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Is it true Slugging is Meta?
Comments
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Clearly you don't play killer. As soon as anyone goes on a hook at lest 1-2 people have to hop off gens cause of the 3 possibilities that could happen.
1 Killer is proxy camping needing 2 people to save.
2 killer quick spots someone and starts chase making 2 leave gens.
3 killer leaves hook to apply pressure and kicks 1-2 gens and chases 1 person by the time the save happens.If the save dosnt happen before the first stage ends its kill on next for that player.
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why? if killer proxy's, you just rush gens and let person hook to 2nd stage. the killer loses if he loses 3 gens for 1 hook-stage. this is also one of the best ways to counter tunneling off-hook because safest spot on the map is on the hook. the killer cannot tunnel people that are hooked. they need to be unhooked to be tunneled. this is especially true if survivor has anti-tunnel and killer chases that person because by the time that person goes down and the anti-tunnel perk triggering, you can win entire game off that
the killer spotting someone going for hook save is worst possible scenario for survivor. maybe stealth better? this is clearly poor play by the survivor. one that is very easy to avoid.
Killer leaves hook → free unhook. goes back to my post about negative pressure for hooking. I think only way you can benefit from leaving hooks early is soft-tunneling.
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that is why those 10 seconds is somewhat big deal because it puts urgency on killer to move away from hooks over urgency for survivor to get to the hook.
But again, this is just talking about how this is hindering camping. And this change was specifically made to counterbalance the buff camping got when gens got their timers increased.
it results in killer being punished for hooking which is where this slugging gameplay is starting to occur. they're getting negative pressure for hooking.
But the question is, if these 10 extra seconds are such a massive problem and such a complete knee-cap for the killer's pressure, why are they then choosing a method that adds another 50-170 seconds on top of that?
Surely slugging produces even less pressure, then?
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This experiment has taken experts for each killer. I know a few of them.
A 75% win rate for players close to the 10k against randoms is pretty low.
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- you don't have to hop off the gen instantly for the save. If you do, you are just contributing to killer's map pressure.
- as soon as you see killer picking up survivor on the HUD, you know that you have the first free window for repairing gens completely safely. If killer carries survivor for 10s, you have 30s worth of total time on all gens you have been sitting on while killer was carrying survivor to a hook. Each second of wasted killer's time is worth 3 seconds of survivor time when one is on hook.
- If killer chases one person upon finding them after a survivor is hooked, that is still beneficial, since now you have almost the whole hook stage worth of time as the 2 survivors remaining on gens to do. Since hook stages are now 70s, minus approx 10s it takes to reach hook and unhook, you have 60s x 2 = 120s worth of gen time, which is two gens at 2/3 progress for the price of one hook state. If you come for unhook right after killer starts chasing another survivor congrats, you've managed to halve that progress to 60s worth of gen time per hook state since now you have only one survivor at gens and you risking potential arrival of killer to a hook to trade way too early.
But again, this is just talking about how this is hindering camping. And this change was specifically made to counterbalance the buff camping got when gens got their timers increased.
it literally works no matter if killer camps or not :)
But the question is, if these 10 extra seconds are such a massive problem and such a complete knee-cap for the killer's pressure, why are they then choosing a method that adds another 50-170 seconds on top of that?
Surely slugging produces even less pressure, then?
with slugging, you don't get notified that killer is going to carry someone, meaning first vital info for you is gone, while also not having that safe time gap while killer is carrying a survivor to hook because you are aware they will instantly go and hunt another survivor. Killer wastes no time while putting more pressure on you.
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You had me until the last sentence. Before deciding [waves hands in the general direction of this forum and a large % of the player base's attitude] wasn't worth it and uninstalling probably for good I got ~100 3+k streak on Wraith only going for hooks and trying to 12 hook as often as possible. It's still technically going, come to mention it. Hooking is definitely still decently strong. If anything, I would have come to the conclusion "slugging shouldn't be this strong"
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Your last sentence is basically what I'm wary of.
