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Bad Perk University: Fire Up
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, not every perk in DBD is horrendously awful. But with some of the strong meta perks that are in the game at the moment, it’s steep competition. Today, we’re going to talk about a perk that honestly isn’t all that bad, but is really underwhelming in comparison to those meta perks. We’re talking about Fire Up.
Fire Up is kind of a cool idea for a perk. Whenever a generator gets completed, you gain a token. For each token, you gain a 4% speed buff to a few actions: breaking pallets, walls, and generators, vaulting windows, and picking up and dropping survivors. When all the generators are completed, this means you get a 20% increased action speed for every action I just mentioned.
So why is this perk bad? Obviously, 4% is not a huge amount, though 20% faster speed for things like pallets, generators, and windows, is actually kind of awesome. At maximum tokens, you match Brutal Strength’s kicking speed and exceed Bamboozle’s vaulting speed. But wait, how do you get that increased action speed again? Letting generators get finished? Oh. Needless to say, losing generators is never a good thing, but it’s also an inevitability. In balanced matches, you’re going to lose at least a couple gens. A perk that makes you stronger the closer the survivors are to winning is an interesting concept, but the effects are minimal in the early game, middling in the midgame, and at maximum when you’re in the endgame. Getting to the endgame with all the generators done is less than ideal, and unfortunately, Fire Up isn’t going to bail you out of that. Breaking pallets and walls is something you want to avoid doing in the endgame if possible, since that only slows you down from catching a survivor trying to escape. You can’t even kick generators anymore once they’re all finished. The faster vaulting is OK, but once again, this slows you down. And what about the faster picking up and dropping speed? The one unique thing this perk buffs? Well, it’s a niche effect that’s marginally useful in the mid game, but in the endgame, you have to actually down a survivor to make use of it. In the typical endgame build, killers usually bring perks like No Way Out, Blood Warden, Remember Me, No One Escapes – no, NO! We don’t talk about that perk here! They’re usually not thinking of bringing Fire Up, even if it does objectively help in the endgame, and that’s because it doesn’t help against the only thing that matters in the endgame: stopping survivors from leaving.
So how do we make the most out of this perk? In my opinion, this perk would need to have a powerful effect before the endgame even comes close to happening in order to be appealing, but it doesn’t. If only there was a way to make its effects better. Oh wait, didn’t I just mention Brutal Strength and Bamboozle? You see, Fire Up actually stacks with these two perks. This means you could potentially have a breaking speed of 40% and a vaulting speed of 35% at max tokens. But even in the mid game, for example when 2 gens are done, that still leaves you with 28% breaking speed and 23% vaulting speed, so it’s like having an even stronger version of those two perks. But let’s stop and actually talk about Brutal Strength and Bamboozle for a second, because I want to evaluate if it’s worth pairing them with Fire Up. Brutal Strength has always been a decent perk in my opinion. While it won’t single-handedly win you games, it’s helpful, especially on killers whose powers are countered by predropping pallets. Clown, Wraith, Trickster, Deathslinger, Pig, and many others all appreciate breaking pallets as fast as possible in order to lose less distance and catch up to the survivor. Making this speed faster is obviously strong, though the effects only become noticeable at around 2-3 gens. You might like it when you’re at 4 gens, but by then you’re probably gonna lose. Because of this, it’s a good idea to also bring Pop Goes the Weasel if you’re bringing Brutal Strength, since you can start regressing the generator sooner. If you like chasing builds, the Enduring, Spirit Fury combo becomes more potent with Brutal Strength and Fire Up, since you break the pallets faster and build up Spirit Fury sooner. Now onto Bamboozle. In my opinion, Fire Up was made to be paired with this perk. Bamboozle is a really good perk that I don’t see many killers using. I know it’s not meta or anything, but it’s extremely helpful for M1 killers to block off strong windows and force survivors to leave the loop. For this reason, I think it’s a better idea to pair this perk with Fire Up, as it lets you vault even faster, and therefore block off windows sooner. 15% vaulting speed isn’t terribly fast, but 23%? 27%? If you play it right, you can vault windows quickly and leave survivors with little space to get away.
But let’s talk about that faster picking up and dropping speed. As I said before, it’s a niche effect that’s somewhat helpful in saving time, but there’s actually a pretty useful thing that Fire Up can counter because of this: flashlight blinds. So the Fire Up and Brutal Strength combo makes it harder for survivors to blind you at pallets. More observant students have already pieced that together. But Fire Up can also help against flashlight saves. How so? What’s important to know is that blinding a killer to make them drop a survivor that’s being picked up is a matter of timing. Do it too late, and the killer has time to look away. Do it too soon, and the killer gets blinded, but doesn’t drop the survivor. Survivors who are really, obnoxiously good at flashlight saves have the timing down to a T, which lets them blind the killer from stupidly far distances or from freakish angles. But what happens when you happen to pick up the survivor faster? While 1 or 2 tokens of Fire Up barely make a difference in this regard, 3, 4, or 5 tokens will absolutely throw off survivors who are used to the normal timing, and it’s subtle enough that they might not notice it for a while. Honestly, though, if you hate flashlights that much, you could just use Lightborn, but hey, it’s another option you have for screwing over flashlight users.
