http://dbd.game/killswitch
Feedback on some things (long read, sorry)
As a seasoned player who's spent a lot of time and at least $400 on this game lol, I'd like to take a moment to leave some feedback/constructive criticism in hope that maybe some things can be kept in consideration for future changes.
First I'm going to start with something that will probably bring a lot of disagreement.
Aura reading. This is way more beneficial for killers than it is survivor. The only survivor perks that are truly beneficial for seeing the aura of the killer is Object of Obsession, Kindred & Wiretap. If surviviors were able to see the killer's aura as much as the killer see's their's, there would be rants over it from killer mains. With that being said, killers lean way too heavily on aura reading. Especially Huntress players who have builds completely surrounding aura reading. A killer having a full aura reading build is an unfair advantage. Especially when survivor perks that would counter aura reading are being nerfed or only of use late game. Sole Survivor requires your team to die to have value, and Distortion has been nerfed to the ground requiring you to be chased to have it. So with survivors needing to "earn" the counter, where are killers earning the aura reading?
BBQ & Chili is one of only aura reading perks that is truly earned, along with Blood Warden, and the one where you see auras while carrying survivors (forgot the name). But opening lockers? Kicking gens? Survivors completing gens? The start of the trial? Literally just loading into the match earns you aura reading? Survivors walking past a totem? Survivors vaulting? Killers being blinded gives them an aura read? And the plethora of add ons that killers have that are aura reading and not actually earned.
You want to change up the meta? Rework aura reading. This game is supposed to be like "hide and seek" but how does that work when the killer see's auras the whole match? Aura reading could be traded for screaming instead with killer's instict to show where they screamed from. Or maybe make it so they need to earn it too. Must kick 3 gens to gain a token. Must open 3 lockers. In my opinion, aura reading shouldn't have ever been brought to the game as heavily as it is. I do however understand from the killer's side how some may struggle with finding survivors. But its overkill at this point.
Distortion should not have been changed with how heavily aura reading is used. If anything, make it so survivors need to be doing gens, healing or even going for saves to earn the tokens. This way people aren't hiding the whole match and need to participate in order to get value from the perk. The power of altruism is able to protect you from being seen! (But again, why do survivors need to earn tokens and killers don't need to earn the ability to see auras?)
My next topic is slugging.
Slugging is great for when you need to apply pressure and maybe slow things down. But leaving all 4 survivors on the ground and refusing to hook? Why are we forced to endure that? We can't disconnect to leave, so we just lay there on the ground. This is tedious and boring from the survivor's perspective. This goes for the end game mori as well. Slugging is at an all time high right now because of it. No one wants to lay on the ground and wait for their teammate to be found and/or die.
My suggestion to balance this is if 3 or 4 surviviors are being slugged and none have been hooked for 40 seconds, a survivor at random gets the ability to pick themselves up. This will discourage slugging the entire team and refusing to hook. If the survivor that got up gets slugged again, the timer restarts and someone else gets the ability. This keeps Unbreakable in good standing too, because the ability to get up will be granted at random, where Unbreakable is guarenteed (if you haven't used it yet). And as for killers slugging when there are 2 survivors left for an end game mori: If a survivor is left on the ground until they've bled out half way, they should have the ability to get themselves up once. This encourages the killer to make the choice of hooking the survivor or letting them go while they find the 2nd survivor. No one wants to just lay on the floor and wait to die in a video game.
My next topic is the anti-camp.
The range of where the killer is standing to "counter" the anti-camp is way too close. The anti-camp stopping if someone is nearby also sucks, because it encourages people to not go for saves, thus forcing the hooked survivor to unhook themselves and get tunneled.
My idea of a solution for this is to increase the range a killer needs to be for anti-camp to not progress. Killers are standing pretty close and the meter barely moves. It should fill up faster with how close the killer is to the hook, and a survivor nearby shouldn't stop the progression of anti-camp. Maybe change it to if two survivors are nearby it stops. But if one is nearby and the killer is very clearly only 10 feet away, it doesn't make sense for anti camp to stop, because that is still camping.
My next topic is about No Way Out.
