Mettle of Man discussion
Continuing a series of threads on the least picked perks according to Nightlight, next up is Ash's perk Mettle of Man (0.48% usage)
Mettle of Man - After you earn 3 Protection Hit scoring events, Mettle of Man activates. Once activated, the next occasion that would put you into the dying state from the injured state is ignored. The next time you heal back to full health, your aura will be revealed to the Killer when you are further than 12/14/16 meters from the Killer. Mettle of Man will deactivate the next time you are put into the dying state.
Increases your chances to be the Killer's Obsession. The Killer can only be obsessed with one Survivor at a time.
Mettle of Man went through some changes during and after the rework so it got as high as about 1.5% a month ago, but has settled back down to around 0.5% or so since. Either way it doesn't see much use despite hypothetically having a potentially strong effect, namely protecting you from being downed similar to Endurance but without the restriction that Endurance has involving Deep Wounds. It can even hypothetically trigger multiple times per match if you take enough Protection hits between uses.
But that leads to the issue with the perk, namely that it requires you to take a whole bunch of Protection hits to get any use out of it. Taking a single Protection hit might not be too hard, for instance if you rescue someone at a hook and the killer is nearby odds are pretty good you'll take the hit. Or if the killer is carrying someone nearby you can bodyblock them for it. Doing it three or more times in a match though is probably getting into the realm of taking too much time off gens where you're running around, taking hits, and then healing the damage to take more hits, etc. Yeah you eventually get a "free hit" out of it but it comes at a pretty significant time cost.
Therefore aside from the meme thing of intentionally trying to take a ton of "free hits" using this and Dead Hard and Off the Record and such, it's probably not that great a perk with the hoops you have to go through to use it. (Not to mention that aura downside is adding a little insult to injury, you could remove that aura and the perk still probably wouldn't be all that good.)
So I suspect this one could use a buff. The most obvious buff would be to reduce that 3 hit condition to 2 hits and see how it goes, I'm honestly not sure how that would play out though. You could almost certainly remove that aura from the perk either way. If 2 hits as the requirement across the board is too strong, you could also gradate it having, for example, the first use takes 3 protection hits to trigger but subsequent uses only take 2. That would keep the first one at the same difficulty but make it more likely to get multiple triggers.
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i can guarantee you that 2 protection hits would make this broken. Ive seen this be used in swfs with reactive healing and purple medkits with extra charges and it does somewhat well. if it had only 2 as a requirement , this exact thing would go out of hands for the killer.
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Another taboo perk discussion. Second chance perks.
I think their original rework of the perk was to make it more of perk you earn over-time in the game. Taking protection hits for 0 reason is throwing the match as survivor especially at hooks when the killer is carrying survivors to the hook. Protection hits is not a good way for survivor to earn the perk.
I think the perk should work like deliverance. you need to get 4 safe unhooks to earn the activation of the perk. I think more survivor would use this perk if the trigger conditions did not involve throwing the entire game to use the perk. I think this is how they meant to rework the perk after nuking the perk. I am just not entirely convinced that a perk that rewards survivors second chances from survivor passively playing the game is entirely fun for killer. As a result, I cannot see this perk ever being an enjoyable perk for killers to play against.
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This is focusing on an extreme, and you even mention how this uses purple medkits (with extra charges at that) and another perk that is bad outside of a build + SWF. Things should not be balanced around extreme scenarios like this, that leads to bad balancing.
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2 hits would be too strong. For that to be balanced it’d need to work how it did in the since reverted reworked version and that sucked because conspicuous actions disabled it prematurely making it very limited. 3 hits is the right number.
That said, I think the perk should just deactivate immediately once you’ve used your free hit and then you can immediately start building up tokens again, rather than needing to be downed to reset it. And then just get rid of the whole “the killer sees your aura when further than 16m” thing. That just feels like an unnecessary remnant from the original version of the perk.
Since it would then need something else to differentiate across its perk tiers (since it’s currently the aura reading range of 12/14/16m that I’m suggesting to remove outright), maybe it could grant a small healing speed buff when self-healing (eg. 6/8/10%) and this would make getting your protection hits a little bit easier and more efficient. Nothing big, but I needed to add something for the sake of perk tiers and survivors typically bring medkits if they want to try and make this perk work.
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I think the original version allowed for 3 of any type of hit, and they changed it to 3 prot. What if we hybridized the system?
