Survivalist Rework Idea

[Demon Swords]

Thesis / Overall problem

Survivalists role in the game is too be the jack of all trades by allowing all weapon use at the expense of some damage and to have skills that give utility and survivability. The problem with the perk though is that it not only deals less perk bonus damage but none of the skills increase damage output by much while most other perks have multiple damage increasing skills (except swat.) An additional problem is that with each patch that comes out more weapons are made for the other perks, which usually fills a different problem that the other weapons of that perk has. With more weapon choices within the bracket of each perk, the less of a use the ability to dabble into other perk's weapons has.

link to Current survivalist: https://wiki.killingfloor2.com/index.php?title=Survivalist

Rework ideas:

Tier 1 - Weapon Handling


Tactical Reload: Increase weapon reload speed.

Nimble Hands (Temp Name): Increase weapon switch speed by 25% and reduce recoil of weapons by 25%.


Tier 2 - Survival Techniques


Fallback - Increase damage with your 9mm pistol and knife by 85%, and Increase Ammo Capacity by 15%.


Military training - Increase move speed by 10%, carrying capacity by 5, melee attack speed 20%, and inflict 50% more damage with melee weapons.


Tier 3 - Equipment


Medical Training - Increase the potency of all your healing 30%, decrease the cooldown of your syringe and healing darts 50%, and your grenade becomes a healing grenade.


Weapon Harness - Carry one extra grenade and Increased explosive resistance and area of effect of all Explosives by 40%. (including grenades though I don't know if it normally would or not.)



Tier 4 - Zoning


Spontaneous Zed-plosion - Zeds you kill, have a 30% chance to explode, damaging and stunning nearby Zeds. (same as before.)


Lockdown - Increase the power of all incapacitation methods by 50% for all weapons and increase damage against incapacitated zeds by 10%.


Tier 5 - Specialist Training


Madman - During Zed time, all your weapons shoot 3x faster. (same as before)


Escape Artist - During Zed time, you cannot be grabbed from clots or immobilized by E.D.A.R lassers (removing the effect of it upon zed time), and you move and switch weapons in real-time.


I am too lazy to write the rationalization of every change idea, so feel free to ask if you are curious.

 

[Aze]

Not bad. Not bad at all! I'd like to reveiew (and revamp) a few things though:

TIER 1

Tactical Reload - Good! Basicly everyone I've seen discuss Survivalist reworks wants this change.

Nimble Hands - This one would likely always be worse than Tactical Reload, since it's only really good for weapons where recoil (or swapping weapons) matter. I'd suggest something like this instead:

Elite Magazines - Increases magsize of all eligible weapons by 50%. Ineligible weapons get elite reloads instead (Weapons that'd get reloads instead of magsize would be: Boomstick, Doomstick, HX25, M79, M32, RPG, Seal Squeal, Seeker6, Pulverizer, Hemoclobber, 1858, .500, Crossbow, Railgun, M99)

This makes the first tier an actual playstyle choice that is a lot more fair. For example, Nimble Hands with an M99, what good would it be, really? That said, the suggested bonuses on Nimble Hands aren't BAD, I'd just place them elsewhere.

TIER 2

Fallback - Compared to Military Training, this one feels a tad weak. Maybe bump the ammobonus up to 20%? And give the 25% weaponswap bonus here as well perhaps?

Military Training - Movespeed is always great. Weight bonus is amazing. Melee bonuses are nice (to the point of making the knife bonus on Fallback almost useless in comparison). I feel this talent almost has too many good things packed into it at once.

Dunno what to suggest for these two talents that wouldn't be a complete rework of both though, I'll have to think about it. I do agree on ammobonus vs weight though, that's still a good pick (it's a weapon deepening versus weapon broadening difference, and both are dosh-dependant).

TIER 3

Medical Training - I like that you packed all the healing stuff into one talent. It all fits, feels balanced too, as it's useful no matter what you have as your loadout.

Weapon Harness - I like that you packed all the "demolitionist" things into this one, but I do feel it's a bit on the weaker side of things (especially considering Medical Training being such a good talent). And the name doesn't fit that well... unless you also add the 25% recoil reduction here? That way, the talent is a bit more general, fitting more weapons than just explosive ones.

TIER 4

Spontaneous Zed-splosion - It's a good talent as it is, yes, but I have two problems with it:
1) It's entirely RNG
2) It's useless against singular targets.

Thus I'd suggest this:
Zed Buster - Increase max health by 25% and every 4th kill causes said enemy to explode, damaging and stunning other nearby enemies.
With that, RNG is removed, and the added tankiness let's you fight singular enemies a bit more safely (could be a lifesaver when fighting Scrakes, FPs and bosses, in particular).

Lockdown - General incap bonus and conditional damage? Not bad! Thumbs up from me.

Tier 5

Madman - Is ok as is.

Escape Artist - I feel it's missing something. It's not bad, but it's a tad too... defensive? Don't get me wrong, full movespeed is very good, but it feels it needs a TINY bit extra on the offensive side. Maybe make it similar to SWAT's Battering Ram instead?


Overall, good suggestions though (despite my nitpicking). Better than many others, that's for sure!

 

[Demon Swords]

This post is about commenting on the changes (or nitpicks) Aze proposed and to throw out alternate ideas when reflecting on my old ones.


