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Survivor is not fun
Survivor gameplay is so stale, most of the perks are situational, the good/decent ones get nerfed into the ground.
With each new killer they have new mechanics for their power and addons. Survivors get... a skin with 3 mediocre perks most of the time.
Survivor gameplay has been practically the same for the last 7 years, the only new thing that was added was boons... wow.
Playing dead by daylight feels like a toxic relationship (for me) I want to quit but I still come back from time to time to check in and I'm just disappointed every time.
Looping is a thing of the past, half the new killers can hit you through them. Flashlights have been nerfed, med kits can't even fully heal you anymore, (edit, I meant to say that medkits heal slower now than before) a toolbox last 5 secs. Meanwhile killers have endless tracking perks and counters. Fine looping was crazy back in the day but that was a survivors only way to stay alive and buy time. The maps are smaller and killers have more tracking perks.. make it make sense.
This game desperately needs new game modes or fun casual modes where people aren't so sweaty and have some variety for BOTH killer and survivor. The game is great and exciting when you first get into it and that's what reels people in, but at some point most people will hit a wall and the game just becomes boring and repetitive. (On the survivor's side at least)
I'm don't think the devs really care, because if old players quit they will just be replaced with new ones and the cycle continues. So why bother improve when you have the formula?
Comments
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The game becomes boring for both sides, base gamplay def needs a REAL update.
I have no incentive to play anymore really.
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This is just from today. There are two possibilities regarding solo queue right now:
Something with the matchmaker is completely bugged and needs to be fixed.
Matchmaking is working as intended and these are the results for my killer games. It needs to be reworked/fixed in that case.
Either way, this can't go on. This matchmaking is atrocious.
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Nah, they stopped doing those. The last few maps haven't had any.
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There's enough killers to keep things decently fresh if you're not COMPLETELY against playing killer. I like to jump around alot, so I'll play a game or 2 as one killer, then swap to something else. I feel MOST ppl have several characters that they more or less completely disregard after lvling them up for their perks.
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Backfill could be the cause. Anytime someone leaves a lobby, the matchmaker throws MMR out the window to find a replacement. You might have replaced a lower MMR killer in those screenshots.
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I would like it if they release at least one new item a year for survivor. A landmine, a zip line, a short time cloaking device, a half eating sandwich that you can throw at the Killer, anything at this point
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Outside of events, I just play for the Tomes/Rift now. It's not worth my time anymore. I used to be able to get sacrificed but still leave the game with an average of 20k bloodpoints. My games these days are such steamrolls that too often I'm leaving with around 10k. It's simply not worth my time.
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Steamcharts player count is the lowest in almost 4 years, so I think a lot of other people agree with you that the game is getting stale. Sure lots of new perks and killers have come along but really not much different about the core gameplay since the game's inception.
(Yes I know Steamcharts doesn't count players on all the other platforms, but there is no reason why the trend would be any different on other platforms)
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I wish there were more ways to interact or feel engaged. It's either chase or objective. Nothing going on outside of that.
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Lack of changes to the many, many useless items, add-ons and perks is another reason why the game feels so stale to me. I have SO many items in my inventory that will never get used.
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I disagree that the game becomes boring for survivors. I prefer the killer role but playing survivor for me is pretty fun as well. 34 different killers mean, that I cannot tell what's going to happen before the match.
It could be a Nurse that dominates us, a Trapper that struggles with the basics or even a Hillbilly trying to curve. Against each of them, I play differently. Looping is still possible. It just isn't as straight forward as it used to be. Just because you are behind a rock doesn't mean you are completely safe. This is what makes M1 killers so weak in the first place.
Smaller maps and more tracking tools mean less time spent doing nothing. The general consent is that doing gens is pretty boring. But that's almost 50% of the survivor role. So it can only be a good thing, when the killer is constantly in chase with the survivors. This is the interactive part of the game. It's what makes the game so addictive. I'm not sure what other part of the survivor role is so enjoyable that you'd prefer it over interaction with the killer.