You need 6 tokens, 2 are given per prot hit (with the same 3 only prots to activate), and 1 for any other type of hit (or 1 per hit, and a bonus 1 token on prot hit, functionally the same, but programmatically different). You would need 6 personal hits to activate it with yourself alone, but you could do a combination of prot and normal.
Eg. I take 2 protection hits for a teammate, going down. I am currently at 4/6 tokens. I get Healed by my hook rescuer, and the Killer hits me at the last second, but they swap aggro to my teammate. I am now at 5/6 tokens. I heal myself up in a teammate's boon, and the Killer finds me on a gen after hooking the prior person mentioned taking aggro. I am now injured with MoM prepped at the full 6/6 tokens. The Killer continues to chase me and activates MoM, leaving me alone to instead go after the now Make Your Choice affected rescuer. I heal back up in the boon, but now the Killer has perma aura-read on me until the Killer decides to injure me again.
I think the personal vs protection difference would be good at 2 to 1 ratio, but this could also be tested with a different ratio. For example a ridiculous 10 to 1 would need 30 tokens, giving 10 tokens per prot, and 1 per normal. It could also be tested with different hit types, for example Special vs Normal giving differing token amounts. This could run into an issue with Killers such as Legion however, so I would only recommend testing 2 prot 1 all others before anything more fancy.
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i think the idea with 6 tokens 2 for prot and 1 for normal hit would be good in theory. however the perk in itself is totally unbalanced as soon as it becomes somewhat good because it just grants you a guaranteed second chance which is undeserved and unfun to play against.
i think i would rework the perk so you only gain that effect if you are currently taking a protection hit. then this perk could only be used in certain cases, f.e. getting a teammate to an exite gate while tanking another hit or for sabotage builds tanking another hit.
that in conjunction with an easier activation of course.
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Taking extra hits for sabotage implies that saboteur would need to be fixed - in description it states you sabo in 2.5s but in reality it's 3s. As killers are able to consecutively hit you at 2.7s, you would need to be able to tank like 5 hits for this to have any effect + sabo loosing CD (basically you would use sabotage only to not loose collision). Or purple toolbox with both speed addons. This is too big of an investment to be worth anything. I mean you can have sabo squad making you not hook anyone, but they won't do gens to get it efficiently. It's bad tactics that might be a little fun, but it almost guarantees you loosing the game.
What I am trying to say is, that this change would be almost meaningless buff.
IMO what would be meaningful buff is @mizark3 's version (this might even see some real usage - still not meta) or @sizzlingmario4 's version (I think this will buff the usage rate only a little, but we would maybe see this perk go closer to 1% usage rate).
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first of all, you can go to the hook before the killer gets there and start sabotaging. also, its not just about sabotaging hooks but tanking so many hits that the killer cant get to a hook in time. also you would have to use skill to use mettle of man and dont just get it anytime you want. its stupid to just get an extra chance. you could for example body block and tank 2 hits while another survivor is getting tunneled.
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If you go to the hook before killer, then you don't need MoM for anything. If you take MoM for tanking, than you don't know how the game works - you loose collision after hit, so if you are healthy and take a hit and try to bodyblock for your MoM, you are just wasting your time. Killer is free to ignore you and still hook that survivor ignoring survivor's body. If you add or remove any condition to MoM - it does not matter. You will NOT use it for your intended purposes, which means it's totally beside point whether the perk is active or not. What you basically create is a perk that can't be used for it's purpose. OR it can be used if you include additional perks making it quite an investment that will probably yield you nothing - your buff of the perk makes 0 sense and nobody will use it anyway, because it provides no benefit.
For the tunneling part - sure enough this would help. But you know what would help even more? You not wasting 1 perk slot and hell of a lot of healing time on trying to get that perk to activate and instead insert this time into generators. Paradoxically this will give much better chance for tunneled person to survive then your suggestion. Because taking 3 hits will buy him ~8s of free running distance, but he will need to wait for ~120 more seconds of chase time for it to break even on your investment (your 3 heals + running at killer) - sure enough some people are capable of it. But those people would win the game anyway.
Meaning your buff would still make the perk totally worthless
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na if you bodyblock the killer with MoM and then go to the hook and sabotage it works.
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It does not from 6.1 You don't get enough time to sabo. It worked before 6.1 but then killer's after hit CD got lowered by 0.3s. You would need purple toolbox with speed addons to combat this. Otherwise this does not work. Meaning perk that is designed for sabotages (saboteur) is already not enough. I play it. I tried it multiple times. You don't have enough time for it. Even if you are able to use all the sprint duration it does not work
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also the killer doesnt catch up to the other survivor that fast so you could easily tank twice.