BHVR, if they want to "fix" this has two options.
- Make hooks stronger.
- Remove yet another option from the killer's hands.
Choosing the latter would be a very bad move and I'm not convinced they won't go for it.
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You had me until the last sentence. Before deciding [waves hands in the general direction of this forum and a large % of the player base's attitude] wasn't worth it and uninstalling probably for good I got ~100 3+k streak on Wraith only going for hooks and trying to 12 hook as often as possible. It's still technically going, come to mention it. Hooking is definitely still decently strong. If anything, I would have come to the conclusion "slugging shouldn't be this strong"
your argument is based on two things:
- the skill gap between you and average person that reached soft MMR cap (you kept improving, but you will still be matched with people between soft and hard MMR cap no matter what, and amount of people closer to soft MMR cap is much bigger)
- not analyzing how your opponents play and what mistakes they make (and average pub survivors makes awfully lot of mistakes due to low macro knowledge) and then rushing to making a "black and white" conclusion that…hooking is still very strong.
I managed to get winstreaks with Agi only in my loadout as Oni. Does it mean killers are so strong that you can play them perkless and win? No, it means that MMR system is extremely flawed, because when you first reach soft MMR cap, you will be matched with people around 1600 MMR score, but at the same time if you keep improving yourself and increase your MMR score, you will still be matched with people around 1600 MMR score.
That's not balance related, that's skill gap related.
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MMR is a complex thing. It's flawed but I sometimes wonder if it's not flawed on purpose.
Getting matches where you sweat all the time is bound to give people a burnout.
It appears, and was suggested, the current match making alternates hard, mid and easy matches.
But an easy match for someone is an hard match for his opponent.
I'm almost convinced that alternating difficulty thing is true BTW. I'm amazed at how sometimes I crush a difficult team of survivors, bracing for the next match, only to get care-bears who get 8-hooked at 5 gens. Then I let them go because I can't possibly kill babies* and my next match is back to sweat lane.
*) Especially because amazingly they didn't give up.
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Feel free to tell that to the people who think hooking is an auto lose 🤷♂️ you said it not me
If "I can win without perks" is, as you said, a skill gap thing, surely other scenarios, such as "I can't win the way the devs designed the game and must resort to cheese strats" fall into that same category
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let me be clear one more time.
Average survivor severely lacks macro knowledge.
Average survivor player doesn't know how to get use of a hooked player for the advantage of their team over killer.
On the same side, average killer player will look for the most effective ways to win the game.
Tunneling "at 5 gens" is severe skill issue on survivor side and actually only smart and effective application of tunneling on killer's side if survivors actually know how to play the game.
So then, should we balance the game around how good players perform against bad players? Should we really make this game impossible to play as one side at actual high skill levels because average player on other side still can't manage to counter such strat as tunneling even after 8 years?
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it literally works no matter if killer camps or not :)
Sorry, what impact does 'increased urgency to leave the hook' have on a killer who is leaving the hook immediately anyway?
With slugging, you don't get notified that killer is going to carry someone
Do you think survivors are just sitting there with question marks over their head when you do not pick them up for an extended period of time? Remember, they can see when you DON'T pick up, too.
And yeah, you are immediately setting pressure on the next target. But in that case, you are once again talking about the time from pick-up to hook, which did not get any changes at all.
And it's hardly enough to compensate for having an additional 50-120 seconds of 'hook time', if that is as big of a deal as you've been insisting it is.
If this is not emblematic of DBD's biggest issue.
Making a big argument about survivors just being plain bad, while simultaneously arguing that there's some kind of pressure on killers to min-max, to meta-slave, to cut every corner they can and exploit every loophole, bug, glitch, everything, in order to chase those wins.
100+ winstreaks on killers, 1000+ winstreaks on killers, killer winstreaks without perks, killer winstreaks while being AFK for the first half a minute, that's all fine, but a survivor finishes a gen while another survivor is on the hook because of ten seconds that were added to compensate for an undeserved buff to camping/tunnelling: 'Well now the game is just unfair to killers'.
