Was Ruin ever good?
After I vented my frustration about the changes of Ruin, I decided to look at it from the dev's perspective and why it was changed to begin with. And then, more importantly I looked at what made Ruin good to begin with and how it compares to now.
Ruin was a perk that applied pressure by having causing gens to regress of the great skill check wasn't hit. People believed that this made it really strong and put it at top tier. But in order for something to deserve to be top tier it has to come into account of the highest of play possible. Ruin ONLY applied pressure if survivors couldn't hit those skill checks. But what happens when they could? What happens when they can just hit those skill checks no problem? Then the perk is so useless it's not even worth going to look for it to break, which is apart of the pressure it applies. What we have is a perk that NEEDS for survivors to be bad at skill checks. It's a perk that required no skill on the killers behalf, you couldn't make more use out of it unless you had other perks. It depends on the Survivors only. Survivors could hit those skill checks and there's nothing the killer can do about it. This perk was HORRENDOUSLY unbalanced and unhealthy. If you weren't adapt as a new player at skill checks then Ruin DEMOLISHED you. However if you were good at great skill checks then Ruin was absolutely and utterly useless.
Now for the new Ruin. No matter how skilled the survivor is, the killer can pull up and chase them off the gen and it will regress. No matter what. By 3x the amount if you were to kick it. If you went up against a skill check savvy killer and chased them off the gen nothing would happen to that gen and there's nothing you could do about it, but now there is. And if by chance you get an early hook then they HAVE to leave the gens for a rescue or risk the game getting a lot harder because you're a man down.
My point is I realized not only Ruin wasn't that great of a perk, but as I write this post I realized that it was a straight up unhealthy perk, because of how much it needed survivors to be bad at skill checks. The changes are miles ahead of what Ruin was previously and I totally understand why the devs are happy with their in house testing now.
Comments
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The reason ruin was needed for the game is so that you could find survivors before the first generator was completed and hopefully down one person and put them on a hook. If you have three survivors working on one generator while using a slow moving killer such as huntress, by the time you get to the first generator it was completed. AND that's still going to be the case.
However, if you run iri head with soldier's belt, then that huntress is going to be called a try hard. It's unfortunate but true. So with the new ruin you'll probably be seeing more Freddy's, Spirit and most likely Hill Billy.
Do I like new ruin? Yes to a degree. But there needs to be an address on gen speeds and how easy it is to get the first gen out before first chase happens
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You obviously dont face 3 - 4 swf groups at red ranks mainly rank 2s. Ruin as it is now definitely buys you little bit of time to get the hooks going before getting gen rushed into 0 kills. I'd take even 30 secs of it being up to what it becomes after patch.
The only positivee thing is that everyone is sleeping on corrupt intervention which replaces ruin a lot better if you know what you are doing and choose the right killer for it. Enough said.
edit: yes devs, the ruin change is going to nullify some killers and favour some a lot as the 2nd post points out.
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It denied progression bonus, that was good enough against survivors who are good at hitting great skill checks.
Also; if we are gonna nerf perks because they have a passive effect that doesn't require any effort, then more perks would need to get nerfed on both sides.
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"But in order for something to deserve to be top tier it has to come into account of the highest of play possible."
This is an absurd assumption. The vast majority of players don't qualify as playing the highest quality games. If a perk is effective against the vast majority of players then it is top tier. Popular things are popular for a reason.
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The reason for this post was not to talk about Gen Speeds but Ruin alone. One thing at a time.
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Having been away from the game for awhile and hanging out in purple/green ranks, I took ruin off of all my killers as a preview of things to come.
Honestly, I feel less stressed about it. Ruin gave me one more thing to have to worry about. Now I can just focus on doing what I am supposed to do.
I am no stranger to red ranks, mind you. I toiled there before and understand the value of ruin. No perk can save you there. Bad map design and many killers with a lack of map pressure will beat you, ruin or not.
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I forgot to mention that progression bonus. It's only 2% progression. That is not at all enough to make the perk strong. Especially with a toolbox, or gen speed perks.
It being passive wasn't a problem, it's the fact that it's a passive that requires players to be bad at skill checks. It was a passive that was solely in the survivors control.
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Imma do some manual quoting to make it easy as to what I'm replying to:
"But in order for something to deserve to be top tier it has to come into account of the highest of play possible"
"Ruin ONLY applied pressure if survivors couldn't hit those skill checks. But what happens when they could? What happens when they can just hit those skill checks no problem? Then the perk is so useless it's not even worth going to look for it to break, which is apart of the pressure it applies."
