http://dbd.game/killswitch
Up the Ante discussion
Continuing a series of threads on the least used perks according to the aggregate site Nightlight, next up is Ace's perk Up the Ante (0.14% usage)
Up the Ante - For each other Survivor still alive, grant a 1/2/3% bonus of luck to all remaining Survivors.
I don't play survivor that often, but when I do I always play Ace simply because he's my favorite looking survivor thematically. (Plus Plunderer Ace rummaging through chests for sweet bling never gets old. 😄) So it's a little disappointingly ineffective his perk Up the Ante is.
Really this boils down to simply that Luck is a really, really weak effect. The only thing Luck currently does in the game is increase your chance of pulling yourself off a hook. That's it. And since trying to pull yourself off the hook is almost universally a bad idea except as a last ditch effort it's just not worth increasing people's chances of doing it by a few percent. Even if you hypothetically stack Up the Ante and Slippery Meat and a 3% Luck offering you still only have a net 65% chance of pulling yourself off the hook in the six total attempts you get from Slippery Meat, and that's assuming it's even a good idea to try and someone else isn't going to come rescue you and you're not getting face camped, etc. And that's half your perks plus an offering to get that.
Basically I think the issue here is the Luck effect as a whole could use a boost. Some possible changes might be
- Make it so your Luck bonus also gives you a passive chance of dodging or blocking damage. Having a small chance of getting lucky and evading an attack that might have hit you otherwise could be a fun effect that's also good enough that people might throw it in a slot.
- Have Luck give you a chance to ignore the consequences of missed skill checks, or to give you a small chance to get double the benefit from a standard check.
- Have Luck impact the rarity of loot from chests.
- Have Luck increase the chance, if you are the last survivor, of the hatch appearing in the closest possible spot to your current location.
There are a lot of possible things Luck could subtly help with, I think it's a relatively unexplored area of the game that could see some interesting effects you don't get elsewhere.
Comments
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Up the Ante used to be busted so it got the nerf hammer. Once upon a time you could have 4 people run that perk and everyone got +9% luck.
Since ranks completely reset every month on the 13th you had easy games for about 1-2 weeks where you could farm all the items you needed for the rest of the month.
In short : it was busted.
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"Luck also has no effect on items recovered in trials"
My friends were able to get an average of 1.4 purple items out of chests in 10 games in a row using this strategy. UtA no longer stacks and luck no longer affects chest loot. Empiricall evidence rather solidly proves that once upon a time Luck did influence chest drops.
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Luck never influenced chest drops. The only change the devs ever made to Luck was it used to help open bear traps.
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Up the Ante has never been patched. Are you thinking of a different perk?
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Up the Ante does not stack anymore. It does not work the same way anymore.
That's what they said but that's simply not possible considering the rate at which we got purple items using that perk when compared to control tests with no loot/luck perks.
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Up the Ante does stack. Luck never affected chest loot.
The only use for this perk is going all in in a SWF with UtA + Slippery Meat + Vigo's Jar offering to basically guarantee a self unhook for everyone.
The only perk that affects chest loot item rarity is Plunderer's.
ANYWAY.
The whole concept of this perk is a waste, because Luck as a mechanic only affects unhooking yourself, and most other implementations of luck would be pretty unfair imo. Honestly I just want them to merge UtA with SM (but make UtA personal) and then go back to the drawing board on the perk entirely.
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Luck isn't really a mechanic that should be used a lot in a game like this anyways.
I wouldn't mind if the luck mechanic in general was expanded to also affect chests since chests already have some luck element to them (just that they aren't currently affected by luck modifiers), but honestly that's about it.
Beyond that, I would say at the very least make the perk a 7/8/9% bonus to luck regardless of how many survivors are alive (as long as the survivor with the perk is still alive), rather than making it get progressively weaker after each survivor death. This combined with the other change might make it more useful for chests especially in dire situations if you're looking for a key, and could be combined with Plunderer's for maximum potential.
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Or maybe your tests just were random chance? 🤷♂️
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I would like to see the devs actually make luck a more meaningful mechanic since right now all it affects is the chance to unhook yourself.
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My personal thoughts are that I don't like "luck" in DbD, I'd rather something more solid and guaranteed - especially as Luck can only refer to self unhooking at the present time, with the recent bloodweb changes there's now more opportunity to get the good items from the bloodweb so I don't think it should affect items found in the trial (it currently doesn't, nor has it previously). Having luck to dodge a hit, without any skill involved just seems to be counter productive and would lead to more frustration than Dead Hard did prior to it's nerf.
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Thanks Mandy. What sort of benefit might be a change you’d think could be good for Luck then if it were up to you?
Personally to me something like Luck thematically kind of implies a bit of uncertainty or randomness but swayed in your favor versus a set in stone benefit. Like a critical hit type thing in an RPG or getting a lucky break on where something spawns, that sort of thing. The tricky thing in practice is what areas of the game are actually conducive to a bit of randomness that can be skewed toward the Lucky player?
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I'd actually not have luck as a mechanic at all :) but that's just my personal opinion, I'd rather things more tangible and not left to chance. Whilst I am a fan of map RNG, I'm not a massive fan of things being too random in a game such as DbD where repetitiveness is part of the game.
(going to just add in here, please remember these are my personal opinions - feel the need to add that given that people will jump on what I say).
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Yeah, it’s kind of like a similar thing that comes up a lot on Boardgamegeek when people talk about randomness in boardgames. Some people like a bit of randomness in games, others absolutely hate it and like games to be purely deterministic beyond the initial setup.
