Suggestion for Improvements [Perks/Meta/Gameplay]
I’ve been playing mainly as a survivor for 7 years now. I understand that everyone should have fun while playing. Here are some survivor-side change ideas. I’m here to suggest improvements, not to ruin the player experience in any way.
Observations
- Currently, survivors are too fragile during chases.
- With the many mechanics added over time, killers win most 1v1 situations very quickly.
- This makes chases short, frustrating, and often hopeless for survivors.
⚡ But the chase phase is the core of the fun in DBD.
It’s the moment that creates stress, tension, and unexpected turnarounds.
👉 Therefore, this part of the gameplay needs to be given more weight again.
Global Balance Proposal
1. Strengthen Survivors in Chases
- Slightly increase survivors’ base speed.
- Reduce or remove penalties after falling from a height.
🎯 Goal: Survivors should be able to win multiple chases in a single match, not just last a few seconds before going down.
2. Greatly Slow Down Generators
- Instead of repairing directly, survivors must first search for parts scattered around the map to activate a generator before repairing it.
- Once activated, generators should also require more repair time than today.
🎯 Goal: Compensate for stronger chase potential and prevent matches from ending too quickly.
New Survivor Perks Ideas
- Soft Landing
Removes recovery time after a fall. Cooldown: 20/30/40s. - One More Time
After the Entity blocks a window, the survivor can vault it once more. Cooldown: 40/50/60s. - Full Speed Ahead
Survivor runs 3/4/5% faster while not exhausted.
In exchange, they are Broken until the end of the match.
Does not stack with other speed perks. - Boon: Duty Calls
Within a 32m radius, survivors can build fragile pallets on designated spawn points.
Changes to Existing Perks
- Dead Hard
- Should become permanently usable again, like a regular exhaustion perk, with a cooldown of 40/50/60s.
- The 0.5s timing is too short considering ping, servers, and hitboxes.
- Slightly increase this timing to make it viable.
- Decisive Strike
- 2 uses per match instead of 1.
- Stun duration: 4/5/6 seconds.
- Should not deactivate when self-healing (but keep deactivation for gens/totems/unhooking/endgame).
- Head On
- Once activated, the locker becomes yellow, giving information to other survivors.
Anti-Tunnel Adjustments
- Remove Bloodlust when a killer is chasing a freshly unhooked survivor.
- Possibly add a form of survivor Bloodlust mechanic.
New Mechanic: Breakable Doors
- Survivors can perform a slide tackle to pass underneath.
- Limited to 3 uses (like window vaults).
- Once the door is destroyed, the mechanic becomes unavailable.
Menu Improvements
- Ability to see teammates’ perks in the lobby before the match starts.
Conclusion
✅ Strengthen survivors’ ability to hold during chases.
✅ Make chases longer and more engaging.
✅ Greatly slow down generators by adding new steps.
I’m available to discuss this with you :)
Comments
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Survivors definitely not that fragile in chases, that we can justify adding “press e to dash” button again
Doing generators is really boring, majority of people wouldn't be happy to deal with them longer than it is already
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Survivors definitely not that fragile in chases, that we can justify adding “press e to dash” button again
I don’t find this argument valid. Killers also benefit from speed boosts, even though they are already naturally fast. It makes sense that some killers gain extra mobility depending on their addons, perks, or certain conditions. Likewise, I think it’s fair that survivors can dodge a hit with Dead Hard—it’s neither unrealistic nor “superhuman.” As a killer, it’s perfectly possible to wait out an evade and punish the survivor afterward.
Doing generators is really boring, majority of people wouldn't be happy to deal with them longer than it is already (True)
As for generators, an interesting idea would be to add steps where survivors need to explore the map to gather missing parts. This would add more variety to the gameplay: once all the pieces are installed, the generator could then be fully repaired in just about twenty seconds. The time spent searching and assembling these parts (around 2–3 minutes) would make the experience more dynamic and far less monotonous than simply sitting on a generator and waiting for the progress bar to fill.
:)
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before all this.
Apply vision restrictions to survivors when repairing, downed, or on the hook.
This has no impact on solo play, but it somewhat limits the use of external voice communication when playing in teams, preventing the acquisition of information that shouldn't belong to the survivors.
The Lights Out code is ready-made.
