Shoulder The Burden Is Poorly Designed... (DBD Perk Design)

I think the main flaw in the design is the Exposed status effect, not the hook trade. A decent survivor is probably not going to use this perk in the situations it was intended for (proxy camping/tunneling) because they'll just trade hooks 1 for 2. It would be a bad play. You'll only see it used in situations where the killer isn't camping or tunneling, because survivors aren't going to want to immediately get a 2nd hook after they eat a hook state for someone. It's not countering tunneling. It's countering spreading hooks.

The problem is, I wouldn't want to see any other meaningful downside to the perk. I don't think a perk like this should really exist at all. I don't agree with trying to balance player choice tactics with perks. I think that has to be done at a base game level, especially for the survivor role when the counters to those tactics are macro-based or involve randomly selecting the correct perk for a situation that may or may not happen. I don't think you end up in a healthy spot mechanically when it's all said and done. Static objectives are one thing. They happen every game for the same number of charges/hook states. But nebulous things like tunneling can't be left up to perks.

See, the fact it's completely in the survivors control whether the perk can be used or not is what leads to it punishing killers who aren't even doing the thing it's probably meant to be countering (Which I imagine is either tunnelling or focusing hook states on 1/2 survivors and ignoring others).

Surely a more healthy solution would be making it something that's more in the killer's hands. Take reassurance or camaraderie - If the killer isn't trying to force someone who's 2nd stage to die, which is usually where these perks see most value then it's almost a wasted perk slot. These perks are really strong IF the killer decides to use those tactics but are wasted slots if they don't.

Shoulder the Burden on the other hand is almost never a waste of a perk slot unless you happen to be the survivor who's getting targetted first, in which case someone else with the perk can bail you out. Even if the Killer's not tunnelling you, the killer is still being punished in a way for hooking you.

The IDEA for the perk, letting more confident survivors sacrifice a huge resource in order to help a struggling survivor out is amazing but in execution it's a bit all over the place.

People have been suggesting that for OTR as a way to fix the bodyblocking issue.

But if the upset about StB has taught me anything, it's that tunnelling is well and truly broken as all get-out.

In 6.1.0, gens were changed to take 10 seconds longer, the on-hit sprint was reduced, the on-hit cooldown was reduced. At the same time, a bunch of perks were shuffled around. In the scramble that followed, as survivors tried to get their footing with the changes to what had been a long-standing meta, killers had a very easy time, and you know what happened?

gen soeeds are still the main problem, slowdowns are unnecessarily nerfed in an attempt to make meta shift while failing miserably because slowdowns will be the most effective thing even at their worst because guess what, gen speeds.

And do you know what actually happened? People were crying about more accurate matchmaking because they didn't want to wait for long, now when they are getting stomped because they randomly get 50h Megs in their teams, we are talking about "killer being way too easy" and not "matchmaking is at fault"???

The fact that DS got slaughtered in that patch led to a massive spike in tunnelling. Killers had an easier time than ever and killers tunnelled more. Within a week, killers were already downplaying the relevance of 6.1, claiming it just made gens take a little longer when that was only one of like half a dozen buffs.

let me correct this for you. DS didn't get slaughtered, it actually received an additional condition to be used, and that condition is skill input. In it's former state it was such a free distance where you didn't have to think about where to direct the chase and where to force the down.

I won't say that this is the easiest killers have had it, because that was when regression was so damn bad that the number one method of securing 4Ks for some killers was to time out the damn servers with a locked-out 3-gen.

easiest time for killers was Eruption + CoB meta, other than that, no other time period was particularly easy unless skill gap between you and your opponents rises so much that soft MMR cap becomes a joke and you consistently 4k.

But an anti-tunnel perk shows up and the forums are on fire again because a handful of forum killers that have never made a single mistake in any of their games ever but somehow never manage more than 2 hooks per match are absolutely convinced that killers are at a 15% kill rate and a 0% winrate.

because even though you will bump into really skilled survivors kinda rarely, you will still notice the power of anti-tunneling perks, especially when used for something completely different than tunneling. The fact that average player is bad and can't use specific meta perk doesn't mean perk shouldn't be touched at all. It's in fact the worst argument for not touching the perk.

