Tunneling

Having to take a chase is “pain” for you?
But if I’m supposed to stop tunneling… what toys are you giving up on the survivor side then?
A nice, clean tunnel, a little bit of slugging when it makes sense — I like my toys, y’know?
I mean, I really love it when a good, clean tunnel goes brrrrr.

Efficiency is beautiful. ✨

…

"spreading the love" between the remaining Survivors is still doable once the first person is out and the tunnel is done :D

make those basekit which will effect the lower tier killers potentially killing their playrate even more then what?

nurse/ blight all over again for another year?

making perks basekit is a bandaid fix, it should not have been a thing to begin it, give the killers a reason not to tunnel, not punish them and not fix the problem

don't blame the killers

blame the fact everyone seems to be ignoring the fact gens are overtuned as hell and are no longer pressurable

i had mulitple nice killers who started tunneling when 3 gens flew in one short chase

hell killers are currently playing with 3 gens

no matter how bad or good your chase is u will always lose 2 gens it was 1 gen before springtrap

so you know getting one person out fast makes the game winnable, less stressful and more managable, it also makes it so survivors are gonna lose because how this game is designed for the survivors to fall down like legos the moment one survivor dies

yup .. exactly this.

Perks should never be there to fix design flaws – they’re supposed to add variation, not be mandatory to patch bad game design. Without old Borrowed Time, survivors just wouldn’t get away once camping started. No matter what. It wasn’t right that players had to bring a perk just to counter that situation.

There are still hooks in the worst RNG spots on some of the worst survivor maps where, without solid bodyblocks, OTR, or DS, survivors just can’t get away. Map design and RNG are the real problem here—looking at you, Borgo… Coldwind… sometimes Haddonfield. What’s really needed are map reworks, not basekit stuff.

Sure, you could just throw DS and OTR into basekit (let’s be real, people tunnel through those perks anyway—just let the tunnel run), but then survivors would actually have perk slots for other stuff. That wouldn’t be healthy.

Nurse and Blight already dominate as it is—they’d just end up being even more common. Classic “fix” that really isn’t a fix.

Killers that tunnel basically limit themselves and stop themselves from getting better at the game in exchange for some cheap wins. And it's a vicious cycle too. Once their MMR starts rising from all the undeserved wins they get faced with better survivors that know how to punish tunnelling more effectively (be it, by just being better loopers in general or whatever), they will need to start using all of the best tools in their kit to stay competitive in their inflated MMR, which will then reside in even more tunneling or cheap tactics for cheap wins.

Why is tunneling the only "cheap" tactic? It's a tactic you can use that helps you win. You could say the same if anything else. "Oh survivors who bring medkits/toolboxes artificially inflate their MMR and then they'll go against stronger killers they need to rely on items more and more for more cheap escapes. Survivors hurt themselves by bringing items." Like no, tunneling isn't some oversight exploit that breaks the game. It is a part of the game that you can use if you'd like and know how to and that can help you.

That's also completely disregarding how the person being tunneled feels about it, which is another pain-point entirely. But since the overarching mentality that's been plaguing this game has been "I am not responsible for your fun" (For both sides by the way), I doubt that's gonna change anytime soon.

Killers losing games isn't particularly fun either. I personally hate chemical trap and syringes, but that doesn't mean Survivors are bad for using them.

I don't think hook timers have been extended either

In fairness, they did add an extra 10 seconds to hook stages about a year ago. While sorely needed, it still doesn't change your other point that:

That means you can't pop all the gens while that Survivor is hooked without risking more dying in the process. It's incredibly tight and is unlikely to be successful unless you're blessed by the matchmaking gods.

Tunneling is a playstyle, items are not. At best, you could compare survivor items with killer add-ons, in which case I could ask you the exact same thing as you did with items.

Why can't I compare playstyles to items? They are both things you can relatively easily try to use for an advantage. The same arguments can apply. You are just using a seemingly arbetrary line to draw a distinction.

Also, items and add-ons don't change the core gameplay loop in a way that streamlines and deprecates gameplay as much as tunneling does.

They absolutely do. Tunneling is the same gameplay loop. Get chased, get downed, get hooked, meanwhile the other Survivors do gens. Items meanwhile. Syringe and Styptic essentially give Survivors a free health state for free, Flashlights and Flashbangs add a whole new element in the form of saves even without pallets, Fog Vials add on demand LOS obstruction. Items definitely affect the gameplay loop more than tunneling.