With that being said, a different game mode would be nice. I would like something completely unpredictable, random and fun. Perks could be randomised every 2 minutes, the killer could change after every hook and pallets could randomly change places.
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Player count has been steadily dropping and I think that has something to do with the matchmaking getting worse and worse. There are fewer players in the different MMR pools, so the matchmaking system has to match people with widely varying MMR scores more and more frequently. As the player count continues to drop, this problem will only get worse unless BHVR increases the wait times (which could result in even more players leaving).
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The thing is, chases these days are not as long as before and don't really buy your team much time. Survivors desperately need new objectives or items.
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I still do not know why green keys exist... why? Hell why is it even possible to find one in a chest? They are literally useless without wasting addons on them lol. Med kits have been nerfed into the ground and under.
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all them map and keys addons just sitting forever taunting me. Wish I could sell them for even 5% of the orginal price Haha
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After playing blight no other killer is fun. I've tried to pick up my old mains and even plague, but nullifying the boredom of holding w after someone is unique to blight. Blight also has the highest skill cap by such an absurd margin it would take someone unhuman to achieve it.
But then I go out of my way to play against the best survivors possible only to only get 2 out of 4 that are really good and then what? No increase in anything visible?
There's no progression, I sit on blood points because prestige means absolutely nothing. There's no draw to getting better and no reward for getting better.
My macro was better than 99% of players at 350 hours and I've only gone down since then because it that would mean gg every game without a chance for survivors. Now I play like a mechanically adept bot and I'm put in a lose lose situation.
I am a one trick until I get bored or find something more entertaining in every video game I play, 70% of killers are very uninteractive for both sides. On the flip side I already found my interactive killer main and playing other things would just be boring.
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Preaching to the choir, here… totally empathize w you
Been on that vibe for years
Feels like empty sex toward a slow, useless death.
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MMR needs to be scrapped. It has caused far, far more harm than good.
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Yep. Pretty much what the OP said. The game needs to be remade from the ground up. I feel like killers are being designed and reworked to deal with SWF rather than be balanced around solo and casual players. Pallets have become mostly worthless considering how many killers can hit you over them or vault over them. The survivor experience is largely RNG given how we can't even see the perks of our team let alone anything from the killer. So many perks should have long been built into the basekit of survivors by now. Healing takes way too long even with perks and items. The amount of time it takes for survivors to recover from a hook situation takes too long. The biggest problem I think is how limited in movement survivors are. There really is no dodging in this game. Its just run until you die in most situations. We don't need more perks or items. We need DBD 2 with an entirely new experience.
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Gens gens gens. Nothing but gens for years.
You and your teammates are either glued to gens from the start, or you all die. What a fun gameplay loop
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There's so much wrong in just one paragraph (the fifth):
1.) Flashlights NERFED?? With the addition of the the buffer, it's the EASIEST it ever was to get a blind. Take Background player to the mix, and you can get a blind even from insane distances.
2.) Med kits were nerfed yes, but EVERY kit heals you once now. Equip some good add-ons, and you get two heals out of it. That's perfectly reasonable. Having a single med kit that can heal you up to 4 times with insane speed, THAT was broken!
3.) Toolboxes we're not changed AT ALL in the recent time! The last change to it was a BUFF to the charges! Commodious toolbox still holds extremely long, and with extra charges and perks like Built to Last or Scavenger, you can get value out of it the entire game. That 5s you mention does only apply to Engineers toolbox. And like I said, it's like this for AGES. Complaining about that fact now is so weird!
If you manage to put that much misinformation in just a single sentence, I cannot take your post serious at all.
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med kits can't even fully heal you anymore
That's news to me. They were working just fine yesterday.
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This may be due to every killer running sloppy? Hemorrhage is brutal.
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Chases aren't as long as before? Of course they aren't. You're not supposed to be able to loop a killer for 5 minutes with no trouble. Because if you can do that, then what is to stop the next survivor from doing that as well?
This isn't really a strong argument. A killer doesn't have unlimited time in a match and you cannot expect BHVR to balance the game around 3 hooks per match. A killer already falls behind schedule when you can delay them for more than 45 seconds (easier on some killers than on others). So it's not surprising that the average chase doesn't take as long anymore.