But killers are still winning considerably more than they're losing. Killrates are high, there's massive winstreaks, there's all kinds of funky experiments rolling around that prove how much you can do as killer. Heck, for this complaint of tunnelling being necessary, Hens and four of his friends scored an over 90% 3K+ rate over a hundred matches while not just not tunnelling, but not using any killer powers.

• average survivors forcing an early 3v1 by giving up on hook;
• average camped survivors giving up on hook instantly;
• average survivors not knowing basic macro aspects of the game;
• average survivors lasting 20s in chases;
• terrible matchmaking.

Killrates are massively inflated by factors completely unrelated to actual balance.

And just like that, we're back to the poor, poor killers who somehow only really ever talk about how bad things are when survivors threaten to get a perk that doesn't go straight to the bottom of the trash bin. Heck, I've probably contributed more buff suggestions than most of the forum killers combined. But they're all mum about it until survivors are the slightest bit listened to.

survivor meta is literally far more diverse than killer meta ever used to be. Rn we are having hex meta thanks to overtuned Thrill only. After it's nerf we will get returned to old Corrupt-PainRes-Eruption(Grim) meta.

'Tunnelling is mandatory!', cry forum killers, desperate to ensure that no balance changes can be made to change it.

M1 killers against any somewhat decent survivors stand no chance if they don't manage to tunnel one survivor out early lol. Again, let's not use "high killrates on weak killers" as an argument since we know skill level of average survivor.

Tunnelling has continued to be a beatstick that forum killers use to try and force balance to go their way. How about we just let it lie for a sec, hm? Let Shoulder the Burden do its thing, see what it does.

how about we actually fix the core problem that stands behind tunneling instead of throwing bandaids that literally just make it even worse for more than half of the killer roster? Why don't we think about lack of hooking/hook spreading incentive?

Because either it'll tank killer winrates and prove that tunnelling was just creating an illusion of balance and force BHVR to acknowledge your point of view and do something meaningful to help killers along…

if we see players giving up much less, lasting much more than 20s in chase and actually having proper gamesense and macro knowledge and tunneling still keeps yielding very good results, then we can talk about it being "broken" or similar stuff.

Or it'll do jack for the winrates, proving that tunnelling wasn't necessary at all.

to actually prove it, go and play an M1 killer against a decent survivor team and see for yourself :)

This is far from constructive, my friend.

We're all here because we love the game and want to see it flourish. Even when we disagree on the methods, there is no reason to act so adversarial.

players should stop using poorly designed as clickbait word towards mechanics they don't like. shoulder of burden removes the extreme time efficiency of killers that efficiently tunnel.

not gonna read the rest of this but your view on 3 sec decisive is another example of people thinking perks are bad because they dont know how to use them

3 sec DS was still an amazing perk, you just couldn't use it in the open anymore. you had to set yourself up in a loop and if you used it there then you would literally reset the entire loop and begin the chase from the start. if you were tunneling as killer and a survivor who was good at looping did that to you, it was very detrimential.

the opinion that 3 sec ds was useless stems from people who had no idea how to use it. and now its 4 sec instead of 3 because people suck and use tunneling as an excuse to have any braindead ######### in the game .

so what does the fact that conditions 1 and 3 aren't specific to tunneling, but are core to countering have "not" to do with it?

Because it essentially turns your advice into 'just win, 4head', and not an actual counter.

And condition 2 is literally 100% true, hooked survivor is basically at the state where they can't be hunted for the whole duration of one hook state.

Except it also leaves them incapacitated, which means they're exactly as useful as them already being dead, and it opens the door for the killer to snowball a ton of extra pressure on top. It is not in survivors' best interest to leave someone on the hook, unless the killer is camping.

how difficult is it to understand that this perk doesn't only work against tunneling? And how many times do people have to repeat themselves with explaining?

That doesn't matter! The one thing is denies is the one thing that gives tunnelling -all- of its value. It having value outside of a tunnelling killer is not the point of this argument. The point is that the incredible value you ascribe to this perk to deny an early kill is the exact same value that tunnelling provides. Shoulder the burden and tunnelling both operate off the same value.

hooking and killing is the only way killer wins too, so?