"Killers losing games isn't particularly fun either." Again, same thing could be said for survivors. Besides, just because you don't tunnel, doesn't mean that you will lose, far from it infact, statistically. The game still has a 60% Killrate after all, and even higher for alot of Killer Mains, but that is not the topic of this thread anyways.

Yeah that was my point. Losing isn't fun for either side. So we shouldn't just suddenly put in huge balance changes against slugging/tunneling unless we know how to counter ramifications. Killers have a 60% killrate overall, tunneling included. Also, I am kind of confused on this point. Yeah, I won't lose every game without tunneling, so? Like am I supposed to be like "Damn, this game is wineable but I am already over the average winrate so I should just give up?" Like no, people generally play to win, regardless of how much they are supposed to.

Tunneling is a choice and a tactic. Items are part of the game's design. They're not comparable.

Tactics and hook stages are also part of the games design? Like there is no law that would stop the devs from putting in something like "Oh, once you get 12 hooks all Survivors die and never before that." Tunneling is not an exploit. Items and tactics are both parts of the games design.

I win some games, lose others. I never tunnel, and actively avoid recently uhooked survivors. I'm playing the game as I believe it was intended to be played, and I have the exact 60% kill rate the game shoots for.

My killrate on Skull Merchant is 77% and my Killrate on Dracula is 52%. That doesn't mean Skull Merchant is S Tier or that Dracula is mid. Self reported data from a few individuals doesn't say much about the general balance of a game of millionsm, especially if we have better data.

Last time it was reported the escape rate data was at roughly 40% overall and easily over 40% at high MMR (https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/1k58ik7/stats_january_march_2025/) this data of course includes people who tunnel.

wdym?

I’ve just been a super active player since release. I’m just really careful with some of the people here on the forums. There are a ton of “forum mains.”

The last person who tried to tell me about “cheap wins,” “low skill,” and “git gud, you just have to improve” had 5k posts on the forum but hadn’t even played 100 hours in DBD since 2021. I rack that up in two weeks easy.

Sorry, but when someone plays so little (and not even on Killer), it’s hard for me to take any of their “advice” seriously. There are people (like me) who play this game competitively, and tunneling/slugging and all that stuff is just part of it.

It’s just funny how it always goes in the direction of: “You don’t have macro and can’t play/win any other way.” Just because you pick the most efficient strategy whenever the opportunity presents itself (no, there are plenty of matches where straight tunneling isn’t the best choice).

You can do this in a lot of standard-average lobbies (even in high MMR) without perks and without add-ons. It’s basically a coinflip if u against “average teams”—so why should I gamble?

Especially when I read the mindset of a lot of people: “You just have to know how,” “You’re just bad,” “You haven’t developed the necessary skills.”

Being constantly confronted with this mindset from the DBD community, something I’ve really never seen in any other PvP game, I’d rather just end these lobbys fast, clean, and as efficiently as possible.

This survivor community is sometimes so entitled, (or people like u are just ready to throw out, “you can’t even play this game no macro/no skill) I just don’t care about weaker lobbies anymore.

Not that you’re thinking of.

"but maybe not 85% though, and that's what's stopping you."

I honestly don’t give a damn about my kill rate, but I’ve got my principles.

For me, it’s simple—just like in Tarkov, Hunt, CS, or basically any other PvP: learn the game and fight back, oru will die fast in this match. Yup, I know, DBD isn’t the same because it’s asymmetrical. But I’ve never seen a community so damn unwilling to learn, but honestly, every time I’m confronted with the mindset of people in this game (forum, after-chat, whatever), I really ask myself: why should I even care?

And there are plenty of people who play the game competitively, and their perspectives and opinions can be pretty different from the (admittedly way bigger) casuals… but it’s always the ones who just want their experience to count.

i mean.. like this guy:

cogsturning

Brother, you are wasting your time.

…and tons of other “I downvote everything and my opinion is the only one that matters” people. :D

classic dbd community.

but..

Luckily, at the end of the day, everyone can play however they want as long as they’re not abusing bugs, glitches, or breaking ToS. That’s exactly what I’ll keep doing myself—without holding back (not even in casual lobbies, because I know this community way too well). And yip,

I’ll still keep saying it on the forums whenever this tunnel talk pops up again…:

tunneling is part of the game.

Slugging is part of the game.

Proxy camping is part of the game.