Survivors don't need new objectives and there are 2 main reasons for that:
1) New players are already overwhelmed and can barely get a grasp on how to play the game.
2) Survivors in general hate side objectives. We have seen that with pretty much every new killer over the past 2 years.
The main complaints about these killers are always connected directly to their in-built side objectives. The funny thing is, that we've been asking the devs for these things.
But for the sake of this argument, what kind of second objective do you think would best be suitable and what would make it more fun than what we already have?
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This is the solo queue experience ATM. These days I just get off after a few games at most due to the sheer number of matches that end like this. Haven't played since the day the Billy update released and i'm totally fine with continuing that into the foreseeable future. The game just isn't fun.
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This is also an important point. You don't get anything for playing survivor compared to what you get playing killer. If the game is going to be balanced in the way it currently is then survivor bloodpoint gains need a massive overhaul. They don't seem to view this as an issue sadly.
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It wouldn't take much for them to fix the issue but sadly here we are, in my opinion they went wrong when they decided to find ways to extend the trials without adding anything additional, you can only hold m1 for so long before you finally play something else and realize what a real game is supposed to feel like, there's a reason the devs tell us to "play something else" when we're tired of it and it's because they don't care they've already made more money than they ever thought they would when this all started
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I'm pretty sure a med kit can only fully heal you now if it has addons now and it's way slower than before anyways considering you're wasting a whole item to heal yourself it shouldn't be so slow considering the pace of the game is much faster these days.
Tell me how many times you see flashlight in your lobby and how many people even know how to land a blind? Also lightborn these days doesn't make it take longer to blind but it negates it completely.
My main point of the post was survivor game play and how stale it's been since the game inception.
Also you're just justifying using items with the help of perks and addons. Why waste so many resources to make something good?
You don't have to take my post serious I'm just a casual dbd player that has been playing for years. I just wanted to voice my POV on survivor gameplay knowing that nothing will change and to see if others feel the same.
And lastly My main point of the post was survivor game play and how stale it's been since the game inception. All a survivor can do is run and do gens which is fine but it gets old and that's why games have different game modes. But the devs are so fixated on making mediocre outfits that they forgot to keep the game fresh.
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I know that chases were crazy back in the day, I played through it but now it went to another extreme we have killers that can hit through pallets, walls, teleport, rush. But survivors got boons... which are quite useless unless the killers is literally blind and cannot spot the totem. You can even see the blue particle in the air and that's a dead giveaway of the general location of the boon. Last game I played I could see the blue particles from across the Knight's map, then next thing I know that person's boon was gone and quite frankly boon cons outweigh the pros imo.
You clearly missed the part where I said the game needs new game modes. I did not say to change the BASE game but it would benefit from having variety and fun game modes that are not as serious.
As for game modes it literally could be anything, 2 killers 8 survs, lights out (that they are working on now), special in game power ups.. ANYTHING maybe new surv Items.
I am speaking from the POV of a survivor. As a killer you can easy switch killers to change things up but as a survivor they're ALL the same.
Also like I probably mentioned before I just play casually these days usually if a friend wants me to join them, I just wanted to voice my opinion as someone who's been playing since the early days.
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Chases aren't engaging when 80% of the time all you can do is hold W and decide where to die.
Then you have the map reworks so on the occasion you get a killer that doesn't ignore the core chase mechanics, you can loop a LT wall or a pallet between a short park bench and a barrel. Where even if you get a pallet stun without being hit validated, you won't have enough distance to reach anything else.
Survivor skill expression is dead, mmr is awful, and gen progress crawls with the power creep in slowdown/tracking perks combined with empty dead zone maps.
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Compare Survivor now to a year ago and its pretty sad how many nerfs have been dealt. Community mindset is pretty bad too, survivors are constantly told that they deserve to have things taken away time after time with nothing exciting being given in return. I stopped caring about community opinion after people said (and still say) Dead Hard doesn't take skill though.