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thats just wrong. if you bodyblock the killer until he hits you, you will get distance because you get an automated speedboost and the killer slows down after hit. and you can currently sabotage right in front of the hook where you get hit, then sabo with alex toolbox and speed addons and dead hard right after. so this would even work without an alex toolbox, because you get distance from the hit.
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Tanking hits helps you only if a, you already sabotaged hook (and you are able to get close to killer - which is screw-up on killer's side) b, killer got greedy for far-away scourge hook c, there is your whole team to take hits (so you exchange down for like 3-6 hits making it net positive for killer every time but when there are 2 hook states in a game and they are on carried person - but you still risk scenario where 4 survivors would be downed). This is again too specific scenario to be worth perk slot.
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also your math doesnt check out at all because any waysted time of the killer is free gen time for the other 2 survivors in the trail.
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Yes. I said so already. IF you bring alexis toolbox WITH both speed addons (maybe even green one alone can be enough sometimes), this will work and substitute your DH. I already said this is quite an investment, because you loose so much time to activate it, need to have specific item with addon(s) to use the perk AND be close enough to killer to use it optimally (meaning you probably also need breakout to make it in time). Sure you can run that thing. But don't expect to win that game. Because you are throwing to get value out of it
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its not throwing at all if you save your 2nd stage teammate from getting downed and removed from the game.
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My math checks out perfectly. Because it's all about how much time I can potentially save compared to how much time I can invest into my primary objective. If the net result is almost always in favor in doing gens instead (and in the case it isn't - the game is won anyway), then doing that ineffective thing is always bad. It's deliberately going for ineffective play. I mean - you don't need to go for optimal play all the time. I sure don't bring BNP's to my games (with very few exceptions). But doing things that are (almost) always by huge margin subobtimal IS THROWING. You will not see usage of a perk that requires you to throw the game if it does not include something that can be considered funny (so yes - people bring blast mine even if it's throwing the game. But MoM and taking free hit for loong heals is 100% not that funny as blast mine)
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Ok. Say that I go for this specific case. Say that my teammate wiggles free. Does that mean that my tunneled teammate is safe? Oh no it doesn't. Because killer will be stunned for something like 3s. But survivor is also stunned for 1s. Net gain for the survivor is 2s (this assumes killer will not realize what's happening and does not let survivor wiggle into stagger effect - which happens rarely, but good killers do this should opportunity show itself). What I usually see is survivor going down within 10s of wiggling free. I mean - this is good for a team to do gens, but it will NOT REALLY help tunneled survivor. And considering all the time investment. It's still throwing the game. And this assumes that survivor will indeed wiggle free which is still a HUGE assumption.
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where is you argument besides using words like throwing , ineffective and suboptimal plays ?
dont talk to me if you dont understand that its a 4v1 game. in high elo survivors get tunneled out of the game almost every match and having a tool that can potentially prevent that is quite good. I would however still mainly see this being used in swfs that use reactive healing.
Also you have to think about how often you could actually activate this protection hit. You just need a survivor in front of you and it works. F.e. when running to the gate you could often easily escape. And people often run adrenaline just for that single reason of getting out. And that perk could be used way more versitile.
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You talk about high MMR and you ask about my argument about suboptimal and throwing? Hello. You can't talk about high MMR and require inefficient play. These things don't go together. What you propose is outright useless stupid in high MMR. It's same as advocating that territorial imperative would be OK if it gave aura instead of just notification and arguing when and where this would be enough. So again WHEN will be sabo toolbox MoM and some supporting perk EVER going even close to taking DS, DH, OTR and Adrenaline with strong medkit? I will tell you when - NEVER. It's bad meme combo that could potentially get some playrate OUTSIDE high MMR play IF it was easy to use. So we are back at the stuff I already said. Your argument makes 0 sense in buffing MoM usage. What @mizark3 and @sizzlingmario4 said would. But only outside high MMR. It's far from meta and it's suboptimal and I gave you multiple scenarios WHY that is the case
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This is SPECIFICALLY true for high MMR. Where efficiency is the king. You will always go for chase (anti-tunnel) builds or genrush builds. Sabo plays have 0 space in real high MMR plays. And the reason being, surprise surprise - that it's SLOW/INEFFICIENT. It wastes too much time. Giving killer too many opportunities to down everyone.