Overall average loss rate of 36% and apparently that's still too high for the common forum killer.
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Riiight. When survivors struggle it's because all survivors are bad, when some killers struggle it's because the game is balanced against killers 🙂🙂🙂
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Sorry, what impact does 'increased urgency to leave the hook' have on a killer who is leaving the hook immediately anyway?
because killer literally won't be aware than there will be 3 survivors doing gens instead of two for the much longer duration than they would expect, which is a tremendous impact on killer's further decision making + puts the killer into a more disadvantageous position because in this case, hook doesn't generate pressure on survivors, but on the killer instead.
You seem to fail to realize that killer who immediately leaves the hook literally expects one person to go for the unhook earlier while they can be able to pressure the two remaining survivors on gens (i don't even know how many times do i have to say this).
Do you think survivors are just sitting there with question marks over their head when you do not pick them up for an extended period of time? Remember, they can see when you DON'T pick up, too.
they can only see where the slugged survivor is and they will have to think about much more factors when having a slugged survivor rather than one hooked that is about to get unhooked.
And yeah, you are immediately setting pressure on the next target. But in that case, you are once again talking about the time from pick-up to hook, which did not get any changes at all.
downing a survivor and immediately going for the next target wastes much less effective time than downing survivor, picking them up, taking them to a hook, hooking them and then going for the next target.
And it's hardly enough to compensate for having an additional 50-120 seconds of 'hook time', if that is as big of a deal as you've been insisting it is.
you still seem not to understand how much wasting as much of killer's time actually means in this game.
100+ winstreaks on killers, 1000+ winstreaks on killers, killer winstreaks without perks, killer winstreaks while being AFK for the first half a minute, that's all fine, but a survivor finishes a gen while another survivor is on the hook because of ten seconds that were added to compensate for an undeserved buff to camping/tunnelling: 'Well now the game is just unfair to killers'.
winstreaks made by top 0.1% of killer players across all servers who forged their macro and micro skills through various tournaments and have the most perfect kind of game sense against pub survivors to prove how many mistakes average survivors make and how flawed MMR system is. Not to talk about how many actually mid killer players will act like they are on a winstreak while literally searching an excuses for matches lost between those won.
It's literally a pure MMR flaw thing, not a balance thing.
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actually hooking people has been repeatedly nerfed every patch for a long time, the situations where it's not worth it are getting more and more common
people can't complain about both slugging and unreasonably broad definitions of 'tunneling'/'camping' that mean the killer is obliged to just feed free unhooks to the survivors
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when did i say all survivors are bad?
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Sorry for using hyperbole. If I had known you would focus on it without addressing the actual point I was making I wouldn't have used it
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the actual point is that in pubs, anyone who loses is actually bad yes.
But there is a clear way to filter out actual balance arguments from those just made by people who fail at macro aspects, like:
- Omg I lost because survivors were constantly hiding and genrushing (when nobody even brings toolboxes nor gen related perks, obviously a sign that killer failed to put some early game pressure and was likely overextending chases/not being able to realize which gens to pressure);
- Omg i lost because killer tunneled/ 4-men slugged at 5 gens (literally most obvious sign your team was utterly bad)
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because killer literally won't be aware than there will be 3 survivors doing gens instead of two for the much longer duration than they would expect, which is a tremendous impact on killer's further decision making + puts the killer into a more disadvantageous position because in this case, hook doesn't generate pressure on survivors, but on the killer instead.
You are way too far lost in theory. Stop trying to be academic about this, stop trying to think up elaborate schemes, and think about the difference this -actually- makes in practical scenarios. 'Killer won't be aware' is not an actual consequence for the game, least of all with all of you blithering about how you are anticipating the exact scenario you say killers can't anticipate.
'Hook doesn't generate pressure on survivors'
If they are leaving that survivor on the hook, that is a benefit to YOU. That is one less survivor you need to worry about for an extended period of time. That is more pressure for you when they finally DO go for the rescue. That is more room to snowball.
