Appraisal discussion
Continuing a series of threads on the least picked perks according to Nightlight, next up is Elodie's perk Appraisal (0.43% usage)
Appraisal - Start the trial with 3 tokens. When a chest has already been opened, consume a token to rummage through it for an item. Rummaging can only be performed once per chest. You rummage through chests 40/60/80% faster.
Truth be told, I don't play survivor that often, but when I do my survivor of choice is always Plunderer Ace because it's kind of fun just going around grabbing random crap from chests. 🙂 (He uses Plunderer's Instinct, Appraisal, Ace in the Hole, and Open Handed). I'll go in with some cheap tools, head to a gen near a chest, use the tools up, loot the chest and hope I get something useful, and then use that and so on. It's a total gimmick, definitely not even close to being a meta build or anything, but I have fun with it.
That disclaimer out of the way, I can understand why Appraisal isn't used that much.
- Are the tokens even necessary? Honestly, would this perk even be close to overpowered if it simply let you loot every chest twice? Why does it even have these tokens at all, it's just an unnecessary complication.
- Just for reference, it normally takes 10 seconds to open a chest and loot what's inside. Appraisal reduces that to 5.6 seconds. Hypothetically if you rummage around in chests four or five or six times that can add up to a bit of savings, but I suspect since a lot of people don't really notice it when they rummage an individual chest they don't really think about that benefit.
- Another ding in its popularity is probably simply that I suspect looting chests is seen as a distraction from the main goal of repairing the gens and escaping and even from secondary goals like healing and rescuing each other. It takes some time traveling to a chest in the first place, after all, and then it takes time to loot it, and even when you loot it you might just get an item like a key or flashlight that you might not bother using anyway. If you do happen to get a toolbox it can save time on the gens but when you factor in the amount of time you spent looting that toolbox it's not as big a benefit as you might think. A medkit can be useful to heal yourself, but again you could have spent that time maybe just finding another survivor who can heal you if you can't do that. So while the items are kind of fun to play around the time it takes to get them out of chests kind of eats away at their benefit. Of course if you also run, say, Plunderer's Instinct and/or Pharmacy with this it speeds up the process of finding the chests and you're more likely to get an item you want, but now you're looking at multiple perks to loot chests which isn't something a lot of people are probably interested in. (I do it for fun but I'm weird! 🙂)
So I do think this perk could probably use a bit of a change or buff to make it a little more popular and maybe help it stand on its own.
- The main buff that jumps out is remove those token, they're not needed at all.
- Also you could maybe simply reduce the Rummage time on an already opened chest to 1 second, basically making it as close to instant as animation allows. That extra time shaved off would make rummaged items worth that much more benefit in total.
- Another possible buff would be to give Appraisal an aura effect similar to Plunderer's Instinct where you can see the auras of already opened chests. (So you'd have Plunderer's Instinct shows you auras of closed chests while Appraisal shows you auras of opened chests.) This would maybe help Appraisal stand a little more on its own a bit.
One last note, in the long run I think part of the reason appraisal and Plunderer's are less popular is simply that, while toolboxes and medkits are obviously useful, the other types of items are definitely perceived as being not quite as good. Flashlights are fun but honestly not that great overall since time spent trying to flashlight saves is usually better spent on gens. Maps can be somewhat handy but I think aren't used as much simply because once you know where something is you don't really need the map for it. And Keys, while they might on rare occasion let you escape at the end of a match, are really only useful for their secondary aura abilities from various add-ons. So in the long run I do think the game might be well served to reexamine Maps, Keys, and Flashlights and maybe buff or merge some of their abilities to put them more on par with tools and medkits. (For example, you could merge Maps and Keys into a single Compass like item that has both the aura effects and the hatch opening effect. That would both reduce the item clutter in bloodwebs and from chests and also give a new stronger type of item that might be a little more in line with tools and medkits.) If or when a broader item adjustment happens then I think it would also in the process help perks like Appraisal or Plunderer's Instinct.
Comments
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I like and also hate the idea. All these buffs would make the perk more appealing. The problem is that looting chests even if it was instant is still something that helps killer more then survivor team. Any perk that encourages looting is killer's perk in disguise.
Then again - if we do want to buff this perk I think even all of these things combined would not make it too OP. Maybe reducing the time to 1s might be a little too much, but it still promotes going for chests so...
