The conondrum of Sprint Burst/Lithe

at this stage of the game, i wonder if it makes sense for players to choose their own balancing with public custom games that can introduce banning of perks... i feel that may be more applicable and offer a chance for the roster to play the game as players see fit, rather than forcing games and available perk combinations to be global across all characters.

I'd honestly love more Exhaustion perks to be like Head on/Dead Hard/Dramaturgy, where they work off interacting with the killer more/just a more interactive abilities.

Like they should be like survivor powers, I'd love to have more ways to make my chase more creative.

• Sprint Burst should work off of a longer cooldown instead of exhaustion (to prevent it from being paired with Vigil). Let's say something around 60-90 seconds. It should also be on a separate ability button, so that SB users doesn't have to walk all around the map.
• Lithe could have the time cut from 3 seconds to 2 seconds of 150% speed, based on the situation it is used in.
  If used on a safe window, you get 2 seconds, but if it is used on an unsafe pallet, you get the usual 3 seconds.
• Balanced Landing should have the speed component removed, and instead work on a 20 second cooldown timer. Increase the stagger reduction to 90%, so that it becomes more like a "parkour-based" perk.

Rest of the perks looks fine from your suggestion.

this i can agree with. vigil throws off the balance of perks heavily in its current state because it's making exhaustion perks way too accessible. these perks were not designed with fast recovery in mind.

All exhaustion perks should get the dead hard treatment and only activate once per hook state.

Exactly. We are at the point where "But M1-Killers" is not a valid argument anymore. Because if we now start nerfing Perks because M1-Killers have problems against them, guess what will happen? People would still play their Ghoul, Blight and Nurse and will not suddenly switch over to Trapper or Doctor.

Buffs and Nerfs should happen to specific things, not by nerfing Survivors or buffing Killers overall. Too many times already it was said that certain Killers are mainly played because other Killers are not viable due to X, and when X got fixed, there was no change at all.

@Topic:

When it comes to Exhaustion Perks, the goal should be to have more variety. People use Sprint Burst and Lithe because you can use them on basically any map. Other Exhaustion Perks are either too weak, e.g. Head On, or just too situational. Overcome only works when healthy, which also means it does nothing against tunneling and against Instadowns. Smash Hit is just too unreliable and with how weak Pallets have become, they are usually quickly dealt with by Killers - if there is even a Killer you can reliably stun. And Balanced Landing simply does not work on certain maps because they either dont feed any spots at all or it is RNG.

If the weaker Perks are buffed, then there is more variety and more variety would also mean that there is a bigger likelyhood that a Killer gets lucky and the Exhaustion Perk is not good on the map they are on. E.g. if Balanced Landing would get buffed, the Killer would have a good time if the Map is Gas Heaven without a Hill or the new Trickster Map. But something like this would not happen currently, simply because nobody would take Balanced Landing over Sprint Burst or Lithe.

This is coming from someone who does not even use Exhaustion-Perks btw…

The logic of your reasoning is flawed.
TL;DR of your message is basically: "Survivors use sprint burst or lithe to reach a loop. Then they can use that loop if they are skilled, and the killer loses."

So you're not even complaining about speed boost perks. You're complaining about the loops.

I wasn't aware that it was literally impossible to reach a loop as a survivor unless you used sprint burst… dang.

I face 3x Lithe paired with WoO consistently that seems to be the main survivor build i face but that isn't really an issue for me it's when all that is paired with Finesse that it becomes an annoying slog to deal with. and I happen to see 3 Finesses consistently. why do we have to deal with exhaustion on top of exhaustion?

finesse really makes ghoul tempting despite my attempt to be a good person

I mean yeah lithe, sprint burst and dramaturgy is basically 70% of the reason I don't play M1s. People talk about boring well lets talk about holding W when every person pre-runs across the map with lithe/sprint burst or just uses Dramaturgy like old DH.

If you end up in a dead zone the killer either herded you like a sheep or you misplayed your positioning.

If the killer blocks the window that is a good play on their behalf.

But none of that really matters to the point, why should you get another health state for losing?

The less used exhaustion perks aren't weak by any means though, they're just situational, which is a good thing. It's more of a design issue than a balance issue, and the issue explicitly lies within Sprint Burst and to a lesser degree Lithe (at least Lithe requires you to have some kind of vaultable resource nearby and good positioning relative to the killer) being universally applicable, making most of the other exhaustion perks irrelevant, especially when you factor in Vigil making their uptime absurd. You can't fix that by just buffing the other less used exhaustion perks, you have to nerf/rework the other two, or at the very least the 2016 design failure that is Sprint Burst. Like yes, they could guarantee a dropdown spot for Balanced Landing on every map, and they could stand to adjust X conditions of perks like Smash Hit, but the universal applicability of Sprint Burst/Lithe would remain. And personally I don't think we need more chase ending haste/haste uptime tied to perks, we need less.

