Opinions on Gen Times (and Do They Need to Be Changed Again)?
Lately I've been asking all of my friends who play the game what they think about the gen times and whether they need tweaked more. I've also seen varying opinions between social media pages and here, so I'd figure I'd ask what everyone thinks!
Do you think gen times are okay where they are at? Do you think they need to be raised/lowered? Do you think there needs to be a mandatory second objective?
Comments
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I think gen times are absolutely fine, and we're in the era of DBD where a killer's actions and skill expression have the most impact on gen times ever.
The only real problem that exists outside of poor macro play and over-reliance on regression perks is toolboxes, in my opinion. At least, from the killer side- from the survivor side, stacking regression perks can be pretty obnoxious, so I wouldn't mind that being tackled at the same time as toolboxes.
It'd be tempting to say that "gen progression" is the problem from the killer perspective, but it really is just toolboxes. Without toolboxes, all the other gen progression tools are totally manageable and fair, even when stacked.
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Only way to really find out would be to test it I guess. If they nerf the speed of toolboxes though my question is this: What would their new purpose be? Just sabotaging hooks?
I'd also have to personally disagree on some points though. There is plenty of instances where you can play a near perfect game, but a team of coordinated survivors can still smash out gens, even without toolboxes. So long as everyone has basic looping knowledge and can read the HUD, you can still lose matches despite making minimal/no mistakes.
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I would personally propose just replacing the current repair speed increase with something else. One of the ideas I've seen floated around that I quite like is having toolboxes "lock in" repair progress so a gen can't go below a certain amount, which of course would come with the actual repair progress being default speed- but there are probably a ton of options for what it could look like that I'm not even aware of.
To your second point, perfect games are extremely rarely ever played, and you should expect that your opponents have the ability to win consistently if they play better than you do. Besides, that wasn't actually my statement- even if that is true now, it used to be even more true. We're in the best time the game has seen for skill expression mattering for killers.
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I feel like gen speeds are alright on their own, but there's too many things affecting them. Killers even after this next patch will have plenty of slowdown options and survivors (especially with the upcoming Invocation buff and bardic inspiration) have plenty of speed increases to use
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I think stacking slowdown, or Gen rush should not be a thing.
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Toolboxes need a complete pass, to balance the repair times, especially when a commodious or event toolbox is stacked with repair addons and perks. There's only really a problem when the repair stuff is getting stacked.
BHVR repeatedly nerfs generator regression and slowdown perks, because of stacking…… the same should apply to generator repairing stacking… like when a survivor uses a commodious toolbox with wire spool, socket swivels, streetwise, and built to last. And it's extra broken if they are good at hitting great skill checks, and can reliably use hyperfocus.
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I think my biggest concern is they are introducing a new perk that boosts repair speed (which is pretty decent) while also buffing another perk (not that Invocation: Weaving Spiders didn't desperately need it), but the counterpart only saw nerfs. That almost never ends well for balance
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Dont worry, the new Perk is not good. And obviously Weaving Spiders needed a Buff, you cannot really have the opinion that the Perk was in a good spot. It will still be super-bad anyway and can never be in a good or healthy spot, since it is either too weak or too strong.
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That could be an interesting concept yes.
You're right. Perfect games are extremely rare. But what isn't rare is feeling like you made less mistakes than the survivors you play against and still losing. Unless you are running a killer with a decent chase power, most competent survivor teams can usually undo any pressure you apply. Even against a good killer, I'd say an experienced survivor loops for a minimum of 30 seconds (that is without factoring in exhaustion perks and some maps that have a good amount of safe loops). That's a third of a solo gen, or about half of a two-man gen assuming there is no perks/toolboxes in play. If you down the survivor there, you might be able to stop a gen from finishing while losing another, and then the cycle repeats itself until a survivor makes a critical error that allows a snowball or all the gens complete.
If the chase goes longer than 30 seconds, you are likely losing multiple gens for a single hook state if you commit to the chase. If you drop chase, you may be able to stop the gens being worked on from being popped, but that survivor you've left will just go hop on a generator instead, and now you are back to square one. Some killers with stronger chase power might be able to fix this, but a good chunk still fall short.
Overall survivors can make way more mistakes than killers and still come out on top with gen times. I apologize if I misunderstood your original statement, and I don't disagree that the state of the game as far as skill mattering for killers has come a long way compared to years prior. I just think it is far from perfect and worth noting skill isn't the only factor
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I don't have access to the PTB so haven't been able to judge for myself. I'll probably wait till I can test it in my matches before I form an opinion. I agree about the Weaving Spiders part as well. Feel like anything affecting gen times will always be controversial.
My worry still stands though that a bunch of regression perks took a hit with none of the survivor counterparts taking a hit.
