http://dbd.game/killswitch
Clown Changes (9.1.0)
Unfortunately I'm not onboard with them, I don't really like the idea of placing greater emphasis on The Clown's invigoration bottles because I personally don't really like using them.
I play Clown to be an area denial killer, I really like the gameplay of placing negative zones that discourage and impair survivor's options. It makes me feel like how using molotovs in Left 4 Dead feels, you throw bottles down where you don't want your threats to be, in advance, to eliminate their options. That's the gameplay fantasy I like to engage with in Clown.
But I never really saw the need for the alternate projectile, I really liked the depth of his area denial alone, and adding a second bottle adds all kinds of complexities to his gameplay, such as having to manage your single inventory of the two bottles. Having to switch between them with only one button based of "tapping" and "holding" which for a player is a vague and approximate type of control distinction, especially for two actions that do not resemble one another. And that these bottles do not provide area denial, they require different skills and consideration which massively increase the amount of mental bandwidth to engage with proficiently.
It's just not something I'm particularly interested in engaging with, because ultimately it makes Clown far too complex with adding very much nuance(?) As in, it just becomes a matter of placing down two zones (in a specific order) to create a bigger speed differential, but takes a hell of a lot more inputs.
I think, ultimately, if I am forced to use invigoration bottles more or invigoration bottles are made more central to the Clown's gameplay, I would rather just not play Clown. Invigoration bottles are strong and useful, but they just don't relate to the gameplay I want out of Clown.
Comments
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I agree, although the bottles are best used together. assuming the bottles can essentially balance out I imagine veteran clown players will be fine. Although I don't see why this change was needed at all.
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I think it isn't meant to be an emphasis on the yellow bottles so much as feeling like they accidentally emphasized purple bottles too much and wanting to make them feel equal. Obviously if they actually managed that remains to be seen
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If you're sleeping on the yellow bottles then you really should reevaluate.
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True but purples objectively are the most fun and skillful part of Clown's kit and those changes are clearly dumbing him down by putting both bottles usages in competition with each other. 1 yellow should not be worth 1 purple by default. People who love yellows more already can give the edge to their yellow bottles via addons, there's no need to reshape his default ecosystem like that.
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They arent that good most times is hard to get value from them and cost you mere time on one loop in some instancess survivor can just leave and go to other loop before you set up not to mention you need addons to make them better or his purple so its better to use thats the reason why most clown mains I met didnt even use then. Now they will buff them and nerf the purple ones idk why if its like decrease hindred from 15% to 12% than is kinda ok but more would suck, less reason to bother playing clown he is slow with no mobility and his antiloop is just predrop and hold m1 on gens all that is needed to beat him nothing hard.
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I feel like we need to try it out before making a decision. A
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I don't like it either i've been playing clown using purple 95% of the time for 5+ years, yeah it could be suboptimal and I don't care… I understand increasing activation speed for yellow because it's really slow, but the nerfs to purple aren't needed
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I dont think that they are the most fun and skillful part. Fun is subjective, I think using the yellow bottles in good ways is more fun than just using the purple ones. But as I said, it is subjective, so I can see people think otherwise.
But saying that the purple bottles are the most skillful part… No, not at all. Purple bottles are the absolute baseline. And all skill you use for those can be used for the yellow ones to more extend. IMO using the yellow bottles well is more of a skill expression than using the purple bottles.
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yeah i really hope the buff is effectively just making the haste/hinder effects equal 12.5% instead of 10 and 15%
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Over emphasized? The tonics ARE the killer power, now I'll admit I have bias in that Clown was the first killer added to DBD when I played, and it was a very exciting time for me. Back then, clown ONLY had the tonics, so for me, they ARE the power, the invigoration bottles are just something to make him more "competitively viable" I don't really care about that, I just want to exclusively use the purple bottles because that's what that interests me about Clown personally.
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It's not that I'm sleeping on them it's just that I deliberately do not want to integrate them into my gameplay despite their usefulness. And I'm not interested in the killer design being adjusted to force my hand. I don't find that gameplay as enjoyable and I'm expressing myself now. I know the yellow bottles are very powerful, but that's not really the focus of my point with this discussion.
