Nerfing Items by making Items more easily available to survivors.

Here's a plan: Chests will open instantly. There'll be more chests per map (in total 8 or more?). Items from chests come with add-ons. Chest related perks will be buffed appropriately and keys will be adjusted in a way to be more appropriate to this giant item influx.

So what do you think? Are you happy with the item buff?

In this version of the game, every killer would get "gen-rushed" by 4 survivors with on average yellow to green toolboxes with add-ons or have a med-kit to quickly undo your hits.

That is the first step to nerfing items.

Let's assume that the killer without add-ons and the survivor without items have an equal power-level as illustrated in the picture above. A killer can have add-ons slightly increasing their power level, but we will assume the effect of it being a low-medium increase.

When we look at survivors and them having items, we would see a medium to very high increase:

The orange section is the extra power the survivor has for having an item equipped in the lobby. Now here's the problem: Your job is the move the killer power level up or down in order to create a balanced experienced for all players.

If you move it to the Survivors with items height, then item-less survivors are too weak to play as, in the same way as playing against equally experienced survivors with 4 insta-heals would be overpowered.

You can choose to shove the killer in between, but then again: Now you're not satisfying either situation.

The solution of this problem is to decrease the difference between Survivors with items equipped in lobbies and survivors that don't equip them. Basically: The right-side chart will get its own orange section, but theirs will be granted during the game.

If a survivor currently searched through a chest, they already lose a lot of time. Imagine finding a brown toolbox, which almost wins you as much seconds as it costed you to open the chest, let alone searching for it; such a survivor wouldn't have managed to get even close to the orange area in the chart above. After all: The time it took the person equipping it in lobby was 0 in-match time.

That is the current fundamental flaw with items: Where as the ability to equip items in the lobby should've only granted you the option to CHOOSE your exact load-out, due to how finding items during the match plays out, it also grants you the ability to meet a superior power-level.

It is the power-level aspect that we seek to destroy and have item-equipping in lobby serve as a mechanic that let's you specifically choose. Once item-less survivors can meet pre-equipped survivors, then the job of moving the killer chart up will be easy, and we can freely choose in which way we'd desire to do so. If all survivors would be able to acquire 2 items each, then even the lousiest killer buff of buffing generators up to 90-100 seconds would already likely have done its balance job. In fact, in many of those games, those generators would continue to only take 80 seconds to repair. The only difference is that the precious power level deemed problematic with items can no longer be reached as the base game can be considered harder. Now there's no need for a lousy compensation. There's a see of posts of passionate forumers detailing interesting and healthy killer buffs that would serve as an appropriate compensation.

now...;

Here's a plan: Chests will open instantly. There'll be more chests per map (in total 8 or more?). Items from chests come with add-ons. Chest related perks will be buffed appropriately and keys will be adjusted in a way to be more appropriate to this giant item influx.

If you got a Deja Vu from that, then, well; you were correct. But now you understand the "why".

Thank you for reading!

To keep things short and to the main idea:

The specifics of the key or perk change will not be discussed in this post.

The specifics of how the blood-web and frequent item collection may result in an overdose and how to address it will not be discussed in this post.

etc.

but feel free to think them out in the comments!