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While I can't say for sure because I haven't personally seen these games, I strongly suspect the players who feel this way probably aren't playing as well as they think.
I don't necessarily blame them for this, though, because it can be very hard to learn the more 'hidden' aspects of fundamental killer play. Something like chase time can be very easily measured and you can see your improvement in that specific area of skill expression yourself, but there are a lot of players who don't even know what this game's macro play looks like, let alone how well they're performing in it- and in their defence, it's not as though anything in the game would clue them in to this concept.
I'm aware it can be a little reductive and dismissive, but I do truly believe most of the people who claim that they make very few mistakes and still lose are only paying attention to how short their chase times are, and not any of the otehr crucial skills + concepts for winning matches of DBD.
(Also, I'm pretty sure those players still hover at around a 50% winrate, which would be balanced even if the specific way their losses manifest could be frustrating to experience.)
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I don't think gen times need touching, but I do think progression/regression needs some kind of hard cap.
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I don't doubt that is the case sometimes. I can truthfully say that even playing survivor in solo queue I've watched killers do everything right from chases to map pressure and still end up losing simply because everyone on the team was moderately experienced and on gens at all times, negating any kind of possible pressure the killer applied to us. The only time this might be slowed down is if the team accidentally puts themselves in a 3 gen.
I've noticed the issue with this though is it is always the same killers with this issue when I play against them (Trapper, Wraith, Freddy, Sadako, Demogorgon, Nemesis, Doctor, etc.) but never killers like Nurse, Blight, Spirit, any ranged killer or killers with slowdown like Pig/Pinhead. So it's possible that the issue there could be with certain killers instead of gen times
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I feel like there is somewhat of a hard cap to regression with the regression events, but there isn't anything restricting progression stacking
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I do think gens go too fast but I don’t think just adding gen time is the answer. Gen slow down shouldn’t be required but it general speaking is. The gens need to take longer to finish and gen regression perks should be gutted in the process. Currently survivors can be completely trash at looping and go down very fast yet still win the game just because of gen speeds. That shouldn’t be a thing. It’s the same thing as if the killer is bad at chasing he shouldn’t be getting a 3-4K.
Rather than adding gen time I think we need an early game collapse. Think something like Corrupt Intervention. I also think there should be a small gen repair penalty if injured. This encourages healing and makes just ignoring healing and gen rushing more difficult. Something small here like a 10% slow if injured.
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I wonder if it would be better for gens/slow-downs/items to have different conditions and effects depending on killer? So for killers who are ‘M1’, maybe have longer Gen times and/or negate the effect of speeding up perks/disable Gen repair toolboxes (I think the game should let survivor know before hand when match is made to allow for adjustments of perk and item selections accordingly).
Conversely, for very mobile and anti-loop killers, slow-downs could be disabled or reduced.
I can’t see a world where a blanket approach would not hit someone very hard as a negative compromise.
It is probably time to have conditional things that have a more flexible approach to addressing issues in the game I think.
I’ve mentioned in older comments that going forwards, the game could also apply conditions to players at different positions of the spectrum - those very new players can have some more leeway (e.g. going into bloodlust sooner, in-built base kit anti tunnel and slug etc).I’m sure there are gonna be those who can and may abuse such an approach but it surely can’t be a majority and at the very least worth trying out perhaps.
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I agree with this 100 percent. As long as survivors know how to read the HUD, you could play with minimal mistakes as killer and still lose due to gen speeds.
I think the early game collapse would be a good idea, but I also feel like having a mandatory second objective could work as well. Not exactly sure what it could be though
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I think you're right. If it is changed as a whole someone is always going to get the short end of the stick, and the only way to really fix that would be to alter it for individual killers. I can't imagine how long that would take to implement though or how many issues it would create in doing so (bug wise)
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I think touching gen times again is not a good idea. 90 seconds for a gen already doesn't feel great. Have you seen the impact that Thanatophobia has on some survivor players? It's not a good perk, if you can't keep all 4 people injured but just seeing that red progress bar is awful. Giving them the feeling that they progress even slower is not good. There is also the issue, that this scales massively with slowdown perks, which are already super meta.
Instead, I think survivors need a worthwile side objective. I had suggested this a few times already but I think it would be really nice, if they looked at The Game and its mechanical doors for reference. These doors open when the gens next to them are powered. It would be nice, if instead of gens, the requirements were something different (like finding a key for a locked door or whatever) and it came with the payoff to make a part of the map accessible for survivors and open up some strong loops. Likewise, there could also be spots where survivors could close and lock doors which would then work as breakable walls with a window right next to them.
