Bad Perk University: Dying Light
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. Today’s perk might be a bit controversial, and if you read the title, you already know which perk I’m talking about. Dying Light. Now there are mainly two different responses to this. The first one is something along the lines of, “What are you talking about Time? This perk is fine. You’re just bad at the game!”. The other one goes a bit like, “Yeah, I know what you mean, but I still run the perk from time to time because it’s fun.”. And you know what, props to the second group of people, because they understand what fun is, a concept most people don’t fully grasp, or understand that it’s subjective. But I want to talk about this perk because it’s actually pretty fascinating in its design, both its successes and failures. So let’s get on with it.
Dying Light is a perk that might trick you into thinking it’s better than it actually is. When you equip this perk, the Obsession heals and unhooks their teammates 33% faster, so right off the bat, you’re helping the survivors by running this perk. In exchange for this downside, every time you hook a survivor other than the Obsession, all survivors aside from the Obsession gain a 3% debuff to healing, sabotage, and generator repair speeds. By the way, once the Obsession dies, the effects of this perk go away. In other words, for every normal survivor hook, the action speed debuffs increase in severity for every survivor except the Obsession.
So why is this perk bad? There are a lot of holes in the strategy that Dying Light suggests that go unnoticed to casual players. It’s only when you really think about the way the perk works that you realize that the impact this perk might have on a match often isn’t worth the drawbacks. First of all, it’s a perk that incentivizes you to ignore the Obsession and go for the other survivors. Depending on the kind of survivor the Obsession is, this can sometimes be a bad idea. If the survivor is clearly an experienced looper who can run you for 5 gens, then yeah, you should probably ignore them and go for a survivor who’s less godlike. But if the Obsession is clearly not very good at looping, you should probably focus on them and make sure to get them out of the game as soon as you can, because they’re the weak link in the team that’ll make your life easier if you get them out of the way. But let’s say you ignore the Obsession like you’re intended. This is a survivor that not only has free reign on generators, but they can also heal and unhook their teammates faster than if you weren’t using this perk. And if you’re chasing the Obsession, if you happen to down and hook them, you won’t be making progress towards Dying Light tokens.
Second, the other survivors. OK, picture this. You have 2 stacks of Dying Light already, and you’re going for a third one by chasing and downing a survivor that’s not the Obsession. Guess what? By chasing that survivor, they’re not being affected by Dying Light because you’re chasing them, so they can’t heal, repair, or really do anything that Dying Light affects. So at any given point when you have stacks of Dying Light, you’re really only affecting 2 survivors with slower action speeds, 3 if you’re chasing the Obsession, but I already told you the problem with doing that.
Third, the effect of Dying Light itself. The effect starts off small, yet you still have to deal with the powered up Obsession. Having 1 or 2 tokens basically does nothing for you. 3 or 4 tokens is a bit better. 5 or 6 tokens is when the perk actually becomes difficult for the survivors, but by then, they might have already finished the generators because they were able to reset quickly while still keeping up with generator repairs. Sure, when you have a lot of tokens of Dying Light, the slowdown can be pretty oppressive, but by then, the survivors are either already in a winning position because the slowdown took so long to build up, in a losing position because you’ve been crushing them, or mostly dead because you REALLY wiped the floor with them, in which case Dying Light is almost overkill. If you were doing well enough to get so many tokens in a relatively short time span, then you might have actually done as well, if not better, if you brought a more reliable perk for slowdown, like Pain Resonance or Pop Goes the Weasel, both of which are perks that reward you for hooking survivors arguably better than Dying Light does, and you don’t even have to ignore the Obsession or give them a boost.
Look, I’m not stupid. I know WHY Dying Light buffs the Obsession. It’s to give the survivors a way to partially counteract the slowdown that Dying Light incurs by making one survivor immune to its effects and work around the slower repair speeds by having a way to heal faster. But with perks like Circle of Healing and Desperate Measures being in the game, do you really want to give survivors more methods of healing faster? Survivors already have perks to counter every method of applying pressure a killer has. Spreading injuries/hit and run? Circle of Healing. Slugging? Unbreakable. Tunneling? Borrowed Time and Decisive Strike. You can’t even commit to chases because Dead Hard is practically basekit at high mmr. The last thing you want to do as a killer is give survivors more resources to work with. Bottom line, Dying Light is a perk that can be described as a “win more” perk. If you’re dominating survivors with it, it was unnecessary to bring. If you’re struggling against survivors, this perk can actually make things worse for you. I can’t think of any other perk in the game that can backfire like this other than Unnerving Presence.
