Addressing the Current Meta – Balancing Tunneling and Aura-Reading Power

It still needs to be changed, where it prioritizes the survivor with the least amount of hook states when selecting a new Obsession. I have lost many matches to this perk as well, since the perk seleced me immediately upon being unhooked, causing the killer to tunnel me out for free.

One suggestion that has been circulating lately is to revert toolboxes back to their original state, where they had more charges to begin with, but much, much slower repair speed (like 10-15% or so), and also take away the increased skillcheck chance, to reduce the effectiveness of builds like Hyperfocus + Stake Out.
Another good way to incentivice hooking would be to change hook sabotage into a hybrid system of the current and the old one, where it takes longer to sabo, but the progress does not get reset if you let go of the interaction, while also keeping the current 60 second hook respawn logic in place. That way, if a survivor wants to sabotage, it requires a lot of setup first.

I have done a few "all-seeing Survivor" kinds of builds in the past, with Eyes of Belmont, Alert, Fogwise and Scene Partner, which often times gives you a near permanent aura read on the killer.

It definitely makes mind-games practically impossible for the killer to win, unless they also run aura builds.

I miss old DBD for many of those reasons, back when you had maybe 2-3 aura perks on either side, and the most commmon ones were BBQ for killer, and Object of Obsession for survivor. No Lethal Pursuer either, so the killer had to guess where survivors spawned.
And old Ruin, with the red skillchecks. The perfect slowdown perk

Simpler times, when the game had more chill.

I play Killer somewhat more than Survivor (I watch a lot of Survivor gameplay to try and suck less though), and it's not fun playing Killer a lot of the time either. My matches seem to fluctuate between being a horrible, joyless slog where even if I technically win I feel like I lost, or an absurd mismatch on hydrogen-bomb-vs-coughing-baby levels, where either Survivors give up almost instantly because one thing doesn't go their way or I have absolutely no way of exerting any pressure at any point and get teabagged at the exit gates. The gap between the strongest Killers and almost all the rest feels wider than ever, and most of the changes people suggest would barely affect the strongest while making the weaker ones miserable and the lowest tier unplayable. Moreover, Survivors already have a lot of great tools to help themselves and one another but don't often have the means or the coordination to use them.

My suggestions? More information for solo queue Survivors, so they have a chance to respond in the ways SWFs can easily. Being able to see each others' perks (whenever that gets here) will help a lot. A comms/ping wheel like in Overwatch would allow solo Survivors to communicate simply in-game without the mess voice chat would implement. I wonder if basekit Kindred would help Survivors with tunnelling, since I see Survivors unhook in the Killer's face and then leave the poor unhooked Survivor to their fate straight afterwards far too often. In extremis I could see some kind of total loss of collision with both Killer and other Survivors for an unhooked Survivor until they perform a Conspicuous Action or a timer runs out, with some kind of visual effect like a marker over their head.

On the Killer side, it goes without saying that the weaker Killers need meaningful buffs and the stronger ones need meaningful nerfs as well as sidegrades to make their powers more useable but less oppressive. Some Killers have built-in anti-camp which also discourages tunnelling ab initio, and that could probably be applied to more Killers, especially the ones that are very good at punishing unhooks like Trickster, Huntress, Billy etc.

I also think more perks need to be viable, while the strongest ones need reining in. At the moment the diversity of Killer perks is not great (though Vecna 2: The First But Not Actually has introduced a bunch of good but not overtuned ones), but the strongest perks are still really powerful while still working when a Killer tunnels. I've said it elsewhere but it would help to reintroduce for several top Killer perks the effect that Hex: Ruin had before, where a Survivor death disables it. You can have an early 3v1 or strong slowdown, but not both. Then you could look at improving weaker Killer perks (especially chase perks, which often don't feel like they justify the perk slot when you could run something more reliable). There are also some Survivor perks that could benefit being changed: Vigil is just obnoxious and makes playing weaker Killers harder while having no impact on stronger ones 99% of the time; Stakeout/Hyperfocus as a combo is unhealthy for the game and, in a certain sense, encourages tunnelling (if a Killer suspects you have it, it's in their interests to hunt you down and prevent you from blowing up their generators at double speed); Resurgence also encourages tunnelling because a Survivor being almost instantly healed after unhook means way less time Survivors spend resetting, it counters perks that don't benefit tunnelling like Gift of Pain and Sloppy Butcher, and it's also completely undone by hitting the Survivor off hook. Moreover, in general I see too many Survivors bring builds solely focussed on doing gens or being chased, and not helping or giving valuable information to their teammates: perks that are altruistic could use a tune-up, while I wouldn't mind seeing some of the more self-centred perks that are very popular getting toned down.

Killers deserve a Second chance perk like DS.

They already have stuff like NOED, and

Something like "Hook Chains" when the first survivor is unhooked they instantly get rehooked if the killer passes a skill check, and gain another hook level

Oh, ha! I thought you were being serious for a second

I've always felt the game should have a dynamic system that buffs and nerfs each side as the balance of the game changes.

Track the hook states and number of dead survivors against total generator progress.

If the survs are on the back foot then give them a gen repair speed boost and maybe 1% haste or slow the killer a tiny bit. if gens are flying then slow down repair speeds and give killer a little speed buff, maybe quicker recovery from missed or bad hits.

This would keep the gsme tense so it slways feels like the win is in the balance. I'm honestly sick to death of playing survivor games where within 2-4 minutes it's obvious that we have no chance of finishing gens. It's immensely discouraging.

I don't know, could you imagine if there was a perk, perhaps more than one, or even killer powers, that let a killer cut through survivor health states. The survivor EXPerience wOuld be Substantially alterED.

In my experience, when playing with friends, unless we are going against a cracked A+ or S tier killer main, we usually get 2 to 3 escapes, even when hard tunneling comes into play. Usually we lose to tunneling when the killer hard tunnels someone who messes up - touch gens before healing, run to a dead zone or is just plain bad at looping.

Hard tunnel is a gamble: is you try to tunnel someone out and the player is good and have anti-tunnel perks, you are probably cooked. I saw recently a very tryhard Dracula main from my server lose a 100+ streak because he chose to tunnel someone with anti-tunnel perks and very good game sense. He took 3 escapes with only 3 hooks and that it.

Now SoloQ is hell due to how inconsistent teammates are, but this is more related to MMR than game balance. There are randoms who just chew the killer's heart in the match and others who fall like flies to a insecticide against M1 killers

People in this forum seems to hate this, but there really should exist mechanics that incentivize the killer to spread hooks instead of tunneling - without giving survivors plot armor for incentive, of course. Without this, tunneling and forcing a 3v1 will always be the best scenario for killers.

About aura perks: Distortion is a plague, i hate this perk and the way it worked back then. It punishes killers for using aura builds and incentivize even more anti-gen perks and stealth survivor gameplay. The devs should really focus more in perks like "We see you" from Eleven, that gives you stacks and notifies you when you have your aura read without blocking aura from working.