This would allow for more resources on maps, which makes chases a bit more interesting especially against stronger killers but it would also reduce the pace of the game slightly. The problem is that this would take an insane amount of work and a lot of balance changes to perks as well.
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i don't think early game is issue. it is regression/passive game delay over time that is the issue. killer's regression is too weak and the killer have not a single base-kit regression perk for successfully winning chases. there is nothing that punishes the survivors in term of gens when you do well.
what killer need is 150%-200% gen regression and one of the regression perks base-kits that works off downs which could either be
- global surge after a down
- Pain res
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Yeah I've been saying for a while that a secondary objective would be the best course of action. The only issue is if the objective is not mandatory, people will just ignore it like the totems and then nothing changes
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Global surge after a down seems like it could be an interesting concept. Question is would it use one of the regression events on the generator or not?
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I would change only two things right now:
-make 3-gen feature count only for actual kicks
-make survivors always spawn togetherjust increasing gen time is boring and actually forcing people to run gen perks.
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I agree that no one really wants just an increased gen time. I think a mandatory second objective would work much better, but not really sure what that could be
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I think gen times are fine where they are.
Considering where the KR's are standing, I don't think lengthening gen times is a smart move.
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no. it would be 4% regression event which is below the 5% number. to get other 4%, you run the surge perk.
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Base regression of 200% and a built in pain res would work. There needs to be things that reward the killer for getting new hooks on different survivors base kit.
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The regression event number is 2.5%, not 5%, for the record.
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I mean, there are killers with second objectives as power and they are usually not popular. Their kill rates are usually one of highest, because it often makes them noob stompers.
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Those sound like pretty fair and balanced ideas to me.
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I think, such a second objective should not be mandatory. However, the benefits should be so enticing that survivors will do it regardless. This would allow for more strategic gameplay (possibility to ignore it at a risk) and it could give us the best of both worlds when it comes to chase time vs gen time. Survivors want longer chases and killers want longer matches. You can't have one or the other. It's both or neither.
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Gen speed is mostly fine and there isn't any increase that's remotely fair that would cause the players who say they are too fast to be happy. Playerss that say they are too fast, for the most part, just have bad macro play and pressure. Yes sometimes you lose 2-3 gens in the first few minutes of a game. That's the point of hte game in which survivors are strongest. They have all their resources available, every one of them is healthy, none of them are being chased yet, none of them are on hooks, they're all sitting on gens, so of course that's the point in the game where they are getting the most progress. as the game goes on their items get used up, they get injured, the map loses pallets, they have to go for unhooks, heal, target important gens, and contend with the many powerful regresssion and gen blocking perks of which most killers are using at least one. This all causes gens to slowdown and the rate at which you get hooks to increase.
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i'd raise it to 5% because 2% surge is a little bad.
i don't know if they'll give any perks to killer base-kit. they did add base-kit BT for survivor though. the 10 second of gen repair is helpful as it gave killer soft-version of corruption intervention without disrupting the survivor gameplay.
I have feeling that if they ever do buff gen defence significantly, they'll give survivor something crazy like base-kit DS because apparently tunneling an issue, not survivor's skill level in the chase.
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That would be nice ☺️
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See I have an issue with the last part of that take, people don't ever want to admit when they're wrong or what they could've done different in certain scenarios, sometimes choices you make can seem like they're right while in reality a different decision at a crucial point can make all the difference in the world, the survivor skill does matter in these situations and sometimes people just need to admit they lost because the other team was better and just give them their props, it doesn't mean you're bad everyone has bad games but it's how you handle it that matters most because you're defeating yourself by making the assumption "there's nothing I could've done" when sure there is something but does the ego allow you to accept it? Nope people can't handle it because they think they're the #1 Blight NA east server and all that bullcrap people spew
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I agree with this the biggest problem I see in my friend group (alot of them play Dbd but only started this year)
Is that killer progresses through MMR to quick in my opinion. A below average player using decent perks and popular strategies can blow through wins back to back to back in the beginning and while you played for a week or two you now getting people who have been saying for years and in teams when it comes to survivors. It's just way more of a struggle to progress through MMR ranks as a survivor as you only get progress from escaping with most of the time 4 random teams mates. And almost always a Dud player as MMR like to tag one newb with higher skilled players to balance things for killers it seems could be wrong on that last part but definitely feels that way.
So a "I did a perfect game" just means your not even experienced enough to see missed opportunities as I assure you even competitive players can watch a match and point to things they could have done differently
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I think stacked regression and slowdown is really obnoxious to play against. I'd really like to see diminishing returns across all equipped slowdown perks that increases with the number of slowdowns equipped. It's just beyond obnoxious to have a gen 80%+ only to have it get hit by Pain Res+Grim+Pop. You can argue the balance aspect all day, but it's objectively bad gameplay to sit and watch a bar fill for 70 seconds and then have to do it all over again without actually progressing the game.