You are starting from your conclusion and then arguing backwards from there, as opposed to looking at the situation and constructing a conclusion from that.
Again: if you don't camp or tunnel, this change makes no difference to you.
they can only see where the slugged survivor is and they will have to think about much more factors when having a slugged survivor rather than one hooked that is about to get unhooked.
Yes, and as long as they can see that survivor laying on the ground, they know that the survivor hasn't been picked up, don't they?
'They will have to think about much more factors' is weasel-wording. And these exact same factors come into play once the survivor is on the hook, so it doesn't make a difference.
downing a survivor and immediately going for the next target wastes much less effective time than downing survivor, picking them up, taking them to a hook, hooking them and then going for the next target.
Again, the ten bonus seconds of hang time did not change this. This is almost as old as the game itself.
you still seem not to understand how much wasting as much of killer's time actually means in this game.
Except no one's 'wasting the killer's time'. You're the one complaining about 10 extra seconds of hang time and then opting to instead take on 120 extra seconds. The only one wasting killer's time here is you.
winstreaks made by top 0.1% of killer players across all servers who forged their macro and micro skills through various tournaments and have the most perfect kind of game sense against pub survivors to prove how many mistakes average survivors make and how flawed MMR system is. Not to talk about how many actually mid killer players will act like they are on a winstreak while literally searching an excuses for matches lost between those won.
It's literally a pure MMR flaw thing, not a balance thing.
Killer anecdata > Evidence. As always.
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sorry for not having black & white shallow picture of the game and actually taking my time to give a deeper explanation of such a complex aspect of this game that is macro :D
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I was addressing your slug concerns.
Regarding the 10s hook change:Gen times would need to have an added 21-30s to generators, not 10s.
One survivor hooked still allows for up to three survivors on generators simultaneously or spread out.
Meaning a maximum charge/second input of 21-30 charges (based on efficiency penalty of any grouped survivors) if survivors utilize that added extra time to its maximum potential.
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75% 4k rate.
90% win rate if you include the games where they got 3 kills.
Quite a lot of the killers had 100% 4k rates even with hooking.
Even if you don't consider a 3k to be a killer win, a 75% win rate is insane by the standards of any game. Yes, including this one.
Also it's important to note that the slugging playstyle also produced a similar number of wins, which shows that it's not particularly that much stronger than hooking, if at all. It just produced a higher number of 4ks than 3ks because of the nature of hatch.
If you never hook anyone until all survivors are on the floor, then you will almost always 4k in games which you win, because the last survivor is never given a chance at hatch.
Seriously, go back to that video and add the 3k games to the 4k games. The number of wins is actually higher than in the slugging games.
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75% 4k rate when these are included:
- terrible MMR system;
- terribly playerbase mentality that consists of very high give up rate in soloQ (3v1 in early game is catastrophical for most teams), lot of players playing in very selfish manners and lot of players griefing
I haven't played any other game where matchmaking is this much bad and community plays the game in a worse way
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That 90% would be closer to my expectations. (I've watched two of these killers as I follow them regularly. I don't think anybody escaped the slugging matches they've shown.)
The rest of you post is matching with my experience and expectations.
And yes, a 3K is a win in my book. 2K a draw, anything less a loss. I believe it was defined like that by the devs. It's also one of the common critique of the devs putting kills forward instead of the number of hooks.
I don't necessarily try to four-slug myself. I do it opportunistically, or I try it when I can't find an easier way to slow the survivors down … or as a counter against some tactic (as you know survivors can make themselves very difficult to hook)
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Again: whatever you are talking about, it's not the reality of DBD.
Gen times would need to have an added 21-30s to generators, not 10s.
It's never gonna be 30 seconds -unless the killer camps-. If the killer just continues playing as normal, those 10 seconds will not come into play. It is still in the survivors' best interest to get that unhook as fast as possible.
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Getting the survivor unhooked as fast as possible gives the Killer a larger window to harass generator progression and utilize regression perks while more survivors are preoccupied resetting instead of reaching generator “checkpoints” (generator completions), that cannot be regressed by the Killer.