"However if you were good at great skill checks then Ruin was absolutely and utterly useless."
It did, it forced Survivors who can hit great skillchecks to not get bonus progress. If we assume you get a minimum of 4 skillchecks during gen progress, that's %8 progress you denied with Hex: Ruin. That may not seem like a lot of time, but it does add up over the long run.
"It's a perk that required no skill on the killers behalf, you couldn't make more use out of it unless you had other perks."
Yes and no. Every Hex: Perk requires no skill on it's part to have an affect. The skill comes from defending it while also defending generators, one of which is more important than the other. Prior to this new Ruin, no perks really combo'd with, theoretically, any perks. For example, Third Seal and Knockout could be used in a strange slug build, but they didn't really combo as much as do their own individual job.
"Now for the new Ruin. No matter how skilled the survivor is, the killer can pull up and chase them off the gen and it will regress. No matter what. By 3x the amount if you were to kick it."
Yes... For one Survivor unless you're lucky/Discordance popped. Even in the situation with Discordance, good Survivors will split up, wait for you to choose who to chase, and the other will get back on the gen. Now, you have 1 Survivor being chased (with a possible 1 gen being regressed) and 3 Survivors not feeling anything. This means unless you know where every Survivor is at the beginning of the match, and can force the Survivor you're chasing into them to force them off as well, you don't get anything. Not to mention, that only pauses them for a few seconds, until rinse and repeat my discordance situation.
"And if by chance you get an early hook then they HAVE to leave the gens for a rescue or risk the game getting a lot harder because you're a man down."
This is it's one saving grace, but it's minor. This would be like taking the perk Bamboozle with all maps having only 1 window (obviously not the case, but go with it.) Having an entire perk for one situation feels extremely bad, and with every other situation that it has minor affects on, it feels pointless, and I'd rather run something completely different.
"My point is I realized not only Ruin wasn't that great of a perk, but as I write this post I realized that it was a straight up unhealthy perk, because of how much it needed survivors to be bad at skill checks."
And this is where we go back to their post about how Ruin is "unfun" for Survivors who are new/bad at skill checks. Ruin in it's current form is, imo, a Rite of Passage for Survivors, teaching them to hit Great Skillchecks. Afterwards, they learn to ignore it. I hardly ever broke Ruin because it didn't bother me. The thing I enjoyed about leaving it up was it slowed the game down, allowing for actual fun chases, as compared to without it where the game generally ends before anything has happened, and all I did was press M1.
"The changes are miles ahead of what Ruin was previously and I totally understand why the devs are happy with their in house testing now."
Keep in mind, this is the same in house testing that thought the 3 second disarm on Doctor, Nemesis releasing to PTB with Deep Wounds being affected by Terror Radius, Oni not having a cap on his flick, and an Ultra Rare for Demogorgon that allows Shred to break pallets, were all good ideas. This same testing group during the Dark Times thought giving Survivors a way to pick themselves up while downed, especially in a time when Hooks didn't respawn, was a good way to keep variety in the game (as every killer ran basement builds to counter this.) The thing they should do is never close down the PTB, and any changes they think up/code, push it to PTB. Implement a system where after you complete a PTB match, if there was a changed element in the game, a questionnaire pops up asking the players what they think of it. You'll slowly notice that those who want to just play for fun won't touch it, but those who want to improve the game and are willing to deal with buggy, broken, and imbalanced changes, will continue to play on the PTB to help the devs make proper changes.
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That's not how tiers work AT ALL. Just because someone refuses to adapt to a perk doesn't make it good. It only means people refuse to adapt despite being able to eliminate it entirely.
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2% progression bonus for each survivor working on a gen, which could be two or three. Judging by the inconsistency of the skill checks, I still consider Ruin did a decent job against that.
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You can't separate Ruin from Gen speeds in regards to topic, as Ruin itself affected gen speed. They're linked hand in hand.
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Nah sorry i disagree. Even when you were able to hit great skillchecks or hex skillcheck, you didnt get the extra progression which in turn would lead to okayish gen speeds, people who say it didnt matter simply didnt play it.
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It does not really matter if the first Generator is completed. This is the problem which many people seem not to understand - what happens at the start is not really relevant for the Outcome. If one Gen gets done early, yeah, cool. But that does not mean that all Gens will be completed. Or that even more Gens get completed after the first one.
It is just logical that the first Gen(s) are faster, because Survivors are at their strongest. Nobody is in a chase, meaning 4 people are on Gens. If one person is in a chase, 3 people are still on Gens and the Ressources (Pallets) are all available. But once Pressure is applied, things change - if one person is on the Hook, another person needs to go for the Rescue. This is two people on Gens. If one of those is being chased, one person is on a Gen, the other 3 are occupied. THIS is Pressure. And this is relevant and not that the first Gen does not get done fast.