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Survivors definitely not that fragile in chases, that we can justify adding “press e to dash” button againI don’t find this argument valid. Killers also benefit from speed boosts, even though they are already naturally fast. It makes sense that some killers gain extra mobility depending on their addons, perks, or certain conditions.
The main point here, survivors have pallets and vaults as compensation. Naturally, the killer will be faster - their goal is to catch up while the survivor uses the nearest resources.
MFT +3% patch showed why survivors shouldn't get easy speed boost. Old dead hard also was changed for reason, I don't see any “valid” reasons to add this again, beside “but but killers are faster”. Like… really? We call this objective argument?
Finding survivor role extremely vulnerable - is something exremely subjective. Until some videos where survivor can loop killer longer than 1 gen exist this opinion can’t be proved as unanimous valid.
U can’t make chases longer just because u wants so. Because it is FOUR survivors against one player. Chase isn’t the only factor that matters in this game and defines someone weakness
This would add more variety to the gameplay
I would find this idea viable only when this game will be able to create decent tutorial and gradual leveling for players. Right now, it’s just making already pretty messy game even more complicated
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Personally, I disagree with much of what was said here so imma use that format to respond.
- Strengthen survivors in chases.
- no, the point of pallets and vaults is for survivors to regain some of the distance they lost to the killers base speed giving them more base speed negates almost all chase mechanics.
- no again, this is meant to add to the tension of the chase by trapping you on one elevation, dropping should be a calculated risk not open up the entire map to you.
2. Greatly slow down gens.
- This component idea at first might seem good, and it could work as a game mode type thing, but I don't think that's really a good idea for base dbd. This idea just has so many moving complex parts that it could even break the game, think about how many spawn locations would need added and how hard it'd be to memorise them, and what if one glitches into a wall like totems did in this recent update, that just bricks a gen.
- Also, gens are objectively the worst part of this game, and that's coming from someone who finds their mechanics relaxing. Making them take longer would just be an unnecessary lengthening of the match.
- If I were to try and make gens longer I'd personally use something like the blood gens from blood moon, make the pumps kickable and make them take slightly longer than they previously took to finish them. That way there's more variety in the gameplay of the generators and more ways for killer to slow them down.
3. Survivor perk ideas.
- Balanced landing already exists.
- I don't like it because it basically just draws stuff out unnecessarily (like a majority of your suggestions). You should use a vault for all that its worth not get an extra go around.
- Did we not learn anything from mft?
- I actually don't mind this boon perk though. I'd say there should be a limit, so you can't just go absolutely insane with it but I think being able to add 4 or 5 fragile pallets might be a fun idea for a boon.
4. Changes to perks.
- there's a reason dead hard got changed to be post unhook, as another commentor said, 'e to dash' should not return.
- again no to everything said except maybe the first point. The stun is fine in most cases and a conspicuous actions should be a conspicuous action.
- I actually really like the head on change.
5. anti-tunnel.
- If a killer already has bloodlust when you get unhooked removing it won't stop them from getting that hit.
- This literally has no meaning or explanation.
6. Breakable doors
- I think that has some potential but it should be once and the killer has extra breaking speed on said door because the goal of those doors is to flat out stop people from going that way and shouldn't just be free distance for the survivor.
7. Menu improvements.
- yes.
Look, clearly you didn't write this yourself, chatgpt wrote this. You can tell because the only sentences to use the word 'I' are the in the beginning and final paragraphs and chatgpt has no sense of self (not to mention the emojis). So I don't know how much you actually thought about what was said, but this absolutely would ruin the player experience for the killer side in so many ways and also make other mechanics like gens so much more boring.
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"Look, clearly you didn't write this yourself, chatgpt wrote this. "
Do you really think he came up with all his ideas? That I didn't just use chatgpt for layout? xD
I understand your questions, it is indeed a 1vs4 game but behind each player hides a real person who enjoys playing or not.
"If a killer already has bloodlust when you get unhooked removing it won't stop them from getting that hit."
So you tunnel yourself and the killer also has the advantage that if the tunnel lasts a long time he gets speed boosts. I don't think that goes in the direction of fair play. :)
I gave them some leads and ideas, then they are free to do what they want with that.
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"So you tunnel yourself and the killer also has the advantage that if the tunnel lasts a long time he gets speed boosts. I don't think that goes in the direction of fair play."
