Perk ideas for the perk rework

Fropps

In the far future we shall have balanced perks, so the prophecy has foretold.

I come up with ideas for perk balance all the time, since we finally have a forum, I think I should share my best ideas so far.

Fully-fledged perk balance ideas

Self-Care:

While Self-Care has at least one token, unlock the ability to heal yourself without a medkit at 50% speed. Gain a token by cleansing a totem and lose a token when hooked by the killer. Increases the efficiency of Med-Kit self-heal by 10/15/20 %.

Fixing self-care is a complex problem, one that I don’t have a concrete solution to. Self-care in its current state breaks a fundamental part of the survivor’s gameplay. Needing other survivors to get healed again introduces uncertainty that is psychologically important for survivors to act the way they should. Slowing down the rate self-care heals so that using it doesn’t actually increase your winrate more than any other perk doesn’t fix this problem. The only way to keep self-care’s core functionality and the game’s core uncertainty intact is to turn self-care into a resource that you will be uncertain you are able to obtain in the future. Additionally, self care in its current state slows down the player experience (however, this may be a necessary evil as healing during a chase is something we want to avoid being viable). If you turned self-care into a resource that you have to do actions to replenish (like doing a gen or totem), you are still spending your time inefficiently, but in a way that increases tension and interaction rather than decreasing it. A change like this would be better for everyone.

Alert: Reveals the killer's aura for 6 seconds when they use the break action and their killer power within 12/24/36 meters. (This excludes state changes such as crouching as pig and changing modes as doctor.)
This effect has a cooldown of 60/45/30 seconds

Alert isn’t used much because the effect the perk generates is generally not powerful enough to justify how little it activates. Alert including killer powers opens up opportunities for the survivor to try and mindgame the killer with knowledge of their position during a chase.

Left Behind: In addition to the current effects, increase bloodpoint gains from doing generators as the last survivor alive by 300%.

Left behind is a tricky perk. Everyone else has to die in order to use it and the killer has to not use the usual strategy of slugging the second last person while they try to find you. You are also forgoing trying to find the hatch (not anymore?), which nets you 7000 points if you escape using it. Additionally, if you do decide to do generators to escape for some reason, the generators unavoidably create a notification when you complete them, letting the killer find you, then kill you. These factors combine to make left behind completely unusable. Increasing the bloodpoint gain from gens while it's active turns left behind into a challenge perk. It doesn't make the hard road out any easier, but it definitely makes it a lot sweeter. This will in turn increase gameplay variety in the end-game, making that part of the game much more fun for everyone involved.

No Mither: Please, for the love of god, make the survivor start healthy and hide the status from the killer.

No killer will ever leave you on the ground if they know you have this perk. While some people do appreciate escaping with perks that make the game harder, the fact that you can’t even utilize the benefit of No Mither is a bit silly.

Sloppy Butcher: Wounds inflicted by successful attacks slightly/moderately/considerably increase the Survivor's Bleeding frequency. Bleeding also persists for 5/10/15 seconds after the target is healed.

Sloppy Butcher is weak for four reasons. 1: You need to hit someone in order to make use of it. 2: there are better ways to find injured survivors, like sound. 3: People get healed up really quickly after you lose them, leaving this perk with little utility in the way of finding survivors who you lost more than 15 seconds ago. 4: this perk is completely outclassed by nurses calling as a tracking perk. Making recently healed survivors bleed for a bit after they’re healed makes it so it’s less easily completely shut down by healing and gives it a niche that a perk like stridor doesn’t share.

Not-so fully formed ideas

Two perks bug me, though I haven't had a good idea about how they might be fixed.

The first of these is NOED. The problem with NOED right now is that it feels unfair. Games are build from rules. While insta-down attacks might not be extremely powerful statistically (The devs would have nerfed this if it made a substantial increase in kill rate), NOED breaks one of the fundamental rules of the game by downing you without bringing you into the injured or exposed states.While it's fun to play with, these must be other ways to make the killer significantly more powerful after the gates are powered.

The second one is Monstrous Shrine. Monstrous Shrine is very much useless. It's nice and thematic but it does nothing to make you want to run it. What I propose is that Monstrous Shrine should be made into a challenge perk à la We're going to live forever. However, there is a huge space to be explored here, and I feel like I would be doing a disservice by simply proposing one option. Maybe Monstrous Shrine could:

Grant rewards like bloodpoints (or even an iridescent shard!?!?!??!) when a survivor is hooked in the basement
Inflict a debuff onto survivors that have been hooked in the basement (ideally so that they are kept alive as a detriment to the team)
Grant an effect that grows stronger as survivors are hooked in the basement.

Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

iOrangeStain

I like your idea for Monstrous Shrine a lot. We have blood point gain perks but not Iridescent / Auric gain perks.
With a slight number buff, here's my little idea:

Your fervent care of the hooks found around the map has aroused the Entity's interest. The hooks are granted the following bonuses:
9/12/15% faster Entity progression.
5/10/15% increased difficulty on escape attempts.
4/7/10% increased penalty to escape fails.