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I don't really think I agree with this at all, I think the invigoration bottles are a good addition to the Clown overall, I just don't like the idea of being strong armed into using them, I'm happy ignoring them and that's really my concern at the moment.
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Definitely, once I get a chance to test it in practice it's probably fine, This discussion should be mainly about first impressions and initial concerns.
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The main reason I dont CURRENTLY use yellow bottles more is simply because the activation time makes them kinda unwieldy. With them shortening that down... I could definitely see myself utilizing them more. Kinda just depends if it hits that sweet spot.
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Most clowns literally just do nothing but skilllessly throw purple after purple spamming hinder making the chase boring as heck because there isnt really one. I'd rather go against 100 ghouls in a row than the boring garbage gameplay that is clown bottle spammer as a baseline.
Gut the purple or its hinder value and emphasise the yellows more.
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I definitely agree that spamming purple bottles is a problem, but that was why when clown was first introduced he slowed himself down with each throw, this meant unless you effectively blocked an area throwing a bottle directly at a survivor was a waste of time. Because the Clown isn't huntress, his bottles aren't meant to hit survivors they are meant for area denial.
This is to say I'd rather the movement speed make a comeback rather then weakning the tonics themselves.2 -
Trust me, you should be happy that those unoptimal Clown players don't use their yellow.
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It's just weird that bhvr seems unable to just give killers buffs instead of wrapping any buff with a nerf.
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To change Clown and Knight without just buffing them is unreal. Good Pig got some love of the weaker killers but this is just stupid.
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I don't think nerfing the purple bottle and buffing the yellow bottle will make people use the yellow bottle more, it'll just make the people playing less with the clown. The purple one is his signature power, the only type of bottle he had before the rework. If you force people to use both bottles for being effective it will make him more difficult and less people will play him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just let the people use only the purple one if they want, even if it is suboptimal it felt good anyway, like the old clown with a single type of bottle. The good players use them combined anyway. Also the latency make the bottle switching fail sometimes and this issue will be more noticeable.
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You realise you're just exchanging one annoyance for another
"Clown just speeds himself up with his bottles, with no counterplay"
As least as survivor, being hindered is something you can avoid or counter with good pallet use. You won't be able to stop Clown getting haste.
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Thats what people forget that yellow bottles arent just buffing clown but survivor too and without purple ones or box of cigar they dont have alone much utility only as some mobility if we call it but 10% speed thats nothing great for mobility other killers have teleport (freddy simular to clown but much better because he has teleport), houndmaster, wraith. But no need to panic this may be same as xeno changes good/neutral on paper and horrible in ptb more horror that DBD has itself with turrets so we have to see what devs cooked this time same as knight banner spawn.
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bhvr forces killers to play their game their way, even if that mean completely gutting the killer to be more survivor friendly.
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Yeah I don't really get this choice either. Maybe in their play testing they found current state purple bottles with the purposed buffed yellow ones felt too oppressive in chases? We'll find out soon enough I suppose but I'm not optimistic.
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I do not like speed buffs on killers as a means to “buff” them. It feels cheap to go against, and it’s the reason why I despise Wraith so much. I would prefer for both Wraith & Pig’s stealth to have been buffed, and speed increase omitted. I like Pig terror radius going away quicker. Her knife being unsheathed should get a buff like Demo’s hiss before he attacks; when you hear it and don’t see it- you know you’re definitely getting hit. As for Wraith- remove his heavy foot steps when cloaked, decrease the amount of distance before you see him cloaked, remove his snarl when cloaked, and give him that bell add-on where you can’t tell where he is at on the map, as default. Now that would make Wraith scary as hell.
As for Clown, I feel like he’s in a good spot now. Maybe keep him as is and remove the option for survivors to get use out of his yellow piss bottles? I don’t play Clown, but sometimes I get the impression certain clown players are scared to use them more often out of fear the survivor will get more value than the clown himself.
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So after giving my hand at a couple of clown matches I'm really not impressed or even upset, it's a very lukewarm feeling, My matches went fine but there were definitely instances where my preferred playstyle for clown lacked opportunities that I had before.
It's not like clown is ruined, and just like heinously bad it's just that I feel ostracized from playing a killer I didn't really much encouragement to play anyway.