This perk feels kind of punishing as a survivor. Survivors did their objective, they finished all gens and they survived to the end, just to be met with No Way Out. The gate is blocked for entirely too long for a killer who lost the match. It should be blocked at maximum 30 seconds with no "additional time". 15/20/30 seconds for the 3 tiers. Enough time for the killer be alerted that someone is at a door and to try to find them and hook them.
Next:
Maps are feeling way too small and crowded. I understand some maps being larger can be overwhelming as a killer, or even as a survivor to have to run across the map for a save. But hooks and generators are entirely too close together now. A lot of the maps are feeling way too killer biased. Tiles with pallets being used create too many dead ends for chases. Maybe spreading gens and hooks out more and putting better tiles would help with how small they feel?
Last:
Flashlights. They're great for saves, but chain blinding is ridiculous. My idea of a solution for this is to make flashlights have a cooldown timer after a successful blind. Like 10 seconds or something. People do straight up abuse the ability to blind. I know Lightborn exists but if you don't run it and you end up in a match with people who are click happy? It sucks. As for flashbangs, the ability to basically have two should be removed. If you're already holding a flashbang, the perk needs to stop refilling until the flashbang is used. The option to place flashbangs down for survivors to stock up on so they can locker stun and flash bang them 4 times in a row, also needs a change. That is straight up bullying the killer. If the flashang is placed down instead of thrown, make it so it depletes after a certain amount of time to avoid abusing the perk.
I love this game, but there are things going on that are truly making the experience very negative and frustrating. I hope some of these ideas help in some shape or form.
Comments
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You need more upvotes
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Aura reading:
This game is not supposed to be hide and seek. It was like that on release and they made it more chase based over the years.
Anyway, there are some noteable differences between aura reading of Survivors and of Killers. First of all, the Killer needs to get to Survivors to progress the game. Might be obvious, but the Survivors can win without even seeing the killer. The killer can't. The killer relies more on knowledge, therefore they need it more. Secondly, you can't really compare Killer Perks to Survivor Perks. The Killer only has 4 perk slots, the Survivors have 16. Killer perks need to be 4 times as powerful as Survivor perks for them to be balanced. Aura reading perks are far from the strongest perks in the game. If you use aura reading you give up direct chase power or gen regression that could have been in that spot.
To take a look at the examples you named:
Opening a locker, only Trickster and Huntress do that reguarly, the other killers need to waste their time doing that and it makes a sound to nearby Survivors. And that perk fails if the Survivors aren't near lockers.
Kicking a generator is an atrocious waste of time. If even 2 Survivors sit on a gen they gain more total progress in the time it just takes you to kick it. And even then it only shows nearby Survivors.
You also mentioned completing gens, which refers to Bitter Murmur. An absolute trash perk that, i have only ever seen beginners or random perk people use. By the time the first gen pops you should generally have an idea where everyone vaguely is.
I agree Hex Undying doesn't need to show aura, but since they insist on having perks levelable there has to be some stat that changes as you unlock it.
I'm all Ears is also perfectly fine, it pretty much only triggers when you are already in chase with someone which helps mindgame against them, especially since vaulting usually already puts them at a distance against the killer.
Aura reading is fine. This game is not hide and seek. It is not about finding Survivors as much as it is about chasing them.
Slugging:
Slugging is not at an all time high because of the mori. It is because BHVR made tons of balance changes to discourage it over the past year. They buffed Sabotage, Increased Hook Time, Nerfed Pain Res and Pop and Grim Embrace, Buffed DS, Added Deceisive Strike, Nerfed FTP + Buckle Up (I don't want that combo back, but it is still relevant), buffed Flashbangs, kept Flashbang in the game despite being bugged, etc… Slugging is at an all time high because it became the more convenient option.
About your suggestion. If you get the right hook spawns, there are still spots on Maps like Eyrie, Badham or Hawkins where Survivor can be unhookable if they go down. As long as these aren't reworked I think basekit unbreakable is a bad idea.
Anti-camp:
The Resolve Meter was not supposed to be anti-camp. It was supposed to be anti-face camp. If a Killer camps you can do gens and then trade hook stages last second. It eliminated face camping and non-face camping has easy counterplay.