Justified or not, only killer has benefited from balance passes. And there's no indication this will change in the future, so I'm not shocked if some people are quitting over it. There's legitimately nothing to look forward to as a Survivor player aside from skins lol.
This is a crazy take but I honestly want to go back to the Eruption Meta, at the very least we had Boons/DH/Strong Maps/Useful Medkits. Its not like the game quality has improved since then anyways.
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Chases aren't engaging when 80% of the time all you can do is hold W and decide where to die.
This.
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The game has been destroyed for survivors. I can't hold my stomach playing anymore.
They made the game into ez win simulator for killers while removing all skill expression from survivors.
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I will always believe the devs that work day to day on the game are trying to kill it by making the game as unbearable, impossible as possible for their largest player base. It really is not hard to see that. They even ignore and totally dismiss complaints of it. In customer service, that is a big no no.
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I don’t think they are worried about their player base. Too much, they recently hit over 69 million players. There isn’t a ton of marketing that they have to do because there are so many streamers that Market the game for them.
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I would disagree. I definitely don’t think the game for killers is “easy mode” it’s incredibly difficult for killers too and times a complete stressfest.
Survivors definitely need a little bump in their meta for sure but both sides got significant changes.
Survivors still have perks like, windows, lithe, sprint burst, flashbang, background player, well make it, deadhard (which should be 3 uses not 2) blastmine, wiretap, kindred, etc, I could go on and on that are all really good perks.
Boons are still powerful just because we don’t have the old version of COH, survivors still get basekit BT, Anti Face Camp mechanic (Which ppl confuse for anti camping 🤷🏼♂️)
However perks like deadhard was too much of a nerf. Made for this should’ve been left alone.
Both sides struggle for sure but survivor again definitely needs a bump in its meta. Hopefully they don’t nerf Adrenaline. It doesn’t need to be touched.
The introduction of new game modes this year is excellent.
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I'm pretty sure a med kit can only fully heal you now if it has addons now
You are wrong.
it's way slower than before anyways considering you're wasting a whole item to heal yourself
How is it a waste when it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do? Self-healing is powerful, always has been, it's why Self-Care and CoH and medkits were nerfed in the first place. If it's easy, it's unbalanced.
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What’s been burning me out is MMR & playstyles.
It’s not fun when you solo queue and get teammates that DC at will, crouching edge map while you’re rotting on hook while someone else in chase and another is hiding in a locker. Or when you’re being chased by the killer and 1 gen has not popped or progressed. Or you get a killer that’s tunneling/slugging your teammates out off the bat.
When I’m on killer, I’m obviously 3-4king quite often (I am a P100 Blight main), and I still somehow get paired against actual babies. I get anon survivors that do, and say, the dumbest things, I get survivors running Calm Spirit/Distortion that avoid any type of interaction whatsoever and once you find them, they last maybe 10 seconds in chase cause they don’t look behind them or path efficiently. Or I get survivors that start throwing fits and tossing pallets not even a minute into the game cause they see it’s a Blight. It’s just so demotivating and boring.
If you aren’t cranking gens in solo queue, you lost, if you aren’t tunneling or applying pressure on killer, you lost. If you’re just trying to run fun builds on killer or survivor, you lost. Hate it.
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Doesn't change the fact that med kits for nerfed. It's a waste because before even a brown met kit was decent and got the job done faster without addons. So yes to me it's a waste, I don't understand why they even touched med kits when sloppy butcher is a thing, plus countless other killer addons or perks that either make you broken or flat out expose you and 1 shot you.
You can nit pick the details but a nerf is a nerf.
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I can tell you mostly play killer if you think doing generators is interactive. You think smaller maps and more tracking tools means less time doing nothing? Again more reason for me to think that you only play survivor once in a while. Most people get downed even faster and the game ends faster.
We have Freddy, Oni, Spirit, Onryo, etc etc who can literally teleport or sprint across a shrunken map. Most of the tiles with pallets are literal traps because weather you try to loop it or drop the pallet you're stuck in an animation and the killer gets a free hit no matter what you do.