Each time you hook a survivor, you gain 1/2/3 Auric Cells .

karimew

I don't think they'll let you earn free auric cells, since that seems to be their currency bought only with real money from my understanding. But I'd love it for iridescent shards!

iOrangeStain

@karimew said:
I don't think they'll let you earn free auric cells, since that seems to be their currency bought only with real money from my understanding. But I'd love it for iridescent shards!

That's true and that's why I think it would be good as perk. Especially since the value would be so low. But, considering you would need to hook a survivor 110 times to get the very rare shirtless Daddy David... That could be a lot but... A perk related to Auric Cell or Iridescent Gain would be so good. I thought Auric would be good because you need so many to get some that are Auric exclusive. Would be my dream though.

Fibijean

1) I see your point about self-care, but I don't think changing the way it works so fundamentally is the solution. Since you don't get emblem points for healing yourself but you do for healing others, I've been trying to let other people heal me as much as possible since the emblems were introduced. Of course, some survivors don't care about other people's points. Perhaps instead of affecting self-care directly, they could make it so that you earn benevolence points by allowing others to heal you, which would discourage use of self-care and make it more of a last resort.

2) I think your idea for alert is very interesting and potentially great, but you'd have to be very careful about balance when implementing it. Maybe reduce it to 3 seconds rather than 6 if you're going to let them see killer powers as well. Alternately, I saw someone in another thread suggest that they simply lower the trigger cooldown (or not have one at all!) to make the perk more viable for use during a chase.

3) I like your idea for left behind. Perhaps they could even make it so that your generator repairs after everyone else is dead don't give a visual notification, or only do so 50% of the time.

4) 100% in agreement with no mither. That has always been my main issue with that perk and why I never use it. Other survivors should still be able to see the status icon, but the killer shouldn't.

5) I actually think sloppy butcher is pretty good for finding survivors injured during a chase, especially on indoor maps like lehry's or the game where the blood stains are so obvious. Finding survivors through bleeding has no counter other than no mither, which is a double-edged sword of a perk, unlike trying to find them through sound (countered by iron will). It just makes it that much harder for survivors to escape after they've been injured. Also, I don't think it's necessarily true that they get healed soon after you lose them. Most survivors will wait to heal a teammate until the killer is well and truly gone, from fear of nurse's calling, and as you said earlier self-healing during a chase is rarely a viable option.

6) The only issue I have with NOED is that you don't know they have it until they hit someone and the status icon appears. That's why it feels unfair. If it were simply changed so that the NOED icon appears as soon as the exit gates are powered, survivors know what's going on and know that if they get hit they'll be downed, rather than taking a gamble on being hit not knowing whether NOED is active or not.

7) I don't know about making basement-hooked survivors a detriment to the team, but I do like the idea of turning monstrous shrine into either a bonus bloodpoints perk like BBQ and chilli or a token-based perk like fire up.

Fropps

Thank you so much for the response!
1) Regarding self-care, I definitely wasn't taking into account the emblem system and I think that's a very good point. However, I think if we're going to take into account incentive systems, we should also take into account that healing yourself gives you bloodpoints, while letting others heal you doesn't. People play in different ways for different reasons. Some are completely indifferent to rank, and I think we have to take that into account in this case.
2) Alert in this state might be a little too powerful, I'll admit (and reducing the time you can see them for is probably a good solution to that). However, I definitely rather have survivors I'm playing against run an informational perk with counterplay than another sprint burst or borrowed time. The only problem I see with it is it potentially being a counter to the pig using her power to break some loops. However, this could still be circumvented by striking again within the 30 second cooldown.
3) In theory, I like removing the notification, but the killer will probably be able to find out where you were pretty quickly due to knowing where the remaining gens were and which one they can no longer see. On second thought, sometimes you do actually just lose track of exactly where the remaining gens are when the survivors haven't done many. I like this.
4) Yeah. I don't know a single person who likes the perk this way. At this point I'm just assuming that there's some technical reason they haven't done this yet to be honest.
5) I really hadn't thought of the prevalence of iron will when writing about sloppy butcher, though it's obviously not as powerful as other tracking perks otherwise. I don't think such a minor change is going to push sloppy butcher over the edge.
6) Maybe this is true, though I'd also say that this is where much of it's power comes from -taking down overconfident survivors who don't realise you have NOED-. It's still probably a little unhealthy for the game, but I think there's probably a better solution.
7) I was just throwing out ideas and seeing what stuck. From the standpoint of a survivor, I can see why making them a detriment to the team is doesn't feel good. I think you're right about the bloodpoint and token -based solutions being a bit better.

Jack11803

@Fropps said:

In the far future we shall have balanced perks, so the prophecy has foretold.

I come up with ideas for perk balance all the time, since we finally have a forum, I think I should share my best ideas so far.