If the other survivors don’t manage their chase resources well and get downed quickly, yes, it’s important to have more survivors fielded. But if they can last a decent amount of time in chase, better to focus on gens if the opportunity arises to complete a generator without the hooked survivor entering the next stage.0 -
75% was the average across all killers. Some killers had 100%. Some had higher than 75%. Some had lower. Some had actually terrible results, like Nemesis for some reason, who only got 30%, which feels like an anomaly since Nemesis is not that bad of a killer. Especially after the buffs, but I don't know if the results were gathered before or after the buffs. Trapper, well known as the worst killer in the game, got a 90% 4k rate by comparison.
Judging things exclusively by 4ks is a terrible idea. The Nurse specialist was only able to maintain a 60% 4k rate. Again, the video only treats 4ks as a "win" and the person who made the video made a special note for Nurse that she got a large number of 3k games when hooking.
Does a 60% win rate on a Nurse specialist versus a 90% winrate on a Trapper specialist sound normal to you?
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Slugging is no more a dick move than leaving your teammate on the hook to commit to a generator.
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Again: whatever you are talking about, it's not the reality of DBD.
it's not the reality of dbd at average skill level*
It's never gonna be 30 seconds -unless the killer camps-. If the killer just continues playing as normal, those 10 seconds will not come into play. It is still in the survivors' best interest to get that unhook as fast as possible.
"get that unhook as fast as possible"
that is exactly how:
-magnificient tunneling at 5 gens happens, becomes fully profitable and wins the match for killer right at the start;
-killer's map pressure goes stonks up.
And then we ask ourselves why are pub matches so miserable? Thinking unhooking asap is the best decisions for survivors is literally one of reasons why
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Right. So it's a nerf to tunnelling to compensate for the gen time increase's buff to tunnelling.
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Those two things are not the same. We're talking about the hook timer of one survivor 99% of the time. vs. 3 generators. 25% of the killers objective vs. 60% of the survivors objective. The math isn't equal.
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only a dick move if that teammate losses an unnecessary hook stage.
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Hey could you share some of your gameplay to show us how to not be a bad killer?
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Is it a "dick move" if the killer downs someone and know that there are one or more survivors waiting close by for a pallet or flashlight save? What is the killer supposed to do?
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Basically.
IMO still not a huge fan that their solution to address perceived Gen rush was just to increase the time it takes to repair a gen.
But whatever.
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taking in mind that yall can't even last 30s in chases and are allergic to gens, i doubt that every truly situational strategy that is supposed to work only in rare cases against people that have at least some decent skill in this game, tunneling will still be possible.
And i definitely named tunneling as only one of the reasons, but since previous essays didn't manage to be useful in explaining the point to you, i doubt anything will :D
It's just funny when you see people complain about various basic things in the game, but at the same time intentionally refuse to learn how to use aspects of the game in their favor.
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Slugging is insanely strong., especially in solo queue lobbies. Don't let anybody tell you differently. Even the 12k hour content creators will use slugging. It's like a hidden ace. In most games, the killer player loses because they don't slug.
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this is a great way to pinpoint a gameplay design problem on players
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'vs 3 generators'
Oh no, the AFK killer is getting nerfed again!
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Leaving your teammate on a hook for an extra 20-30 seconds to finish a gen isn't a dick move unless they lose a hook state because of it.
In fact, rushing immediately to the hook as soon as a teammate is thrown on (and expecting to be unhooked immediately and trying to self-unhook) is in my top 5 list of worst mistakes bad survs commonly make. I have seen countless games thrown by teammates who rush for saves, or flip out because everyone didn't come running in their first 10 seconds on the hook.
In most scenarios a killer slugging can only be construed as a dick move because it sure as hell isn't effective. Leaving the surv on the ground as opposed to hooking is usually the wrong move for a few reasons:
- It gives the other survs more time to work on/finish another objective. Hooking forces survs to jump off other stuff more frequently. I've got four minutes instead of 70 seconds? Imma finish that gen, thanks killer.
