Xenomorph PTB Testing Affirms That Nerfs Cannot Go Through
Hello everyone, I am Bran, more widely known as theMrHeadache and I wrote the Xenomorph Guide featured in Otzdarva's guide list! I made a post here earlier when they initially posted the number changes, and unfortunately, I've found the PTB version to be even worse than I initially thought it would be based on the dev notes.
I am making this post in hopes that BHVR sees this, because the changes to Xenomorph cannot hit live. Even through brief testing, I've been knocked out of power as Xenomorph 13 times in 4 games as opposed to the usual handful A DAY of play. Turret counterplay used to be a fun skill ceiling to climb on Xenomorph, now turrets almost get guaranteed value no matter how well the Xenomorph plays.
In addition, the charge time for the Xenomorph does NOT feel accurate, feeling far longer than the 0.35 second nerf you gave. Not to mention the vignette for being burned stays for the ENTIRE duration, being distracting and for some, nauseating.
Please reconsider these changes as they make the character feel overall awful to play as and against. The main reason people avoid Xeno is dealing with the flame turrets and the sensory overload, which you have more than doubled with these changes.
Please walk it back!
Comments
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Watched the stream.
Looked bad.
Went and waited in line to try the changes.
Felt bad.gg
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It's really impressive that those changes even got past the drawing board.
It's like Skull Merchant's very first power design; anyone with a kernel of first-hand experience with the game immediately realized it was horrible after one look.
(Big fan btw, read some of your guide and recommended it to a few of my friends who were starting up).
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Completely agree with everything here! I have tried playing Xeno on the PTB (P32) and the dissipation of the burn is ridiculously long. Not only does the Xeno have to take time out of the chase to destroy the turret, like they did before, they are now also nearly guaranteed to be knocked out of their power if the survivor leads them to another turret, far away or close. They are unnecessarily punishing for a killer that can be forced into being an M1 only killer.
The burn vignette staying for the entire duration of the dissipation is just another kick. It was a cool affect when it didn't stay too long but now it feels as if it stays on the screen for half the match in total!
Please reconsider these changes.
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The developers said that they wanted to buff inexperienced players on survivors, so that their turrets would also make an impact.
But they incredibly overpowered SWF with Discord.
How the game against SWF happened before: I got out of the tunnel, broke the turret and started chasing one of the survivors. He ran to the next structure and there was already a new turret there, which his teammate had placed and reported on Discord where to run. I broke the second turret, and the survivor got time to run to the next loop, where the third turret was waiting for him. And so on until I broke all the turrets on the map and finally dealt a hit with the tail.
Now after these 4 turrets, I almost certainly lose the tail and try to hit the survivor in the loop by m1 without killer's ability, or I am forced to exit the chase, climb into the tunnel and get my tail back. I lose a ton of time, lose the chase, and the survivors without my pressure on the map just start genrush.
The developers did not just buff random inexperienced players without Discord. They made experienced SWF players with Discord almost invulnerable to the Xenomorph's ability.
Xenomorph's ability is not so strong compared to other high tier killers to make it SO dependent on the survivors' counterplay and at the same time so that the killer can't counter it.
Basically, now Xenomorph plays not against survivors, but against turrets. Not PVP, but some kind of PVE.4 -
iv not tried the ptb as im on console , xeno on console as he is, is really difficult , but with these changes coming to the tail strike, its going to be near enough impossible to hit any survivor. secondly from what i have seen on streams the amount of time you spend without the tail is way too extreme . double turrets are already strong , but now they are going to be really op. your players are your customers, please listen to us and revert the nerfs that will make this killer unfun to use, and virtually impossible to use on console
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First thing i did was try it as well since hes my main. If these changes go live i might as well just run around with no power and m1 everyone i can reach because this was not thought out. They couldve given xeno a holdable m2 like other killers if their concern was reaction time, delaying it doesnt help you dodge or hit with it any differently besides it just feeling more sluggish. And as far as the turrets goes, if their goal was to make xeno as undesirable to play as possible, even by their rare hardcore mains, then i think they've done a pretty good job so far.
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Agreed, these changes CANNOT go through, just scrap everything, none of these are good changes at all. Xenomorph does not need a double down nerf.
It's easy to just dodge tail on reaction now (i have missed so many tail attacks already compared to before its insane) and we can't flick, its just a worse nemesis whip in every way that can be deactivated easily and with no effort from survivors because they giga turbo buffed turrets into the strongest counter to any killer in the game.
It's just pathetic to play with, it's better to let turrets get you out of power and go into tunnel to refresh your power, because it's just way faster. It doesn't matter how good of a xeno player you are, you will always be forced out of the power, which is just terrible design. Survivors SHOULD NOT have complete agency over a killer power to the point they can just make them an M1 killer on demand with little thought, and we all know how bad M1 killers are in this game currently.
