The Onryo & The Pitfalls of Balancing Around Inexperience

At this point, basically all of us can agree that DbD has a problem with successfully onboarding new players. The tutorials that this game does have are very old and only explain the basics of the game. They might be enough to understand simple objectives, but the counterplay to specific Killers is something that can only be learned through trial and error or word of mouth.

Given how rare some of this game's characters are (e.g. Hag, Twins, Onryo), it's no surprise that even players with hundreds of hours often still fail to engage in basically counterplay. In that time, it's likely that they've only encountered these Killers on a handful of occasions.

This leads to issues for both sides. Survivors become frustrated and dissatisfied with these Killers, and Killer balance issues are left unaddressed due to kill rates being inflated by inexperienced Survivors. Onryo is a really good example of this. She consistently appears at the top of kill rate statistics, despite being widely denounced as a weak Killer — so where does the truth lie? What's the reason for this disparity?

(The things I'm going to discuss don't only apply to Onryo, she's just the example I'm deciding to use because I'm the most familiar with her.)

The Onryo: Weak but Successful?

The Onryo is a Killer who seems successful when looking at the numbers, comfortably sitting in the #2 spot in terms of kill rate (on Nightlight, although the official stats often tell a similar story when we get them). However, actually playing her reveals that her matches consist of flip-flopping extremes that average out to what we see in the kill rates. In this instance, the average kill rate is not a useful metric of how strong or weak the killer is — it's the match-to-match gameplay we need to look at. And that reveals two things:

Killer Wins

• In the average match, the Onryo is propped up considerably by "weak links" on the Survivor team. There's no nice way to say that, so please forgive me if it sounds crass. Matchmaking in this game — as well we all know — often groups Survivors of notably different skill levels together (due to MMR's overly simplistic determination of "skill"). Onryo is a Killer that exerts pressure on the whole team through her Condemn mechanic, any one Survivor failing the "knowledge check" of how to deal with it (disable TVs while repairing generators) sets the entire team at a huge disadvantage by leaving them in an early 3v1. In most of her matches, you'll have 3 Survivors who do the right thing and immediately turn off your TVs as soon as they enable. And then 1, maybe 2, who either:
  • Don't engage in the counterplay at all and rack up stacks quickly, then get Condemned.
  • Only engage in the counterplay once they're already at high stacks, when it's too late. You interrupt them on their Tape run, and then they get Condemned.
• This leads to a one-sided match where the Survivors don't really stand a chance. And not even because her power is particularly strong — it isn't. It's a power that's almost entirely within the Survivors' control. Of all the Killers designed with the philosophy of "interact with Killer object to counter them", her interactions are some of the quickest and easiest to do. In these situations, It's the 3v1 aspect that does most of the heavy lifting in swinging these matches in her favour.
• I know some people are immediately going to claim that Killers like Onryo often still have a high kill rate at higher MMR levels, to which I'd say that high MMR does not mean high skill. The MMR system's current implementation serves more as a measure of "how often do you play" as opposed to "how good are you". You'd think those two things would be proportional to one another, but (as previously discussed) some Killers in this game are pretty rare. So having played a lot doesn't necessarily mean that a player has encountered these things enough to develop the knowledge to deal with them.

Survivor Wins

• Every now and then, the reverse happens. The matchmaking groups together 4 competent Survivors (or you run into a premade), and the match is completely awful. Your high priority TVs will spend the entire game turned off, Survivors will insert Tapes in your face (because they know they can safely get away with it), you won't be able to rack up any meaningful Condemned, and you're relegated to playing as an M1 Killer the whole match. Survivors who know what they're doing exert a huge degree of control over your power, akin to Singularity on release. And it just feels terrible to play.

The Bigger Picture

In this way, The Onryo is currently balanced around ignorance. She's forced to remain painful to play under a fair matchup, for the sake of players who don't understand how to counter her and already lose too much against her. Playing as The Onryo has become increasingly stale because of this. This current design choice leaves matches with meaningful back and forth a rarity, relegating most of her gameplay to stomping or being stomped. It's dull and repetitive, and the reason why I think she has a below-average pick rate.

Solutions

The end goal I'd like to reach regarding Onryo, is to improve Survivors' knowledgeability against her, preventing overinflation of her kill rates, and allowing meaningful buffs to the parts of her kit that feel lacking. Here's a little TL;DR of the problems, and some solutions I think might be worth pursuing:

• Killer-specific counterplay has to be learned externally, via word of mouth > Implemenet in-match tutorials for Survivors.
• Certain Killers heavily punish mismatches in Survivor skill/experience > Improve how MMR determines skill.

Again, I'm going to continue using Onryo as an example to illustrate how this might look in game, although the principles could work for other Killers too!

In-Match Tutorials

So this is something I'm actually borrowing from another game I enjoy — The Outlast Trials. Trials has a sizeable number of different objective types and gameplay mechanics, which it mostly introduces to the player one at a time as you progress through the Genesis program. However — as well we all know — players often do not pick to play through content in its intended/release order. And so to ensure that players aren't left completely in the dark if they queue into a Trial that's "ahead" of their current game knowledge, there are tutorials baked into a lot of the Trials that give you the gist of what you're supposed to be doing.