So how do we make the most out of this perk? In order to minimize the detriment that Dying Light gives at the start of the match, you’re going to want to run other slowdown perks to make Dying Light’s slowdown even more oppressive. I already mentioned Pain Resonance and Pop Goes the Weasel, and while they’re much better perks to run than Dying Light, running either of them with Dying Light is actually not a bad idea. Since all these perks involve hooking survivors, every time you get a stack of Dying Light, every Pain Resonance or Pop is going to hurt more and more for the survivors, since the regression becomes more effective the more repair slowdown there is. Thanatophobia is another good pairing with Dying Light. The slowdown incurred by Thanatophobia actually stacks with Dying Light, meaning repair speeds will slow to a crawl when every survivor is injured, forcing survivors to heal each other, which buys you time away from generators. Sloppy Butcher with Dying Light can make healing painfully slow as well, even with Circle of Healing. This is actually the main reason the slowdown from Dying Light starts off so low. It’s to balance the fact that its slowdown stacks with perks like Thanatophobia and Sloppy Butcher. There’s still the problem that once you reach the point where the slowdown actually becomes a problem for the survivors, you’re probably already winning and don’t need it, but it’s an idea to try.
But what about that pesky Obsession? The one that gets to heal and unhook their teammates faster? While these aren’t foolproof methods, and they definitely have different mileage depending on the situation, I have a couple suggestions. You might consider running slugging perks that allow you down the Obsession, but hold off on hooking them, allowing you to go off and pressure the other survivors that will be affected by Dying Light. After all, a survivor who’s in the dying state can’t do anything other than crawl. Knockout is an example that makes it so the other survivors may have a harder time finding the Obsession. Third Seal makes it harder for ANYONE to find other survivors, at least until they find the totem, which they will sooner or later. Of course, Unbreakable still exists, but hey, just get it out of them early and you won’t have to worry about it for the rest of the match.
There’s still the issue of getting Dying Light tokens in the first place, and the uphill battle you’ll face trying to earn them will usually be the biggest hurdle you’ll have to overcome. So let’s talk about which killers you should use Dying Light on. Or rather, which killers are the only ones worth using Dying Light with, because there really aren’t many candidates. Unless you’re trying to go for his Adept Challenge, you really don’t want to run this perk on Myers. His early game is already abysmal, you don’t want to potentially make it harder for yourself. Yes, he can instadown people, but sometimes you can’t afford to stalk to get your Evil Within 3 and just have to inflict injuries when you can. Same reasoning applies to Oni. His early game can be rough, so don’t make things harder. Plague is an...alright killer to use Dying Light. Since survivors basically can’t heal against Plague anyway, the only thing you have to worry about now is the Obsession unhooking people faster. The downside of that is that Dying Light loses its purpose of slowing down healing, and now only effectively slows down sabotaging and repair speeds. I guess this is a good thing, but Plague has so many better perks that work on her that you can do so much better than Dying Light. Now then, let’s talk about the only killer that Dying Light is worth running on. Legion.
Legion is a killer with a power that basically lets them get the first health state for free, potentially on multiple survivors at a time. After that, they have to chase normally and get the down with a normal attack. The main source of pressure, aside from the rapid injuries, is causing survivors to be nervous when they’re constantly injured, encouraging them to temporarily group up and heal each other, which means time away from generators. By using Dying Light on Legion, you can sometimes trick the Obsession into being overly altruistic and go around healing teammates, which can actually work to your advantage. Because injuring survivors is so easy for Legion, they don’t really care how fast the survivors heal, especially since Deep Wound makes doing anything actually productive difficult. This way, the downside to Dying Light becomes rather moot, and you have more time to start making the slowdown effects more severe. The thing is though, in my experiments trying this perk out on Legion, I’ve found the benefits of Dying Light to either be unnoticeable, or unhelpful compared to the other perks I use, and I felt like if anything, Thanatophobia was causing more trouble for the survivors than Dying Light was. Still, if you’re dead set on using Dying Light while actually having it be worth the effort, Legion is probably the killer to go to.
Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? Dying Light is a difficult perk to balance the way it’s currently designed, but I give it credit for being thematic. The way the old Dying Light used to work was that the Obsession still had the faster healing and unhooking speed, but when you killed the Obsession, every other survivor got a massive 25% debuff to their healing, repair, and sabotage speed. This was a strong effect, to be sure, but it made it so tunneling the Obsession was heavily encouraged, and that was really unfun gameplay that was thankfully moved away from. I don’t want the perk to be reverted to this version just so it can be good, so maybe we can work with the current version and make it less detrimental or stronger in some aspect. We have to be careful if we want to buff the numbers of Dying Light, since it stacks with other slowdown perks, but we can try by changing which action speeds it affects so we can safely increase the numbers a small amount. Thanatophobia used to be a bit like this too. It had lower debuff values, but it affected healing speeds as well as repair speeds. So even though the only way to get rid of the debuff was to heal, the perk made healing itself harder. Since then though, it no longer affects healing, but it has stronger numbers and it affects totem cleansing speeds. I think Dying Light could use a change like this. For example, you could make it no longer affect healing speeds, but it slows action speeds down by 4% each time, and it now makes blessing totems slower. It’s a bit of a shame that Thrill of the Hunt already makes blessing totems slower, because it would also be thematic to the perk. It’s called “Dying Light”, and making it so blessing takes longer, like the candle is dying out and becoming harder to light, sounds really cool. If you made this change, you could then remove the healing and unhooking buff on the Obsession, but for balance purposes, you can still make the Obsession immune to the effects of the perk. And yeah, that’s how I’d change Dying Light. It’s not really a perk in need of a buff or rework like some other perks, and I suppose if anything, it’s a great perk to flex on survivors. Like you’re saying, “I’m so good at this game, I’m gonna give you survivors a sporting chance and still trash you guys!”. And you know what, you kind of have to respect that. Dying Light is a good perk for when you’re already good at the game and you feel like matches aren’t challenging enough, kind of like how No Mither is a bit like “Hard Mode” for survivors. If you’re not so good though, stay far away from this perk. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!
TL;DR: Dying Light is a “win more” perk that does little for you if you’re steamrolling, and almost detrimental if you’re struggling. To make the downsides less detrimental, run other slowdown perks, slugging perks for the Obsession, and only use the perk on Plague and Legion. To make the perk better, you could maybe remove the healing and unhooking speed buff on the Obsession while still making them immune to the perk, then buff the slowdown to 4%, remove the healing speed debuff, and add a blessing speed debuff.
Comments
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Very nice read man. Imma try it on legion when rework happens and i reinstall the game!
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Honestly the perk is sad original version was unhealthy for the game and then it gets reworked into a awful perk lol
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Holy ######### when you said university you really meant it.
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Those threads give me Star Wars intro vibes.
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Good job. Well thought out.
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Imo, a great change would be like you said, just make the obsession immune to the effects. Don't give extra buffs, but also make it where hooking the obsession still grants tokens. The obsession is still immune, but the obsession getting hooked can still be detrimental.
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Step one: Play as the Plague
Step two: Use Dying Light and Thanatophobia
Step three: Profit!
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Another idea would be that the obsession starts with no buffs.
Every token on dying light could increase the obsession's healing and unhook speeds by... I dunno, 5%?
This way, at least you won't be giving the survivors a buff while you get nothing.
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Dying Light isn’t a great perk, that’s true. In particular the fact that it buffs a survivor at the very start of the match and gives the killer no immediate benefit at all means the killer is literally worse off at the start of the match when they run this perk than if they ran nothing at all. It can pay off once you can get four or five hooks, but if you get off to a bad start it actually hurts your chances of catching back up.
I do think one thing you said is slightly off
First of all, it’s a perk that incentivizes you to ignore the Obsession and go for the other survivors. ...
That’s not quite right, Dying Light doesn’t incentivize you to “ignore the Obsession”, it just incentivizes you not to “kill the Obsession first”. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with chasing and hitting and downing or even hooking the Obsession, just don’t prioritize killing them first before everybody else. Typically when I run this, for example, I tend to slug the Obsession so they’re still out of the picture while I hook someone else. And generally speaking slugging one survivor and hooking another is a decent strategy, you’re trading off a hook to gain 10 second of additional chase time on a different survivor which can significantly increase your pressure on the survivors as a whole compared to always hooking on every down, depending on the situation.
I also typically combo Dying Light with Dark Devotion, for example, so I can hit the Obsession and injure them, they run off, and then I get an ambush on a different survivor and hopefully a quick down and hook on them since I’m now Undetectable.
Besides, even if hypothetically you do happen to be in a position where you can quickly eliminate the Obsession, great! Go for it, Dying Light isn’t stopping you and now you’re in a 3v1. But 75% of the time the Obsession isn’t the one you’ll aim to eliminate first.
So TLDR I totally agree that Dying Light could probably use a buff. I would either remove that boost the Obsession gets, or make the first hook worth 10% or 15% slowdown and the rest 2% per additional hook, something like that, so that at least the perk can immediately ramp up to a decently noticeable slowdown right from the first hook.
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Step 2.5: Get genrushed anyways.
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Bro! I don't start reading novels until a little closer to bed time.
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It needs the downside of it not effecting the Obsession and it buffing their healing removed, completely unnecessary. The perk isn't good enough to warrant these negatives.
Second it needs to not be removed if the Obsession dies, it just needs to freeze wherever it was at similar to STBFL.
Now it's alright. Not crazy strong or anything, just alright. It's one of those perks that by the time it starts to get noticeable the games already basically over.
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