Why is there need for such an already strong counter to a power to get a huge buff while said power gets nerfed as well? Why is poor gameplay and bad decisions and usage of a survivor resource being passively rewarded with a guaranteed value? They have made an already frustrating to play killer that so few people play, far worse in every way possible.
These changes were made with NO CONSIDERATION to the xenomorph players whatsoever. If anyone from BHVR reads this, if you goal was to make the xenomorph into an unfun, unplayable mess that no one wants to play, then congrats, that's what you have accomplished. Balancing for the lowest denominator is literally THE WORST way to ever balance anything ever, because those players should eventually learn and improve and play correctly.
The problem was always that survivors never went against xenomorph enough to LEARN THE COUNTERPLAY, because its a killer that is generally unfun to play as for most people against even half competent survivors. So instead you make changes so that they'll see even less play, there's no logic here, make it make sense.
Guess ill only play Nurse and Blight now, thats the trend you are setting.
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The sad reality, they don’t care, survivors don’t find Xeno fun to play against, survivors have complained about the tail since its inception (even though pyramid heads power is similar, and better in every way) survivor fun and enjoyment at all ranks is paramount, the last victim of this was Chucky. Xeno is not popular enough or played enough for them to even notice the impact of these changes.
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after everything that I’ve seen about these changes, they absolutely need to be reversed. Zenomorph is gonna be played way less if these changes go through.
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The entire point of this killer is that it’s supposed to have a powerful M2 attack, which is balanced by the fact that turrets can completely take away its M2 power.
But now its M2 attack is so weak, that it doesn’t justify turrets existing at all. I’d rather play Nemesis, that often requires 3 hits instead of 2, because his M2 is way more reliable and I don’t need to worry about turrets turning him into an M1 killer.
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I agree, these changes are like the twins rework, just in the other direction powerwise.
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And Also, let the turrent has the cooldown that it wont stay active forever.
let say 60 sec after set up and it will run out of battery and destroy itself.
We should not have infinite counter like this
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I absolutely agree with the OP. The nerfs to this character are completely unjustifiable. What the devs are planning to do will be a nerf on the level that Skull Merchant received. It would make him completely unplayable, and one of the worst killers in the entire game. Completely unacceptable. Scrap all of the changes. None of them should go through.
The changes to his heat dissipation (both the 1——→15 second nerf and the reduction of his heat dissipation by ~92%) can not see the light of day under any circumstances. I struggle to follow the logic on this for what BhVR could possibly be thinking with applying such dramatic nerfs.6 -
The more disturbing precedent is that, with Skull Merchant, Chucky and now Xenomorph, any Killer deemed too "unfun" by players who are not good at playing against them can incentivize BHVR enough to completely destroy their design, making them so weak that only the most dedicated fans of the character would actually bother.
I liked Pyramid Head and Nemesis, but I have a very strong passion for Xenomorph and being essentially told to stop playing Xenomorph if I want to have an enjoyable time...I think I'd rather stop playing altogether.
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The thing is I'm not even sure there's going to be a dedicated Xeno playerbase after this. Xeno gets compared to Nemesis quite a bit and if you like how Xeno plays currently on live, I see no reason why you wouldn't jump ship to Nemesis.
Skull Merchant and Chucky both currently have something unique that makes it hard to just jump to a similar killer.
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I've watched your video on the matter and I have to say, xeno really shouldn't have gotten those changes that they have currently
It only made things way worse than it needed to be
Like surely these changes won't go through right?
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Terrible changes for real. Also, really not satisfying other add-ons changes, I expected more from such a massive change.
All that there's to say is in this video:
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Not here to play devil's advocate, but maybe things like "only getting out of power a handful a day" is one of the reasons why it needs to be nerfed, cause it's its counterplay after all. I don't play Xeno so I can't exactly give a fair critic, but I would guess that getting it out of power SHOULD be a given and SHOULD happen more than once in a match. Also I checked your video and you were doing well even with the nerfs. The tail attack delay even helped you in situations where survivors tried to dodge, but the delay let you reposition the attack and hit anyway, so maybe you are overreacting a bit. I think the most aggravating thing I saw was that heat builds up really quickly with the changes, even though you have almost double the "tolerance", for how slow dissipating it is.
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I saw the video this morning, it looks really bad.
#JusticeForXenoCat!