Both sides playing for the win is just part of the game

Edit: One side easing up in weaker lobbies might be possible in DBD (compared to shooters), but it should never be the baseline expectation—yet that’s exactly what the survivor community constantly demands. And the moment you don’t play along, it’s always the same story in DBD. No gifts: survivors instantly show their worst side. That’s why I just end those matches as fast and clean as possible—give them a reason to finally start learning the game instead of just flaming or complaining.

Why should commonality determine balance? Hag is the lowest pickrate killer in the game. Does that mean they should never change hag again? What about maps? Map offerings are extremely rare nowadays and there are lik 45 different maps you could go to, so odds are any given map is very rare, and each time they add a new one all the other become more rare. Should they never rebalance maps? Or does the arbetrary line get drawn somewhere between these points?

I mean, syringes are low skill, but outside of chase do you know what is also low skill? Holding M1 on a survivor for 16 seconds. I do agree that it can save time to use a syringe if you don't tunnel, but it takes as little skill as healing outright, which is literally holding a button and hitting some skillchecks. 

Thats why I said low skill, high reward. Even ignoring you can use the medkit normally between popping a syringe, saving 16 seconds for each Survior or 32 second total is huge. There are definintely tons of games where the results would have been completely different if the last gens popped 32 seconds earlier/later.

But when you get tunneled you still need to not get hit in order for it to work. I honestly don't understand this argument at all.

If Survivors go down consistently in less than 16 seconds, that is a skill issue on their part, and the killer would very likely have won without tunneling. And if you don't get for 16 seconds off the hook its a free health state.

Besides, you are completely overlooking the fact that Killer perks exist. People that tunnel usually bring a plethora of gen slowdown perks like dead man's switch, grim embrace, corrupt, deadlock, pain res, surge, heck even thrilling tremors if you wanna get fancy. These perks literally take the job of having to apply some map pressure by just passively slowing the game down, or pushing survivors in a certain direction in corrupt's case. It requires no input from the Killer besides pain res (which is probably one of the worst tunnel perks anyways since it requires you to hook different people, and at that point you aren't tunneling anymore, you are splitting hooks) and applies map pressure by itself.

Dead Man's Switch requires you to let go off the gen, which in your view of tunneling the killer doesnt do. Grim Embrace requires different hooks to be remotely good. Corrupt only blocks some gens, meaning Survivor can just do the others and deactivates once you get a down. Surge requires the person to take chase to the gens being done. Thrilling Tremors only blocks gens nobody is working on. Deadlock and Pain Res are the only ones where you get free pressure without doing anything while tunneling. And by the same logic, Survivors have perks and items. Deja Vu, Hyperfocus, Brand New Parts, etc…

Okay, are we talking about the same tunneling? When you tunnel, you don't split pressure pretty much at all, unless the person that is being tunnelled is currently on the hook in which case you would usually try to disturb survivors from completing generators. Tunneling is specifically used because you DON'T need to split pressure or objectives, rather hyperfixating on making the game a 1v3 in the shortest amount of time.

You need to effeciently pressure objectives while the Survivor is on the hook, while also being in the position to return in time before they sneak off. Don't pressure enough and the team pushes through gens before the tunnel is done, too much and you lose your tunnel target.

Also, by "cheapest" I mean, once again, that it is low skill high reward.

If cheap means "low skill high reward", then anything is cheap. Lets talk about window vaults. By vaulting one you get distance on the killer for the price of holding shift and pressing a spacebar. Slap on Finesse to make the vault save and Lithe to get distance to use it on the next vault. Also it is not technically impossible to win as Survivor without using vaults? So is vaulting a cheap tactic that needs to be addressed?

You slap on gen slowdown, load into the match, find the mikaela, down her, hook her, go to some gens to get survivors of of them if your perks didn't do that by themselves until she is unhooked, then return to down her again, presumably whilst she only has one health state since she just got unhooked, rinse and repeat.

The average killer cannot teleport back to the hook. If you leave to pressure gens and the Survivors play it well, odds are they are gone by the time you return to the hook. And if you don't pressure gens you don't pressure gens. Unless you play Blight or Kaneki pressuring Gens and unhooks at the same time is far from easy.

Also if tunneling is as OP, easy and common as y'all are saying it must have a massive effect on the killrate and just removing it would drop it massively. Even in your view, it would argue for massive killer buffs along with anti-tunnel changes, not just anti-tunnel changes.

Well you can't really generalise and say that a survivor should never go down quickly since that also undermines Killer skill or any Anti-Loop powers of the ever growing roster of Killers. And you know, if the Killers could have easily won without tunneling in that case, why didn't he do it? Because it is easier to do with tunneling.