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I agree. I dont think that Ruin is good. I think that it is something that people simply keep in their Loadout, because they used it early and it worked. And of course Ruin works when you start using it in yellow Ranks. But the higher you get, the less useful it becomes. Can be compared to Self Care in my opinion, it does not really matter that much to waste those 32 seconds in low Ranks, because while the other Survivors might not be efficient, the Killer is usually also not really the best. But the higher you get, the better the Killers become so that 32 seconds in a Corner are crucial.
Same with Ruin - good Survivors can hit those Skill Checks and dont need to search for the Totem. It mostly gets cleansed when they find it by coincidence. Or, if they decide to search for it, they know WHERE to search for it. Sure Ruin does not give such a huge time benefit as in low(er) Ranks.
For me, I stopped using Ruin after it got cleansed before I was able to see where it is. Did not see it at first glance (probably behind a Gens Aura), so I was like "I will check later"... Aaand, its gone. Afterwards, I did not use Ruin anymore, which feels less stressful for me.
And I really hope BHVR will go on with that change (especially because it would be quite bad if Killers get their will by complaining, this could lead to some "interesting" things like protresting to remove BT or whatever) and that Killers will see that Ruin is not as needed as they think it is.
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I think you got it wrong then.
If the passive effect wasn't a problem, then being a passive effect to justifiy a nerf isn't really a valid argument anymore, because you just dismissed it as a problem. Then the conditional is being bad at a game mechanic; in this case hitting great skill checks.
Or is it the other way around? It's unbalanced and unfair being punished for being bad at game mechanic (being bad at hitting great skill checks), because a passive effect punishes you for being bad?
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Ruin was a nuisance. Kind of like mosquitoes when you go outside at certain times sometimes they don't bother you other times you're number one target. But if they're not messing with you, they are on someone else. Now survivors can play with only the 25% of being found. That to me equals 3+ gens done before someone is dead in 100% of matches and boring gameplay.
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Understandable. But killers are going to see this as a major impact against them.
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Completing one gen before the killer even sees a survivor is stupid though. And yes, you can run corrupt intervention, but my issue is that it still goes away within a certain period of time and survivors can just be super immersed while waiting for that time frame.
If anything, there should be a perk that has x tokens. Gen speed progression should be slowed by I'll say 15,20,25%. Each time a generator is completed one token gets taken away. So say give three tokens. At least that's a reliable early game source to counter gens, it's not overpowered since there's only three tokens. And it's only a few seconds more for generator progression. That's honestly how I feel ruin should have been in the start
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80% userate in red ranks. Yes it was good.
Deceisive Strike, Borrowed Time, Dead hard are also good and have roughly a bit less userate i assume.
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Ruin has never and never will be a meta perk. It's a totem which it even more useless, therefore ruin has and this change proves it the weakest killer perk in the game. Ruin if it was not a hex and just a regular perk may make it c or b tier. Everyone says ruin is part of meta build it's really not sure it caused survivors to take more time to gens, but ruin proves fundamentally that survivors are not as good as they think they are gen speed is fine in my opinion it takes over a minute to do a gen. What isn't fine That you needed to change one part of a perk to show you how garbage it actually always has been
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I played a thousand hours at rank 1 for many months and Im safe to say that ruin provided an advantage ONLY when there was already an advantage i.e. my team couldnt hit skillcheck or find totem.
Every single time the team was composed by strong survivors ruin was either down in 10 secs or everybody just powered through gens anyway.
I myself can hit 8 out of 10 great skillchecks on average, some games im around 50% and some around 100%
the advantage ruin gave was esponential. The worse the survivors the bigger the advantage and that was not a well thought mechanic. I wont comment on the changes yet tho.
the thing is on high level of play ruin had very little impact and btw it should have been created to counter this.
Again, gens speed is not fair but ruin was not the solution. If you get genrushed pre rank 1 you are playing killer wrongly cause the top 0.5% premades are rare
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The reason Ruin was so good was because it applied pressure at the very beginning something killer sorely lacked and desperately needed. For example, look at Corrupt Intervention, a lot use it not because it has a fantastic effect (in fact i would call it average) but because it has an effect that applies pressure right at the start.
Killers need perks that place pressure on survivors right at the start. This is why Ruin is used.
