Knock Out vs Solo Queue

Blindness is often underrated.

Knockout could still have a decent effect if the duration of blindness was tied to the other effects for 15 seconds. Would still allow for bursts of slugging for pressure, and prevent Background Player sprints to score an instant flashlight save, but wouldn't be a hopeless case for long-term slugs. Also, even with swf it can take a short time to describe where you are to your team mates, those first few seconds are actually easier with an aura than with voice chat, so it would still have some impact on swf while being less oppressive against solo.

How is that toxic if we can see in your screen shot that he's picking someone up to hook them? He's not bleeding y'all out. How's that toxic?

Well what you're describing isn't what's shown in the picture.

Also, why are you or your teammates going down in a corner in the first place? If my teammate goes down in a corner, while annoying, that's my bad teammates fault, why would I be blaming the killer or the play style for that? I wouldn't be upset at the killer.

While of course I'd rather the perk be changed to effect both equally as I mentioned in my other post, the game is balanced around solo queue, not swf. "Toxic" isn't the right word here. "Strong" would be. Toxic implies intent behind the actions to ruin someones fun, not just choosing to play a strong build or play style they may find more enjoyable. They aren't doing it for the sole purpose of trying to bother people. I would also always rather be slugged. It's more advantageous to me, has more counter play, and I can quite literally do more on the ground than I can on the hook. The only reason to prefer being hooked over slugged is because the person wants to remove themselves from the game and that shouldn't be encouraged anyway. I don't count "slugging to let everyone bleed out on the ground" as a reason to hate slugging because that is realistically very, very, very rare. I play way more than the average person and I don't think I've seen that once in the last 200 games.

What would be your proposal then? If you go significantly lower then it's trash compared to the current version. We're trying not to nerf it, just make it equal against solo and swf.

Also they can recover most of their bar without being affected by either of those, so those two other perks would be doing basically nothing unless they did zero recovering and you were trying to pick them up from zero and the killer was on top of you..which if he is the other survivors should be on gens..so he's losing the game. So you're describing a scenario that makes the killer throw the game to achieve. Keep in mind this build scenario is also the killer bringing basically zero gen slow down since he's committing all his "slow down" to slugging/anti heal, so gen speeds themselves would be much faster than what you're currently facing.

Essentially "most" the pickup would be from recovery, not healing, if those other perks were active, so those aren't really relevant. I'd also argue that only 70% recovery slow down isn't significantly slower than the time you'd save from current Knockout with how long people spent looking around the map for you.

"Just throwing out numbers, I would say 30% recovery speed would be
balanced. That takes a normal survivor from 32 to 45 seconds to fully
recover iirc. "

It would actually take it to 41.6 seconds. So that's 9.6 more seconds to recover. So you think the time Knockout added per survivor pick up was only nearly 10 seconds? Honestly now. Knockout in its current form even against swf where it's significantly less effective was adding way more than 10 seconds, and that's its worst case scenario nearly. I would say a 20 second increase, at bare minimum, would come close to what we're getting currently, and that's being generous, probably more.

"Healing debuff is tricky to balance because of the potential for
multiple effects to stack. I don't remember exactly how the healing
speed formula works when combining multiple buffs and debuffs so I would
need some help to see what the upper and lower possibilities would be
when considering healing builds vs anti healing builds. "

Well my point here is that it wouldn't even need to be factored that much because the person on the ground is doing most the "healing" with recovery, not the survivor picking them up. The person recovering would get to 95% and just get tapped up. So all those anti healing perks are only affecting the slug, regardless of what changes we make here, for the final 5%. Basically insignificant. So other anti healing perks don't really matter for this topic on Knockout is my point essentially.

"I would still include blindness and slower crawl speed for the downed
survivor as it fits the perk thematically and would help counter some
builds like power struggle. "

My issue here is adding this to the perk is gonna reduce how much recovery/heal slow down we get on the perk since these are extra features. The recovery/heal slow down matters a lot, while the Blindness just for that person and the crawl speed is nearly irrelevant. I don't want irrelevant features added that reduce the numbers on the actual relevant feature. If the killer is running this to slug he doesn't care about power struggle. Also if we're just talking thematics here, the word "Knockout" sounds extremely thematic with solely just recovering and being healed on the ground slowly because you've been hit so hard.

"Prove was nerfed when it saved less than 10 seconds."