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Did some testing with Xeno yesterday and yeah, I agree these are not good changes at all. The tail feels much worse now and getting hit by 2 turrets in a short timespan is almost guaranteed to remove your power now, kinda like how double turret setups were before except the turrets don't even need to be close to each other anymore, just anywhere within 15-20 seconds of running distance will do the trick. It doesn't really matter how well the Xenomorph plays, previously you could avoid losing your power most of the time if you were good at Xeno but now you can't really. Turrets need to be impactful against this killer given the strength of the tail attack (at least before this PTB), but 2 turrets shouldn't be guaranteed to remove crawler mode either. At the same time, the tail attack needs to be strong given the existence of the turrets. The PTB changes remove a lot of the survivor skill expression in good turret placement, they make the tail attack far more clunky and difficult to use than before (making the killer feel bad to play), and overall these changes severely dumb down the killer to a degree where they are no longer fun to play as or play against.
Some of the addon changes are okay, but pretty much all the basekit changes should be rolled back (both the buffs and the nerfs), I don't think any of it should go through to live. Revert the tail charge time, revert the miss cooldown, revert the tunnel buffs, revert the turrets, revert everything except for the addon changes. None of this is good.
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Another voice in support of reverting the suggested PTB changes to Xenomorph.
BHVR, you already killed my girl Adriana. For the love of the Entity, don't nuke my Ultimate Weapon from orbit as well!1 -
Boosting this as well. These changes are so bad.....
I'm scared of what changes they have planned for plague and pinhead
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Sadly unlike Twins fail, this is not negative for survivors. So I am quite confident they will do it anyway.
Being terrible changes for the killer didn't stop them with Skully, or Chucky.3 -
These changes are effectively removing xeno from the game without actually removing it. It's already one of the least killers played in the game - this will effectively make it extinct.
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Just wanted to add that I agree with this post. I understand that Xeno can be a noob-stomper, but these changes will make their already low pick-rate become non-existent at higher levels, and miserable to play.
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This is an example of wasted resources. Xenomorph was one of the least used killers and these changes will only make the situation worse. So why bother? I thought that with Singularity they already understood that you can't leave a power in the hands of the survivors, no matter how strong the killer may be no one wants to play such annoyance.
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the issue with your point is that he's a dedicated xeno main, only getting knocked out of power 3 times a day is expected for that level of player
vs in the PTB 13 times in 4 matches, its an insane jump that clearly indicates that now the xenomorph has no counterplay to turrets and will get knocked out of power no matter how good they are at the killer. 3 per day is an outlier not the average, so when outliers are getting 13 in 4 matches imagine how much worse your average xeno is gonna be
and saying that he did BETTER with the M2 nerfs is clearly ignoring all the times where the delay would deny him a chance to hit, and you can still reposition in live
and yes you have almost double the tolerance, but running the numbers its 1.5 seconds vs 2.6 seconds to get burned out, whereas recovery time from a 99'd heat meter is 4 seconds vs 102.5. not even double thburn time in exchange for 25.6x the recovery time is insane5 -
I came back to DBD, after years away, for the initial Xeno release. The Xenomorph and Alien movies are extremely important to me personally. One of the main reasons I’ve stuck around to learn all the other killers I play (survivor as well) is because of the Alien licence and introduction of Ellen Ripley and the Xenomorph.
I normally don’t make posts, or chat in stream chats, but I’m there lurking and absorbing knowledge and loving the character. I go to Bran for much of my Xeno knowledge, and stand with all that is said here by THE Xeno main TheMrHeadache.
Sure there are things I would have liked to see different about the character, but I think in terms of the limitations of a multiplayer game BHVR did a pretty good job with my favourite movie monster of all time.
Please consider rethinking these changes. I have fallen in love with many DBD characters and kits (namely spirit, Vecna, and Oni) but the loss of The Xenomorph being decently playable may be the last straw for me.3 -
Because the point is that the turret still requires the killer to effectively go out of their way to either avoid it, or destroy it, thus giving the survivor more distance so that they can run to another turret. The point of the turrets is not to knock the killer out of the power, the point is to force the killer to deal with them or be severely punish for it.
You have to remember that without being in crawler mode, xeno literally has no power. Its like an oni for example.
Its similar to pig's traps for example. Good pig players aren't using the traps to get kills, the point of the traps is to force the survivors to get off of gens, and remove the traps, and if they don't, they risk just dying outright. So when you trap a survivor, you don't tunnel them, you ignore them mostly (sure you can harass them a bit if you run into them, but you aren't going out of your way to go after them)
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These changes are an insult to any xeno fan. It would be better to outright remove her from the game than to disgrace her like this. Some of us spent hours and money into this killer and even with all the problems she had we still played her. Xeno wasnt as good as top tier killers but we still had fun, a small yet loyal playerbase. These changes feel like a kick to the balls for no other reason than pure spite. Tail attack was ok-ish, we can get used to that. But this heat dissipation change is equal to hate speech.
I wish the person who made this would speak openly why and how did this get into his/her head. Im really interested in seeing which drugs are you using.