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Idk it doesnt need much buffs i dont think
They probably had tokens because you can stack 4 purple coins together in a swf, imagine being able to get 20+ items in a single trial, possibly even more if your swf has appraisal as well
That would probably break the engine with that many items on the map
Id much rather see pharmacy's nerf get reverted or better yet, combined with the current version (so you can have the chest speed permanantly and be able to open a chest for a medkit once while healthy and open one again while injured)
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I'm skeptical the engine would break with 20 items on the map. And while it's funny to think about 13 chests on a map and the survivors pulling 26 items out of them it's definitely not overpowered. There's diminishing returns on pulling more and more items out of chests. After all, how many flashlights and keys do you need for instance?
Think of it this way, if using 4 coins in a swf so they could pull out 13 items was actually a good idea people would do it. I can't remember ever seeing this happen though.
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Are the tokens even necessary? Honestly, would this perk even be close to overpowered if it simply let you loot every chest twice? Why does it even have these tokens at all, it's just an unnecessary complication.
it has tokens because in the ptb, the original intention of the perk was for a single chest to allow you to rummage a chest 3 times. you would get 4 items from 1 chest. This got nerfed because of old keys. Plunder increases rarity chance and appraisal allow you to loot single chest 4 times which gave you a good odds to get a skeleton key/purple key every match. Hatch used to spawn if 1 survivor died and 1 generator was remaining meaning that survivor could potentially 3 man escape from keys. The killer could lose for a random trap door mechanic. this also applied when 2 people were alive and 2 generator were left standing. the survivor with the key could open the hatch and 2 survivors could escape through hatch.
They nerfed the perk because of hatch mechanics. The perk never got re-adjusted. The perk is bad because every item except med-kit is a waste of time. A chest takes 10 seconds to open but best toolbox base-kit toolbox is 10.67 seconds. Every other toolbox is negative in terms of time. Maps are only used for tracking totems but their radius to use them only tracks maps within 8 meters. You need add-on that increase distance to track items(when holding the button) to use the map. Flashlight used to be ok before their update. They had a lot of base item durability to do basic functions, but after their nerfs, the item has no durability without add-on's. Keys were only used to open the hatch. After the hatch was changed negatively, the main use of key is to use blood amber which base keys do not have from finding them in a chest. The hatch itself is for drawing, but a survivor will bring a key in the match from the normal bloodweb if they wish to escape through the hatch.
Med-kit are only items that are efficient to loot from a chest. It takes 10 seconds to loot from a chest and 16 second to heal. so in total, you will heal yourself in 26 second. a green-med kit will heal you in 10.6(21) seconds. you have 1/5 chance to get rewards from opening a chest. Looting chests is unrewarding in dbd which is why looting chests in dbd is throwing. Before the items became worse, Key,Flashlight and old toolbox with 80-180 charges, you had 4/5 chance to maybe get an item that is beneficial in the match so looting chest might not be a bad idea but throughout complaints of dbd in regards to items, all items have received negative changes. I do expect med-kit to eventually be weakened as well. My predictions will be that med-kit will receive large charge reduction either by raw numbers, such as 4/8/8/12 charges for each med-kit or a nerf to self-care mechanic of med-kits such as removing the mechanic entirely or increasing the charge consumption of med-kits by 100% when used for self-caring(This effectively double the cost of self-healing), so a purple med-kit would spent 32 charges to self-care heal 1 health-state from the survivor. I am more incline to believe that med-kit self-care function will be removed purely because of red styptic needle & purple stypic needle. Just my guess from trending pattern with the other items.
in general, they will not really improve these perks because what make or breaks this perk is how effective the base-version of the item is. current item list is 80% useless and 20% useful(killer say that med-kit are overpowered apparently).
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Maybe not with 20 items but I mean if EVERYONE has appraisal and there would be no tokens that limit this, it probably would when there's 80 items
And yeah ofc u don't see it often, its about as useful as stacking fog offerings on any map that isn't eyerie, mostly meant to mess around instead of caring about escaping
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I agree that we should see the Aura of opened Chests. I also run it with Plunderes and Ace in the Hole. It feels really stupid that if someone else opened a Chest you cant see it anymore.
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