That's not an argument.

ahh yeah, slaughtered because casual players can no longer have fun while getting free value of it while not having to think about where they will be downed, right?

Its activation is entirely in the hands of the killer. If you get hit with it, you deserve to take punishment. It's not 'free value', since it costs a hook state and requires the killer to sign a consent form in triplicate to get hit with the stun.

i don't care what your "forum killers" think, i am here for the same reason i am on forums for basically any PvP game i played, proper game balance that isn't about making it "fun" for casuals by making broken stuff.

Then maybe encourage BHVR to deal with the broken thing that's plagued the game since its inception, instead of ONLY caring about what survivors get to fix it.

we could literally get as many ppl in dbd community to test which side gives up more times, even myself, and there are basically 7-8 games where survivor(s) give up on top of one game where killer gives up.

Besides, memeing killers are vast minority, let's not pretend they are some kind of majority.

Additionally, let's not put MMR into this story since it's as good as nonexistent. If you constantly keep improving, skill gap between you and average opponents at soft cap is so high that you will consistently get great individual results on both sides.

Again, you're arguing back against one or two things while not having anything to answer against any of the rest, and once again, I must remind you: ######### stats are still more than no stats.

i am literally winning most of my matches as both sides and it's literally mostly because my opponents make grave mistakes, especially when i play killer. Average killer complaining about genrushing usually doesn't even know importance of things as Corrupt Intervention in build and being aware of importance of the first chase.

Oh, you mean the killrates are deflated?

core problem is…KILLERS LOSING? Core problem is literally lack of proper incentive to hook/spread hooks (+10s hook timers, hook grabs removed, hook related perks on killer side getting nerfed constantly so many hook related meta perks on survivor side, sabo buffed), which results in uprising of unhealthy strategies like tunneling and slugging. And you are here basically acting as if we should first give hand to people who…simply refuse to find a workaround against anything in this game, while killers usually find workarounds after every drastic balance change.

You did not read what I wrote about the whole 'kicking the can down the road' thing, did you?

Killers AREN'T a stronger role, that's a fake bubble created by terrible matchmaking that was guess what, literally induced by community that would literally never want it to improve because they don't want longer queue times.

Literally everything suggests they are.

do you know that in comp tournaments, there are very heavy restrictions on survivors against M1 killers?

Did you know that there was a comp tournament with no restrictions that showed the roles as neatly balanced?

With that in mind, are you aware that their experiment has NOTHING TO DO with balance between killers and survivors, it literally points out how flawed MMR system is and how low soft MMR cap is because average survivor is so bad that they can get obliterated even by a completely powerless killer.

And you think that this is okay, and even that it should be significantly worse than what it is. Top MMR 4-man SWF hitting 50% escape rate needs to get nerfed, with no regard for what this will do to the other 90% of the game. This is just not going to work. It's going to nerf survivors out of the game outright.

And if you want to use this as your argument for "omg so if you are having difficult time as killer, that's a skill issue", mind you, Hens and his friends are top 0.01% of dbd playerbase in terms of skill, knowing almost every single macro aspect of this game.

Okay, and? Weren't you the one that said we shouldn't balance to the casuals?

Again, the perk requires the killer's consent to work. It's not supposed to be balanced when it does fire because the killer did something wrong to make it fire.

The opinion that DS is in any way powerful stems from people who lack the self-restraint to not set it off.

How about we test that for once?

i'm reading in disbelief and really questioning if i should keep going after you literally tried to invalidate using basic gameplay and macro knowledge as a counter to specific strategy. Truly unbelievable.

also to give you the benefit of the doubt: even if it IS a good strategy (with tunneling still being a better one) why the hell should killers bend over backwards to appease survivors by playing in a more "fun" way? never in my 3.5k hours have I ever seen a survivor intentionally play worse to benefit the killer. they dont do gens slowly because its more fun and I dont see anyone calling them bad for doing that and saying how that's a "problem".

That's not 'benefit of the doubt', that's covering your own behind.

