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Bad Perk University: Hoarder
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. You know, contrary to general opinion, I think the Twins are quite strong killers. They may not be very popular with players, mostly due to the disaster of a release that was Binding of Kin, but they turned out to be unique and interesting, being a pair of killers that hunt together. Charlotte handles the dirty labor that usually comes with being a standard killer, while also being able to go stealthy by taking a nap, and Victor is the fast and agile threat that disables healthy survivors and picks off injured ones. When played well, and not in a campy way, they’re both strong and fun. Even their perks were pretty good. Oppression is a decent regression and information perk that allows you to regress multiple generators at once or know which generators are being worked on by forcing the survivors into a sudden and small skill check. Coup de Grace, while not my favorite perk, can be a very unexpected perk for survivors to face, causing them to think they can run you for a little longer only to find themselves face down on the ground because you happened to use the Eyelander as a melee weapon. And Hoarder...oh wait never mind, that one’s terrible.
Hoarder is an interesting perk, to be sure, but not very appealing at a glance. When a survivor touches a chest or picks up an item within 64m of you, you receive a special loud noise notification for 4 seconds, in a similar fashion to Spies from the Shadows or a survivor in Tier 3 Madness. In addition to this, this perk will spawn 2 extra chests in the match, as long as there are potential chest spawn points available. That last part may make you scratch your head as to why you’d want something like that, but it’s there mostly so Hoarder activates at least 10 times, one for the chest interaction, and another for the item pick up.
So why is this perk bad? Let’s be clear about something, 64m is actually a pretty hefty range. The chances of a chest being opened within that detection area is more likely than you might think. Of course, survivors have to actually think to open chests in the first place, and if they decide to only focus on generators, Hoarder won’t do much for you. Notifications when picking up an item are much more applicable. Survivors will often drop items for any number of reasons, and pick up an item they like that they want to take with them when they leave. No, the real reason the perk sucks and the thing that really deters players from using it are the extra chest spawns. Yes, it’s there so the perk procs more than a couple times, but need I remind everyone that keys still exist. These game breaking items that let survivors leave the match earlier than they’re meant to, and serve as a constant threat by merely existing, can still be found in chests. So when you bring Hoarder, you’re pretty much saying to the survivors, “Hey, you want to find keys easier? Here you go! I’ll hear when you do that, but it won’t matter if you find a key because now I have to worry about it for the entire match. Aren’t I such a cool killer for giving you a sporting chance? You’re welcome!”. Look, survivors already have it relatively easy, you don’t need to make their lives even easier by making finding a key more likely.
So how do we make the most out of this perk? This is a tracking perk at the end of the day, and it’s a form of tracking that is very unexpected and has a wide range compared to other perks of its type. But if you think you can carry a match with Hoarder as your only means of tracking, you’re only kidding yourself. I recommend another tracking perk that allows you to detect outside of Hoarder’s range or cover up the gaps in its detection. Discordance is a strong perk that shows you the location of at least two survivors when they work on a generator together, no matter where they are on the map. Whispers is a consistent tracking perk that will light up when a survivor is within 32m of you, so if Hoarder goes off, you can move in that direction and have more reliable tracking with Whispers. Ruin and Surveillance is still a very strong perk combo that allows you to pretty much see every generator that’s regressing and know when a survivor gets on those generators again. Even if Ruin gets cleansed, Surveillance is still quite a good perk on its own. Remember that Surveillance lets you hear generators from further away as well as show auras. But now we want a perk to make Hoarder truly shine. Hoarder procs when a survivor picks up an item, but once they pick up the item from a chest, there’ll be no more notifications from that chest location. So if only there was a perk that made survivors forcefully drop their items, forcing them to have to pick it up again, triggering Hoarder. Oh that’s right, Franklin’s Demise. This is perk is basically non-negotiable to pair with Hoarder. When you run these two perks together, you’ll get many prompts from Hoarder because the survivors simply cannot accept losing their precious items. This works to cover the main downside to using Hoarder, which is the greater chance of keys. Because Franklin’s Demise drains item charges, and keys won’t open the hatch if they have no charges left, Hoarder is much safer to use. But I’m not quite done yet. There are two killers in particular that really capitalize on Hoarder in a very surprising way. The first one is Nemesis. Those vaccine chests? Yeah, Hoarder works on that and the vaccines inside. Make the survivors drop the vaccines, and they’ll be Contaminated for a long time. The second one is the new killer in the fog, Pinhead. Yeah, you know the Lament Configuration? When survivors pick that up within range, Hoarder will also trigger. And because survivors are Oblivious while holding the box, it’s often quite easy to sneak up on them and steal the box off of them. It’s amazing how well this works on him. Are you tired of survivors opening the box without your consent? Forget opening the box, now you can punish them just for touching it. Now the next time you go against Pinhead, you can be paranoid about Hoarder. It’s always funny to see a low tier perk become useful on specific killers, isn’t it?
Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? I think more than anything, I just want to see keys reworked. The problem with Hoarder is less how it functions, but more what it enables for survivors. They can already find Medkits and Toolboxes, but keys just spoil any fun for the killer when the match goes a certain way. The better long term solution to fixing Hoarder and making the game healthier is to just rework keys already. At the very least though, keys no longer open the hatch if they have no charges left, so Franklin’s Demise is there to help. The easiest fix is to make it so keys cannot spawn in chests, but that's primarily a band-aid fix for the greater problem. As for the perk itself, I’d like for the perk to reduce item rarity like it was originally intended to. It wasn’t the case in the PTB, but rather than try to make that work, the developers just kind of gave up on it, or maybe they changed their minds about it. If reducing item rarity isn’t possible, then maybe making it so chests take longer to open would be nice. But the problem with that is that would suddenly make Hoarder more obvious, and the strength of the perk is that no one expects you to be using it. Honestly, just rework keys, that’s how you fix Hoarder. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!
Comments
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I dig this idea, it's stupid enough to catch people off guard
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Pinhead makes it good at least it alerts you when a survivor picks up the box.
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I mean its a information perk, which rarely gives you information and this information is most of the time useless.
This is obvious if you look what insane buffs you could do and still nobody would run it. You could:
- add a 10sec aura read
- 10 sec oblivious effect
- 30 sec exposed status
All of this together would make this perk really strong with franklins. But only one of this buffs would be fine for this perk.
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It also works on Nemesis Vaccines, but that's far less useful unless for some reason you want to run the iri addon that causes survivors to be exposed when they use it. But even then that's such a very niche situation.
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