If you really wanted to change something about xeno but you didnt know what exactly, you could ve just found some objective top tier players and ask them about their opinions, since they know more about your character than you do, instead of listening to tons of mad survivor mains complaining about every killer that isnt an M1. These ppl have no credibility to speak, hell, they dont even wanna learn the counterplay, yet you consider them to have a valid opinion. If these changes go through you can expect a lot of your fanbase leaving dbd.
It seems to me that you ppl from BHVR care more about what survivors think than what is objectively good for the game. MAYBE Im wrong, but only MAYBE. Its up to you to show me if Im right.YOUR MOVE BHVR.
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Thos is what boggles my mind most; Xeno is already a killer designed purely for survivor enjoyment; the turrets act as basekit WoO with the cherry on top bring a chase breaker.
IIdk How much easier or perfect a survivor friendly killer could be, but here we are.
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it’s surprising he’s not popular cause besides FNAF and F13, Alien was the 3rd most requested character to be added to dbd
I see why he’s not popular though. A boring un fun and uninteresting power that’s annoying for survivor and killer. It sucks cause alien is such a cool character stuck with a mid power. Compared to Vecna and Dracula it’s like they didn’t even try
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Watched your video Bran. Completely agree. I've been playing Xeno since launch and these changes just hurt. Really hope they don't go through. Alien is my favorite horror franchise ever, AVP 2010 was one of my first introduction to horror games, and I was one of those weird kids that wrote stories in the alien universe on fanfiction.net :P . I've always played the character because of my absolute love for the franchise and the Xenomorph creature in general. That being said….
I find it insulting enough that flame turrets even exist in the first place, when runner mode gives absolutely nothing to Xeno. Xenomorph is, legitimately, the only killer in the entire game that can have their entire power removed with zero gain or cushioning for the Killer.
You can use tapes against Sadako, fountains against Plague, solve the box against pinhead, use clocks to wake up against freddy, remove demogorgans portals, use vaccines against wesker and nemisis, get artists crows off yourself, lock the dredges lockers, use EMP's against Singularity, Dispel Unknown clones. But in every single one of these instances, the killer is still left with something to use in chase, even if it's much weaker. Sometimes these interactions can even be used in the killers favor.
Sadako can (try) to condemn survivors by corralling tapes, and at the very least can still demanifest herself in chase, and teleport to TV's on command.
Fountains give Plague the ability to vomit projectiles that damage survivors, and even without them, she can infect survivors and objects, leading to an inevitable breaking of their health state.
Sure, you can wake up against Freddy, but doing so grants him invisibility at a certain range, and he can still teleport to generators on command.
Demogorgon always has their shred ability even if their portals are removed, meaning they always have a method of anti-loop.
Artist can hit you before you dispel crows if they're good enough.
Dredge can always use their remnant at loops no matter what, ensuring they always have some form of anti-loop.
Singularity can always replace turrets at a literal whim, replacing cams in less than a second, meaning if they can see a survivor, they can always use their power.
The Unknown can always use their UV in loops, ensuring they ALWAYS have a form of anti-loop. Dispelling the clones even comes with the added risk of being caught in a teleport.
Nemesis can always use his whip as anti loop no matter what. I can be annoying having to burn three health states but the option to anti loop always exists.
Good Wesker players do not care about Vaccines. They can ALWAYS use their Virulent bound as a method of anti loop.
Pinhead at least gets the option to teleport to the user of the box, ensuring a free chase. Not to mention they ALWAYS have the ability to use their chain gate, meaning they ALWAYS have an anti loop.
But Xenomorph? Nothing. Nada. Once they are broken from their power, thats it. No Virulent bound, no shred, no tentacle whip, no instant teleport, no crows, no remnant, no projectile infections, no UV, no cameras to place, no chains, absolutely nothing. They are rendered completely basic with absolutely nothing, and are the only killer in the entire game that inherently gives the survivors this ability.
Turrets should have never been able to break you out of power in the first place. Slow you? Sure. But if they wanted to remove your entire ability, Xenomorph players should have always gotten something out of it, because that has been the design philosophy for every single killer in the game but them. Maybe you destroy pallets faster in runner mode, or move slightly faster, or have some sort of base kit stealth. Something.
It was never a fair design to begin with- and that still wasn't enough.
That sucks.
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i agree! please reconsider the PTB changes.
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It's almost like the devs don't play their own game. Or when they do, they're embarrassingly bad and make changes based on that.
I also wholly agree with being disturbed by the trend of killers getting nerfed based on feedback from baby survivors. This needs to stop and reverse course immediately. I know you guys want new players to stay, but nerfing killers every patch is not the way to do it.
I'm also very scared that you plan to change pinhead in the same way (right after getting the final payout.)
If only they had a dedicated group of experienced players to get feedback and suggestions from. 👀
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My comment has been deleted & edited for being inappropriate and written in a negative frame of mind.
Post edited by TheSingularity on-2