I think the top tier killers do have to be nerfed at the same time. But if we're to believe that M1/weaker killers can't be used as an argument for exhaustion nerfs/reworks then I don't think it's proper for the existence of the top tiers to be used as an argument for exhaustion buffs in the same breath. Neither of those arguments are logically sound if the goal is to maximize the fun/interactivity & fairness of the average DbD match regardless. It's just some whataboutism born of frustration more than anything.

I know I'm not the person you're responding to, but I would like to weigh in if you don't mind.

I think saying Dead Hard is an extra health state for losing isn't really accurate, personally. You aren't losing just because you got hooked, for starters, but more pressingly what Dead Hard does is give you a parry.
You aren't guaranteed to actually get to tank that hit, it's completely up to circumstance. Some killers it's very reliable, others it'll work once at most, there are smart and dumb ways of playing around it on both sides, etcetera.

You can whiff a Dead Hard and it just gets you downed, ditto for the killer successfully baiting it. On the design front, I think DH is pretty reasonably well designed, at least if you aren't looking at the killers who have a harder time baiting it like Huntress.

So, at this point in time most of the exhaustion perks are fine with the exception really of dead hard and sprint burst.

Lithe is fine because you have to loop inefficiently or activate it early, because you can't fast vault something without activating it.

Sprint burst would be fixed if you couldn't 99 it. How that gets addressed in a way that doesn't buff the other exhaustion perks, or make sprint burst confusing i'm unsure on.

Dead hard is just a badly designed perk, because it gets countered by hard tunneling the survivor with it and hitting them right off the hook. And it promotes lose/lose situations, where the killer basically has to swing, and eat the dead hard, or not swing and eat the pallet. It basically functions as old dead hard just without the distance. The difference being compared to the old dead hard is that when you used it outside of for distance, it put you in an animation lock that made it so you couldn't vault the window or pallet. But was too strong when used for distance. Probably the best fix i think for dead hard id like to see. Is to increase the time it gives endurance to say 0.75 seconds so its a bit easier to use. But then using it puts you in a state where you can't vault windows or drop pallets for like 2 seconds.

I'd also probably buff head on to stun for 4 seconds so it gives you about the same distance as the other exhaustion perks.

Balanced landing also might be able to get its passive back of not slowing you on drops even if you are exhausted. It was a problem back when there were tons of infinites everywhere, but i'm not sure how it would play out today. Would need to be tested before i can confidently say it should go one way or the other.

What I will say is, if they change anything about SB or Lithe (and I think by extension, Vigil would need to be looked at as well since it plays a pretty big factor in the strength of SB and how often it can be used + Vigil is just busted in general), I would want those changes to be paired with toning down the S tier killers in the same update (something I think is overdue anyway) so that the changes wouldn't benefit them overall. I'm not necessarily against the idea of toning down SB, but it would be a big change and would require some re-balancing on the killer side imo, at least for the top tiers.

Killer perks require you actually do something (mostly chasing, downing and hooking survivors which requires significant time investment) to actually use them. SB and Lithe do not require any real conditions and provide immense value on a relatively short cooldown for zero effort from survivors.

Stop treating killer perks like they are equal to survivor perks because they are not. Not to mention there isnt potentially four copies at once giving the same level of value, killers perks need to give 4x more than survivor perks as its 16v4 perks.

I don't even know why you're moaning about gen slowdown, in a world where you can easily get 30s free chase extensions every single chase per survivor which gives the other three survivors the equivalent time to do an entire generator just from that single perk. Its been garbage for awhile now which is exactly why people are stacking them to actually try get value from them because everything else also gets nerfed since we apparently arent allowed good chase perks either.

Your right its not just a health state its complete invincibility for the moment allowing you to even tank instant downs and with some killers it literally unavoidable you cant fake throw an axe. Its even worse.

No this is ridiculous throw your screen up and down? Faking a power animation? (a lot cant do that so it not a good measurement) This is not counter play this is pure cope throwing your screen around is more likely to harm you than the surv. Besides that most people using Dead Hard usually use it when you have to swing and at that point there is nothing that can be done.

The killer invests time while the others do gens (their objective) while you chase someone and down them (they lost the chase) and then you pick them up without getting stunned or blinded and take them over to a hook all to secure one hook state and when they later get rescued they now have an on demand 3rd health state that they got for losing.

And it is losing if getting downed and hooked is not losing than what is full death? That the only time a surv is considered to be losing or have lost? That's ridiculous. It is losing you are failing at your objective by going down and getting hooked, you get Dead Hard by losing allowing you to artificially extend chase its extremely unhealthy and should be completely reworked.