General Change that matters more latter:
Basic Grande is the Molotov instead of He Grenade. Reason 1: I want the survivalist to have molotov for Maham Maker (changed tier 3) and starting with it makes more sense then at lv 15 you suddenly no longer have the option of your grenade that you started with. Reason 2: Molotov is an improv weapon which makes sense for a Survivalist to have.


Tier 1 Reload vs Mag rambling

Reason for nimble fingers idea: I don't like that reload and Mag tend to be stuck together. Most people will just default to one or the other by personal preference unless they like mag and they want to use a non mag increasing weapon. So I tried coming up with a non mag related perk but it would be too hard to find the perfect equal to utility perks let alone one as useful as reload speed.

As such i believe it is better to just allow them to be stuck together again. At least it will allow more interesting weapons to get mag size when they otherwise can't (though the main benefit of swat over survivalist using the same weapons is that swat weapons have low base mag size so you need to be swat to utilize them well, but oh well that perk needs lots of changes anyway.)


Tier 2


Fallback - I do agree that when compared to Military Training, fallback is very underwhelming, but I wanted it to be about the same strength of the other versions of fallback. I was worried I put too much into military training since I wanted it to be about as strong as melee expert was with the utility that weapon harness had. Though i ended up making Military training too strong since the only nerf from Malee expert was 10 move speed at all times instead of 25% while holding a melee weapon.


Alt idea for both skills of tier 2


Military Training - Increase damage with your knife by 85%. Increase move speed by 10%, carrying capacity by 5, and gain 25% weapon switching speed. Parrying an attack with a melee weapon reduces incoming damage by 25%.


Head Hunter - Increase damage with your 9mm by 75%. increase head shot damage by 10%, reduce recoil by 25%, and Increase ammo capacity of your weapons by 15%.



Alt Military training rationalization - The reason that I made altered Military Training the way I did is that it is interesting that everyone has a knife and that knife can parry yet it seems nobody uses it for that presumably because it is too impractical to switch to it, parry damage, then switch back to damage weapon. For this reason, I designed the perk to allow to utilize the knife this way by increasing switching speed and increasing the usefulness of the knife while out. Additionally weapon speed is useful while carrying multiple weapons which extra weight incentivises. Lastly I wanted Military training to replace malee expert to allow some melee combat though the survivalist will never compare to the berserker in malee and also has access to other close quarters weapons so having a skill that needs you to buy a certain weapon just be useful when other weapon types cold serve the same role seems unnecessary. So instead having you possess the melee weapon you would use via buffing the knife seemed more logical.


Head Hunter Rationalization - With Military training buffing the knife part of fallback it seemed natural to make the other option effect the 9mm. Since the usefulness of the 9mm is one-shot head-shot kills of small zeds with fallback I thought making the perk center on that made sense (I also wanted the Survivalist to buff those stats somehow anyways.) The recoil in this case is quite useful as it will alow weapons will recoil to more easily be able to get headshots against the same target multiple times.


Tier 3


Mayhem Maker (modded and renamed weapon harness) - Carry one additional grenade, increased explosive resist and Immunity to your own fire by 40%, and increase the area of effect of explosives, flames, and poisonous gas by 40%.


Tier 4 comments on Zed-plosion change idea


The idea for Zed explosion buff is too good as 4 kills of zeds at 30% chance gives about 80% chance of at least one explosion so a guaranteed one every 4 is too low. Also having the perk give Defensiveness is too good as well as the perk already stuns zed on success and deals damage (though only a small amount.)

I do agree that more consistency would be useful so how about one of these ideas:

• Kills against zeds gives stacks where smaller zeds like clots and crawlers give least and tougher ones give more points. When certain stack threshold is reached Zed-plosion activates,
• At start of possessing zed-plosion or on zed kill the game will pre-roll explosion chance and tell you when next kill will trigger it. (With this system multi-explosion from a pack of zed kills couldn't occur so slightly increasing chance would be a good counter balance for this.)

The problem with giving a threshold is that; 1. It is hard to balance the perfect number and 2. Zeds get bigger and harder to kill as waves go by. With it getting harder and harder to get kills as waves go on the number for zed-plosion must be low to be useful in later waves but can't be too low that it activates very often in low waves. A threshold also insinuates a very awkward playstyle choices. One of these is that if your in a team and you have zed-plosion you may choose to not kill strangler zeds when ready for activation because you want to save your zed-plosion against a group of zeds. The second problem is that it greater incentivizes weird attack priorities. For example: if their is a scrake next to a group of clots you may decide to spend your efforts on the clots more then the threating scrake because you know killing the side zeds will trigger the explosion against the scrake. With a percentage you don't know when it will activate and thus you may hope that killing the scrake will cause the zed-plosion to help kill the clots. A percent incentivises just playing normally and going "nice" or "that's cool" when it happens instead of attempting various weird strategies to get precise zed-plosion activations.


Tier 5 commenting on Escape artist.


I thought of making it similar to battering ram of being able to pass through enemies but i thought it would remove too much uniqueness from the swat perk (especially since that perk is all about utility so removing the uniqueness of a skill in the perk would devalue the reason to pick it over this perk.)

 

[Ic0n0clast]

I like my move speed increased while hold melee weapon plus they increased the dmg output of melee weapons. Try the Hemoglobber on right, right, left, left, right perks.