Dev Update: DS Nerf/Gen Slowdown Nerf

I expect all gen slowdown threads to cease.

🤣

I don't agree that a nerf to the most powerful and prevalent perks in a category requires a compensatory buff. There are still a load of other viable gen slowdown perks that haven't been nerfed, and you are absolutely not forced to run Pop Pain Res to 'cope with gen speeds'.

If it were a truly universal nerf to gen slowdown that would be a different matter, but it's literally just 2 regression perks and 2 gen block perks. It's not the end of the world, you just need to stop being a metaslave.

That said, it woul be the ideal time to look at toolboxes, especially considering that they're adjusting sabo speeds too. At the very least Commodious and Wire Spool should be nerfed a little, so that a purple toolbox might actually be better than a green one.

As far as the 8.0.0 changes go, they're clean, healthy nerfs. They're a tiny bit weaker, but they'll still be very strong, and killers will be able to get plenty out of them without them being as oppressive as they can be in certain builds on certain killers. I'm personally still going to keep running all of those perks as much as I do now.

People complaining about the nerfs need to remember the treatment Ruin and Call of Brine got. At least these perks are still viable.

I'm not a big fan of getting only 20% instead of 30%, since I'd like to be as oppressive as possible and curb-stomp every group of survivors that comes through, but it's understandable from a gameplay balance perspective. And it if means the end of BU+FTP, I'm not complaining.

Ultimate Weapon, on the other hand, was overnerfed into oblivion, and nobody at all is ever going to run that again, which is disappointing since the original nerf they gave it was enough.

Honestly, I didn't think it affected gameplay all that much when DS was originally nerfed to three seconds, and I also didn't really notice any changes in game flow when they re-buffed it to five. The only thing DS needed was to deactivate during the endgame.

When I play survivor, I've never used any anti-tunneling perk other than OTR on a regular basis.

You can really tell when someone never plays killer just by their words lol. Sounds like to me you are a survivor main trying to downplay it so they don't nerf it. And those changes werent anything.

i dont understand the hate to Pop it was 30% to CURRENT progress applied to gens 60% and below progress is nothing it only had real value when gens were at 90% progress now im just gonna use Grim Embrace where you can't do gens for 100 seconds hope survivors are happy

The meta won't change that much. Slowdown will still be the best play. The only one that will probably see less play is Pop. The others are still decent.

I think it was the right move, the main issue with slowdown was Pain Res and Pop being used together. Now this combo will be less oppressive, even if it is still relatively common.

There are some issues with it though - while this will make high tiers killers less oppressive they will still be really good as they never needed it in the first place. However low tier killers are now weaker and actually encouraged to run more slowdown because a single one might not be enough for them.

Slowdown definitely needed this nerf, but I hope they buff some of the weaker killers later to compensate.

As for DS, there's probably a few reasons for this changes:

1. The perk was already very good against most killers at high MMR and in competitive settings when it was at 3 seconds. They may have wanted to reduce it a little to not make it so powerful there while still keeping it useful for less skilled players. 4 seconds is a good middle ground.
2. It drastically hurt lower tier killers more than higher tier ones. Whether it is 3 seconds, 5 seconds, or even 7 seconds, killers like Nurse and Blight won't care that much as they can just down you again quickly. However for killers like Freddy or Trapper, a single DS could potentially lose you the entire game. If the perk is game changing for low tier killers while only being a minor annoyance against the high tier ones, I think a slight nerf is fine.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good update.

You misread. I said that "People complaining about the nerfs need to remember the treatment Ruin and Call of Brine got," meaning that at least Pain Res and Pop didn't get the treatment that Brine and Ruin got.

When I said that "these perks" are still viable, I meant Pain Res and Pop. I thought that was self-evident.

[…] they could become a little oppressive when used together.

That hasn't changed. Stacked on top of each other they are still damn powerful. What has changed though is the strength of only 1-2 slowdown perks. Each individual perk was completely fine. It's a similar situation to exhaustion perks. Imagine, if you could stack all of them and they only had individual cooldowns.

We are at a point, where we can only achieve perk variety by forcing it. Otherwise people will stack the same kind of perks for as long as they remain useful. Nerfing all slowdown perks into obscurity isn't an option though.

Tunneling unfortunately seems to be getting buffs now. Slow down nerf means killers will tunnel more and with ds nerf this soon it will be easier even it was not that difficult before. Though some killers tunnel even with 4 slow downs at 5 gens so that get at least bit nerfed.

It's definitely an issue of the devs not looking into the reason why killer players are quad stacking slowdown perks. I think the slowdown perks needed some nerfs, but at the same time why aren't we buffing other killer perks/basekit regression or nerfing survivor gen regression perks/items?

No. No. No.

Gen defence wasn't decently nerfed, it was eviscerated. There are no good gen perks now, certainly not Deadlock which wasn't even worth running up to this point. People will still cycle through them as they continue to receive nerfs, until the devs decide to address gen speed or chase efficiency.

5-second DS stun is way too much. At 3 seconds, you had to actually use your brain and go down near a loop so you could start looping after being dropped. Now we've gone back to 2019 where you get a DS stun and get a free cross-map run vs anybody bar Blight. But duration of the stun is just a cherry on top, honestly. The biggest strength of DS is forcing the killer to go on a 4th chase to kill the survivor. It's forced because tunneling is necessary, because gens are too fast and/or chases are too long. All these killers and perks keep getting nerfed and buffed because core issues keep getting ignored.

People complaining that 4-second DS is too weak, threatening to not use it anymore, are ungrateful for a great anti-tunnel tool which shouldn't have been buffed in the first place. Why it was re-buffed to 5 seconds, I'll never know. Why it was brought down to 4, I'll never know, because usually killer outcry just gets ignored. This back and forth buff/nerf did nothing for the game, but it did make a killers and survivors argue again instead of focusing on real issues, so mission accomplished.

If someone is on their second hook before a gen is done, the survivor team is bad and deserves to lose. I can't remember the last time it happened to me playing as killer, because I don't face babies.

Where are these supposed buffs to tunneling, anyway? Because I'm updated pretty well, and I haven't had 1 neuron fire in regards to killer buffs. DS is 4 seconds now? Congrats, you just got an already strong meta perk buffed by a net 1-second. It shouldn't have been 5 in the first place. Do you know how game-losing the perk is to be hit by, just in principle? And I'm getting hit with 1-2 a game, and almost still winning. Imagine if the perk was balanced, and I could reap the rewards of thousands of hours of experience and "getting some thick skin." Nope. Survivor will continue to be buffed to where, and I called it, milquetoast survivors can beat veteran killers.

“Now that the survivors are playing well because MMR, and the gen defense is weaker, look at the results: Killers losing and drawing by default. Nobody wants to play the role anymore, so they're gonna quit the game or go full-time survivor.”

Yeah ok💀