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and btw blast mine isnt throwing. in combination with wire trap its decent because it makes it so the killer gets stunned and has to kick the gen twice to remove wiretrap while giving your team information about where the killer is.
imagine everyone working on gens would run that perk combination in solo q, it would provide you with constant information and it does get rid of quite a bit of time from the killer if he decides to kick gens. and yea i dont run it myself but im just saying its actually not that bad.
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And who in you "high MMR" runs it? I presume nobody. And there's a good reason for it
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i dont know about you but im in red rank 1 and i see it like once every 5 games or so.
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I saw that build. I think once. I know that wire tap has it's value. But I don't see people combining it with blast mine. Because it's redundant
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It suffers from having to do so much just for one extra hit... I wouldn't even call it a second chance perk
But I'm not sure what can be done to it...
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I might be mistaken, but I thought @sizzlingmario4 's version was how it worked prior to the 6.1 nerf and subsequent un-nerf. I thought you could restack MoM after activating it, but now you have the flaw of the Killer having perma aura-read on you while you are healthy. That generally means the Killer will find you and chase you, down you, and now you are on hook with the aura portion reset. Theoretically though you could repeatedly heal and put yourself back in the chase to get your MoM stonks. Maybe that was a bug or just the Killer tunnel visioning my friend and slugging me in favor of staying on them, technically resetting it though by my entering the Dying state. It was a while ago and I haven't used MoM as much as I did previously.
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I agree with your assessment and I said the perk would be dead months ago when it was first changed. I had multiple people laughing at me for saying the perk was a joke and changed for worse! They told me I didn't know what I was talking about because MoM was clearly buffed and will be better than reworked Dead Hard, funny how things play out. It could definitely use a re-re-re-rework but honestly I still don't think most people will use it. There's still way better perks to take if you're in SoloQ and even still as a SWF it hinders efficiency. I don't really know what changes can be made for this to get better
These were my exact words, I don't feel anything has changed since then:
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So exactly the same thing I was saying.
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your post is inconsistent. you are saying that you can abuse(utilize) reaction healing and med-kit to trigger the perk but in other posts, you state that a good usage of the perk is using it for sabotage.
Using med-kits to endless tank hits at hook is a waste of survivor time which is why protection hits is a bad trigger condition. Your wasting time to activate a perk when doing generator is better option. Your also wasting your med-kit for this action. Purple stypic can be used to activate this perk but it is not worth it because purple stypic is better used as defensive safe-guard towards playing injured/chase extension.
As for sabotage, You need dead hard and Alex toolbox+Hacksaw to perform sabotage. MoM is wasted perk for sabotage. The perk design is to gain second chances over course of a match but designing a perk that grants consistent second chances means that killer has to hit 4 extra times to down someone. that's way too strong when multiplied 4 times at 100% consistency. they need find a better balance between the perk activates once per match or once every two matches on a single survivor. Currently, the perk is straight bad and never worth considering in any survivor build.
the teammate is not safe but successfully performing a sabotage does provide a 4th hook-state and delay the tunneling death. It is like decisive strike for your teammate.Sometimes that is all you need to finish last generator. I wouldn't call sabotage useless especially with toolbox, its low commitment move for somewhat high reward. The killer slugging offers no reward for the killer in the current iteration of the game, so just a free second chance. The biggest time that sabotage wastes is not sabotage itself but rather healing to tank a hit to sabotage. This is why you often only sabotage on 2nd hook-state survivors where there is only 1-2 generators left because one survivor spending time to sabotage killer objective at this point in the game is somewhat worth it since 2 survivor can easily finish the last two generators if your team is efficient. Sabotage is more of heighten version of survivor body-blocking. soloq is too disorganized to use mechanic towards a positive outcome. not enough information to use the mechanic.
Jake's saboteur perk is pretty garbage but if the perk granted 75% sabotage speed and did not go on cooldown for cancelling it, it might be decent perk option assuming soloq had more information to use it.
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I agree with almost everything you wrote. The point about wasted time for that sabotage play was directly linked to how much time you need to waste in order to provide the play. It was meaned in this context. Otherwise fully agreed.
One additional note tho - I do play saboteur also in soloQ. The perk is bad, but not garbage. You just have to be lucky (scourge hooks or map with higher hook spread) and you have to guess which hook the killer will use. I have made quite a few successful sabo plays even in soloQ. But again - you have to get a bit lucky (and probably also tank 1 hit)
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