I said what I said because I'm confused about what the original statement said. We're you trying to say 'a killer can't gain bloodlust if they're chasing a freshly unhooked survivor' or 'if a killer has bloodlust and a freshly unhooked person shows up they lose bloodlust'. It wasn't clear what you meant because you used chatgpt and didn't elaborate.
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Strong killers who are already strong in tunnelling don’t even gain blood lust, because every m2 usage drops it. Even after miss. I can’t really say bloodlust is something that actual defines outcome of tunnelling.
The bloodlust system exists as a workaround for M1 killers. Or a shortcoming of certain maps. And you're proposing to provide crutch with another workaround, just from a different side. Which will create even further gap between strong and weak killers. It’ll affect only killers against who u don't really need do a lot to avoid tunnelling.
Nurse wouldn't simply care about survivor having +3% as form of bloodlust. Every killer without mobility - yes. But usually they are already weak in tunnelling, and simply using sources around is enough. There are perks and loops for “anti-tunneling” for reason. There are opportunity to spread gens or run to comp corner for a reason in case of tunneling for a reason.
In your defense I will say I don’t really like people starting to be over obsessed with blaming someone using AI on this forum, because one check from internet already can show this post is human written
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I also understand your point of view; it's obviously a game that can't be 100% balanced, but if we take the examples of playing against the nurse, it doesn't happen every day to come across this kind of killer. :)
I think the modification or addition of survivor perks was quite consistent with the current gameplay and meta. As for movement speed and chase duration, that remains to be seen :)
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I also understand your point of view; it's obviously a game that can't be 100% balanced, but if we take the examples of playing against the nurse, it doesn't happen every day to come across this kind of killer. :)
I think the modification or addition of survivor perks was quite consistent with the current gameplay and meta. As for movement speed and chase duration, that remains to be seen :)
I’m sorry, but this something about subjectivity again. Some people on this forum multiple times complained that they don’t see m1 killers anymore, just because on high level players don’t find them viable anymore. And your change proposals are about aggravate the situation even more.
MFT + Hope patch, Clown yellow bottles rework, Krasue’s fly, Buckle up meta, Old exhaustion perks mechanic are clear examples why we must to forget about to use haste status effect as a way to justify some change…
That's probably the most lazy way to change this game, IMO.
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Well yeah, it's my own fault that I didn't stop reading after "Slightly increase survivors’ base speed".
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There was a trade-off for the increased movement speed. But I'm sure you read it all, my little rascal :)
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"Chase is the most fun part of the game"
"Anyway increase gen times"
There's a certain disconnect here. Also good God do I hate emojis and this chatgpt garbage. Imagine outsourcing your creativity to a machine. Shameful.
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I used AI only to generate the layout. (You are hyperfocused like a Labrador on a piece of meat. :D )
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Just give us a ping system to share info. Even if you can't find a gen, you could flag chests, totems, and pallets to help out the team. That would give survivors more to do AND bridge the gap between SWFs and solo. And it wouldn't even be a "buff" to survivors, stat-wise.
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Setting your usage of generative AI aside, I'm not sure how survivors would expect to win games if we hugely up gen times and add even more macro loss states whilst removing a lot of chase-focused win conditions.
Survivor players largely already don't care to understand what gens are priority, and by adding an activation condition they're more likely to commit to a bad gen to work than set up good pressure around multiple key gens simultaneously.
Killer players are also disincentivised to chase if they're not going to be given any sort of win expectation. Vaulting under breakable doors opens genuine infinites - right side downstairs DDS main door immediately comes to mind and upping survivor movement speed fundamentally breaks every single tile in the game as survivors are in a far safer position than they were.
As a result, Killers will just play territorially. 3 gen holding is easier when the survivors can't even work the gens in the first place so playing for 1 hour lockout becomes optimal, as gens take longer and chases aren't worth it.
Post edited by kit_mason on2 -
Your reasoning isn’t entirely wrong, but I find it quite dull. It often leads to the same outcome, and overall survivors feel really weak. Looping the killer has become much less interesting and fun than it used to be :/
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Your suggestion would be to make looping such an outright punish that killers avoid it entirely. I'm not sure how that achieves your stated goal.
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And putting Decisive Strike at 1min30 is, I suppose, absolute cheating in your opinion?
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We both know my issue isn't with any one individual change.
Decisive is the least of my worries, really. I rarely have it affect my games at all.
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