Also just doing generators is not fun tbh, I personally don't find gen rushing fun. Why would I go into a match sit on gens the whole time and escape?...It's boring. I (and many others judging from the responses) need something that freshens the game it's not always about escaping or getting the 4k you have to enjoy the process otherwise what's the point? It would just feel like a chore or work.
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I would love to see something done with matchmaking. It's my biggest gripe about this game. As a survivor main the difference between a good game and a horrible game comes down to teammates.
Get paired with decent teammates and you'll have a fun game with at least a chance of escaping.
Get paired with bad teammates and it will be a bad game that was over before it even started.
I would happily wait a little longer in a lobby to get paired with survivors that have some experience and at least attempt to do objectives, but too often I get paired with people that are relative newbs and avoid doing gens like gens are the killer.
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Three games this morning. First, I was the chosen one with Lethal Pursuer and he tunnelled me out. Second, I happened to run past the killer's Devour Hope totem so he made it his mission to tunnel me out. Combined total of 10k bloodpoints and 2 depips. Third game was a Twins steamroll at 5 gens. Two survivors just let go after the first survivor died - can't blame them - but the killer was nice and gave me hatch at least, so I got some bp. But all up just a waste of my time. I didn't really get anything worthwhile.
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If you play the same against all killers then you clearly do not understand the strengths and weaknesses of each killer. This also explains why your matches are boring. I mean, you just immediately die because you didn't actually play around them.
The only 2 killers with a teleport are Singularity and Hag. Hag is a completely different beast. Play against her like you would with a M1 killer and your match ends in 2 minutes. That's the equivalent of trying to apply Nurse's (although very limited) counterplay against Bubba. It doesn't work that way and constantly losing is probably pretty boring. But that is your own fault. You choose to play that way.
If I were to play M1 Nurse, I would lose all my matches as well. Does that mean Nurse is a weak killer? I very mich doubt that.
Every killer has a unique power. You need to treat them differently. I don't understand how that would lead to the same gameplay every time. Unless of course you're just hard set on playing one particular way with no variation.
I agreed that a second game mode would be pretty nice. Not sure why you think you'd need to convince me. But you said and I quote: "Survivors desperately need new objectives or items." This was not directly tied to potential second game modes.
Ok. Let's count all killers that have Shift + W as their only counterplay. That's Trickster, Knight, Artist, Skull Merchant, Chucky and Dredge. That is 6/34 killers (~18%). 18%<<80%. That is not debatable.
It's more that Shift + W is a counter to most killers. Even when these killers already have other counters.
LT walls are a good point. They are completely useless for someone who can't do the basics of looping but painfully strong for really good survivors. Win the mind game and you get out on top. Isn't that what loops should be like? Whoever plays better wins?
I am not a fan of the good ol' Ormond table pallets and other pallets that weak either. It's the opposite of shack. You don't have a right play as survivor. Nut let's be honest, there are at worst 15 such pallet spawns across all maps.
Survivor skill expression is definitely not dead. Gen progress always 'crawls'. Unrestricted gen speed is pretty much a guaranteed loss even against bad survivors and it only gets worse when survivors actually know how to loop. However, I am completely against the combination of DMS + Grim Embrace. This should have never gone to live.
I covered tracking perks before. Do you really want to hide all game? I don't understand how that would be fun. There is no interaction in hiding. Tracking perks mean less time spent doing nothing for killers and survivors. So, more time spent in chase. How is that a bad thing?
Empty dead zone maps? You mean like Ormond, The Game, GoJ, Asylum, Chapel, Shelter Woods, Toba Landing, all Badhams, all McMillans and all Azarov's maps? Yeah. Huge dead zones. You only have pallets everywhere and the mandatory main tiles.
The few maps with actual dead zones (like Haddonfield, Thompson House and Cowshed) aren't much better for killers either. Because they also have huge safe zones. Let's take Haddonfield for example. The streets start off as risky and then become dead zones as the pallets are depleted. The houses however remain huge safe zones the entire game. There are videos of survivors looping killers for all eternities around them. Cowshed is the same in that regard. One half is a giant dead zone, the other is filled with long tiles, Jungle Gyms, a Cow Tree, shack and more strong filler pallets. These maps are horrible for both sides.
