Please Do Not Make Changes to Pinhead
As the title suggests, Pinhead is an interesting killer, and currently, his strength is very balanced, with no need for nerfs or buffs.
Although his abilities are strong, maximizing their potential requires strategic planning, and survivors have ways to counter him. This means both sides have a fair chance of winning, without either side having an overwhelming advantage.
As it stands, his right-click and chain hunting abilities are perfect and fair. Despite their power, they still leave room for survivors to strategize, making interactions very engaging. Any numerical adjustments to his right-click or chain hunting abilities, whether nerfs or buffs, could disrupt this balance.
Additionally, making changes to Pinhead could result in many serious bugs, similar to the past chain hunting bug.
In March last year, you added a mechanism to prevent Pinhead from camping the box by standing on it, but this mechanism had a severe bug. The bug caused the system to mistakenly trigger the mechanism and reset the chain hunting if Pinhead stood still for more than 5 seconds after picking up the box from a survivor, sending the box away. If Pinhead grabbed a survivor holding the box from a locker, the grab animation took more than 5 seconds, causing the mechanism to be triggered 100% of the time.
During that period, some survivors aware of this bug would intentionally hide in lockers when they could no longer run, forcing Pinhead to grab them and reset the chain hunting, gaining an advantage. This made it possible for Pinhead to be unable to use his chain hunting ability properly for the entire match. Some even claimed this was an intentional design by the developers, justifying their actions.
Despite numerous players reporting this severe bug, you were unable to fix it promptly or temporarily remove the problematic mechanism. The bug persisted until November last year, taking over 7 months to be fixed. During this period, I encountered many survivors maliciously exploiting this bug, especially those claiming it was an intended design rather than a bug, making the game very unpleasant. I fear this situation might happen again.
It seems that Pinhead is a very complex killer to design, which is why adding a simple mechanism last year resulted in a severe bug, and you lacked the technical ability to quickly resolve Pinhead's issues.
My suggestion is not to make any changes. Currently, Pinhead's situation is quite stable, but any future adjustments could lead to severe bugs, and you might not be able to fix them promptly. Besides, Pinhead is already very balanced, with no need for adjustments. Please don't take such a huge risk.
I really don't want to be taunted by players maliciously exploiting bugs while playing Pinhead, or have to wait over half a year for you to fix Pinhead's bugs again. Just thinking about it is disheartening. For a complexly designed killer like Pinhead, please avoid making changes unless absolutely necessary. The fact that he is stable now is already a miracle. Please consider carefully whether the announced changes to Pinhead are truly necessary. Thank you.
Comments
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He is one of the top killers in terms of kill rates, higher than the desired 60%. He will get changes and saying that bhvr shouldn't change anything because it might cause bugs, is silly, because then they couldn't change anything ever again.
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I don't agree. His chains are incredibly low impact for how punishing they are to miss. He stomps bad survivors and is worthless against good ones unless you're able to keep constant chain hunts up. Against good survivors that's his entire power: keep chain hunts up. It sucks.
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Chains shouldn't break on environment. Chain hunt is too slow to start. Recovery on binding a survivor is too slow. Apart from that's there's some good combinations that can be setup with Ceno.
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The Knight enters the room.
About Pinhead, i think they will just change some mechanic like the Box spawn logic for something much more RNG than before, put some add-ons as basekit and perhaps rework the possessed chain. The Cenobite is fine for me, he doesn't need huge nerf or changements, just some issue about the QoL and the Box/Chains event
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Looking at past data, Pinhead's kill rate in each version generally falls within the range of 50% to 60%, not significantly different from most other killers. His overall kill rate should be at most close to 60%.
Moreover, the kill rate is not the key factor in deciding whether to nerf or buff a killer; it's just a reference. The main consideration is the complaints from players about certain killers. If you pay attention to the official changes to some killers in recent versions, you'll find that their adjustments are often based on common player complaints. These changes might not even involve nerfs or buffs but are just tweaks to less popular playstyles. If adjustments were based solely on the kill rate, Freddy would need to be nerfed.