As far as what killers to run Fire Up on, there aren’t really bad killers to use it with, aside from Nurse and Hag who rarely vault or break things if they’re playing correctly, but I believe there are two killers in particular that benefit the most from Fire Up’s speed buffs: Myers and Legion. Myers has naturally faster vaulting speed in Tier 2 and Tier 3 Evil Within, though it’s still not all that fast. Having Bamboozle is excellent in this regard, to let you do it faster and block off windows, both of which help Myers immensely. Legion has even faster vaulting speed when using Feral Frenzy, and pairing it with Bamboozle is incredibly fun. They even have an addon (Frank’s Mixtape) that lets them kick things faster in Feral Frenzy, and an addon (Iridescent Button) that lets them break pallets when they vault them, meaning you don’t even have to use Brutal Strength. Adding Fire Up to these killers allows you to vault at comically fast speeds, so if nothing else, it’s a lot of fun to use on them. And I think in builds like these, Fire Up is all about fun. It’s not trying to be strong, it’s just a fun idea.
Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? I’m not really sure if this perk even needs to be changed or reworked, to be perfectly honest. Since it stacks with Brutal Strength and Bamboozle, buffing its numbers to be stronger on its own is dangerous, as it could potentially stop survivors from reasonably escaping the killer. That being said though, I think if you were to buff the number to 5% per finished generator, it wouldn’t break the perk, and it would lead to nicer, more even numbers when paired with Brutal Strength and Bamboozle. Looking at the list of remaining killer perks I want to talk about, it’s all downhill from here. I haven’t even gotten to perks like Distressing or Claustrophobia. But I will. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!
TL;DR: Fire Up is a perk lacks potency when you need it, and doesn’t help too much in the endgame where it’s at its strongest. To make Fire Up more potent, bring perks like Brutal Strength and Bamboozle to make breaking and vaulting speeds much faster, and bring complementary perks like Pop Goes the Weasel and Spirit Fury to weaponize the faster speeds. Recommended killers to use Fire Up on are Myers and Legion, due to their naturally faster vaulting speed. A simple buff to the perk could be increasing the number from 4% to 5%.
Comments
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What if Fire Up was hook token based instead 🤔
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I personally think it would be cool if they added stun times to fire up
Would be nice to have a gigastack build with enduring
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If I’m just trying to have fun and can’t be bothered worrying about gens I love playing a simple build on Myers which is basically what the OP lists out. Like you said Fire Up, Bamboozle and Brutal Strength all synergise well together. Simple effective perks. The fourth slot can be used for a variety of perks like Pop or maybe Corrupt to help with early game stalk, but personally I like to run STBFL. When you build up the stacks and combine it with the increased vaulting speed it’s pretty deadly.
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Fire up is viable on one killer so far as I can tell : Michael Myers.
You never play him without Bamboozle and with 3-4 tokens you vault insanely fast in T3.
Fire up helps several things : Break pallet, vault, pickup animation. This last one is interesting because it changes the blind timing on flashlights and almost nobody gets it right.
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I honestly don't mind fire up the way it is. Maybe changing 4% to 5% could be a minor buff to it, but I honestly think it's a nice fun perk to run at times. I'll put it on my clown because I don't have anything else better to run. It throws off good survivors because of the flashlight timing being slightly different. The fact it's a mid-late game perk doesn't bother me because that's the purpose of the perk. You start to get stronger as the gens become more completed. It compliments the rest of Freddy's perks because Freddy has two end game perks as his other teachables.
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Like the post says, Fire Up does seem weak mainly because it takes so long for its effect to actually matter and even at that point it’s not any better than other perks which have comparably ok effects but which last the whole match. The bottom line is that a perk which is only useful in one phase of the game needs to have an effect which is stronger than a perk that lasts the entire game and Fire Up does not reach that level of strength. It needs to be closer in effectiveness with other good endgame perks like No Way Out or even NOED (which frankly is overrated in my opinion, it’s a solid perk but not literally the best perk in the game like some people think.)
I will say that’s it’s ok to have a perk which works best in combination with certain other perks. Undying for example isn’t a bad perk even though on its own it’s kind of meh because when you combine it with other Hexes it has solid synergy. So in principle if combining Fire Up with, say, Bamboozle or Enduring gave solid synergy it would still be a decent perk. The issue is simply that Enduring and Bamboozle work best in the early and midgame when Fire Up gives little beneift and aren’t as good in the endgame when Fire Up might make a difference.
If I was going to change Fire Up I would either just make it be a flat bonus of, say, 10% - 15% on all action speeds for the whole match, or maybe give it a starting bonus of 8% and ramp it up from there. That way it gives some benefit in the earlier parts of the match when you actually need it most.
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Freddy's theme is the later the game, the stronger he is. Which is Gen done count. The number is that weak because its equal to Brutal strength & Bamboozle.
I think they could make it 4 tokens +5% instead of 5 token +4%. So at least there is 1 Gen left to make the perk work at it's peak.
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Most just dont run it correctly whatsoever. A decent clown player who was incredible instinct and tracking can utilize fire up with bamboozle and brutal strength will dominate survivors one by one. We just have a community that brainwashes the killer community into thinking they cant compete in the 1v1. It will never be changed and should never be changed.
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Fire up should works backwards of the way it does now, you should start with max stacks and lose one every time a gen pops so that way you can utilize the perk to get early pressure instead of being in a already losing situation for the perk to be useful
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It ruins the whole theme of the perk though. The whole concept of fire up is that you get stronger as the game goes on.
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You could still leave it as fire up and be that the entity is coursing through your veins at the beginning of the trial getting you fired up to start the killing, my point being even if it weren't worded the way I said it you could still come up with something that fits and make the perk better than it is now
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Good advice. Time to fire up Myers!
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Here’s how I would buff Fire Up.
For each Gen completed gain a token.
For each token your Pallet/Gen breaking speed, vaulting, Picking up, dropping, missed attack and successful attack cooldown is 4/5/6% faster. For each Gen completed your movement speed is increased by 1%.
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