Why was Xeno's tail nerf never reverted?
Xeno had a buff from his PTB where his movement speed during his tail attack was increased to 2m/s from 1.2m/s.
This turned out to be too much, but it returned to its original PTB value instead of a middle ground. Why?
On top of this Xeno's miss AND hit attack are both 3s long. Successful attacks have been getting reduced to across the board (slinger to 2.7s, demo to 2.7s, etc). Missed attacks tend to be shorter than successful (Demo 2.25, Blight 2.5, etc).
Why is xeno stuck at 3s? It feels awful and very clunky to play with.
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The current move speed was the original one on the ptb, like you said, and it was perfectly fine during that testing period.
The only reason people noticed a difference or even complained at all was the bug when it went live where there was zero attack slowdown at all.
People got used to having zero penalty for missing and are apparently still blaming it on this change, even though that's never been the issue.
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It was dumb to nerf the slowdown in the same patch where fixing the bug that caused no slowdown to be applied was the issue. Should have fixed the bug and see if the tail slowdown was still an issue.
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As long as the killer still gets free hits there is no need to change them.
Using your M2 in situations outside of an animation lock has the same risk and punishment most other M2 killers can and should have.
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Turrets were nerfed from PTB.
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there was not zero penalty for missing. you still suffered a cooldown. you just did not lose any distance.
the noticeable part of nerf was that it made turrets into free health-states because you lose distance for hitting turret with your tail. The other noticeable aspect is that dbd doesn't have missed cooldown movement and successful cooldown movement speed. it only has hit-cooldown movement speed.
So it is either fast or slow. The 2.0 m/s gave Xeno soft-version of stbfl. It was only like 2 stacks or 3 stacks but it made killer feel a lot better.
Current xeno has bad add-on variety because of turrets require xeno to use emergency helmet or Stardew map. In some cases, it is just better to use both. His other add-on focus on tracking but tracking is so somewhat situational and not really needed. What he needs is add-on for his tail to be better. He should have an add-on to increase his tail strike length by +2 meters and an add-on to decrease successful cooldown by 0.6 seconds. Add-on that make killer feel good to use and don't feel like a game tax.
I want them to buff Xeno without nerfing his tail charge time. unfortunately, i don't think they will buff him without nerfing his tail charge time meaning that xeno is stuck in limbo. he needs buffs to be A-tier killer instead of high B-tier killer but they won't give him the buff to be A-tier because survivor will complain that xeno is "unfun".
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Xeno doesn't need any turret based add-ons since it is easy to reaction M2 and break a flame turret (add-onless) unless they put 2 on the same spot. Putting 2 on the same spot is already such a disadvantage for the rest of the map, that the cost is too great. Plus there still is the problem of free hits on tunnel exit if someone dares grab a flame turret.
The biggest flaw and strength of Xeno is similar to Pinhead, being a soloq/lack of coordination stomper. When the Killer is designed around abusing the lack of Survivor coordination, the Killer fails conceptually IMO. They need to make Xeno's counter less team oriented, and more individual oriented. That's why I think Singularity is perfect, because you can individually OR teamwork to work against them. If you are getting tunneled and tunnel facecamped by a Xeno, there is no meaningful counterplay. What, is a teammate gunna walk a flame turret all the way over to hook, or risk giving a potential camping Xeno a free camp tunnel hit? So Xeno's design is just poor all around.
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Because the buff from PTB never should've happened in the first place. While it's true that there was also a bug during that first couple of weeks which made you not lose any distance sometimes, it didn't always happen and even when the bug did not occur the buff made missing the tail attack too forgiving for the killer. Given how quick Xeno's tail attack is and how little time survivors have to react, you should be punished if you miss it.
The current 1.2m/s speed for that cooldown is fine.
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where to begin…. where to begin.
these add-on are not used to BREAK turrets. these add-on are used to IGNORE turrets. if i had to give an analogy, let's use tanks in league of legend or whatever concept of tank you understand in video games.
Imagine your health bar as health bar for going out of Xeno form. Imagine this as your HP bar in league of legends. If your tank, you want to tank damage for your team such that you take MOST amount of damage possible without dying.
So here we have two tanks.
Player 1: tank is 1000 hp.
player 2: tank is 3000 hp.
The most amount of damage you can take is 1000 damage, but in practice, taking 999 damage is gonna get killed in the game. You don't want to take all 999 hp, let's say you play it safe and you take 600 damage. by not taking Emergency helmet and Stardew map, you are taking risks because your barely killing turrets and any turret you come across, you HAVE to break it.
Now we go to player 2 who more tank. He can take 3000 damage. so he is also going to play the game safely and not take 2999 damage. He has more wiggle room to say take 2400 damage. So first benefit here… that you will never fail to break a turret but the real benefit is that you can ignore weak threats to threaten you out of the turret and calculate whether a turret is worth breaking or not.
You don't want to be playing Xeno on edge where you respect every turret and you only just make it to break turret. in practice, you want to be ignoring turrets entirely because if you can ignore turrets entirely and down survivor without losing your power, you can punish poor turret placement. If the player complete a gen, by you NOT destroying the turret, the survivor has to and pick up turret and slow to use that turret else they're just -1 on that turret.
