Ultimate Weapon IS Problematic... Just Not For The Reasons You Think...

Iron_Cutlass

What Is Ultimate Weapon?

Ultimate Weapon is a new perk that is introduced with the new Alien Chapter. It has the following effect:

Whenever you open a locker, Ultimate Weapon activates for 30 seconds.

• Survivors entering your Terror Radius scream and reveal their location to you.
• Survivors suffer for the Blindness status effect for 30 seconds.

This effect has a 40/35/30 second cooldown.

How Is It Problematic?

While people look at the base effect and come up with niche scenarios as to what makes it overpowered or strong, I wanted to look at things via a different perspective... the perk economy.

Dead by Daylight has hundreds of perks, with many different effects, most of which are just slight variations of the same thing that intend to fill a specific niche. And with their being a limited amount of perk slots, all of these perks are competing against one another to be slotted, thus demanding that each perk be balanced in relation to already existing perks.

To put it bluntly, Ultimate Weapon is bad for the perk economy since it functions better and fills a niche better than the alternatives to a significant extent.

Dont believe me? Let's take a look at some of the other perks Ultimate Weapon significantly outshines.

THWACK!

THWACK! has the effect where upon hooking a Survivor, the perk becomes active. Breaking a Pallet or Breakable Wall will cause all Survivors within 28/30/32 meters of your location to scream and reveal their Aura for 4 seconds.

This should be a no brainer as to why Ultimate Weapon negatively impacts this perk's usage rate.

Ultimate Weapon does not require you to hook the Survivor to get information, you just search a locker to proc its effect. Furthermore, Ultimate Weapon has a lingering effect when making Survivors scream, meanwhile THWACK! is a single instance.

Ultimate Weapon, to put it bluntly, requires significantly less effort to proc a stronger effect.

Whispers...

Whispers has the effect where a Survivor within close proximity will cause the perk to activate, and the Entity will start speaking to the player with the perk.

Ultimate Weapon provides far more accurate tracking than Whispers since it provides the exact location when they enter the Terror Radius, and depending on the perks, this tracking can become more accurate (Monitor and Abuse) or less accurate (Distressing) with it's range being decreased and increased respectively.

Whispers was always a niche perk that had a mini cult following, however I think a huge portion of people will just swap to Ultimate Weapon instead, thus dropping this perk's usage rate.

That Being Said...

There are potentially more perks that I am missing out when making this.

But Ultimate Weapon really reminds me of the Call of Brine meta. While everyone was spouting that Call of Brine was too strong, I was pointing out how the perk and the meta really worked against Surveillance and put it in a bad spot. Of course Call of Brine was nerfed and the two perks are used depending on the build, having equal opportunities to shine.

Not to say that BHVR should nerf Ultimate Weapon, instead I think BHVR should maybe provide other perks with something a little bit extra to push them a bit forwards, and maybe BHVR should be a bit more considerate as to how one perk affects the perk economy.