Post edited by Xernoton on4 -
What? Ok... At this point I am questioning whether or not we speak the same language here. I said there is nothing interactive besides the chase. Doing gens is boring. Which is why that should not be the main focus. This is why I argued that tracking tools are a good thing.
I am flabberghasted. How did you read my comment and came to the conclusion that I thought gens were interactive? I said that they were boring and that it's the general consent (in the off chance you preferred doing gens over chase).
Freddy's teleport is real oppressive. It gives him so much chase power because he has it permanently and it's not telegraphed at all and you can choose freely where to teleport to. Oh, wait. None of that is actually the case.
Also, you just listed killers that can do a little more against Shift + W than a Trapper. So you actually need to engage in a chase with them, which again can only be a good thing because Shift + W isn't all that interactive either, is it?
Shack, 4 lane walls, trash pile gyms, jungle gyms, rock filler pallets, all but one pallets on The Game, GoJ's pallets (again all but one) are death traps? You should not drop the pallet on the same side as the killer in case you didn't know. And when you get mind gamed around these (close to impossible on quite a few of them), then isn't that your fault? It can't be all god pallets like the one next to Midwich's staircase, that guarantee you can never get hit.
That last part clearly shows you either didn't read (in that case tell me and we'll leave it at that) or we don't speak the same language. We already covered that and you didn't actually argue against any of my points in that regard.
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I agree but for a completely different reason, I feel like everyone plays the same 4 killers. I only ever see Blight, Wesker, Legion, and Chucky. It's made worse by the fact they all do the same gd thing and it's just killer that moves fast which isn't the most engaging thing in the world to play against.
I don't even blame the devs entirely because we have interesting killers like Singularity, Huntress, Executioner, Cannibal when they're not camping, hell even Spirit is more engaging. But no it's game after game of "Oh wow I wonder if the killer is just going to run at me really fast with nothing for me to engage with" because people are lazy and can't be bothered learning any mechanics more complicated then running in a straight line.
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Sure Sadako has been nerfed to the ground to deal with SWF.
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I don't know about the specific points; a lot of them seem wrong but the overarching idea of Survivor being unfun does seem to ring true with a hefty portion of the playerbase.
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Usually I'd suggest playing only killer to encourage the devs looking at the problem (if many players decide not to play survivor anymore).
Did I miss something with the flashlights? Last time I've played they had been considerably buffed. Timings were so generous my mother could probably manage them.
That being said, I'd enjoy fun game modes. I plan to come back to the game for the "Lights out" event see how it goes.
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Surv has always been stale. Its always the same second chance perks and exhaustion maybe every few months some stupid perk combo because of oversight or bugs. And I can already see a rise in wire tap given a certain video made on it when regarding the regression changes.
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You are simply wrong. A med kit without addons heals you full once. If you miss a skill check or get interrupted with hemo, then it won't heal you full, but that a misplay from your side then.
Yes, the med kits have been slowed down. You could argue that it might be too much (although you can mitigate that pretty effectively with speed or skill check add-ons), but we are coming from a situation where medkits could heal you in 8s, multiple times. That was totally broken and got a well deserved nerf.
You know what's funny? Med kits altruistic healing was actually BUFFED! If you want fast heals, just let someone else heal you with a med kit, or heal someone else with yours. Yet no one does that. Or use we'll make it. Fast heals still exists, but they take some more investment now than just equipping one op item.
I see flashlights way to often for my taste (playing killer). Often have multiple games in a row with two or more flashlights. And I get blinded constantly from the stupidest angles, even when I'm doing everything I can do dodge it. Blinding is stupidly easy in the current game. Lightborn is there to help me get a chill round, not having to mind being blinded.
I even agree to you that the game might be stale for survivors. That's why I mostly play killer. But undermining that with hyperbole and just plain wrong facts does not help you your argumentation.
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