But ultimately, it makes no difference. With tunnelling in play, both sides are dissatisfied. Those who vehemently defend tunnelling also seem to be frustrated with how 'weak' killers truly are, and how hopeless any game against decent survivors is, so if tunnelling were to be removed, IF you were to be right about the necessity of tunnelling, BHVR would have to actually buff killers in a meaningful way to bring the balance back up.

If tunnelling being busted is the only thing that is keeping up this facade of balance, then ripping off the veil should get you guys what you want too, and survivors can finally get that lifelong issue out of the way.

Sound good?

lmao how is that covering my own behind?

Because it's a back-up argument in case tunnelling is proven to indeed NOT be necessary to win.

and dude, im sorry but the hope that every killer will be viable if tunneling is removed due to buffs is nothing short of a pipedream… we've been nerfing tunneling and camping nearly every update and the weak killers have still not moved in terms of strength.

In the near decade that DBD has been in operation, the nerfs given to camping and tunnelling are the removal of hook grabs, 10 second haste and endurance, and the most timid anti-facecamp ever. Contrarywise, BHVR has been so delicate with the matter that even getting 5 sec DS back didn't last. These tactics have never been adequately addressed, BHVR continues to pussyfoot around it.

yeah, would be awesome if bhvr would make dividing hooks more effective than tunneling then make weaker killers better to compensate but that is never going to happen. if they "removed" tunneling, they're not gonna go to each and every weak killer and give them (MAJOR) buffs to compensate. that is a pipedream which would require a gargantuan amount of time, effort, testing, and community feedback for EACH KILLER. its not going to happen.

They don't need to. I've made suggestions for killer buffs that would work, but only IF camping/tunnelling are properly addressed. And these were nothing more than simple number shifts for a subtle but impactful effect.

To claim that they need to go through every individual killer to manually adjust all of them is overcomplicating the issue. We already saw that they can just buff killers wholesale, since that's what they did in 6.1.

im at a loss for words, its not a backup argument lmao. it is me pointing out the hypocrisy between survivor efficiency and killer efficiency. but sure, call it whatever you want. still have not addressed what I actually said in that sentence

if you think that the myriad of insanely strong anti-tunnel and anti-camp mechanics/perks is not enough then I really do not know what to tell you. good loopers who run these perks make it almost impossible to tunnel them unless you want to lose. but I guess that is not enough and we need more.

simple number changes will not magically allow every killer to divide hooks and still win against good teams… and these simple number changes would still require a great amount of testing + community feedback + time.

 it is me pointing out the hypocrisy between survivor efficiency and killer efficiency. but sure, call it whatever you want. still have not addressed what I actually said in that sentence

That is completely irrelevant to the discussion though, isn't it? So why bring that up and try to label it as a 'benefit of the doubt' thing?

if you think that the myriad of insanely strong anti-tunnel and anti-camp mechanics/perks is not enough then I really do not know what to tell you. good loopers who run these perks make it almost impossible to tunnel them unless you want to lose. but I guess that is not enough and we need more.

Evidently this 'myriad' of 'insanely strong anti-tunnel and anti-camp' is doing jack to actually reel in these tactics if they're still flatly the level best thing a killer can do. And if they were this 'insanely strong', then why the uproar over another one being added to the pile?

You'd expect tunnelling to be dead in the water with a 'myriad of insanely strong anti-tunnel mechanics/perks', but somehow everyone's convinced that it's the only thing propping up the killer winrate.

Something isn't adding up here.

simple number changes will not magically allow every killer to divide hooks and still win against good teams… and these simple number changes would still require a great amount of testing + community feedback + time.

Just because -you- can't envision it, doesn't mean no one else can.

Because it's a back-up argument in case tunnelling is proven to indeed NOT be necessary to win.

omg, tunneling is proven not to be necessary against people that can't hold a chase longer than 20s and so their teammates can't split pressure at all!!!

In the near decade that DBD has been in operation, the nerfs given to camping and tunnelling are the removal of hook grabs, 10 second haste and endurance, and the most timid anti-facecamp ever. Contrarywise, BHVR has been so delicate with the matter that even getting 5 sec DS back didn't last. These tactics have never been adequately addressed, BHVR continues to pussyfoot around it.

you know that BHVR is also noticing that people are going way too far with requests for anti-tunneling and camping buffs as a coping mechanism for still lacking basic macro gameplay knowledge, right?

