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Stridor discussion

dugman
dugman Member Posts: 9,713
in Feedback and Suggestions

Continuing a series of threads on the least picked perks according to Nightlight, next up is Nurse's perk Stridor (0.41% usage)

Stridor - Breathing of Survivors in pain is 25/50% louder and regular breathing is 0/25% louder.

Stridor's upside is that if a survivor is crouching kind of nearby or hiding in a locker it might help you hear them when it otherwise might be hard to pick out. Also, now that Iron Will is 75% noise reduction instead of 100%, Stridor is no longer completely cancelled by Iron Will (which despite Iron Will's nerf is still run about twice the average rate on Nightlight, around 6-7% usage rate, so it's still something you'll see in matches.)

That's the good news. The bad news is kind of bad though

  • Off the Record is one of the most popular survivor perks and it gives survivors 100% sound reduction which means it completely negates Stridor as well. So even though the old Iron Will situation was mitigated it was replaced by the new Off the Record meta and you still will have a lot of situations in games where you can't hear an injured survivor despite using Stridor.
  • It's not obvious when you hear a survivor using Stridor when you would have heard them anyway without it, cutting into its perceived benefit. Even if the perk is actually helping a killer might not realize it and will think it didn't do anything at all. (Personally I've run Stridor now and then and I think, maybe, it's helped me find a survivor hiding sometimes, but who can tell? 🤷‍♂️ )
  • And lastly even when the perk is working it can mess up your perception of how far away they are unless you use Stridor all the time. Basically if you normally don't use Stridor, and then you use it for a match and hear someone, you'll intuitively think the survivor is a lot closer than they actually are which can mess up your reaction to it. You can hear someone behind a wall, for instance, and think they're on your side of it and be confused when you can't see them.


Stridor does therefore feel like a perk that could use a buff to boost its usage. Some possible ways to do it might be:

  • Increase its sound amplification from 25%/50% to maybe 75%/100% so the sounds are much more obvious and picking out normally inaudible sounds is much easier. The downside to this would be the muscle memory thing of not knowing the distance, but then again if the louder amplification helps find enough survivors that you'd otherwise miss than that would outweigh that downside.
  • Reduce Off the Record's sound reduction to 75% or so similar to Iron Will. That way it doesn't completely negate Stridor in the meta.
  • Let Stridor amplify ALL survivor noises, including walking and running and also sounds from dying survivors on the ground. Maybe even include sounds of ongoing gen repairs.
  • A more unusual but maybe interesting buff would be to have Stridor give you an actual compass direction type indicator to nearby injured noises (similar to how you get a direction indicator for loud noise alerts). That way not only do you actually hear the noises more easily but you also get a really strong sense of where it's coming from. Plus this approach could have an added upside of being useful for hearing impaired killer players who might otherwise be having trouble picking out survivor noises. (In fact I could be wrong I seem to remember DbD Mobile has a feature similar to this built into the game.)


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