New Blood Amber: Honestly Not That Bad?

jesterkind

When the key rework first came out, I initially sort of wrote off the Blood Amber as not really being worth it with the new downsides it was given. In the time since, though, I've decided to play through a good chunk of matches building around the Blood Amber like you could do before, and while it involves a different build now… I actually think it's pretty good, still.

The biggest part of the realisation that it isn't as bad as I thought initially is that I noticed the "show killer's aura" and "show your aura to the killer" parts aren't connected the way they are for Object Of Obsession. It's two separate effects that happen independent of one another.
In some ways this is a weakness - if a killer's Undetectable you can't read them, but I'd assume they can still read you - but more importantly it means you can mitigate the downside. Anything that cloaks your aura doesn't stop the Blood Amber from showing you the killer, and that's pretty reliably doable.

So, what I've been running it with is the obvious choice: Distortion.

If you have a token for Distortion, activating the Blood Amber consumes it, changing the effects from one good and one bad - see the killer, but the killer sees you - into two good effects - see the killer, and hide your own scratch marks.
This can result in a pretty hefty boost to chasing in tall loops, but even if it doesn't, you still get pretty unrivalled killer tracking. Assuming you get to use Distortion on every charge the key has (which is admittedly unreasonable), you get four seconds of aura read four times, hiding your scratch marks at the same time. You get an extra use with the brown charge addon, and if you - like me - run it with Eyes of Belmont, you get six seconds instead of four. Add onto that the fact that the new Blood Amber has a considerably higher range than the old one (64 metres instead of 32), and you get a surprising suite of use cases where it shines.

Despite how it might seem with the stated downside, the Blood Amber is a genuinely potent stealth tool that allows you to rotate away from where the killer is and only go for safe unhooks/heals with pretty startling consistency.

With that said, it would be disingenuous not to mention two big detracting factors:

First, you obviously can't guarantee that you have Distortion active for every moment you'd want to use the Blood Amber. If the killer doesn't have any aura reading, that's pretty doable, but it's also fairly common to see one, maybe two aura perks in most loadouts. This doesn't lower the Blood Amber's effectiveness, but it does curtail how and when you'd feel comfortable activating it.
Other forms of aura blocking exist, but have their own inconsistencies too. They work, you might prefer them, follow your heart.

Second, this is obviously still weaker than the addon used to be. It used to shine at mindgaming in loops in a way that it's still capable of doing without as much consistency. Instead of being able to feather it, you get predetermined bursts of aura reading- still more than worth using, of course, but it'd be unreasonable not to mention that this is still a downgrade for this use case.

Still, even factoring in those two things, I was surprised at how useful the Blood Amber still is. Especially considering that you still get the considerably expanded usefulness of the key's base as well- you still get to read your teammate's auras while the key is active, you still get to open chests quicker for guaranteed high-grade loot, you still get to open the hatch. You'll want to do those things less, but they're still there.

TL;DR: The Blood Amber is still pretty good and, despite appearances, is surprisingly good as a stealth tool if built into correctly. What was the one asterisk on the statement "Keys are much better now" isn't as much of an exception as I thought it was.