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Understandable, so does that mean we should expect luck to be removed sometime in a future update? What will happen with up the ante then? And will everyone's luck offerings be disabled? Not that anyone would really miss them given that they are mostly used to mess around lol
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As I made clear in my post - this is my personal opinion, I do not make Design decisions...so please do not read so much into my personal comments
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Oh, sorry i just thought it would be something you would suggest to the designers and they would more likely do it given you are part of their team :P
Thanks for responding tho!
(BTW, did you see my comment regarding the scratched mirror? Im unsure if the description is incorrect in saying that it gives extra brutality on a score event or if its simply bugged)
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I give Designers community feedback on many, many things - however, I keep my personal opinion out of things. When I'm in these meetings I give my opinion based off Community, as I'm not representing myself there, but all of you. I may say what I personally feel, if it differs in any way...but that holds little weight in the decision making processes.
(otherwise we'd have a super buffed Head On & Deception :) )
And as yet I'm afraid I have not had time to go through all forum threads, I will get to it!
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Up the ante with slippery meat and 2 vigo luck offering. you have 100% chance to escape the hook among 6 attempts. If the killer camps, you need 3 vigo luck offerings. I wouldn't call the perk useless. if anything, if you build around it, its stronger deliverance with no conditions to trigger. main issue behind the perk is that you need SWF to use it and everyone to commit to the same perks. I am not sure if up the ante stacks, I have heard that it stacks among two survivors, but no confirmation if this is true.
your suggestion adds random RNG to the game where the successful proc of the rng would be too much impact on the game outcome. competitive games do not like game-changing to have game-changing effects. The main reason why this version of luck is not complained about is because the risk of failure is too high in term of punishment that it is not worth attempting unless you use perks to remove entire rng of the action itself. The only time people commit to self-killing themselves on hook is when they have already lost so the risk vanishes. I would say Mandy's opinion would be the popular opinion on this topic.
They did merge Up the ante+Slippery meat. That perk is called deliverance. They just added a drawback to the perk to prevent it from being a spammed second-chance. Surprisely, its powerful perk vs campers with new self-BT although from BVHR current statistics It is not popular so player do not value the perk precisely because its inconsistent. I wonder if the perk would be more popular if the perk globally only worked once among your entire team.'s hook-states with no drawbacks. Sounds a lot like old decisive strike that used to only work for obsession instantly.
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Where are you getting 100% chance of escape? Base escape chance is 4%,Up the Ante is 9%, Slippery Meat is +4% and three extra chances, and Vigo luck offerings are +3%. Even with four luck offerings that’s only a 29% chance to get off per attempt which comes out to an 87% chance of escape in six attempts, not 100%.
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the math does not work that way. Up the ante is stacks 2 times. As to why it stacks 2 times, I have no clue and if you run slippery meat on all 4 survivors and 2 up the antes with 2 vigo luck offering. You have 98.7% chance to kobe among 6 attempts. You have to be very unlucky to fail 98.7%. One thing to note is that if you escape in your 6th attempt, you will lose 1 hook state, I'm not sure if this is a bug or just how it is intended to work but that is how it works right now.
I have only went against a single time, it was memorable game. It was a game on Crotus asylum(Nurse map) and I was playing Oni with Old top knot & Akito crutch. The game ended in 2 kill, 2 escape. It happened like 3 weeks after they first released their new MMR system in DBD. All I do not remember much about the game other I killed 1 survivor by 3 hooking them and then slugged two people in end game, but I was forced to pick a survivor near exit gate, I got DS and then the other two surivvor's left after I hooked survivor. This is my only experience vs these perks. I have no opinion of these perks other than they look powerful on paper but in practice they are not used very much.
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If you have all 4 survivors using Luck Offerings and Up The Ante, you get like a 99% chance to unhook yourself using all 6 attempts. It's impossible to ever hit a 100%, because as long as it's possible to fail any of the attempts, there's always a chance to fail all the attempts.
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I see what you’re saying now, you’re assuming every survivor is running Up the Ante.
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I don't think anyone ever made video regarding luck in the game but I searched google and got this video from 2020 dbd titled "Up the ante is actually op".
this video is like... the personification of what was powerful in old dbd. DS+Unbreakable, SWF, powerful maps like old Ormond, Instant escape keys. the game really has changed for how it looks. So if your curious to how good up the ante is. you can watch this video to gauge the performance of the perk. it does work. Just only for SWF.
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Too much RNG in either direction ruins the game. Did you see Otz's video where groaning storehouse only had 5 pallets?
On the issue of Luck I really like Choy's idea where you can't even attempt to escape from the hook unless everyone is down or hooked unless you have the slippery meat perk.
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All the suggestions are good for luck buffs except the hit dodging. I feel like having a small chance to dodge a hit would just feel awful when it does happen and can cost the killer entire games.
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Up The Ante is excellent in a Kobe SWF.
If 4 people run Up The ante, slippery meat, and a luck offering the chance of successful kobe goes up to 99.27%
Which basically means litearlly everyone has deliverance with no broken status and no condition to unlock at the cost of 2 perk slots and an offering which doesn't really matter.
Post edited by SkeletalElite on0 -
This is what I've always thought about luck too, it is a completely outdated mechanic, it should be removed/reworked imo. Thank you for saying this Mandy :D
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Absolutely agree
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I'd like to have Head on Deception buffed, for real! ######### it would be so much fun in a match, especially if Deception was stronger!
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Alright, hope you could tell the bug fixers this issue sooner or later cuz its been bothering me for a while now :)
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Luck is such a useless mechanic, it should be retired. I'd say reworked but I can't think of anything worthwhile aside from speeds increasing for survivors every time one dies to make up for being down a survivor but I think killers would flip out if that happened.
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