A thread formerly titled "Killers need to improve and get better"

Well I still do it when I play Survivor :)

Well I mean, it’s a Dredge, which usually is a chill game LOL

Killers need to improve? Who doesn't?

You are talking mostly about beginners though.

There are many ways to win but even being rushed, there are ways to counter.

As killer, I main Nurse but I also play other killers. It generally goes well with a good half of roster. I'm no beginner: I've got more than 3.5K hours in total : Steam (killer mostly) + Epic (when I don't want to be asked to play with friends) + PS5 (survivor mostly).

Yesterday for the rift, I've played The Artist: a killer I don't like and don't even fully understand.

It was in the saloon map. It wasn't going very well and not only because I was trying to do that stupid challenge. By the time I've got my first hook, three generators had popped almost simultaneously. (So about 90 seconds in: they had toolboxes.)

I didn't really care but I've decided to take that opportunity to do a small experiment. I've tunneled and proxy-camped the survivors one by one (Something I never do as I care more about having fun chasing than anything else.)

As bad as I am with that killer I've wiped them out with relative ease.

Two of them were raging in the end game chat, saying very nasty things. Something that makes no sense to me as for one, they didn't play easy by doing these gens so fast and for two, why would I be bound by made-up rules?

All this to say:

I'm pretty sure that by playing "nasty", a killer can almost always win, or at least close to that 60% target ratio.

I don't plan to try though.

I also need to say I've got many tactics very different from that one that aren't very enjoyable for survivors. I regularly get two to four rage-quits when I use them. (And these I do often as I see them as "applying pressure".)

tbf… there is A LOT of things to learn about the killers. and dredge is kind of rare.

so I can forgive people for not knowing about the locker thing.

Yeah it's def both sides but in regards to the human nature thing it's really bad in this game compared to others.

I'd say this is partially true. No matter what happens, I can't fix my teammate from bringing No Mither or Weaving Spiders or trolling to make me lose. I can't force the correct person to get off the gen, and the correct person to stay on the gen. I can't change anything that my supposed teammates do.

I can make a better decision in chase on both sides. I can chose to provide pressure on a side objective (heal/snuff boon) or main objective (pump specific gen/chase specific Surv) on both sides. There are nearly no cases as Killer where you can lose due to no fault of your own (outside of blatant cheaters). It is the (vast vast vast) majority of cases as Survivor where you can lose due to things outside of your control (IME).

If I could play a solo Survivor gamemode instead, then I could actually improve and have my wins and losses be in my control, but as long as I have to rely on trolling teammates, the majority of my losses are going to be out of my control and infinitely more frustrating.

"There are nearly no cases as Killer where you can lose due to no fault of your own"

I completely 100% disagree with this statement. There are many games you lose on killer outside of your control. I would argue killer has vastly less agency than survivor. You have to stop thinking of survivor as 4 different people, you are one team. The agency comparison is 1v4, not 1v1v1v1v1. The game is in the survivors hands to lose or win, that is agency. Almost all games I lose are because me or my team played bad. The team playing bad is still my agency, we are one. Most the killer games I lose I would replay them exactly the same, that isn't agency. You make the mind game and either the survivor falls for it or not. Making the mind game was still the right choice either way. If both sides play perfectly the killer loses every time. That shows who has the agency.

Most games I lose as survivor I could have changed the outcome if me or my team played better, that's agency. The outcome could be changed through skill.

Most games I lose as killer I don't think the outcome could have been changed.

 I have 3 other teammates helping me complete my objective as well. 

I'm really glad you have team mates like that! Gives me hope for the game. PLease send them to me as I do NOT get those. I am alone, I feel alone, and I usually die alone. While they dance in the gates, rather do bones or chests, or even remain in that locker all game.

Experiences differ. Vastly apparently. But we are not the same. Even objectively, sometimes I wonder if the killer bribed my team or something. Ill try to record a few and toss some up here.

I also play both sides 50/50

Kicking generators is a bad habit I got when I bought the game 4 years ago.

I still do it like a bad habit too. I think some have done it so many times that it's like smoking a cigarette. You don't even realise you're doing it.