Shoulder the Burden is literally the cherry on top of the fact that survivors have no right to complain about getting tunneled anymore, you literally have plethora of basekit anti-tunneling features, perks and macro knowledge aspects at your disposal, if you still end up dying fast into the match, it's literally your and only your fault.

They don't need to. I've made suggestions for killer buffs that would work, but only IF camping/tunnelling are properly addressed. And these were nothing more than simple number shifts for a subtle but impactful effect.

To claim that they need to go through every individual killer to manually adjust all of them is overcomplicating the issue. We already saw that they can just buff killers wholesale, since that's what they did in 6.1.

tunneling is a CONSEQUENCE of bad game design and the fact that spreading hooks is literally just validated because it's a way to severely handicap yourself and flex of you win that way. And honestly, if a killer manages to beat your team by spreading hooks (especially an M1 killer) you should feel embarrassed way more than you'd be if you lost by tunneling.

its not completely irrelevant to the discussion. the balance of dbd is about which side can complete their objective faster than the other. that is it. when you are only addressing how fast one side can do their objective (killer) and not the other then therein lies a problem. survivors can be as efficient as they want but when the killer does it, its a problem that calls for basekit changes as well as perks that are so over the top that their effects pale in comparison to any efficiency slowdown the killer could run.

the perks are not doing nothing. tunneling has been made immensely difficult against good teams due to the many perks/basekit changes they benefit from which cost the killer so much time. if tunneling is still the best strategy after all of that then the conclusion is not that the perks are doing nothing, the conclusion is that the other playstyle (dividing hooks) must suck so bad that despite insanely strong anti-tunnel mechanics, tunneling remains a better strategy because again, dividing hooks is a horrible strategy at its core.

just because I cant envision it doesn't mean no one else can? last time the killer got a basekit buff it was so minimal that it didn't change anything. and then they gave survivors basekit meta perks.

except for the fact that you can win (almost) every match on either side with how bad current matchmaking system is

Which means that tunneling isn't as necessary as you and other Killer mains say it is.

its not completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Yes it is. In a discussion about the necessity of tunnelling, and specifically talking about experimenting with tunnelling being removed for a while to see the impact on kill rates, talking about 'gens going too fast' is irrelevant, because the experiment is specifically there to prove or disprove exactly that. It's just you pre-emptively doubling down on your argument because you're worried that such an experiment would indicate that tunnelling is indeed not necessary to win.

Unless you're implying that the balancing should be done in a quid-pro-quo kind of style where, even if tunnelling is proven to be just be an excess that's been hindering balance more than helping it, it shouldn't be addressed because it might feel unfair for killers somehow?

tunneling has been made immensely difficult against good teams due to the many perks/basekit changes they benefit from which cost the killer so much time.

Again, it's not adding up, dude. If tunnelling has been made immensely difficult specifically against good teams, then why is tunnelling specifically necessary against specifically good teams?

if tunneling is still the best strategy after all of that then the conclusion is not that the perks are doing nothing, the conclusion is that the other playstyle (dividing hooks) must suck so bad that despite insanely strong anti-tunnel mechanics, tunneling remains a better strategy because again, dividing hooks is a horrible strategy at its core.

Or, alternatively: Tunnelling is just that damn broken.

just because I cant envision it doesn't mean no one else can? last time the killer got a basekit buff it was so minimal that it didn't change anything. and then they gave survivors basekit meta perks.

That's not a counter-argument.

Also, are you talking about 6.1? Because that did skyrocket the killrates.

so now we are putting words in mouth even tho i never said such a thing nor pointed out to it? We never learn, do we?

That is the entirety of your argument against everything that's being said.

because of two things:

Both of which are incompatible with your earlier, boastful assertion that BHVR shares -your- point of view. Guess the devs aren't as on board with your 'tunnelling is necessary and survivors that ask for nerfs to it are just whiners' viewpoint as you claim they are, huh?

and it also means playing against tunnelers is way easier than you think is, tunneling success rate is massively inflated by people who simply can't last longer in chases and give up so easily against tunnelers.