Some of these are small playable sections, which obviously couldn't be translated to a live match of DbD. But the game also makes use of contextual tooltips — small pieces of guidance that pop up in the top right when interacting with certain objectives or mechanics for the first time. For example, when afflicted with Nausea, you'll get the tooltip: "You are poisoned. Find an Antidote or suffer." in the top right of the screen.

It's short and unintrusive, but it tells you everything you need to know:

• What happened,
• how to solve it,
• and that there's consequences to ignoring it.

I think DbD could really benefit from something similar to this the first couple of times you face a Killer. Not too long ago they added in-match explanations when picking up dropped items for new players, and I think this could be a really nice expansion to that system. They don't need to explain every mechanic in the game, but I think some things like Killer-specific interactions could benefit from some added context for new players.

Here's how it could work against Onryo:

• First time a Survivor is in range of a powered TV: "Disable powered TVs to work on nearby Generators safely."
• First time a Survivor retrieves a Tape: "Remove Condemned by interacting with the highlighted (yellow) TV. Gaining too much Condemned will kill you."

I think all it would take is one or two tooltips to point players in the right direction when they first face a Killer.

Audio/Visual Feedback

If the above system seems too intrusive or unworkable for a reason I've missed, then I think we could try conveying some of that information non-textually — primarily through the use of animation, sound, and visuals. This is something that DbD has historically done well, and we can see just how effective its use is in The Plague.

Similarly to Onryo, The Plague is also a Killer whose counterplay involves Killer objects — highlighted in white to the Survivors. However, where Onryo's counterplay largely gets ignored by inexperienced Survivors, people have relatively few problems cleansing at Plague's fountains. Oftentimes new players cleanse too much against her!

Clearly then, something about the presentation of the Plague's status effect is effective in communicating a sense of urgency, whereas The Onryo's is not. So what are the differences? And which aspects can we "adopt" to better convey the threat of Condemned?

• Being infected by The Plague immediately causes your Survivor to start coughing and retching, and also displays a meter behind the character potrait indicating infection progress. The colours are red and sickly green, which combined with the aforementioned animations, immediately convey that you're mounting up to something bad and need to act. Even if you don't know what specifically will happen upon reaching full infection, it's obvious that it's negative and you ought to do something about it.
• Gaining Condemned stacks causes faint scan lines to appear on your Survivor's character model, a very brief effect of TV static on the screen, and a white bar on your character portrait. Of course for anyone familiar with the IP Onryo belongs to, you can probably guess where things are headed. But DbD attracts a wide audience who might not be familiar with the property, who really aren't given much to go on here. White is a very neutral colour, and the effects which accompany stack gain are pretty mild and easy to miss in comparison to The Plague. It's not surprising that so many new players don't treat Condemned with the urgency it requires, because the game doesn't really give you any indication that you should. Of course, much of this is intentional design with the aim of replicating the slow burn mystery and dread that the IP is known for, which I don't want to lose, but I do think some improvements are needed. Not all of these may be required, but I think it is worth considering the following:
  • Slightly increase the volume of the sound effect that plays when you gain a Condemned stack.
  • Increase the intensity of the "scan lines" that appear on the Survivor's character model when they have at least 1 Condemned stack.
  • Have Survivors "react" to gaining a stack in some way, perhaps by flinching (similar to when they get Weakened against Unknown), grunting, or having their animations change (similar to when in Madness III against Doctor).
  • Change the colour of Condemned stacks on the HUD to the sickly green colour of the Onryo's weapon.

MMR Improvements

This is probably the trickiest one, and sadly I don't know exactly how to fix it. The problem with it currently is that its analysis of a Survivor's "skill" level is too simplistic. Only taking into account escapes versus deaths leaves out a lot of important context, and allows players to "cheese" their way to higher MMRs (e.g. by hiding for most of the game and letting their teammates do the heavy lifting).

Escapes and kills aren't completely meaningless, they're just not enough on their own. Something else — possibly time spent on Generators? Time spent in chase? Might help make MMR more reflective of a player's skill level.

The Onryo: Pain Points

If we're successful in helping Survivors to engage with the counterplay, it's likely that Onryo's kill rate would fall (and probably quite significantly). Which would then give us room to address some of the pain points that crop up when playing her. I'm conscious that this post is already very long, so I'm not going to get into all of the issues I have with her, just a couple that bother me the most.

Add-Ons

Onryo has a pretty lacklustre set of add-ons. There's only 4 that I ever actually use: Bloody Fingernails, Videotape Copy, Reiko's Watch, and Remote Control.

There is one thing that I think should change across the board, and that's add-ons that trigger upon Manifestation. Currently, there are four ways to "Manifest": manually, by projecting to a TV, by picking up a Survivor while Demanifested, or by completing an Inexorable Stare on a fully Condemned Survivor. Although for some strange reason, add-ons that trigger upon Manifesting, don't work in all of the above scenarios. Some of the add-ons say that they work when Manifesting "by any means", but they just don't. For the sake of consistency (and to give more opportunities to use the effects of the add-ons), all of the above actions should trigger Manifestation-related add-ons. Here are my thoughts on some specific add-ons.