This isn't a perfectly balanced game. Loadouts have a lot of impact on a match and with the amount of perks, items, killers, addons and maps we have, there is no way everything could be perfectly balanced.

Telling someone to "just git gud" when there is a balancing issue is a terrible argument. Otherwise, why don't we buff Nurse back to her initial state. 3 blinks and no cooldown doesn't sound fair to me but there were still survivors that managed to escape back then. So why not tell them to "just git gud" either?

The reason why many people prioritise gens over chases is that the killer always lacks time. Everything that can buy you even a little more time will help you out in some way and in most cases, kicking a gen will grant you more time than running after that survivor immediately. Especially when you can zone them or have a power that allows you to catch up more quickly. I agree though that kicking a low progress gen is often a waste of time.

Said above but I saw the other thread that was the same for survivors.

In the case of killers, it's hard for many of them to accept they have a skill issue because they're fed a pretty outrageous kill rate when they start the game. When survivors don't know how to survive, the killer wins even if they're terrible.

The problem is when they start facing stronger or same skill level survivors, they suddenly feel oppressed. It's not their fault, how could it be? They were winning and suddenly they're robbed.

I honestly felt that way back then. Blamed SWF and all that junk.

That said there's BS in this game that robs you of your agency. Far less than some people say, especially with how maps have changed recently. The majority of the time, losing as killer is your own fault.

So, yes killers need to improve. So do survivors, of course. Especially attitude-wise. One side thinks they're better than they are, the other gives up for no reason.

You’re conflating two things as the same that aren’t. Me saying there’s nothing I could have done to change the outcome is not the same thing as me saying I didn’t make mistakes. Quite different. We’re not perfect, of course I make mistakes. It’s understanding how much of an impact those mistakes have on the game that matters. My point is that correcting those mistakes much of the time would not have changed the outcome.

Now I am not talking about common games, these are much rarer outliers. This also has many factors of how often this is based on killer and other choices pre match.

I had a match recently against a 4 man that had combined dbd hours of over 40,000. So like I said, not matches most people are seeing. Their occurrences rate does go up the higher mmr you are though. After almost 11k hours myself I can pretty well deduce the impact of decisions and how much of an impact different choices would make.

There are unwinnable games as killer, but I think most survivor games could be won by improving the skill of myself or my teammates. If both sides play perfectly, the survivors win every time. Most killers rely on survivor mistakes. This is not something that applies to most dbd games mind you, these are rare high mmr matches. Most killer matches their skill could change the outcome.

There are some exceptions to what I’m saying, but it is generally speaking the case.

agreed 💯

This. This is the best thing I've heard all week.

There isn't a discussion because there really isn't anything to discuss. You're making a blanket generalization that generally is just an implicitly understood thing that people acting in good faith wouldn't argue. There also isn't anything to really be learned or gained from approaching any gameplay discussion in DBD through this particular entry statement. It's the sort of statement that more often just makes people automatically defensive because rarely do people who play this game and are seeking discourse about real or perceived problems with the game going to take blanket criticism well.

DBD as a game has a lot of issues that aren't really getting addressed in ways that seem to make sense for a plurality of people who play killer now or played killer in the past. The game while technically being the most mechanically balanced it has ever been in it's life seems to not feel good to play even if you do everything you've mentioned. The game more often than not feels like a pressure cooker whether you're doing well or not. Some of your suggestions forego some key facts about the game.

Kicking low percentage gens being bad- This can be a bad idea, but gen kicks are better earlier in the game rather than later in the game considering that now they are finite resource. Saving them for later is fine if survivors generally aren't able to progress the game at a decent pace, but you should treat every team as if they are going to push the pace until they prove otherwise. While you can definitely over prioritize this to a detriment it sort of needs to be a early priority considering the recent changes to the game to make kicking just less effective overall the further you get into the game and the more progress the survivors make on gens anyway.

