WGLF Change/Buff
Hey there!
I've been hoping for a WGLF change for a long time now, so I figured I'd voice a couple of ways I think the perk could be improved while promoting healthy gameplay.
A brief history: WGLF used to give survivors +50% BP per token acquired up to 4 (+200% BP total), with tokens being gained for saves and protection hits. Unfortunately this led to a lot of bad decision making on the part of survivors: They would hook bomb with BT even when it wasn't advantageous and take protection hits that gained nothing and gave the killer a decisive advantage because math dictated that you'd easily make up for the BP lost from not surviving would be easily made up for with the tokens... so you had a ton of suicidal survivors giving their teams a massive disadvantage to farm tokens.
By comparison, look at BBQ&Chilli - the perk encourages healthy behavior in game by awarding tokens for hooking different survivors - you don't tunnel or camp if you want to get all of your barbeque tokens, and you have to actively participate in the game with all the survivors. There are edge cases where killers can throw the game looking for their last BBQ stack and make it uninteresting for some survivors, but by and large, the perk contributes a TON to the game because of the way it works:
1) The perk incentivises fun gameplay as discussed above
2) The perk provides a decent advantage for all killers, incentivising use which leads to healthy gameplay
3) The perk provides a BP reward, ensuring that you feel rewarded for playing in a fun way even when you don't get a 4k.
The design of BBQ is honestly phenominal!
Borrowing from that design, here's a quick rework of WGLF - leave critiques or your own version below, and remember: The goal isn't to make the perk good for no reason, the goal is to make the perk incentivise fun gameplay, then provide an advantage to that style of play and a BP reward!
We're Gonna Live Forever: You gain 10% action speed to vaulting and healing OTHER survivors. Gain 1 token for each 40 seconds you spend in chase with a killer and healing other survivors: each token decreases action speed by (2.5/2/1.5%) and grants 25% bonus BP at the end of the game, maximum 4 tokens.
Alternative, slightly better and slightly more complicated version:
We're gonna Live Forever: You gain 10% action speed to vaulting and 40% action speed to healing other survivors without using a medkit. Gain 1 token for each 40 seconds in chase AND for each full health state you heal other survivors without using a medkit: each token decreases the vault speed bonus by (2.5/2/1.5)% and the healing speed bonus by (10/7.5/5)%.
I wanted to have the speed increase with token gain, but I was worried about the perk stacking with Spine Chill and Resilience to create very frustrating chases for the killer... But in general, here are my thoughts:
The most fun, interactive, and skill-intensive part of the game is the chase. You want survivors to get better at chasing, and you want survivors to heal each other so they can get back into chases - you also want them to unhook, but you don't necessarily want them to unhook unconditionally for obvious reasons. Healing is much less intrusive since other survivors can just hold shift if someone is healing them in the wrong situation.
So obviously, by increasing healing and action speed and giving bonus BP for those actions, you're incentivising them. By having these benefits decrease with each token, you're incentivising a shift from chasing/healing to repairing. Perhaps most importantly, when you incentivise long chases your survivors will get better at those chases, hopefully helping to stabilize the skill difference between the best and worst survivors.
As a final note: This perk obviously doesn't include generator repair. While it can be frustrating to be on teams who don't do generators, I think at medium to high levels of skill, incentivising chase over generators is probably a good thing... but I could be wrong.
Let me know what you think! <3
-Jakeroo