thrill of the Hunt
• Spies from the Shadows
• Whispers
• Shattered Hope
• 
  

I recently started a new account on the Switch and within a handful of 3K and 4K games, I was already facing the kinds of teams that I would normally get on my 700+ hour PC account. Except this time I had no decent perks unlocked. Perks do a lot of heavy lifting in this game, whatever your MMR.

I dunno, maybe I got hit with a Smurf check. But I think you guys are underestimating how rough it can be for new Killer players when they first start playing and have even the smallest amount of success.

Didn't Steam just give you the achievement?

Tools of the Trade was retroactively given to people who had already done the required 5 trials before the achievement was introduced to the game.

Ah, got it!

I think you have a great understanding of the game, honestly thought you had been around for much longer.

I joined back in 2018, because a friend recommended the game. The rest is a history of loving a game and watching it slowly become something I dislike.

I dont think beginners need to slowdown gens at all, because the new survivors are hiding all game.

How to improve this?

Well... decrease perk-shard-prizes in the Shrine of Secrets heavily for the first 3 Devotions.

There's a combination of two things happening here.

The first is that there are better general-pool perks than you're giving credit for, on both sides and especially for beginners. Survivors have Deja Vu, Hope, Kindred, Resilience, and We'll Make It, all of which are good and strong perks for everyone and definitely serviceable for beginners. Killers have Bitter Murmur, NOED, Iron Grasp, Sloppy Butcher, Spies from the Shadows, and Whispers, most of which are more beginner perks than useful ones for everyone else but are still perfectly serviceable.

The second is that people are responding to what new players ACTUALLY have access to, not just the general pool. Remember that the survivor side, for new players, also has access to Bond, Botany Knowledge, Empathy, Sprint Burst, Adrenaline, Iron Will, and a handful of other very strong perks. Sure, they'll have to pick one survivor to start with, but there's a high chance their starting survivor has good stuff and it's pretty trivial to level up two characters at once to get more stuff. Killers have a little less, I'll grant you, but there's still some interesting stuff and the power + interest in that role tends to come from powers more than perks anyway.

The beginner pool of available perks is mostly fine. I'm not against expanding it and I think this game has other issues with onboarding, but the available perks are not in a dire spot just because it doesn't contain the ST perks anymore.

It's trivial to get more stuff because you get it by playing. Bloodpoint gains are pretty good right now, and the prestige system overall makes getting perks shared between characters pretty easy. It can be fairly time consuming if you want to get everything unlocked, even if it's only everything you have access to with a base version of the game, but if something specific catches your eye then it really isn't that big of a deal to get it unlocked on the character you play.

As I said elsewhere, I do think it's a shame that perks were lost from the general pool. That's a different argument to the one I'm responding to here, though; it can be both a shame, and not exactly a crippling blow to new players.

So let's look at the characters you have access to with a base copy of the game, and see how many of them have perks that'll help newer players. We'll be assuming PC because I always forget which specific ones are available on consoles, so that means we have: Dwight, Meg, Claudette, Jake, David, Bill.

Dwight: Bond is an invaluable resource for everyone, and new players are no exception. Combined with the good general perks (including the ones you tried to dismiss, they're still useful for new players), and maybe including Prove Thyself and Leader just for incremental bonuses, that's an okay first pick.

Meg: Adrenaline is useful for everyone, Quick & Quiet is at least fun to try and use as a new player, and Sprint Burst is the strongest perk in the game. Maybe not the best for entirely new players as a first pick, but perfectly serviceable.

Claudette: While Self Care is a bit of a trap, Botany Knowledge and Empathy are both very strong perks especially for newer players, providing strong information and an incentive to try and use it, which will build good habits in the long run. Excellent first perk for new players.

Jake: Iron Will is a great stealth perk and new players tend to be a bit more skittish around the killer. Similarly, Calm Spirit is imo more likely to help newer players since they're less likely to be as deeply affected by the penalty. Saboteur may not be great for new players, but at least they have access to it if they wanna learn how to sabotage right.

David: Weakest overall, for sure. Dead Hard is okay but not for newer players really, We're Gonna Live Forever is... fine, and No Mither is not to be touched as a new player. Sure, his perks are weak in this specific situation, but that's one survivor.

Bill: Left Behind is good for newer players, Unbreakable can help deal with your teammates being a little too green and skittish to come help if you're slugged, and Borrowed Time provides nice incentive to go unhook more proactively. Perfectly good first pick.

So what we have here is a pool of general perks that's perfectly good and even quite strong in spots, combined with a pool of starting characters that almost all have strong and useful perks to help onboard new players and push them towards good habits like saving, unhooking, and extending chases. I don't see how new players are "basically doomed" because they lost some other good and useful perks.

Remember, new players don't have the biases and accepted rhetoric that get bandied about a lot by more experienced players. To the people on this forum, for example, over half the survivor perks are trash and only 20 or so are worth using-- but even if we were to do that argument the herculean benefit of assuming it isn't complete nonsense, that's largely only true because everyone involved is playing at a higher level. Considering most perks actually are quite useful even for us, new players clearly have a lot of available options when they're starting out.

I suppose I should acknowledge that I'm doing this hypothetical new player the service of assuming that they're thinking about what they're doing and that they want to try and learn how the game works, but I think that's a fair assumption. Give someone who doesn't know the game but is interested in learning the general pool of survivor perks paired with accessible teachables, I think they'll do fine, broadly. The game will hamper them with a poor tutorial and opaque mechanical systems, but in terms of giving them tools early, that part's pretty okay.

implying that new players are doomed because they don’t have access to a (relatively) recent chapter…. is so… SO dramatic.

what do you think killers did before the stranger things chapter…. do you think pre-stranger things killers just hooked themselves? get a grip. good lord.

there are some seriously strong base game perks. stop relying so heavily on the same 3 perks and gain some well rounded skill by rotating other perks.

yeah sure 70 hours to unlock 1 new survivor or killer definetly not a pay wall

Mindbreaker(/Fearmonger) and Surge(/Jolt) are handy for a number of killers - but in no way gamechangers. Especially not for beginners. - Well, actually Surge(/Jolt) may be, because from what I can tell beginner killers who can't use their M2 well yet often choose to M1 instead - a behaviour Surge(/Jolt encourages. --- Which, for the record, is a bad thing.

Tbh, I think it's a very good thing if mostly gimmick/niche perks are commonly available and new players play without them for a while. It prevents them from being over-reliant/carried by them.

--- If anything there needs to be a "kiddie pool"-detection; where genuinely new players (not smurfers) are placed in a separate matchmaking-pool (idk how you could identify smurfers tbh, maybe based on how quickly they unlock certain perks or sth...?) so that they can get to know maps, mechanics, tiles, perks, add-ons etc. pp. among themselves. The learning curve for dbd is extreme at this point and no new player should be forced to jump into the shark tank after just a dozen or so matches that, for some reason, went well.