SoloQ needed Reassurance, so why did they gut it?
The last patch was an indirect buff to camping. Now that there's minimum 50 extra seconds of gentime, 'just do gens' is not the solution it used to be.
In SoloQ, this is even worse. Because there's no communication, every single survivor will come to hook, thinking the others are in chase. People act like this is the survivors misplaying, I'm sure you've heard "don't all come to hook when someone's being camped, split up on gens!" But the reality is that there's no way to KNOW this in SoloQ, and the survivors are simply playing the best they can with the intel they have. The only way to 'counter' this pileup is the person on hook running Kindred. You can bring Kindred every single game - but as long as you aren't the one being camped, that's two other people in the lobby that have no idea what's going on.
Camping is simply too potent when you lack information. It's a strategy that's easily dealt with by SWF but destroys SoloQ. Strategies like that should not exist.
SoloQ NEEDED a magic bullet to kill facecamping. And with the new nerfs it looks like that magic bullet is dead on arrival.
Let's compare Kinship to the new Reassurance. I run SoloQ Kinship very often in one of my main builds. And in my 100s of hours of running Kinship, I've seen two things:
Kinship is an incredibly rare perk. I've seen it on other survivors maybe once or twice.
Kinship is incredibly low impact without a coordinated team, and is a dead perk slot 9/10 games. If someone gets close enough to activate it when you're being camped, they just unhook and trade.
The new Reassurance is a Kinship that can happen twice. Here's why no-one will run it after 2 weeks:
It's selfless. In this patch, how many people have you seen run OTR vs BT? SoloQ survivors are selfish - they have to be, since you can't depend on others being skilled at the game. And when nobody runs the selfish version of the perk... why would anyone run the selfless one?
You need to be EVEN closer than Kinship to activate it. If you're within 6m of a camped survivor, you're getting hit. And once you get hit, what's the purpose of 30 seconds in SoloQ? Either all the survivors are here and Reassurance is useless because you're bodyblocking the save (& not doing gens) or the Killer comes for you immediately after using it because you're the only one that came and didn't know they were being camped (& rewarding the Killer with another hook, or at least an easy chase).
The range is simply too short to be an 'oh shit' measure - Kinship has nearly three times the range and still struggles to be activated.
So if it's not to help SoloQ... what is the point of Reassurance?
If you're familiar with competitive DBD, you'll know Kinship is actually an important perk. Camping is king here, so adding 30 seconds to the hook timer can be really powerful. Remember, Reassurance now does what Kinship does... twice. Was the point just to make a better Kinship for tourney teams?
Outside of a tournament setting, SWFs don't run Kinship. They don't need Kinship. They have the camping counter built in - communication. So who is this perk for now?
I love the direction this game is going, but these knee-jerk decisions don't look like rapid responses, they look like laziness. This perk was gutted for a hypothetical bully-squad scenario that people proposed actual fixes for (remember: you could already try to kobe on ptb while paused, so just allow you to miss struggle skillchecks too & disable the perk in endgame). It's just like they decided to re-add DMS+Pain Res because they couldn't fix one niche interaction.
And I'm not one to 'us vs them', but the fact it was only SWF who could abuse the perk and now it's only SWF who can even use the perk feels especially cruel.
tl;dr:
Camping has always been much stronger vs SoloQ than vs SWF, recent patch has only made this worse
SoloQ needs an answer to camping that isn't all four people running Kindred
Reassurance was that answer
The Reassurance 'rework' means the perk is only viable in SWF - a 1-time 30 seconds with 6m range is meaningless in SoloQ
But SWF don't need it, they counter camping by default
Reassurance changes lack a design philosophy, who is the perk now for?
SWF bully squads were the problem, so why do SoloQ players take the brunt of the nerf?