Another wild assertion made based on absolutely nothing.

no, it isn't.

Literally every indicator that killer is doing fine or better gets dismissed with 'survs bad', but a few personal experiences are irrefutable proof that killer is UP.

devs are being overwhelmed by "casual" players

"BHVR knows that survivors are WAY out of line asking for these nerfs!"

*BHVR releases another anti-tunnel perk

"W-well, they're just… Getting overwhelmed!"

yeah, you have totally proved my point by trying to completely invalidate any gameplay aspect as a counter to specific gameplay loop because it's easier to go with the flow and believe something is broken, unfair and uncounterable purely because you can't counter it on autopilot.

Gurl, your counters are of a level of quality akin to trying to defend old insta-gen BNPs with 'just get downs faster, 4head'. Literally, your counter is just 'win harder'. That's not a counter. That's just playing the game.

this discussion is stemming from the new perk, shoulder the burden.

its another insanely strong survivor perk which allows them to hinder the progress of the killer objective.

this comes after numerous other over the top meta perks aimed at doing the same, all completely fine under the title of "anti tunnel".

since DBD is a race of who can complete their objective first, when analyzing the strength of one variable we must look at the strength of the other.

when comparing the myriad of anti-objective perks and basekit mechanics the survivors have gotten to the anti-objective perks the killer has gotten, the ones on the killer side pale in comparison.

many of them have been nerfed to either have weaker numbers or to flat out destroy itself if the killer gets an advantage. this will never happen to the survivors anti-objective because those perks are seen as the "solution" to a "problem" so nerfing them would cause many players to complain about the "problem" which is just the killer going for their objective, just as the survivors do.

I do not know why you keep insisting that im covering my ass when I have no reason to. I will tell you right now, I don't care about being proved wrong to the point where I will make preemptive arguments to fall back on. you have yet to address what ive actually said in that statement of survivor objective vs killer objective.

"if tunneling has been made immensely difficult against those teams then why is it still necessary against those teams"

ok, ive said it like 3 time but ill do it again.

tunneling still remains the best strategy against those teams because the alternative, which is dividing hooks, is still such a bad strategy that tunneling remains the better one, despite the tools survivors have to make it so difficult. one of your points is that dividing hooks is not a bad strategy but you contradict that by asking a question like this. imagine having two pieces in a board game and one of them has been strong since the beginning and one of them has been weak since the beginning. now imagine if we significantly nerf the strong piece to the point where using it is very difficult, however we keep the weak piece the same. if players are still using the nerfed piece then what does that say about the other piece? it says that the other piece must suck.


"tunneling is just damn broken"

tunneling is not the insta-win brainless strategy you think it is. if you try to blindly tunnel someone until they are dead then you will lose. strategic tunneling exists, and it does not involve chasing one person until they are dead. it still requires game sense, chase skill, and can be countered.


its not a wild assertion to say that you think countering tunneling is much harder than it is. you have suggested that the very strong meta perks the survivors have received to counter it dont really do anything (saying 3 sec DS was useless) + have said that basekit features such as the anti-camp dont really do anything. you have also said that tunneling is broken, implying that it is an overpowered and uncountable strategy when its not. its much easier to complain about tunneling and ask bhvr for more anti-tunnel mechanics than it is to actually get better in chase and use the countless tools you've already been given. even easier due to the huuuuge anti-tunnel bandwagon which any low-skill player can hop on.

tunneling is abusing the weakness of your opponent in terms of not being good enough in chases to waste enough of your time in order to make the chase worth it for their team, so they basically lead their team into an early 3v1.

Does it require skill? It does. It does require proper chase skills in order to actually pull off, and even with those, you will choose not to tunnel out specific survivor if you notice that they are wasting way too much of your time, so it has macro skills that come up with it.

Acting like it's winning on autopilot is just attempting to further act like it's uncounterable when you literally have all the proper tools and mechanics to counter it (StB is literally a cherry on top and nobody actually has any right to complain about tunneling anymore when this perk exists).

Funny thing is, this is not just about tunneling, people need coping mechanisms for failing to improve at fundamental aspects of the game when facing any strategy their opponent uses. This is a very common case inside dbd community