Small gen speed increases are significant because gen speeds are already ridiculously fast. For example, 5 seconds isn't a lot when something takes 3 minutes, but 5 seconds is a lot on something that takes 40. These are obviously random numbers, but my point is that is a bad example to compare apples to apples. Gens are already so fast that insignificant number changes become significant. This isn't the same however for what we're talking about.

"Medkits were nerfed when they saved less than 10 seconds."

Same example as gens. Previously heal speeds took less time than the hit took to make in the first place, that's unhealthy.

"40+ second recovery is a significant benefit to killer. "

But it's not a 40+ second recovery increase, that's disingenuous. It was already 32 seconds, you are talking about a 10+ second increase. Also killer time and survivor time are not equivalent. It's a 4v1. Every second a killer uses is 4 seconds given to survivors. So if you spend 5 seconds kicking a gen, you just gave 20 seconds of gen time to survivors, or 15 if you got someone hooked. It wouldn't be 5 for 5. So "10 seconds" added to survivor would need be 40 seconds since it's a 4v1, to be equivalent. 30 if we wanna be generous and assume you've got someone hooked or something.

It's also not "just 40+ seconds to killer" how much of that time did he spend getting the injure and then down in the first place? Probably more than 40 seconds for 2 hits. Survivor and killer time are not the same.

This is also ignoring the extra risk the killer takes with slugging since if he fails and you get picked up he gained nothing, no hook state. That's a high risk play.

"You think slugging is fun"

I think being slugged is objectively more fun than being hooked. If you think otherwise I'm open to you giving a counter argument. "Fun" is obviously subjective, the only reason I call it objective in this circumstance is because as said before, something is objectively more fun than nothing. There's nothing to do on the hook other than removing yourself, but there are things to do and plays to set up for on the ground.

"map reworks favor survivors despite every one of them making maps smaller, with weaker loops and fewer pallets."

You're conflating two different statements that are not the same.

I said most reworked maps are still survivor favored. I did not say they weren't made more killer favored. Those are not synonymous statements as you are using them. The reworked maps were mostly made better for killer, yes, but they are still more survivor favored. Those can both be true statements at the same time.

For example: I can take an overpowered perk, rework it to be less overpowered and it still be in fact overpowered. This is what happened with map reworks, generally speaking. The maps are better, yes, but still heavily flawed.

" And not a single map in the game has a higher than 50% survival rate. "

That actually is factually untrue. The data did not show that, you have wrong numbers. Also, the map data itself for that is at this point, extremely old and outdated.

should’ve had in unbreakable

To be honest, I don't like the concept. I have nothing against a perk, that incentivises a killer to play more ambitious and go for multiple downs in a row like Infectious Fright. But a perk that promotes excessive slugging just for the sake of slugging isn't healthy in my opinion.

Also, 70% less healing speed on slugged survivors means they'll be on the ground 48+ seconds. That's more slowdown than Pop + Pain Res often give you and it's only 1 perk, that doesn't need a hook to activate. That's a bit much.

I would make a distinction between slugging to get an extra down and slugging until everyone is on the ground.

The latter is not in tune with the game's balancing. We had that discussion before but hooking actually takes a lot of time and though right now I would argue that it's actually too much and increases the need for slowdown perks, it is what the game is built and balanced around.

Excessive slugging has never been prevalent enough for the devs to properly balance it. There is not much of a protection against it and the protection that exists is kind of situational and doesn't work very well when a killer really commits to it. Unbreakable is only a one time use, so it hardly matters. Exponential is mostly an easy perk to get rid of as well and not very common. Slugging also prevents a good amount of survivor perks from activating. DS, We'll Make It, DH, Deliverance, Resurgence and Wicked for example will not activate a single time.

If it was more common for high tier killers to go for M1 downs, then Knockout would probably be a much more popular perk. The only thing that currently holds it back is that most M1 killers aren't great. However, we already see what some killers are capable of with it. Slugging Singularity has become a thing and slugging also synergises well with Doctor's power (especially on small maps). Let me play Doctor on The Game and I'll show you what "disgusting" actually means.

What makes it more insufferable than hooking in my opinion is that it takes you out of the game for longer without the threat of imminent death. So instead of worrying that your idiot team mate will not get you off the hook fast enough, you wait on the ground for a good 40 seconds, knowing you won't die (yet) but also being unable to actively participate in normal gameplay. To me, that's just very boring.