Now, regarding bugs, it's indeed unreasonable not to make changes just because they might cause bugs. However, from past experience, Pinhead's situation is very special. In the past, there have been many unavoidable bugs related to his strength balance, such as the chain hunting bug, camera rotation bug, and camera zoom bug. When these bugs, which severely affected Pinhead's functionality and balance, occurred, it often took the developers several months to fix them. For example, the chain hunting bug I mentioned earlier, and the camera zoom bug, which had slight changes in each version until it finally stabilized. This indicates that even if the developers want to fix Pinhead's bugs, their technical capabilities are insufficient for quick resolution. The various incidents suggest that Pinhead is indeed a very complex killer, and his complexity might be beyond the developers' technical control. Simply adding a mechanism last time disrupted Pinhead's chain hunting for over 7 months, proving that the developers' management of Pinhead is problematic.
Of course, if the developers insist on changing Pinhead, they can do so if they can effectively solve his issues. Given their past tendency to release half-baked solutions that worsened the situation, I believe adjusting Pinhead will be a significant challenge for them. Finally, if the developers insist on adjusting Pinhead, I hope they will pay more attention to him and monitor his situation closely after the update, as it could potentially bring severe bugs. Please try not to repeat past mistakes. Good luck, developers!
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If the upcoming changes can maintain Pinhead's strength while still allowing survivors to have countermeasures, then I think it is acceptable. I hope that the changes to Pinhead will not disrupt the balance or create numerous bugs that cannot be quickly fixed, but instead make the overall gameplay experience smoother.
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I don't think he really needs a lot of changes. Only things I would really want to see are making him not break his own chains when walking through them and also getting rid of the Original Pain addon.
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Coconut did it again, I assume.
"We will make them suffer! Pain! How many Chainhunts will we get in a row!
YESSSSSS!"
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out of all killers written in road map, He gives me most hype/excitement. I assume they'll buff his possessed chain and weaken his chain hunt. The 3 buffs I would like to see are following
→ Chains no longer break on the environment.
→ Survivors and Cenobite no longer break chains when crossing their path.
→ Cenobite movement speed modifier when channeling gateway increased from 0.8x to 0.96x(~110% m/s)
My guess for how they will weaken chain hunt is prevent Cenobite from being able to spam solve the box.
→ New feature: When 90 seconds of chain hunt elapses, Chain hunt automatically activates for 30 seconds.
→ New feature: Lament configuration solved by Cenobite activates chain hunt for 30 seconds.
→ Increased Lament configuration respawn time to 30 seconds when solved by Cenobite.
→ Added a 45 second chain hunt pause period after chain hunt expires.
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My only hope is they change that addon that allows him to circumvent the off-hook endurance, otherwise I agree.
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Id disagree, his chains can be very punishing and the skill ceiling for it is massive, the best pinhead players dont need to waste any time and make the chain summoning hit the survivior directly instantly.Its only high risk high reqard for noobish pinheads.
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Pinhead badly needs love. BADLY.
- Chains are currently too punishing for not enough reward. They can be finicky to handle, and I'm still not sure why you made the gates not auto lock on or heatseek on Survivors or anything. It's too punishing for such a low reward. He's punishing to play on controller because of this. Shouldn't Chains at least cause Hinder or something? It's a great tool but it needs to be made a bit easier to use, he's already high skill. Don't make him harder by not helping the chains out.
- Box feels a bit underwhelming for finding it. It's almost never worth it to teleport to the box when it's being done, you could reward some small haste for that to catch up easily no problem. It's basically just Slowdown Survs have to do, which is good, but can't it be made a bit stronger in that regard? Maybe only reveal the Box when a certain time amount has passed? Chain Hunt takes forever to happen and juggling it takes a bit too much time for the Killer. The info on finding the box is nice, but the zapping sound is very hard to hear and seeing it on some maps like Coldwind is really difficult. Maybe add a slight Killer Instinct when within about 8 m of the Box? Otherwise box spawn Logic is good.
- Some addons are amazing, but others are meh and still others should just be basekit. Some addons encourage tunnelling which is awful design.
- Why can he walk through his own chains and break them? They're his extradimensional hell-chains, you telling me a Cenobite can't phase through his own chains when his vault animation is literally just phasing through the vault? Remove that entirely, no reason for it.
Just… general QoL things here. Pinhead is really fun for me to play as and against, but he's so unfairly punishing for the reward of what he can do. He feels slightly lackluster despite his power. Shouldn't the Hellpriest feel more powerful than this?
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