They need to make Xeno's counter less team oriented, and more individual oriented. That's why I think Singularity is perfect, because you can individually OR teamwork to work against them. If you are getting tunneled and tunnel facecamped by a Xeno, there is no meaningful counterplay. What, is a teammate gunna walk a flame turret all the way over to hook, or risk giving a potential camping Xeno a free camp tunnel hit? So Xeno's design is just poor all around.
xeno's turrets are already individual oriented. most people only use those turrets as global 1 man personal alert systems on average. the turrets a lot stronger when they're used as 2 man vantage point to break xeno out of his power because they make him waste time to go back into tunnels which often isn't good thing as you lose chase. I disagree that putting 2 turrets is wasted opportunity cost. the key to using them is to put them in high traffic area where it is easy for survivor to get to it. For example Growning storehouse main building is great example. it is easy to get to as survivor and once you get to it, you can easily abuse the god window while also destroying his crawler mode. Even if the player has bamboozle+Self-destructive bolt, The add-on won't do anything when out of crawler mode and bamboozle doesn't help if the player switches loop to nearby strong loop to use the pallet when Crawler mode is cooldown. There is countless map examples where stacking turrets at the right time can mess up Xeno's time efficiency.
The real difference between singularity and Xeno is that singularity EMP counter takes 0 skill to use meaning that its value is always consistent while Xeno's turret take understanding of map awareness and positioning to have relevancy. In my opinion, your just asking for xeno's turrets to be as dummy full proof as Emp's and on technical level, they are as dummy proof as Emp's If you don't use turret add-on's because xeno will break every turret and every turret is free distance/chase extension. That is why we use these add-on for xeno so the turrets aren't dummy proof.
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The ignore turret facet is an interesting argument, I just have a hard time finding the spare time large enough to get an M2 out of it that couldn't have been an M1 instead (maybe an LT wall turret in the center?). It just feels too specific of a scenario. I'll take your word for it, but it just feels too niche.
Individual vs team though, I have to disagree. Ideally, everyone spreads on gens, and places a turret on their gen (or a nearby loop). Even if you have everyone duoing on gens, you still get a double chase on tunnel exit, and even as a bog standard 4.6 M1 Killer, that is such a winning scenario.
Your final point about the Xeno Sing difference kinda cements my teamwork point though. If the team isn't all at the same level of knowledge in terms of perfect turret placement, you lose. The Xeno can let the baby Surv place turrets, and chase the knowledgeable Survivors, and in a worst case scenario, the Xeno is still a normal M1 Killer. Maybe because I have Ghosty/Myers/Legion among my top 5, that isn't a problem for me, so I don't expect it to be a problem for others as well. EMPs only need you to know when to bother EMPing (or a teammate to merely delay a tunnel/chase in a final gen scenario).
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If the team isn't all at the same level of knowledge in terms of perfect turret placement, you lose.
if my team sucks, I lose. what a surprise? Almost like it applies to every killer.
The Xeno can let the baby Surv place turrets, and chase the knowledgeable Survivors, and in a worst case scenario, the Xeno is still a normal M1 Killer
Sure, If your winning as m1 killer, than you might as well just play Freddy. You'll win all the same. I am assuming the players are better then losing to a m1 killer.
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Team sucks I lose - Yes, the greatest flaw of the (Survivor side of the) game shouldn't be exacerbated. Glad we agree.
I assume players are better than losing to an M1 Killer - I mean you are talking about such a small percentage of the population, that I'm not sure that assumption is valuable. BHVR's latest stats has Onryo 2nd, Pinhead 3rd, Freddy 4th, Pig 6th, Dredge 7th, and Myers 9th (lowest with Myers at 61% kill rate). Now to be fair, they only listed all MMR for the Killer specific rates, but even their 2022 stats (the most recent I could find quickly) for the top 5% has Trapper at the lowest with a 56% killrate. So even in the tippy top most players they are still dying to M1 Killers at and above 56% of the time. What's even more crazy, is the lowest and highest kill rates in 2022 comparing top 5% and all MMRs has kill rates higher in top 5% MMR, and lower across all MMRs, so the kill rates might even be higher across the board.
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Hens did a video where he tried to ask a question: "Is the average solo survivor match really that bad?". He averaged around a 65% escape rate across 50 matches. It cannot be that killers have average 60% kill-rate and survivor is able to achieve 65% escape-rate. The statistics must be including mostly new players or average players making making mistakes in-game. My personal experience also does not support such poor escape-rate since I was definitely escaping way more then 39%. I also use similar build to hens while playing soloq with same ideas discussed in the video which I found very surprising.
I cannot base killer strengths on new players/average survivors. I have to base killer strengths on decent survivor soloq survivors and SWF. if you play a killer well, your likely to be matched with these players on average which is what your view of average balance looks like. I never based balance on empirical kill-rate stats. I base my thoughts on balance based off empirical situations in dbd that are likely to happen in the average match. If my ideas are correct, then then stats should validate what is already happening. I see stats as more of confirmation to behaviour, not an empirical tool to balance itself. In this case, they don't so they are not a good determining factor.