Forcing Survivors to make dead zones- That's generally what killers want to do, but the longer you play the game as a survivor the more you learn that a lot of the map tile layouts will allow you to loop while also being rather greedy with pallets. If a survivor is determined to not use a pallet there is little you can do about that as a killer. Also most maps have pretty high density of pallets, relatively few areas where a deadzone can be made in a timely manner. You get deadzones from forcing a chase well past the point of it being a good time investment usually. Only like 6 killers in the game really require you to pre-drop in order to properly evade them in a chase. The most common scenario for most killers is a survivor greeds the pallet and goes down or they just leave loop to the next tile in chain which likely has a pallet or vault. Dealing with these takes time to learn and while tutorials help the game still needs some changes to way tiles chain and/or pallet density on some maps. Also Coup De Grace is not a time saving perk, if you're getting Coup stacks it means you're already behind. It's a decent perk to catch folks off guard, but it isn't saving you time.

Complaints about gen rushing- This is hard one to tackle. Like I said earlier the game feels like a pressure cooker no matter what and the language to express that in this game when it comes to mechanics is limited. An actual gen rush at this point isn't something that most killers in the can do anything about, but rarely is anyone actually talking about a true gen rush. They're expressing that the game feels like it goes by too fast to really enact a gameplan. That's a combination of skill issue and mechanical design flaws imo. The entire game is time management when you play killer and you can't be everywhere at once and pressure everything at once. You have to compromise and depend on specific perks to keep the pace of the game feeling manageable. It shouldn't be that way though, yet we can't just make every killer highly mobile and we can't increase the actual time it takes to do gens by default anymore. If it were up to me I'd alter both killer and survivor objectives to sort change the overall flow of the game just enough so it doesn't feel like a mad dash to get up to speed for most of the killers in the game.

I appreciate this kind of "experiment". I do think there's a bit of bias when it comes to certain players vs others. This is gonna be a hot take, but I think both "sides" are flawed for different reasons and both "sides" deny up and down that they are and accuse the other of it.

!! I will preface this by saying this is just my personal experience from both "sides", and every individual is different, I'm not accusing all of one side or the other of being guilty of these things, it's just in the small puddle of this game i've splashed around in, this is my experience.

For example, when it comes to toxicity, I believe surviors are more toxic. If you are a character they don't like, don't get the unhook fast enough, accidently miss a skill check etc. they will throw you under the bus much faster then step in front of it. Survivors are more petty/selfish and play as if they're not in a team role. Many don't take accountability and blame every other thing than themselves, as admitting they made a bad play or mistake is rare from what I've seen. They need less reasons to turn on you or go out of their way to make sure you fail. Both sides can make toxicity personal, but as a soloq main, killers "toxic" is for pressure/securing kills and survivor "toxic" is a personal vendetta on a long list of possible reasons.

And in my opinion, while killers aren't as toxic, they're more entitled. There's not an equal amount of push and pull there. To this day many killers deny the stats about the killrate, either implying it's not actually more than survivors success rate or that it's even under the survivors success rate, how SWF survival rate sits at 43% in normal play and 48% at top mmr which is still less than half but still often described as too strong and unfair etc. Receive various nerfs they asked for to perks on survivor side but when nerfs hit the killer side to balance it out, they feel it is unjust or unwarrented. I think even your point in this post about there being a bit of a bias between which sides complain, shows that even if the numbers are there, it doesn't prove anything in some opinions.

I think the bias possibly stems from how bad killers had it for a long time, perhaps many may feel they deserve a compensation, no matter how unfair it is because it was unfair for them for a long time. So killer struggles are more understood because they've been victims for longer, sort've a, well you had your time and now it's mine. Which I can't blame them for feeling that way. I do think killer should be in the power role, I do think they should be stronger, and I'm okay with a higher winrate for killers as it contributes to the horror element of the game and I'm fine with where "balance" is heading. I'm not so fine with denying that the role is more powerful and is more successful and insisting the other "side" is "easy baby mode" even when the actual statistics prove otherwise. The denial is what irks me.

Both "sides" deserve understanding as many complaints from both "sides" are valid. But in any case, thank you for the experiment. I wish you and everyone else good games. Please nobody take offense to this, I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings or invalidate them, I'm simply stating what I have experienced, it isn't more or less important than yours or anyone else's.