Tunnel Reduction Alternative: Pain Res Basekit (sort of) and Unique Hook Reward System
- No one likes to be punished, especially by the game itself for playing ""incorrectly,"" or doing your objective optimally. It's why everyone hated the 9.2.0 PTB; players should not be punished for capitalizing on another player's mistake or misplay.
- Killers love Pain Res. Despite its many nerfs over the years and its arguably effectiveness, the perk remains a staple of killer builds to this day. Why? Because it's reliable, consistent, convenient gen delay no matter which killer you decide to play as.
- The reason people tunnel is that it's often the most strategic play. It not always is, depending on the skill of the survivors you encounter and your build, but most killers will take the opportunity to remove a player from the game, especially if that player is proven to be an easy kill. It also has the side effect of pressuring the rest of the team to protect the tunneled player. All of this is in service of one thing: gen delay.
- People love getting high score combos
The Solution: Unique Hook Combo System
Every time you hook a unique survivor (as in, you cycle through their hook stages evenly), you receive an ever increasing amount of instantaneous gen regression on the most progressed generator, similar to Pain Res.
1st Stage: 10% 2nd Stage: 15% 3rd Stage: 25% 4th Stage: 35%
And then it would stay at 30%, as long as you continue to hook different survivors.
If at any time you hook someone you've hooked before in the last three times, the bonus is reset back to Stage 1, and you have to rebuild your bonus back up again. So, for example, if you hook Meg, then Kate, then Jake, then Meg again, you would lose your unique hook combo. But if you hook Meg, then Kate, then Jake, then David, then Kate again, you would not lose it. After that, the hook cycle resets, and as long as you don't repeat hook anyone in the 2nd cycle and kill them, you retain your bonus.
Of course, the specifics of the mechanic should be tweaked and the numbers made adjustable, but the damage bonus should be high enough to reward what is a fairly difficult feat for a killer to pull off (Some killers more than others), and should be comparable to outright removing a survivor from the game (and therefore not working generators).
I feel like this reward would be a fair alternative to the punishment system we saw in the PTB. Killers need to be rewarded fairly for playing in a suboptimal way, and I believe this combo mechanic would be exactly that. Some survivor mechanics we saw in the PTB could also come into play, like the elusive mechanic, so that killers would have a lower chance of accidentally finding and rehooking those survivors they really don't want to find.
I'm writing this in hopes that we do not have a repeat of the 9.2.0 PTB, because I know the devs still want to bring some version of it back, and I feel something like this would be a fair compromise.
Comments
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While this is an okay idea on paper (I think these numbers are probably way too powerful though unless all regression perks are deleted from the game alongside it), it doesn't outweigh the power of having someone dead early and it doesn't address the balance issue that allows killer players to achieve that state easily.
Tunnelling isn't just a mildly unpleasant tactic we want to disincentivise, it's an outright balance problem allowing for easily cheesed wins without much counterplay (outside of some varyingly-effective perks, which is its own issue). That part does also need addressing at the same time, or we're not really going to see tunnelling disappear. Slightly reduced, maybe, but slightly reduced isn't good enough.
The act of trying to chase someone as soon as they're unhooked does need to get much harder if we want to address this problem, so there does need to be something that people will call a punishment. Most of what was on that PTB was pretty workable, just needed scaling back and a few details being removed if we want to be safe.
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there does need to be
somethingthat people will call a punishmentThis is the problem. Everyone says, "We need an alternative to tunneling."
So, the ask is that we give killers a NEW tool (or buff an existing one to be) more powerful than tunneling currently is. This mechanic has to be less punishing (i.e. more fun) for survivors, while leaving tunneling in the game as a backup. (Because if this new thing is too hard to perform, killers will just resort back to tunneling which is free.)
With such restrictive parameters, I have yet to see a SINGLE SUGGESTION that will be even remotely feasible.
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If we add a new tool that is as powerful as tunnelling, haven't we just shifted the problem from tunnelling to whatever the new thing is?
Again, tunnelling isn't just an unpleasant experience, it's unbalanced. It's too powerful. Trying to incentivise killers away from tunnelling is the wrong call- nothing that isn't itself too strong would be appealing, and tunnelling would still exist in the game as a backup, that many people would still use anyway because they wouldn't have to change their gameplay.
Tunnelling existing is the problem, at least in its current form. If you can still stack the chase in your favour by chasing someone who was just unhooked, the problem hasn't been fixed.
In short, we don't need an alternative to tunnelling, we need tunnelling to not exist.
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It's always interesting to see people advocate for special buffs that apply to Killers who don't tunnel, when in reality there should be no buffs of any kind. There should only be deterrence's for camping/tunneling/slugging, the only incentive to not do it should be how outright detrimental it would be to do it. Higher tier Killers do not need to do it and deserve no buffs for continuing to play how they always do, mid tier Killers who lack skill don't deserve buffs either, leaving the lower tier Killers who need to be reworked anyway.
The game needs to be rehauled, no band aid fixes from BHVR are going to hold up anymore. SWF need mechanic changes, SoloQ needs mechanic changes, Killers need mechanic changes and maps/rng need to be reworked.
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Pop will always be better than Pain Res, because it gets the killer to a gen and away from a the hook.
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Yeah, you need to incentivize moving away from the hook. That removes opportunity to camp and tunnel. If the issue is a lack of mobility, then give every killer mobility. Open a portal when a survivor is hooked that lasts for like 15 seconds. A killer can enter it and be teleported to 32 m of their selected gen with M2 disabled for like 10 seconds so Blight/Nurse/Spirit/etc can't run amok while M1 killers are barely affected. Now every killer has post-hook map traversal, good macro knowledge is heavily rewarded, pre-running is nerfed since it's harder to know which direction the killer is coming from, leaving the hook is extremely incentivized thus removing opportunity to camp and tunnel while still being available for whatever reason.
Alternatively, you can move the survivor away (eg 2v8 cages or Pyramid Head's cages). Change unhooking to automatically teleport the survivor across the map away from everybody (same logic as Pinhead box), making insta-heals under the hook impossible and tunneling not a thing at all. BHVR has had the code to deal with this stuff and the understanding that it's problematic for ages.
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Can we just stop to reward killers not tunneling while totally ignoring that tunneling is still the same stupidity as before?
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Killers doesn't need any reward for not tunneling, they should be punished for doing it. Period.
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Unique hooks should benefit killer by:
→ 50 % global regression on each generator
→ 25 % haste for 15s
→ 5 % stackable basic attack cooldown reduction
→ global BBQ for 8s each time a unique hook happens
→ per each hook, survivors repair speed, healing speed and recovery speed is decreased by 5 %
→ per each hook exit gates are blocked once opened, 1 hook = 5s
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I’m a 50/50 player but on the killer side a lot of killer players have proven over the years rewarding for different play doesn’t work and they just still play the same anyways
My suggestion is a casual mode with the ptb anti tunnel and slug and a ranked mode with no anti camp 3 gen no anti tunnel basekit bt only
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