Should Fixated grant its speed boost while injured?

Demogordon_Ramsay · February 2020

The dilemma of Fixated not giving players a walking speed boost while they are injured is something I've been pondering for a bit now. When the Perk first came out, my immediate assumption as to why that cost was added was to discourage the meta of Survivors never healing in favor of sitting on gens with Adrenaline equipped. However, if this was the intention (which I have no idea what the reasoning behind that feature is, but it's just my guess), all that really does is make high-rank Survivors not want to use the Perk. It doesn't make the no-heal Adrenrush meta any weaker; it just clashes with it in a way that people who run the meta don't like.

Here's my biggest issues with Fixated's speed boost not working while injured:

The second bonus of always seeing your scratch marks is only really useful to beginner Survivors. Survivors who are good don't need to see their scratch marks to be cognizant of their existence, appearance, and presence. They can easily manipulate their scratch marks without needing to see them. Moreover, the most common scratch mark tactic of "walk to avoid leaving marks" doesn't require ANY knowledge of what your marks look like; you simply need to know that running leaves them and walking does not. In short: At higher levels of play, Fixated is next to useless whenever you are injured. You essentially have 3 Perks.
Fixated is a skill-based Perk and should have all reasonable avenues to use it open. The scratch marks feature of Fixated is a "crutch" in the sense that it is easily something better players can live without, and wasting your Perk slot on that feature is a hindrance at that point. However, the bonus walk speed has a much higher skill ceiling than what you can do with the scratch marks. The two biggest advantages of Fixated's walking speed bonus are better traversal while working off Exhaustion, and stealth. The first one is only really useful to Sprint Burst users who use it as a chase Perk instead of a traversal one, and it's already easy enough to work off Exhaustion as is. Stealth, however, is widely agreed to be one of the trickier play styles for Survivors to try and pull off. It takes some good thinking to do it well, and even then, it's next to impossible without the aid of certain Perks (AKA being injured without Iron Will makes stealth nonexistent). And then, of course, Killers like Plague and Legion have parts of their kit that disable stealth completely and utterly without exception, making it even less viable. In short: Stealth is difficult. Fixated kind of makes stealth easier, but what it really does is make people who are good at stealth capable of doing more with their skill. The ability to walk farther away when the Killer doesn't have LoS on you, rounding corners quicker, and being able to pull things off that you simply couldn't without Fixated, makes it a high-risk, high-reward Perk. If the Killer simply smacks you, they get to take all of that potential and say, "Haha no, you're not allowed." This, in my opinion, is simply silly as it applies a cost to the opportunity to be a skillful player.
Necessitating a lack of being injured is a terrible stipulation in the no-heal meta. Ever since the healing change back during the addition of Spirit into the game, anti-heal builds have been the bread and butter of so many Killers. I never used it, but as a Survivor, it felt like Sloppy Butcher would show up in more matches than old Ruin sometimes. Combine that with Thanatophobia and Dying Light—both of which are moderately common Perks—and put it on someone like Oni, who literally acquires his power through Survivors being injured, and it's very easy to make healing painstakingly slow. And then you have Killers like, again, Plague and Legion, who can get a free first hit on you by pressing a button or disable your ability to heal entirely, and there are plenty of avenues for a Killer to make healing slow, tedious, a bad decision, or even impossible. Sure, there are a slew of healing Perks for Survivors to choose from, but most of those are for healing others. The two fastest self-healing Perk Survivors have in their arsenal, Adrenaline and Inner Strength, either only proc once per game or require you to find one of the mere five totems hidden around the map that other Survivors may have already cleansed—a problem becoming even more apparent now that more Killers are running NOED and slightly more Survivors actually ARE running Inner Strength now, hampering the Perk's reliability and consistency. The only Perk that allows you to reliably heal yourself, Self Care, cuts your healing speed in half, and medkits have a finite amount of charges. If Fixated was ridiculously powerful, I would understand. But the tricks it enables and encourages are tricky and easy to mess up. Having a large uptime on being uninjured throughout the match is an unreasonably tall order to get a bonus like walking a little faster.
Urban Evasion used to have the uninjured stipulation. Guess what? It was F tier.
(Personal peeve) The stipulation makes the Perk next-to-unusable with No Mither. I know nobody runs No Mither, but come on. I already use up a Perk slot just to turn on hardmode; why should I have the ability to get a sick cool walking speed bonus ripped away from me for the ENTIRE match?
(Another personal peeve) Fixated soft-counters Spirit. And good Lord, do I despise Spirit's putrid, festering, weebish existence. Her update gave us Spirit, it gave us Roll-the-Dice Rancor, it gave us Bruhliverance, it gave us Yamaoka and its eternal immersion, it gave us Adam's terrible voice acting, and it gave us the genesis of the no-heal meta. But hey, it also gave us Oni-chan, so I guess I can't complain too much.

In short: I think the stipulation makes Fixated significantly weaker than it should be, and it only discourages high-rank players to run it in favor of the Adrenawin meta.

Todgeweiht · February 2020