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I feel like even if you look at a survivor's ability to crawl clear across the map to their teammate... the survivor team is being LESS productive if their teammate is down for that long. Whether you hook or slug, its going to require a teammate to come for the rescue either way unless a perk comes in play... which can happen either way.

Before you downvote me into the dirt, please do hear me out - I've no interest in ye olden us vs. them arguments. That being said, having looked into the recent arguments for pro-slugging which baffled me so much, I did hear some compelling arguments. Ultimately, they boil down to a lack of incentives or reasons for a killer to actually hook a survivor.

To the most common point, most hook perks (Pain Res) are considered by killers to be underpowered for the pay-off provided. I'm not interested in correct or incorrect here, just gauging off of the opinions presented by killers. Survivors opinions are not overly important to the argument here as I'm not looking for "The Truth ™" I'm looking for why a behavior is occurring.

Additionally to that, and to me far more interesting, are the amount of popularly run survivor perks and equipment that a killer can completely bypass and/or reduce efficiency of dramatically by slugging. Many of these are incredibly common perks, and some of them reported as annoying to go up against.

"We'll make it"
"We're gonna live forever"
"Decisive Strike"
"Dead Hard"
"Shoulder the Burden"
"Do No Harm"
"Saboteur"
"Adrenaline"
"Boil Over"
"Break Out"
"Flow State"
"Fast Track"
"Deliverance"

So regardless of right or wrong, regardless of "The Truth ™" as would be argued on for perspectives, what do killers gain by hooking? They can activate Scourge Hooks, BBQ, "Grim Embrace", "Pop Goes the Weasel" to list those that occur in the top five killer builds, which are all slow-down heavy builds on Nightlight (yes, suboptimal reporting, working with what I have here.)

But if you slug an individual, unlike hook states, the bleed-out timer never resets adding pressure to healing slugs. This means that you don't really miss out on losing those gen slow down perks, as people go to unslug. Slugging is, effectively, its own kind of slow-down perk that is arguably better than any perk based slow-down mechanic as a result so long as you can slug people. If you can slug people quickly, you effectively lose nothing, but gain hard-counter to many of the most common survivor perks. Okay, sure, so that makes sense.

Another citation I seem to see cropping up is that killers are "punished" for being good at the game. That is to say if a killer can get all four survivors on hooks within the first two minutes of the match, they get less bloodpoints and their MMR pips down for playing more efficiently. So the higher correlation to talent we see in a killer the more incentives they are given to ignore the current system which doesn't properly reward them either way.

I myself don't slug, as I don't see a purpose to it. Short of meme sabo builds, I prefer to hook and slugging never felt necessary. But regardless of whether it's necessary and regardless to the erroneous attempt to shame killers into playing differently, it is telling that so many killers are going this way. The evidence is actually fairly compelling. Why would you deliberately handicap yourself to play by rules that aren't actually rules? If you care about the opposing team having fun, certainly you shouldn't slug, but beyond that there is no reason to not, and many reasons to slug.



Summation - TL;DR

In seeing more and more evidence for slugging I have to admit I see the point and reason to it. I don't think it's necessary for me on my main (Huntress), or on many mains (Blight, Ghoul), but the fact of the matter is that insofar as I can see it outside of shaming arguments there is literally no reason to not slug.

If the behavior was undesirable, properly incentivizing hooking would fix some of it, but that step hasn't been taken so I can't imagine it's considered that big of a problem by BHVR. Equally, more and more survivor perks do gain benefits from this whilst the Killer side feels underwhelmed in similar options whether factual or not. It's not bannable, and it's not implemented into the system to be stopped.

Am I missing something? Is there an argument as to why one shouldn't slug that does not depend upon some kind of emotional appeal? Emotions are grand and all but if I let my opposition win in PVP games just because they beg then it would just push my ranking down, meaning I'd face even less experienced opponent and ruin their days rather than people of my own skill level.

All opinions welcome. Just, you know, try to keep that us v them nonsense out of the thread. It's not constructive and I don't care 'who started it', I showed up after the grand livejournal spats that begat this situation.

Could Hook incentives help, or do we think this is a foregone situation?

There's a major element of the game missing from your rundown here, which is what you get for hooking- it's more than just activating perks, there are basekit benefits to hooking that are very relevant and important to the conversation.

To simplify those benefits, hooking both efficiently progresses your own objective and efficiently slows down your opponent's objective. It's already good at this, spreading pressure this way is as effective as it should be proportional to your skill in keeping it up, and if you just directly buff killers for hooking you run a very real risk of tilting the balance too far towards making killers - especially the stronger ones - far too powerful.

The issue that does exist here isn't that hooking needs to be incentivised over other options, it's that other options can be too good for the effort involved. Slugging is completely fine when it's done in limited, situational ways, but countering very aggressive slugging strats can be dependent on communication and preparing with specific perks ahead of time, which isn't exactly the best spot for something to be in.

To be blunt, the way you fix this issue isn't by adding basekit incentives to hook, it's by just weakening the cheese strat some people employ. It really is that simple.
Something like 9.3's PTB info and bloodlust after hooking could work, to encourage players towards the already good option that currently exists, but even that is a little handhold-y.

Ironically if you had an insidious Bubba guarding 1 gen the whole time... he might just win. Survivor teams will throw to do THAT gen.

Slugging is super risky when 3-4 survivors are up on their feet because they all can move and pick themselfs up and save so only few killers with high mobility or being at two places at once can only make this easier but than again if all 4 loose because they get slugged its on them thats like killer running around single gen thinking he will win because they cant do his gen.

Helps exposing cheaters too.

replay is essential for self improvement, learning and growth.

we have to rely on ttvs to see our own gameplay and I don't like that. bless those who stream and don't hide their VODs or lock them behind paywall

Not even bro. Even blight and ghoul lose to body blocks and basekit bt out the exit gates. The whole system favors survivor players and especially the worst ones. The majority of survivors are bad at this game, they get buffed and stay bad, meanwhile the good survivors get even stronger. Instead of forcing survivors to learn to be good at the game, they hand them wins with bs like basekit borrowed time at egc.

Honestly, not sure. You're STILL giving the survivor team a big window to do anything knowing I can't pressure them. The HUD tells them there's a 0% chance im going to hit them with a hatchet or something. The only thing that would make THAT go away is if they did remote hooking like with 2v8. Hooking takes up basically no time in 2v8, but I know plenty of ppl threw a fit when killers got remote hooking during the anniversary event.

I play both sides and honestly I don’t see slugging as a problem with the killer side. If you’re slugged and teammates aren’t picking you up, that’s a teammate problem, not a killer problem. I recall several recent matches where killer slugged me/my teammates multiple times and teammates were good at quickly picking each other up. Killers lost all those matches because they were never getting anyone to death hook.