You also shouldnt assume Ruin is useless on veteran survivors. While it definitely had less of an effect, when you get a good skill check it pauses gen progress which means unless you AND whoever is doing the gen with you can hit 100% great skill checks you will get screwed over to the constant pausing.
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I mean it bought you a couple of seconds...so there's that...
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I don't care how good you are, you're not hitting every single skill check. Even the standard circumvention (gen tapping) still causes Ruin to have a consistent value. It is increasingly effective against co-op repairs.
The Ruin nerf helps new players, but it is virtually ineffective against solo repairs/split-gens. Gen rushing is everyone splitting up to repair generators--the opposite of what Ruin actually affects.
This is the problem with Ruin: It does nothing against gen rushing, and everything against co-oping. It offers limited value against this.
Personally, I think Ruin is a requirement, even if it's a gamble. Its value is too much of a requirement at mid-high ranks when it lasts decently long enough. Not every player in a match will look for it, and people that don't can suffer some bad RNG that makes it incredibly potent. It sucks that it's a Hex, but I've always advocated that its concept should be reworked and made a core mechanic in some way.
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Ruin seems to always have been a perk that either it does you pretty well in a match or it was just a waste of a perk slot for the match
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So you say because Ruin was used 80 % in red rank games means it is good?
If so this is a false assumption.
That number does not say anything about how good Ruin was. It merely states how popular(!) it was as this number only indicates the usage and not how it actually influenced the game itself.
Now, if we could look at how Ruin actually changed the game when used - Did killer win on average while using Ruin? Were there less gens done on average while using Ruin? - then we would have an answer of how good Ruin actually was.
The 80 % you mentioned, however, simply display that Ruin was a popular perk, not necessarily a good one.
Popularity could simply be based on wrong assumptions people made, ie that Ruin is a good perk without actually knowing it for a fact.
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So, you are you saying that because Ruin was used 80 % of red rank games means it is a good perk?
If so, that assumption is false.
The number 80 % does not tell you anything about how good Ruin was.
It merely displays how popular(!) it was as the number only indicates the usage of the perk not how it actually influenced the game.
Now, if we could look at how Ruin actually changed the outcome/duration of the game when it was used - Did the killer win on average while using Ruin? Were there on average less gens done when using Ruin? - then we could draw some conclusions how good it actually was.
Additionally the popularity of the perk could also simply be based on false assumptions people made, for example that Ruin was a good perk or that it is used oftentimes for that reason when this may actually not be true.
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I'm sorry but with the use of toolboxes and add-ons ON TOP of skill, it's too easy to just power through Ruin and gen rush anyway. I'm not saying it's useless against veteran survivors I'm saying it's useless against survivors who are good at skill checks and there's nothing that the killer could do about having a pause that's less than a second is nowhere near enough to be counted as good. If people really think this pause and a 2% bonus prevention is enough pressure to warrant it being top tier than, the standards are TERRIBLY low.
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Yes they can power through it and yes its not an all mighty perk that stops gen progression. There will be teams that make Ruin look like its not even working. Its not even consistent, you are right that there are a lot of flaws to Ruin, even more than you mentioned. Ive seen killers complain about how bad Ruin is more than survivors.
Yet its used in 80%+ of games, dont you think that speak volumes about how desperately killers need/want ANY kind of perk that applies even a slight amount of pressure early game? Ruin wasnt good because it had some game breaking effect, Ruin was good because it patched a flaw in the game.
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I don't think we disagree on anything. The fact that those teams exist is my issue and why I say it's pretty weak. As far as gen speed is, balance wise I think it's more fair than people believe however I still think it needs to be dealt the same hand Ruin was. Gen speeds are horrendously frustrating and make the overall killer experience downright miserable.
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Tbh actually your end sentence was dumb. Ruin was good and I don't get why you wouldn't think it is good. Not only did u find it amusing and funny when ruin didn't go down in an instant but you would use that to your advantage because survivors don't like to push through ruin and rather would look for it.
It's funny how you said the perk wasn't good but it was actually good because when it didn't go down in the first 5 seconds it was ez to take control and kill survivors. To the survivors though it was almost balanced idk why they nerfed it. Anyone I watched who played the game or when I played the game I would actually get out and escape more then likely. But when I played killer it's like the survivors didn't stand a chance.
So ruin was actually a really good perk and it deserves what it got but it doesn't deserve a Nerf.
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It was good but corrupt intervention is the better, and more consistent, perk on most killers.
I really only use it on hag and trapper anymore because both of them can actually defend it very well, especially hag.
Agitation hag is absolutely brutal if you can drag someone over to the ruin and hook them next to it, because then you can basically camp with impunity.
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