No Way Out:
No way out punishes Surviors for getting hooked. If nobody gets hooked its only 12 seconds. It is a great design and it and grim embrace are the only killer perks that reward the killer for going out of their way to NOT tunnel. It is a well designed perk, with good synergies, an appropiate killrate and it is far from overpowered.
Maps:
Maps don't feel to small to me in the slightest. Quite the opposite. Maps like Shelter Woods, Azarovs Resting Place, or Greenvile feel so big that I need to start running early if I want to get an unhook across the map. I feel like a size of roughly 9000 to 10000 square meters (you can see the map sizes on the dbd wiki) is good for semetrical map, smaller for stretched out maps. Ye, sometimes generators spawn to close on maps like Dead Dawg, but that seems to be an issue with the map, not the map size. Haddonfield or Toba Landing for example aren't great 3 gen maps despite their relatively small size.
Flashlights:
I agree that Flashbangs shouldnt be able to be shared or stacked, but chain blinding is fine imho. You usually get it only when your first blind stunned the killer, otherwise they can just turn their head to avoid it and it was waste of time on the Survivor side.
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On the topic of aura reading, I think the assumption that this is a hide and seek game is a pretty fundamental flaw in your reasoning, because this game is not a hide and seek game, it's a cat and mouse game, with the distinction being that it's geared much more around the chase than hiding from the killer all match.
Stealth still exists and is a strong, viable tool… but it's stealth with the aim of delaying or escaping a chase, not avoiding one outright. That's why aura reading being strong isn't problematic- it pushes the match towards the core gameplay loop, because everyone hiding is actually the match stalling out, not the core gameplay loop itself.
I also think it's a mistake to start applying the "earned/unearned" binary to aura reveal perks because of two reasons. The first is that not all survivor perks that are relevant to this conversation need to be "earned" either, and the second is that "earning" a perk is only one way of balancing its effect, not the only way.
Take, for example, Undying. Now, that aura reveal isn't very good, but discounting that fact, do you earn that effect? No, it's balanced by the fact that the survivors can permanently disable it, because it's a Hex.
Other perks are balanced differently than that, too. Take I'm All Ears- that perk isn't earned, but its aura reveal is also designed to be very situational. It only activates in the specific scenario that a survivor takes a rushed vault near you, and then it goes on a cooldown. That sounds pretty broad, because I'm All Ears is a good perk, but if you think about the breadth of a whole game and where else you might want aura reveal, it's pretty restricted.
On the topic of survivor perks, do you earn those aura reveals either? The good killer-reveal perks for survivor are Object of Obsession (conditionally on you being a good looper), Wiretap, Kindred, and Alert. We can see one perk that is earned via generator repair - Wiretap - but the others aren't, they're balanced differently. Object has risk, Kindred requires the killer to gain a hook, and Alert only activates when a specific action is performed by the killer.
(There's also the Blood Amber, which is the most powerful aura reveal and definitely isn't earned, but items and perks are fairly different in this context.)
The same can be said about the tools survivors would use to counter aura reading, too. Distortion may be earned by merely engaging with the game's expected gameplay loop, but are the others? Sole Survivor isn't (although that perk is trash), Shadow Step isn't, Off The Record isn't, Object of Obsession isn't. Those perks - all counters to aura reading in their own way - are balanced differently.
Aura reading isn't problematic at the moment, it's just pretty good. Stealth is still an option, survivors still have tools that counter aura reading, and most of the individual aura perks are either balanced or actually not good to begin with - though there is one exception there. Nowhere To Hide is unbalanced, it provides too much for how unrestricted it is. If that perk just revealed in a radius around the gen and didn't follow the killer, it'd be much more in line with the other good aura tools.
It's not a question of "earned" or "unearned", just "balanced" or "unbalanced". Earning a tool is one way of balancing it, not the only way.
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RE: No Way Out - End game perks exist for a reason, and if a killer is using them, it means they are playing minus that perk for 90% of the game. That alone balances them quite well. The survivors objective isn’t to do gens, it’s to escape. Just because the gens get finished does not entitle survivors to a free escape, otherwise the game would end when the gens get completed.
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