Bad Perk University: Breakdown

Timeman63

Hello class, welcome to Bad Perk University! I'll be your professor for today, and we'll be going over the worst perks The Entity has to offer and see how to make the most out of them. Have you ever been playing the game and you see something out of the ordinary happen in your match? Something that makes you take pause and think to yourself, “Oh right, that’s a perk in the game. I almost forgot about it.” One such perk is Breakdown. Breakdown is kind of a cool perk on paper. When you’re unhooked or unhook yourself, you break the hook you were on and see the Killer’s aura for 6 seconds. Additionally, the hook that you break with this perk takes 180 seconds, or 3 minutes, to respawn. 3 minutes is a freakishly long time in a game like Dead by Daylight, so that’s pretty crazy.

So why is this perk bad? I’ll be honest, I really like Jeff’s perks. Aftercare is a perk I sometimes run in place of Bond to potentially get information on every one of my teammates, which is important to a solo player like myself. Distortion, while not an amazing perk, has the really cool effect of hiding auras and scratch marks for 10 seconds, which is long enough to block every single aura reading perk in the killers’ repertoire (the ones that have a duration anyway). It has allowed me to make really game changing stealth plays and gives me good information as to what aura reading perks the Killer has. Unfortunately, Breakdown is my least used perk of the three, even if I do like it as well. The reason for that is just how limited in use it is. This perk can only work, at most, twice in a match, since the third time you’re hooked you’re dead anyway. Also, the effect itself, while potentially useful, has some flaws. See, the perk does two things that are potentially helpful, show you where the killer is so you know where not to run, and break the hook you were on so that the killer can’t use that hook to hook you or your teammates for a while. First of all, that aura reading is only helpful if the killer happens to be making their way back to the hook. If they’re busy chasing someone else, OK at least you know, but it’s also pretty meaningless. If they’re right on top of you and your teammate who’s trying to rescue you, you’d better hope they have Borrowed Time, or else you’re liable to get farmed. While the hook is still successfully broken, the killer can also just find another nearby hook to put you on, which defeats the point of running the perk in the first place. Sure, in most cases, you can trust your team to be sensible when attempting to rescue you, and you can feel safe knowing most killers won’t facecamp, but...can you really? I guess what I’m trying to say is that some things are out of your control, and Breakdown can only help so much with that.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? I feel like this perk is rather similar in nature to Second Wind (a perk I’ll get to in the future). They both only work twice, and while their effects are quite good, many things can go wrong in attempting to get value out of them. Thankfully, Breakdown is more straightforward than Second Wind, since it doesn’t have a requirement for it to activate, it simply works. So what needs to happen now is to find a way to put as much control in your hands with this perk as possible. Here are some perks that work well with Breakdown. The first perk that come to mind is Deliverance. Deliverance is an incredible perk on its own, since it allows you to unhook yourself and quickly undo the Killer’s pressure on your team, enabling some crazy plays depending on the state of the match. After all, Breakdown does work when you unhook yourself. I suppose if you like gambling, Slippery Meat would also work? Just use Deliverance. The obvious problem with Deliverance is that it leaves you Broken, and more importantly, if you get hooked first or otherwise fail to get a safe unhook before then, you’re completely denied of a perk. So while it’s awesome to unhook yourself and break the hook in the process, it’s not going to happen in every match. I mentioned teammates having Borrowed Time, because it pairs nicely if you have Breakdown. You break the hook, and Borrowed Time protects you so you can get away, denying the Killer of that hook for a while. Decisive Strike is also great to pair with Breakdown, since it covers the eventuality of still going down despite your best efforts to get away from the hook you broke. Dead Hard is great because it’s Dead Hard, but with Breakdown, it can buy you just enough time and distance to make it to a pallet or vault after you’ve been unhooked, or dodge a hit from the Killer. And just in case you’ve broken a crucial hook and there’s no other hook nearby, forcing the killer to slug you, there’s always Unbreakable to get right back up. Huh, that’s funny. It seems like Breakdown works well with a lot of meta perks. Why is Breakdown not used very often again? Am I missing something here? Oh well. There’s one last thing you can try, but this is exclusive to if you have some friends to try it with. Everyone runs Breakdown and a sabo build. Every time a teammate gets unhooked or a hook gets sabotaged in general, the Killer can quite quickly run out of hooks to use if the hook placement is especially bad. I’ve come across a SWF that used this strat against me, and it took me for a wild ride. I still won though! Going up against four survivors using Breakdown is also what made me realize that if Breakdown were suddenly meta due to a buff, it’d be both fascinating and terrifying. I wouldn’t be surprised if a newer player had a mental breakdown from getting trolled by a SWF like this.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? I definitely want Breakdown to have some love, but at the same time, I can see how this perk can easily get out of control if it’s buffed too much. We don’t want a situation where hooking survivors becomes too difficult to do and the Killer is left with no other option but to slug. But what would I like for Breakdown? I think Breakdown does have an interesting effect in breaking hooks. Pretty much only Saboteur shares that aspect. But I also think having the perk only trigger twice is quite restrictive, given its intended effect of making sure you or a teammate is not quickly hooked again. I’d like for it to work when you unhook other survivors as well as unhooking yourself or being unhooked, but for that to happen, the duration would need to be toned WAY down. 3 minutes is an absurdly long time for a hook, a Killer’s primary objective, to be destroyed anyway, so here’s what I think might be good. When you unhook a survivor, the hook they were on breaks for 30 seconds, which is the normal amount of time hooks stay broken by the way. When you’re the one unhooking yourself or being unhooked, the hook breaks for 45 seconds, which is how long a hook stays broken when you use the Grip Wrench addon for the Toolbox. This makes the broken hook times more manageable for the Killer, so they could slug you for a bit and chase another survivor and come back later to hook you if no one helps you, but it also still serves its purpose of delaying the next hook state, or at least making it harder to achieve. Those numbers are definitely subject to tweaking if it’s not strong enough, but I think it would be a good start. So this is what it would look like:

Each time you unhook a survivor, are unhooked, or unhook yourself, the Hook breaks and the Killer's Aura is revealed to you for 4/5/6 seconds.

A Hook broken by Breakdown takes 30 seconds to respawn, or 45 seconds if you are unhooked.

That’s it! Once again, I actually do like Breakdown, but I also think it is severely underutilized, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it gain some popularity. Maybe a change like this is what it needs to bring it into the spotlight. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!

DwarvenTavern

I'm not turning down what you're saying, this is a very good point.

But I have lost an embarrassing amount of plays thanks to breakdown.