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Probably 7 or 8 games out of 10, all the gens don't even get done in my games. Increase them further and I may as well not even play tbh.
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I really wouldn't say objectivelly. That sounds like a subjective take to me. One that surely many people agree with, but still.
With that said, some diminishing returns would probably be very welcome. But we'll have to see how the slowdown nerfs of the next update are first.
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I think overall gens are too fast for the majority of the killer cast. Assuming decently good survivors.
Sure the top killers are fine but that's just the few up there.
I agree with others saying a secondary objective would probably be the best way to tackle the issue. The issue with that is like @Crazewtboy said, unless it's mandatory it will be ignored.
I will add to that that unless it's mandatory or busted it will be ignored, like boons were. Which defeats the entire purpose of having a second objective to begin with if it ends up making the survivors even more time efficient.
Post edited by MrPenguin on0 -
This is by far the most deflating feeling in the game when you play survivor.
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I don't understand why people think killer needs to be buffed anyway. Killers already dominate pub matches. We're also in the middle of an epidemic where people are giving up in every other match. Is buffing killers REALLY the way to go considering the current state of the game?
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I think the issue ultimately comes from the fact Gen times need to be balanced around both Toolboxes and perks that increase gen speed and Killer perks like Gen blockers and regressers. Because of the nature of these perks, they're necessities at competitive play, and you'll rarely see a general match without at least one of them.
It makes sense, people are going to run what they believe is the best strategy. Still, it'd be nice if it was easier to get by without them. Maybe killers without any slowdown perks in their build could get an extra 10 seconds of gen time? That might encourage going all or nothing on those perks, but it's the best I have.
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Yeah I dont get it either. As a solo survivor most of my games are a wash, yet despite spending way too much time on this forum I'm not here constantly wanting survivor buffs or killer nerfs. I accept that I'm an average player. Yet I see the same familiar usernames consistently calling to make the game harder for survivors just because they (rightfully) got beat out by a better player, or just had a bad game in general (it happens, especially with how easy matchmaking is to bypass). People need to accept their own limitations instead of consistently making them everyone else's problem. Sorry for the rant, just kind of over it.
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Which is I always think, Slowdown should not get nerfed, may be make it even stronger. But its desparately need a hard limit on how much a Gen can be regressed, and the total regression time per match. To make using 3-4 slowdown become redundant, just how they did with Exhaustion and 2nd chances.
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I would much rather do a 6th or 7th gen by default instead of having to deal with regression. Genblock like Deadlock and Grim Embrace are fine. Regression just feels so bad. You sit there twiddling your thumbs for over a minute then one gen across the map gets pain ressed, yours next to the hook gets popped and the killer gets the easiest play served on a silver platter: camp the hook and a regressing 60% gen. In the end we are doing 6 or 7 gens anyway if the killer runs regression perks so the game might as well stop moving the goalpost.
I would say get rid of it, but, with the work that's gone into perks and mechanics, I know this is not going to happen.
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I think gens are boring as all get out. Its my most despised thing about the game. I wish they'd have other way to add gen progress. Like finding parts around the map and bringing them back to do a 10-20 second install for X% progress. Would make more playstyles, builds, etc. And I wouldnt have to sit on my ass and do nothing for 90+ seconds because I probably missed a skill check lol.
If gen speed is slowed or time is increased, there has to be something else. Plz Bhvr… plz.
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No, gens should stay were they are.
Toolboxes could do with a look. I really thought after medkits were standardized toolboxes would get the same treatment, but surprisingly they have not been.
There's also a problem with 4 mega toolboxes on the survivors, but there isn't any real way to address this without BHVR making game concept changes that I really don't think they want to.
As long as survivors know how to read the HUD, you could play with minimal mistakes as killer and still lose due to gen speeds.Four points about killer mistakes in the game:
1: It's frequently impossible to know if you made a mistake or not. If you run by a survivor hiding how would you ever know? When I've watched streamers review their matches inevitably there are things that get missed, and very few people are going to record and review their matches.
2: Lots of things that impact the final aren't mistakes, but a guessing game. Sometimes the survivors just get lucky and it feels impossible for the killer. It happens for survivors as well.
3: Given that they have to work as a group, survivors should make more mistakes because there are more things they can screw up. Even with a SWF on comms there's a lot more survivors can screw up given their lack of information compared to the killer.
4: When mistakes happen is far more important than how many. A quick early game chase is a huge advantage for the killer, while having it happen later in the game (when the gens might already be spread out / progressed and pain res no longer in play) has less of an impact.
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I'm amazed toolboxes haven't been nerfed yet.
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No they don't.
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