Bad Perk University: Claustrophobia

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. Who here remembers the Stranger Things Chapter? It was kind of a big deal at the time, wasn’t it? We got not just one, but two survivors, in the form of Nancy and Steve, and an awesome looking killer in the form of Demogorgon. With them, we got a whopping 9 perks to mess with. Ever since BHVR’s license expired, those perks have since been made into general perks that can be unlocked by everyone, and Nancy, Steve, and Demogorgon players have become rare occurrences. I want to focus on Demogorgon’s perks for a bit, since I already covered Steve’s perks. Personally, Demogorgon’s perks have become my favorite of the Stranger Things lineup over time. Surge, now called Jolt, is a great time saving perk for killers that tend to down survivors with basic attacks, letting you focus less on kicking generators and more on starting new chases (though I’d argue Ruin and Dead Man’s Switch are better for that). Mindbreaker, now called Fearmonger, didn’t start off very good, but with changes over time and the addition of the Blindness debuff, it’s actually a decent perk now. It’s great for denying exhaustion perks and preventing survivors working on generators from knowing where their teammates are through aura reading, especially useful on stealth killers. However, Cruel Limits, now called Claustrophobia, has always been garbage. The only glow up it’s gotten is the better name.

Claustrophobia sounds like a good perk in theory. When a generator gets completed, all the windows and vault locations within 32m of that generator get blocked by the Entity for 30 seconds, preventing survivors from using them. You also get to see which windows and vaults are blocked during that time.

So why is this perk bad? The problem is that, in practice, blocking windows and vaults the way Claustrophobia does is, at best, an annoyance to the survivors. Actually, there’s quite a few problems, so let me break it down. First of all, the 32m range. The perk actually used to be even worse, as it used to only have a 24m range. The new 32m range only helps marginally, because depending on the map and the location of certain generators, you’ll end up blocking maybe 1 or 2 windows that are nowhere near the generator, or in the worst case scenario, none, because the generator was just that far out in the open. Most of the time, Claustrophobia will end up blocking a few windows, but that leads to the next problem with Claustrophobia. Vaults are not the only means of escape and defense survivors have. Claustrophobia does nothing to block the following:

Pallets

Dropped Pallets

Exhaustion Perks, especially Dead Hard

Lockers

Regular holes and doorways that survivors can just fall into or walk through

If you want to capitalize on Claustrophobia, you need to be there the moment the generator pops, and even when you do, survivors still have a plethora of options to get away from you. Now is maybe a good time to bring up a quirk of the perk that may or may not be patched out in the future, but it’s worth talking about. Right now, when the last generator is finished, the other generators also get “completed”, as if the survivors completed them at the same time. Since Claustrophobia activates when a generator pops, it will also activate at the locations of the remaining generators that were “completed”, meaning for the last generator, Claustrophobia is slightly more “effective”. This is hardly a consolation, and I doubt it’ll stay this way indefinitely.

When I think of what this perk is supposed to accomplish, I find myself thinking of a different perk that I feel is simply better: Crowd Control. I don’t see this hex perk very often, as it’s only particularly useful on killers with strong chasing powers like Clown or Trickster, but I feel that this perk is just better than Claustrophobia in its intended purpose, which is limiting the survivor’s options. Sure, it doesn’t block the vault location before they vault, but doing it afterwards means the loop quickly becomes more dangerous and restrictive, often forcing the survivor to abandon the loop early. The problem, of course, is that Crowd Control is a hex perk, and it can be disabled. Even so, I’d much rather be using this perk and get some value out of it before it’s gone, as opposed to using Claustrophobia and having it accomplish nothing useful.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? This is unfortunately a very dependent perk that relies on using other perks to make it remotely usable. That hasn’t stopped us before. Back before Dead Man’s Switch was made viable, it worked decently well with Furtive Chase and Nemesis (the perk). The one perk that is required to bring with Claustrophobia is Tinkerer. Tinkerer, along with making you Undetectable, notifies you which generator is about to be completed, giving you the heads up you need to book it to that generator and hopefully capitalize on the blocked vaults. The best case scenario is that you make it to the generator before it pops and chase the survivors off. The consolation when you don’t is that you slightly restrict their escape routes. Bitter Murmur is also a good idea to use here. You can’t always stop what you’re doing to go to a generator that’s lit up by Tinkerer, so being able to see where the survivors are running off to is nice information to have.

It’s worth stating at this point that Claustrophobia should only be used on killers with map mobility, or at least killers that can capitalize on the block vault locations, like Bubba for instance.

Blood Favor can be a cool curveball to further restrict the survivors’ options. Since Claustrophobia does nothing to help with pallets, Blood Favor can cover this weakness. For pallets that are dropped already, the new perk Dissolution can help. I’d suggest using this perk on killers that survivors tend to predrop pallets against, like Clown, Pig, Trickster, and so on. The problem is that Dissolution gives a notification to survivors when it’s active, but with the other perks you run, it should hopefully leave them with few or no options left, so it shouldn’t matter as much.

