Balance, Camping and Fun: A Misdiagnosed Problem

Introduction

Hello everyone. I'm here to address the fundamental problems of DBD's current design. The primary issue is not and has never been camping, and this misdiagnosis of the problem has been a significant red herring for a long time. I plan to address why the balance is so bad, what the Killer meta's response has been, and how to improve things.

In this post, I have created titles that explain the argument each paragraph makes. I invite you to read them all, but if you ever find a paragraph whose title seems so obvious as to be axiomatic, feel free to skip it.

Dead By Imbalance

All Killers Aren't Created Equally

The first fundamental problem is the disparity between killers. I won't spend much time on this, as it is axiomatic that Nurse, Blight and the like are leagues superior to Freddy, Trapper and the like. Far more important is the why underlying this imbalance. For a Killer to be viable, they must combine short chases with either mobility for map pressure/defense or stall. Many killers simply lack the toolkits to do this and thus lack any agency in chase.

Lack of Agency in Chases

If a Survivor is running towards Crotus Prenn main, that represents over a thirty second chase for a killer whose power doesn't shut off safe pallets or the main building window loops. Instead, such killers are required to run Bamboozle full time as a band-aid fix, as many windows just lack mindgames without it altogether. Specifically, many killers completely lack agency in chase and cannot control anything about the flow. If survivors run to Crotus main, you just have to eat the time penalty and likely lose two to three generators in the process.

Another example is the flashlight: if a survivor is going for a save and you're Nurse, Blight, Deathslinger or the like, it will take no investment nor commitment to chase to punish the flashlighter. Now imagine you're a Myers: what can you really do? The answer is unfortunately not much, because to injure them you have to fully commit to a chase and let your slug escape. It's just another problem that only low tiers really need to deal with.

Fundamentally, these killers are predictable, and they have to slowly walk up to you to pose any real threat, which means they have to invest significant time, sometimes dozens of seconds, to actually injure someone.

Disparate Objective Times

All of this wastes precious time that killers do not have, because all five generators can be done in under six minutes. If your Killer cannot secure a hit, catch up and secure another hit in under thirty seconds, you're relying on survivor misplays to succeed.

Additionally, poorly designed mechanics such as toolboxes are still in the game. Generators are essentially a Killer's health state, and simply by equipping an item, Killer now has less time to play the game. Their "health states" just start immediately reduced and there's nothing they can do about it. It's akin to the original Moris in DBD which used to ignore hook states and kill you on your first down.

Fundamentally, the Killer needs to get 9 hook states to win. If a game only lasts six minutes, you need 1.5 hooks per minute. Assuming you are using a 115% M1 killer, this means every sixty seconds you need to get three hits, plus the time to transport a survivor to hook and the time to patrol and find another survivor. That means you have spent less than 20 seconds per hit or you're losing chase.

Perks Make the Gap Wider

On top of all of this and likely having to run Bamboozle full time as a concession to map design, survivors get a free, massive gap opener with Exhaustion perks. Think of how long it takes to catch up to a Survivor who just used Sprint Burst: maybe 10, 15 seconds? Remember that this means once you catch up, you need to get a hit in 5 seconds to keep pace, and once you do, they will hold W key again with their speed boost as your attack cools down.

The kicker? Since every single Survivor is running these exhaustion perks, every single chase will start with you wasting 10 seconds to catch up, and remember, you need to secure at minimum 9 hooks to win as Killer. That means you are spending a minute and a half every game just catching up to a perk being activated, and again, you only have six minutes to start with. There is, again, no agency for the killer in this situation.

Add onto this perks that annihilate your momentum (Deliverance, Dead Hard, MFT, Unbreakabill, etc.) and all that progress you had is gone. When you're on such razor thin margins as needing a hit in under 20 seconds, you cannot afford to also deal with these perks.

Map Design

Map design exasperates the issue by having unavoidable god loops that are guaranteed to just waste your time. Multiple windows next to each other are a safe zone if you didn't bring Bamboozle, and loops such as the main building of most maps tend to have safe, unavoidable pallets. In the most egregious of cases, these safe loops also involve a window, such as Garden of Joy.

The issue is, again, if you only have 6 minutes to get 9 hooks, even if a god loop only wastes thirty seconds, you've lost almost 10% of your total game time to something that was completely unavoidable and outside of your control.

So on top of losing 25% of your perk slots to map design by needing Bamboozle, even with Bamboozle you're losing a big chunk of time automatically.

The Killer Meta

What is the Killer's response to all this? The answer is not and has never been camping. The optimal meta for Killer is and has always been TUNNELING. Kill a Survivor as quickly as possible, and they lose 25% of their repair efficiency. This is one half of the problem of why Killers tunnel: we simply don't have time to get 12 hooks.

BHVR Incentivizes Tunneling

The second half of the problem is that there is zero reason to ever switch targets once someone has been hooked once. Here's the math on Killer decision making:

If I hook a Survivor, they're now a third of the way dead. Once they're unhooked, it takes two hits to down them again due to the Endurance state. Then, they're 2/3rds dead. If I chase the savior, it will take two hits to down them because they're healthy. Then, they're 1/3rd dead.

It's plain to see what the optimal play is: once someone is hooked, target them relentlessly until they die, because being hooked has absolutely no penalty until it's the third time. Until a Survivor dies, you get nothing for hooking them, and their repair efficiency is still 100% once the Survivor is unhooked.

Put more succinctly, I can choose to get a kill after 9 hooks or after 3 hooks depending on who I target: which one do you think I'm going to pick?

The Solution

Firstly, know that this change would have to come with nerfs to Nurse and Blight at the very least, and potentially other top tier killers. However, the solution is evident: introduce a reward for hooking new survivors as an incentive to switch targets. We don't currently have time to switch targets, so give us time for hooking someone new.

It can be as simple and inelegant as a baseline painres effect for each survivor the first time they're hooked in a Trial. But until there is an incentive, the gameplay loop of DBD will forever be the same: find someone, tunnel them out, rinse repeat.

it's a boring, tedious and frustrating meta, and it has destroyed the enjoyment of both sides. These changes would diversity the Killer meta as well as remove some of the most toxic and frustrating moments of DBD.

TL;DR

Nerf Nurse/Blight, then add a baseline stall mechanic to reward the killer for switching targets