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Yeah, a lot of not-so-good Clown players are scared of using yellow bottles because they (poorly) do so and therefore often end up giving the buff to survivors. Maybe BHVR was catering to those types of players all along with this rework…
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I'll definitely be trying it out. Only reason I didnt use the yellow bottles more is due to how far you had to toss them for it to work for you. Reducing it down to half that makes it alot easier to get value.
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Clown is OP on PTB with 2 speed addons, add Rapid Brutality and it's fast -4 in every game
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I bet, it's such a shame because I don't really want to play clown like that, I want to play area denial after all.
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Coming from a P100 Clown that plays him very similar to Arinad, this change is catastrophic. I’ve always enjoyed using both of his powers and utilizing them at every single loop with strategic measures. At first, I only thought this would greatly affect the players that only used his pinks but I was oh so very wrong. This SHOULD NOT see the light of day. That 3% lesser hindrance along with smaller pink clouds and a second less linger literally MASSACRED him. His yellows being buffed DOESN’T come CLOSE to accommodate for the nerf to his pinks. You’d have to run Flask and Ether just to get him “close” back to what his base kit once was. Dude is already not a strong killer overall, and to destroy him? You’ll HAVE to break EVERY pallet now instead of taking strategic measures to get hits around them. Survivors get very noticeable difference in distances. They will be able to make pallets and even quick vaults faster with the 1 second linger. All the strategic play styling on Clown will have completely died. They really want people to just play him using quick yellows to go faster and to break pallets.
Only a true Clown main that plays him very calculated and strategic truly know the absolute pain of this nerf. This was completely uncalled for. I don’t even camp, tunnel or slug and try to go for 12 hook stages. As long as I’ve played this killer, I’ve NEVER felt so weak in chases. Ironic since he’s such an aggressive chase killer. It’s all the dude had, and they straight stripped him of it..
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If you really can't see and feel this nerf even with the yellows buffed, then you really should reevaluate. His yellow buffs doesn't even accommodate for the over nerf of his pinks.
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Was talking in terms of what's live now, not the PTB. It's to players that only use the purple bottles.
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So now on ptb purple is only 12% hinder and when you leave smoke it last only 1 second instead 2 which is huge (hider aadon is 2% not 4% so now maximum you can get is 14% hinder with his kit). Yellow is faster only second to start, 12% haste instead 10% and smoke pool is larger but still it buffs survivors and if both clown and survivor have haste 12% then its bigger buff for survivor why? Survivors have smaller hitbox so they can hug loops easier and better than killers making them faster on loops. If this goes live clown is top 4 worst killers he si weak now and this makes him even worse.
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Now they can only use yellow because thers no need to use purple, lok at freddy he gets 12% hinder for 4 seconds on sleeping survivors and has 5 seconds cooldown or 6 idk now, on top of that he gets every 30 seconds teleport to healing surv while sleeping or gens(gates if he has addon) and some stealth when survivors are asleep plus dream paletts. All Im saing is not nerf freddy but there no reason to play clown if this goes live just like skullmerchant or trapper (this comes from old trapper main ).
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Pig terror radius could be a nerf against attentive players tho, and buffing stealth really does nothing against good players while speed does make the difference.
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I apologize. I completely misunderstood. Hope this doesn't go through because I honestly don't think they understand how much they actually gutted him doing these changes. It's gunna be a boring and brain dead playstyle that's gunna be LESS effective. All that time, fun and bloodpoints I've sunk into this killer, I don't see myself ever playing as him again.
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Bhvr:
— Survivors aren't using part of their kit!
— lets giga buff the part of their kit they are not using
— (bad/baby) killers aren't using part of their kit!
— lets giga nerf (to borderline unplayable) the part of their kit and related add-ons they use
Double standard much, mister "pretty good job so far"?
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In Clown's case they literally nerfed every single of his good addons, not only the purple ones. Also, I fail to see the "giga" surv buffs. Could you enlighten us?
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I think they're talking about healing perks. Not sure if I'd call them giga buffs but I kinda see what he means.
I run do no harm on my builds and my friend runs resurgence, and I can basically heal him in like 3 seconds on 2 hook states.
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