#1 priority should be improving bad perks
I don't know what others feel, but I'd just like to put out there that as a player I find that my largest frustration with DBD is bad perks.
DBD is so bloated with perks that have way too many limitations, a very underpowered effect, or both. Take for example a perk like Gearhead. You're required to land two hits, then it's active for only 30 seconds at most, and then you need survivors to hit good, not great, skillchecks. If I jump through the hoops to get gearhead to trigger and no generators light up, are no generators being worked or did no one hit a 'good' skillcheck? There's no way to know.
Compare this to something like Thrilling Tremors, which not only tells you which generators are being worked on unconditionally for 16 seconds but also blocks other generators so they can't be worked on. So why would I ever run Gearhead over Thrilling Tremors?
And there are so many perks like this that have interesting effects but are really held back by randomly placed limitations: Surge, Knock Out, and other perks with situational effects that only trigger on basic attacks for some reason; Dark Devotion, Dead Man's Switch, Furtive Chase, and some other perks that only work on the obsession for some reason; Deathbound only applying oblivious when survivors split up; perks that are already bad like Territorial Imperative having both a cool-down, a duration, and a range limitation, I could go on.
And then there are perks that just don't do enough. In particular, there's a real problem with killer that you're sort of forced to bring one of either Pop or Ruin when playing against good survivors, otherwise you just can't keep up with repair speeds. There exist a variety of alternatives for slowing gen repair, but the only one that even comes close to these two perks in power level is Surge. Huntress Lullaby is like old Ruin but requires several hooks to actually be effective and can be cleansed long before then. Overcharge can be fully countered by just hitting skill checks. Oppression is random, and to be honest generator regression without Ruin is just too slow to be effective. The best approach for fixing this particular problem, imo, is making base generator-kicking stronger while nerfing Pop and Ruin to compensate.
I've focused on killer perks because I know them better and I think the problem is worse there, but the same problems exist for survivors. In general it seems like perks are being designed under competing philosophies: one in which perks provide fun shake-ups to gameplay and one in which perks provide game-changing effects to both sides. If the goal is the former, then some of the power of the strongest perks for both sides need to be moved to base-kit as I suggested with Pop and Ruin. If the goal is the latter, then the crap-ton of bad perks need buffing to provide meaningful build diversity.
A close second place in terms of worst parts of DBD is indoor maps, but that's for another post.
Comments
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Absolutely, the sheer amount of subpar perks for both roles is quite ridiculous, especially so when compared against the small size of the pool of viable perks that actually have a reliable impact on the game. And most of the perks in that small pool have been around for years and years, not few of them since the game's very launch.
Perks are only really worthwhile and fun when they can consistently have an actual impact on the gameplay, and DbD particularly benefits a lot from perks that mix things up in notable ways because the base gameplay loop is lacking in variety. Those subpar perks should be brought up to snuff en masse to create a much more diverse perk metagame. The few perk adjustments BHVR does do are just not significant enough most of the time.
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I'd love to have a mid-chapter patch that focuses on reworking and buffing perks while the map team uploads a new reworked map. Survivor perks like Poised don't get used for obvious reasons, and there are too many filler perks that are obviously made to ensure the "3 new teachables per chapter" rule stays unbroken.
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Remember that pointless buff Second Wind got? I'm genuinely convinced that even if those perks were buffed, it wouldn't actually solve anything and they would just increase the numbers.
30 second Poised does sound pretty nice though
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