Fully-fledged perk balance ideas

Self-Care:

While Self-Care has at least one token, unlock the ability to heal yourself without a medkit at 50% speed. Gain a token by cleansing a totem and lose a token when hooked by the killer. Increases the efficiency of Med-Kit self-heal by 10/15/20 %.

Fixing self-care is a complex problem, one that I don’t have a concrete solution to. Self-care in its current state breaks a fundamental part of the survivor’s gameplay. Needing other survivors to get healed again introduces uncertainty that is psychologically important for survivors to act the way they should. Slowing down the rate self-care heals so that using it doesn’t actually increase your winrate more than any other perk doesn’t fix this problem. The only way to keep self-care’s core functionality and the game’s core uncertainty intact is to turn self-care into a resource that you will be uncertain you are able to obtain in the future. Additionally, self care in its current state slows down the player experience (however, this may be a necessary evil as healing during a chase is something we want to avoid being viable). If you turned self-care into a resource that you have to do actions to replenish (like doing a gen or totem), you are still spending your time inefficiently, but in a way that increases tension and interaction rather than decreasing it. A change like this would be better for everyone.

Alert: Reveals the killer's aura for 6 seconds when they use the break action and their killer power within 12/24/36 meters. (This excludes state changes such as crouching as pig and changing modes as doctor.)
This effect has a cooldown of 60/45/30 seconds

Alert isn’t used much because the effect the perk generates is generally not powerful enough to justify how little it activates. Alert including killer powers opens up opportunities for the survivor to try and mindgame the killer with knowledge of their position during a chase.

Left Behind: In addition to the current effects, increase bloodpoint gains from doing generators as the last survivor alive by 300%.

Left behind is a tricky perk. Everyone else has to die in order to use it and the killer has to not use the usual strategy of slugging the second last person while they try to find you. You are also forgoing trying to find the hatch (not anymore?), which nets you 7000 points if you escape using it. Additionally, if you do decide to do generators to escape for some reason, the generators unavoidably create a notification when you complete them, letting the killer find you, then kill you. These factors combine to make left behind completely unusable. Increasing the bloodpoint gain from gens while it's active turns left behind into a challenge perk. It doesn't make the hard road out any easier, but it definitely makes it a lot sweeter. This will in turn increase gameplay variety in the end-game, making that part of the game much more fun for everyone involved.

No Mither: Please, for the love of god, make the survivor start healthy and hide the status from the killer.

No killer will ever leave you on the ground if they know you have this perk. While some people do appreciate escaping with perks that make the game harder, the fact that you can’t even utilize the benefit of No Mither is a bit silly.

Sloppy Butcher: Wounds inflicted by successful attacks slightly/moderately/considerably increase the Survivor's Bleeding frequency. Bleeding also persists for 5/10/15 seconds after the target is healed.

Sloppy Butcher is weak for four reasons. 1: You need to hit someone in order to make use of it. 2: there are better ways to find injured survivors, like sound. 3: People get healed up really quickly after you lose them, leaving this perk with little utility in the way of finding survivors who you lost more than 15 seconds ago. 4: this perk is completely outclassed by nurses calling as a tracking perk. Making recently healed survivors bleed for a bit after they’re healed makes it so it’s less easily completely shut down by healing and gives it a niche that a perk like stridor doesn’t share.

Not-so fully formed ideas

Two perks bug me, though I haven't had a good idea about how they might be fixed.

The first of these is NOED. The problem with NOED right now is that it feels unfair. Games are build from rules. While insta-down attacks might not be extremely powerful statistically (The devs would have nerfed this if it made a substantial increase in kill rate), NOED breaks one of the fundamental rules of the game by downing you without bringing you into the injured or exposed states.While it's fun to play with, these must be other ways to make the killer significantly more powerful after the gates are powered.

The second one is Monstrous Shrine. Monstrous Shrine is very much useless. It's nice and thematic but it does nothing to make you want to run it. What I propose is that Monstrous Shrine should be made into a challenge perk à la We're going to live forever. However, there is a huge space to be explored here, and I feel like I would be doing a disservice by simply proposing one option. Maybe Monstrous Shrine could:

Grant rewards like bloodpoints (or even an iridescent shard!?!?!??!) when a survivor is hooked in the basement
Inflict a debuff onto survivors that have been hooked in the basement (ideally so that they are kept alive as a detriment to the team)
Grant an effect that grows stronger as survivors are hooked in the basement.

Looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

Starting healthy would negate no mithers synergies. Getting in a chase to be hurt is not a solution to starting healthy either. Just remove the icon, (so killer at least has a chance to forget). Make noises reduced by 100%. If we wanna give it another bonus, BP will do fine.

Jack11803

BP*

Fropps

Jack11803, did you delete your original post? I got two notifications.

Jack11803

@Fropps said:
Jack11803, did you delete your original post? I got two notifications.

Mobile malfunction.