I mean not really. If you don't last more than 16 seconds in chase consistently the skill between you and the killer is big enough so that the killer deserves to win. Also, killers tunnel because they don't know that. You don't know if the game is easy or hard until you a certain amount of time invested in it. And sometimes if you want to win you need to tunnel.

 Honestly, in all, comparing a playstyle with items doesn't make sense either way, that's like comparing professional football players via the shoes they are wearing and how that somehow dictates how they play and not just by how they play.

I mean if the shoes had a huge effect on the outcome of the game, with different types of shoes offering different huge upsides and downsides, and each player picking different shoes based on what they want to do, then yeah they should be discussed the same as strategy.

Vaulting as an action itself might just require a button press, but much more goes into it to make it meaningful in the game. As a survivor and also killer you have to be able to judge your angle to the vault, distance to the vault, distance to the killer or survivor, whether it is useful to vault, whether it is useful to pull a mindgame or not, (this only for survivors) whether the angle you have to the vault will result in a medium or fast vault, which might change how you approach it and if you do decide to vault where to go after the vault. And of course, actually pressing the button to vault. In a vacuum, each of these things might be simple and given some time, you could probably determine the optimal play, but in a game, where you might have to do splitsecond decisions based on all of these things and more like whether the survivor or killer is doubling back, it is a very complicated task to do in a fairly fast paced game like DBD.

Don't get me wrong, in a lot of cases the answer to the question of "should you vault" is an obvious one, depending on the circumstances, but when killer and survivors are mindgaming each other at a loop and you make the right decisions based on game knowledge and prior experiences, that's what one would call skill. The difference to tunneling in this case, is that vaulting is a high risk play in a lot of cases, where one wrong splitsecond decision vault could mean getting hit or downed, as to where tunneling is a safe bet in most cases. As killer, you usually have to worry about quite alot of things in a game at all times if you don't tunnel, like what the map looks like, tracking where survivors are, having a general overview of gen progress on non completed things, an overview of survivor resources and maybe even perks.

Why? Because they have a huge impact at how you approach the game and where you want to be at anyone time. With tunneling, the answer of where you wanna be is obvious at all times. At the start of the game you need to find your tunneling target, and then chase them. When you hook them, go to a generator that might be getting worked on, but not too far away from the hook as to where you can't return it. With ever smaller maps that's getting easier and easier aswell. Once the target gets unhooked, you return to the hook, where, unless you ran to the opposite site of the map (which should result in you getting punished since its a misplay and should be obvious if you plan to tunnel), you will either find the survivors healing, or scratch marks leading to them. Rinse and repeat. The first survivor will be dead fairly quickly and now you are at a massive advantage with the 1v3. Just one more hook and finding another chase is enough to halt generator progress completely. But hey, you still have 2 generators left if you tunneled well, or 1 if you didn't.

You could the same exact thing about vaulting abouT tunneling. Tunneling absolutely can lose the killer a game. And it is also a complex thing that requires a lot of decision making that you are oversimplifying here.

Okay, I will adjust my theory for you in that case. When the Anti-Tunnel changes take effect and everyone would stop tunneling immediately, then yes, for a while, I would expect the kill rates to fall, as people who have relied on it to win games lose more games. After a while though, it would adjust again and probably rise back to a similar, probably slightly lower Killrate as peoples MMR adjusts since they after a while will verse people that they can beat without tunneling. 

That theory can't account for top or bottom MMR. Bottom MMR players can't fall lower, and top MMR players will match with the closest player. You can't have a top MMR made only out of Survivors.

Killrates probably won't quite reach what they were before the anti-tunnel changes though, and that's where you then can apply buffs to rectify this issue. You could of course buff killers along with the tunnel changes, but if the tunnel changes turn out to be worthless, you have suddenly just massively buffed killers. Whether BHVR will go the route of Anti-Tunnel Changes first, killer buffs or later, or both at the same time, with potential killer nerfs down the line is up to them. One of the two has to happen, and depending what role you play most, you would probably prefer one of the two options. Either way, BHVR will get heat for their decision.

Buffing down the line as a concept does not work well, if you want people to keep playing. If you nerf killer and then tell killer players "Hey, you might have a killrate of 24% against SWF now, but in a few months to year we will fix it" then people are just not going to play killer for a few months. Look at Skull Merchant. Her playrate is less than half of what it was when she got nerfed. If you want to nerf something, without it affecting the overall playrate, then the buffs need to come alongside it.