- It doesn't burn a hook state, which aside from time itself is the most valuable commodity in the game
- There are multiple perks that may allow them to get up on their own
Since this uptick on slugging happen, I have seen it cost killers far more wins than it got them. And even in some of the killer slugging wins I've seen, the matches went on far longer than they would have had they just hooked. I had one match just today where the killer DC'ed because they were trying so very hard to slug us all, but just couldn't keep us all on the ground, a game they could have won had they just hooked.
I think some killer players are more slugging out of protest of recent surv buffs than they are actually trying to win, and just annoying people.
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Slugging has always been a potent tool in the killer's arsenal, but if by slugging you mean some ludicrous sentiment of "you can't win if you hook", no, that is not "meta", or a thing altogether. Not only can you win most of any match even if you never slug, but hooking is generally better than slugging. And most killers hook and most killers win. Including in tournaments. A killer actually trying to get all 4 survivors slugged is incredibly rare, and it rarely works out.
What you should definitely be looking to do at times if you want to win consistently is opportunistically slug, such as when you have a survivor hooked, down another survivor, and leave them on the floor to instantly be able to go back and intercept unhook attempts or be there to tunnel the unhooked survivor. Slugging is a tool to create pressure, at times you will benefit from that pressure and can even snowball it into a win, but generally you are giving up on actually progressing your win condition and getting survivors closer to their eventual sacrifice. Most of the time you will in fact find slugging to be most beneficial whenever used to more quickly advance the game to the first sacrifice, using that pressure to better be able to get the hook stages needed for that. Hooking is necessary to consistently win against 4 even just competent survivors, you will only rarely be able to 4-slug them unless you are Blight, Billy or Nurse, and even then you could win more reliably and decisively by hooking and getting into that 3v1 that is heavily skewed in your favour, and where slugging then also becomes all the more potent a tool.
As opposed to a lot of people, I think proactively slugging is actually an enjoyable and exciting playstyle that players too rarely go for. Slugged survivors have more agency than hooked survivors, and the "whack-a-mole" gameplay loop of the killer trying to keep survivors down and them continually trying to get back up is actually good fun for both sides, that doesn't lead to foregone conclusions of matches but situations that much more regularly go back and forth and are able to flip around at much of any moment. Even after 10 minutes of this both sides can still be capable of winning out, it is more rare for there to be situations where you can already tell one side is most likely going to win, such as when a survivor has been tunnelled out early. There's also less camping or other "defensive" tactics at play, the game is more dynamic and chase-centric, with less downtime and "going through the motions", more crazy clutch situations that turn the tides momentarily.
I wish that the proactive type of slugging that is not only done opportunistically to support a general tunnel/camp strategy (or of course the "slugging for the 4k with 2 survivors left" type) would actually be more common. I'd encourage anyone to try builds including Infectious Fright and Knock Out or Third Seal and - as a general rule - then only hooking survivors if you don't get an Infectious scream. You'll be surprised by how far this play pattern alone takes you, and how fun it is. You can also use whatever perks you like and simply never hook survivors - mind you, you will lose fairly often on most killers when you do so, but you'll still have an engaging experience, with low downtime and a lot of chases.
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Yes and No. Slugging as it is has become popular since it avoids lots of survivor perks that activate on hook, as well as being a time saver. If you can get downs fast enough (via Blight/Nurse etc.) you could end games in record time. However, Survivors can have perks that hard counter slugging (Unbreakable, Boon Exponential, WGLF etc), not to mention how much being on coms helps.
The reason why it is seemingly meta is that while Survivors do have tools to counter it, most choose not to bring them, since hardcore slugging is not as widespread as the 4-slowdown, tunnel off hook tactics of your average killer nowadays. If it DOES become meta, then I imagine people will start bringing counters. Its just that right now, exhaustion + gen speed is the preferred Survivor meta. Hope this helps!
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