Bloodhound discussion
Continuing a series of thread on the least popular perks on aggregate site Nightlight, next up is Wraith's perk Bloodhound (0.62% usage)
Bloodhound - Fresh blood marks are considerably more discernible than normal and can be tracked for 2/3/4 seconds longer than normal.
Personally I like Bloodhound (in case you can't tell from my icon. 🙂) I've found it to be not a bad replacement for Nurse's Calling to help find injured survivors. Some pros and cons for the perk:
- The downside to the perk is mainly that you can hypothetically see blood trails normally without the perk. Once you're good at see blood normally you might not feel like making the blood brighter helps all that much.
- On the other hand, while you can see blood without the perk, it's almost impossible to miss blood with this perk. It eliminates those instances where the blood trail is obscured by the ground being dark colored, for instance, and it makes it a lot easier to spot blood from a distance.
- Also, even if the color change doesn't do much for you, the fact that blood trails last 4 seconds longer makes it more likely to spot an older trail that you otherwise would have missed, effectively extending the range of the detection effect.
- Blood in general is a good tracking tool because survivors leave it all the time when they're injured (barring certain specific perks to suppress it). So unlike with, say, Nurse's Calling, it's not dependent on the survivor actively healing themselves at that moment near you and it doesn't matter if they're crouching, they're going to leave a trail. You don't always need Bloodhound to see the trail, of course, but if you really like following blood trails this perk can help you do that.
- Finally, depending on the state of the meta, there may be more survivors running perks that hide auras (e.g. Off the Record, Distortion) than perks that hide blood (e.g. Lucky Break, Guardian). This makes Bloodhound maybe less susceptible to some more popular stealth perks than Nurse's Calling.
Overall personally I think Bloodhound is an ok perk, I run it myself from time to time. It's obviously not top tier but it does what it does decently. Mind you, I wouldn't be against it getting buffed a bit just to make it see a little more use, but I don't think it needs a major overhaul or anything.
If the devs decided they did want to buff this perk, one possible way to do it would be to make survivors bleed more frequently when the killer has it (basically bake in part of the Haemorrhage effect). Faster bleeding makes the trail even that much easier to follow. (In fact a common combo with Bloodhound is to pair it with Sloppy Butcher specifically because of that more frequent bleeding.) You could also extend that 4 second duration a bit more, although at some point you get diminishing returns with really old trails. 🤷♂️
I guess hypothetically if the devs really wanted to do something unusual they could revamp the perk entirely and make it do something like give you a compass direction sense toward the closest nearby injured survivor (so you'd see a general quadrant direction to head towards as you "sniff out" the injured target). But honestly that may as well just be a different perk or killer ability at that point.
Comments
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Bloodhound, along with all of Wraith's perks, were introduced as tracking perks because Wraith was suppose to be a scout-like killer.
Also there were not many tracking perks in early DbD, so Wraith's perks saw some usage. But the main thing people used Wraith's perks for was to counteract bugs with the game. Back in the early DbD days, there were bugs that removed grunts of pain, removed scratch marks inconsistently, or just made tracking insanely difficult, so people used Wraith's perks to counteract those bugs.
Outside of that, you never really see any of Wraith's perks today other than maybe Shadowborn. They arent bad perks, just underwhelming perks, just there are many other perks that do a better job at tracking survivors, and with Lethal Pursuer getting buffed, there is no reason to not use aura reading perks over them.
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another pointless perk for killer. tracking for killer is a given. the perk makes little difference because default blood is easy enough to follow. the perk would need tactical benefit for the killer to run the perk.
a possible change would be to make the killer see blood marks over walls as an aura when outside of a chase in a 14 meter radius. I think main issue is that a perk like this kills the ability for an injured survivor to stealth. A Claudette player with spine chill would hate this perk with living passion. perhaps its best that the perk remains ineffective at punishing survivors for being injured.
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