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I remember this video, he was excluding Survivor ragequits and DCs [see 6m in], but including them if the Killer quit [see 36:52], the former of which sadly are part and parcel of normal matches. Without the exact matches reviewed back to back, his claim was dubious at best. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let's assume it was true.
What is stopping his former teammates from dying in a 4K the very next match, negating his stats?
Why because 1 person can be above the stats, no one can be below the stats? They are all in the same MMR bracket, otherwise they wouldn't be matchmade together, so they can't simply be baby Survs inflating the stats.
In normal stats, you are bound to have a 40/50/60/70/80, and that averages out to 60. Heck, you can play a match right now and get a 4K, or a 4E. Does that mean the kill rate is 50%? We average the results over a long period of time.
He doesn't normally sweat for every single match, but you bet he is gunna sweat for content for a video. That level of sweat in unsustainable, otherwise he would still exclusively be playing that way.
If we take this Survivor 65% rate, couldn't we also take winstreaks on Killer? That simply means Blight has ~99.95% winrate, and Oni has ~99.85% winrate if the next match was a loss from this post. That's why this logic fails.
You say you can't base Killers off of average/new players. Then lets go back to the end of my previous post. Back when BHVR gave stats for all and top (5%) MMR, Killers had higher kill rates at both the low and high end of the kill rate spectrum under top MMR. That means that weaker Killers are dragging up the escape rates, not the other way around (or in other words weaker Survivors aren't dragging up kill rates at the same frequency).
The problem here is we both are likely at the higher end of the skill spectrum within top MMR, although it seems as though you assume everyone is as good as you. I get too frustrated with soloq because I see people clearly not as good as me making the same foolish mistakes over and over again. Even as Killer, I can predict some of the dumbest stuff with too great a frequency.
The matchmaking is too loose, because it is the top 25% of the playerbase within the highest end of the system. When you have a 75 Surv matched up with a 90 Killer and 3 95 Survs, that person is not gunna have a good time, and likely ruin the match for the other Survs. Heck, even if the Survs would have normally won, that weaker Surv is either going to make it a 3v1 from 5 gens, or create a bunch of deadzones the other Survs no longer could juice.
As far as empirical things that happen, the same can happen to pump kill rates/drop escape rates. People can have a tome that basically has them throw the game. They can have to get up and deal with answering the door or fussy kids. They can have a VPN Killer getting lag hits from the moon since we have a bad server check system. We can have people taking chase in the wrong direction unknowingly towards the 90% gen when the Killer has Pop. All of these happen as well, but the stats are our best way of guestimating at which frequency they occur for or against each side.
Also since this is getting mostly off-topic, I do agree with OP's point about reducing Xeno's tail CD down to 2.7s. That way it maintains parity with the other attack CDs.
If you want to continue this (non-Xeno) discussion, create a new thread and @ me, otherwise feel free to have the last word.
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Because there was a bug that made it so Xeno has no movement speed penality at all, so people complained. BHVR took that as them going too far and completely reverted the buff AND fixed the bug, so we don't know how much was the bug and how much was the buff is too much.
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he is trying to get 50 regular normal games stats that start with 4 people and end with 4 people.
Why because 1 person can be above the stats, no one can be below the stats? They are all in the same MMR bracket, otherwise they wouldn't be matchmade together, so they can't simply be baby Survs inflating the stats.
yes there can be baby survs inflating the stats. it has to do with how BVHR classifies high MMR games. you have 1 survivor that is high MMR and 1 Killer that is high MMR but 3 mediocre survivor that are not high MMR. that game may be counted as high MMR game because the killer is high MMR. this is done to keep queues at minimum. you can call it below buffer games.
In normal stats, you are bound to have a 40/50/60/70/80, and that averages out to 60. Heck, you can play a match right now and get a 4K, or a 4E. Does that mean the kill rate is 50%? We average the results over a long period of time.
On average, there is more games below buffer. so baby survivors inflating the stats.
He doesn't normally sweat for every single match, but you bet he is gunna sweat for content for a video. That level of sweat in unsustainable, otherwise he would still exclusively be playing that way.
If you play this all the time, it is not really anything special for you.
If we take this Survivor 65% rate, couldn't we also take winstreaks on Killer? That simply means Blight has ~99.95% winrate, and Oni has ~99.85% winrate if the next match was a loss from this post. That's why this logic fails.
this is average escape video. not a win-streak video and those win streaks are…. done by utilizing below buffer games. guaranteed that your not doing win-streaks vs 4 man swf with random maps. eventually they'll win.
Also since this is getting mostly off-topic, I do agree with OP's point about reducing Xeno's tail CD down to 2.7s. That way it maintains parity with the other attack CDs.
Well my opinion remains same. xeno suffers from add-on variety through add-on tax and doesn't have any notable tail strike add-on to bolster his strength.
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@mizark covered most of this, especially the part about certain games being excluded, but you're also missing that Otz had the 40% escape rate over a much larger sample size.
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