• Yoichi's Fishing Net: She doesn't need two Blindness add-ons — change the effect to Exhausted and this add-on would be okay.
• Sea-Soaked Cloth: This add-on was okay back in her original version when the counterplay was to leave TVs turned on, but now that Survivors are encouraged to disable them, this add-on gets no value. Rework to cause Blindness for 30 seconds upon disabling a TV.
• Clump of Hair: Too limited of an effect considering that she has a directional Lullaby. Increase the number from 6 to 8 and it might be usable.
• Well Water: Should trigger on all forms of Manifestation (as the add-on claims it does) and have its number upped from 2 to 3 seconds.
• Rickety Pinwheel: Same problem as Sea-Soaked Cloth. Rework to cause Oblivious for 30 seconds upon disabling a TV.
• VCR: Obsolete now that Survivors see the aura of nearby powered TVs. The aura disappears as soon as you project to one, immediately telling the Survivor where you are. TV auras should linger until you've fully emerged from them to prevent Survivors from instantly locating you and rendering this add-on useless.
• Tape Editing Deck: Detrimental to run as it gives Survivors an additional free disable for their target TV in the early game. The secondary aura reveal effect can stay but rework the main effect to increase the time taken to retrieve or insert a Tape by 0.5 seconds.
• Distorted Photo: Should trigger on all forms of Manifestation. Imagine how thematic it would be to have a nearby Survivor scream while you Inexorable Stare someone.
• Telephone: Rework to scale the strength of the Hindered effect with the number of Condemned stacks the Survivor has. 0 - 3 stacks gives 3% Hindered (the current value), 4 - 6 stacks gives 4% Hindered, and 7 stacks gives 5%.
• Iridescent Videotape: Just terrible — needs completely reworked. Have it increase action speeds (the same ones Fire Up affects) by 1% (maybe 2%) for every Condemned stack Survivors currently have.

Tape Insertion

Some time ago Tape insertion and retrieval times were nerfed from 2 seconds to 1. The goal was to prevent Survivors from being completely unable to insert a Tape should the Killer have Save The Best For Last stacks, but it has had the side effect of allowing Survivors to safely disable TVs and insert Tapes for free in the middle of chases. With even a small amount of distance — a single pallet or vault usually buys enough — a Survivor can insert a Tape in the middle of chase and continue on without even taking an injury for it. This feels incredibly bad to play against.

Experienced Survivors will sometimes just ignore TVs completely, safe in the knowledge that if they do reach 7 stacks and you come after them, they'll just cleanse them in your face. At most, this risks a down, but often you don't even get that.

The Singularity had his objects reworked because of how bad it felt for Survivors to be able to drive-by interact with them in a chase and nullify your power. Onryo needs some of the same treatment. I'm not saying that she should be able to completely deny the insert like she originally could, but it needs to take a bit longer so it's not completely free. ~1.5 seconds seems like a good middleground.

As a sidenote, the animations also look kind of silly playing at double the speed they were originally designed to. Slowing them down a bit would help fix that.

Disabled TVs

I think there's a discussion to be had that Survivors have too much control over Onryo's power, in a way that no functionally-similar Killer suffers from. A good team will keep all of your important TVs off for most of the match, which removes the map traversal element of her power which was so appealing to a lot of us back in her original version.

Holding a Tape also carries no risk for Survivors currently. In her original version, holding a Tape would cause Survivors to passively gain Condemned stacks. The removal of this feature makes sense now that all active TVs afflict Condemned, but it leaves her Tapes feeling kind of redundant, and like there's no trade-off to interacting with her objects.

Other Killer objects exert a "price" for interacting with them. Usually it's simply wasting the Survivors' time, like Pig's boxes, but other times it's something unique like risking being eaten by a Mimic, or Pinhead teleporting to you. Regrettably, Onryo does not have either of these. Disabling TVs is so quick that it's not a meaningful time investment, and you rarely have to go out of your way to insert Tapes as TVs spawn close to Generators — which are objectives you'll probably be going to anyways. If not that, you can easily do it on the way to make a save or look for a Hex Totem, etc.

I think this could be fixed with one new feature: breaking a Tape reenables the last TV that was turned off by a Survivor. For those not in the know, getting hooked while carrying a Tape breaks it. This would give Onryo an additional incentive to hook (discouraging slugging), adds an element of risk to holding onto a Tape for a long time (if you get hooked before you deposit it then you're giving the Killer additional pressure), and discourages tunneling (if you want to keep your map pressure up, you should go after a person with a Tape — a Survivor who has been freshly unhooked won't have one).

Of course, this is quite a bit more experimental than my previous suggestions, and might work out to be too much. Although I'd love if we could see something like this in a PTB one day.

This was really long and kind of rambly, but I hope I managed to get my point across somewhat coherently. Thank you if you read any of this — especially if you read to the end. See you in the fog.