As an optional perk to bring, Fearmonger is great for making sure survivors can’t immediately run away with Sprint Burst, or if they’re forced to run immediately, use Dead Hard later.

Since Claustrophobia is very map dependent, which maps are the best to use it on? Indoor maps will be your best bet here, as they tend to have the most vaults that are close to each other. But remember that just because vaults are blocked doesn’t mean the survivors have no way of getting away. You know, doorways exist. I haven’t done extensive testing on every indoor map, since I don’t like using map offerings other than for Scratched Mirror builds, but here are my findings so far.

Lery’s Memorial Institute doesn’t work as well as you’d hope. While there are a lot of window vaults in this map that can get blocked off by Claustrophobia, the doorways that tend to be close by are easy exits. It’s not horrible, you can catch some survivors off guard during a chase, but it’s not going to work that often. It is worth noting that when the middle generator pops, the perk blocks off like a dozen window vaults and it looks hilarious. It’s not helpful since there’s like four doorways to walk through in that center of the map, but it’s worth seeing at least.

While not technically an indoor map, Haddonfield is a decent map to get some use out of Claustrophobia. Most of the generators are stationed in the houses, and those locations tend to be harder to leave, especially if you’re using the perks I suggested earlier. It also helps that Haddonfield is less of a dumpster fire to play on.

Gideon Meat Plant is a categorically awful map to try to get use out of Claustrophobia. There are very few actual vault locations to speak of, and not in the immediate places where generators are completed. There are about a hundred pallets instead, so if you’re trying to use Blood Favor, it might work out for you better. It’s still not a great time.

Midwich Elementary School is…probably one of the better maps to use this perk on. Many generators are in classrooms with either vaults that connect to other rooms, a hole or such to drop down, or no vaults in the immediate room that lie just outside. Since the map has two stories, the 32m effect of the perk can help block vault locations on the top and bottom floor, and since there are only so many ways to leave a classroom in this map, if you’re using the recommended perk build, you can potentially leave survivors with few options except to use pallets.

When I talk about indoor maps or maps in general, your mileage may vary. I think this is perhaps the greatest failing of Claustrophobia. It does too little, too late. When you have a perk that activate when a generator is completed, you would expect it to have a strong effect to help make a comeback. Examples of this include the aforementioned Bitter Murmur, or Coup de Grace, or Deadlock. Claustrophobia just doesn’t do that, but maybe we can figure out a way to make it so.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? This is a difficult one to think of ideas for while staying in theme with the perk. While the perk might be stronger if it simply affected all vault locations, I don’t think it’s fair for a survivor in chase to lose a chase just because their teammates did the right thing by working towards the objective. Coup de Grace is a bit different because the killer only gets one chance to make the super lunge count, but Claustrophobia works for an entire 30 seconds. An idea I like is to make it work similar to Tinkerer, where the vault locations get blocked when the generator is at 70%, making it so the survivors have their escape options restricted when it matters. When you’re about to approach the generator that’s close to being finished, not when the generator is already finished and the survivors are leaving anyway. It would also be a good idea to buff the range a bit more to make sure it blocks enough vault locations to matter, let’s make it 40m. If you really want to make the perk kind of scary, you could make it so the vault locations are blocked indefinitely until the generator is below 70%. This turns the area around generators into a potential dead zone that survivors would have to adapt to while still having some options. That was a lot, so here it is in writing.

Whenever a Generator reaches 70% progress, all Windows and Vault locations within 40m of it become blocked for all Survivors for the next 20/25/30 seconds.

The Auras of the blocked Vault locations are revealed to you for the duration.

Here’s the version of it that blocks Vault locations indefinitely:

Whenever a Generator is at 70% progress or higher, all Windows and Vault locations within 32/36/40m of it become blocked for all Survivors.

The Auras of the blocked Vault locations are revealed to you for the duration.

This version would solve one of the major problems with the perk, which is how non-threatening its effect is. Short of a complete rework that changes its function, it’s the best I’ve come up with. What fascinates me about this perk is that if it were only better at what it did, it might cause survivors to have to change how they approach some situations. When you’ve used the meta for so long, you get accustomed to using the same strategies and tactics. And why wouldn’t you? It’s worked a hundred times before. Of course, we don’t want a perk to be buffed to the point where it becomes unfair to go against. It’s always best for a perk to be fun AND fair to play against. Here’s to hoping the upcoming perk overhaul will truly shake things up. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!

TL;DR: Claustrophobia does not do enough to restrict the survivors’ escape options. To potentially capitalize on Claustrophobia’s effect more often, run perks like Tinkerer and Bitter Murmur to give you information to go to the location of the generator that’s about to be completed. Blood Favor and Dissolution can cover the weakness of Claustrophobia not denying pallets. Use Claustrophobia on indoor maps or maps that have many vault locations close to each other to potentially restrict the survivors the most. To make the perk better, you could make it so the perk activates when a generator reaches 70% progress, to synergize even more with Tinkerer and block escape options when it matters most.