Ideas for hook sabotage changes and new functionality
Hello everyone! I've been an increasingly avid fan of DbD for about a year now, and figured I would try to get a little more involved in the community so I can hopefully help provide ideas and feedback to make a game I truly love even better.
With that said, one constant I've noticed in low (rank 20-16), mid (rank 15-10) and high rank (rank 10-1) play is that almost constantly the ability to sabotage hooks goes completely ignored by players, with the reason being it is too difficult of a strategy to pull off successfully with far too low of a payoff.
Now I'm not about to suggest we make hooks stop re-spawning again, so instead, what if we offered new ways to incentive players to sabo hooks, and these were the 3 ideas I've come up with
1) Add a secondary button press to complete a hook sabo: boy oh boy is it annoying when you are trying to get those hooks to 99%, and just as you reach 88% you hear that skill check chime, and now you have to choose between intentionally failing the skill check which will give away your position to the killer and force you to re-sabo the regressed hook, or succeed the skill check and have the hook 100%, removing it from play for a few minutes and ruining the 99% strat until it re-spawns. Instead, what if the hook stops sabotaging at 99%, and will display a different button prompt to actually demolish the hook (like how you can use the syringe by a button press). This would make hooks a lot more reliable of a strategy for players, which means games might actually slow down a bit as survivors spend time prepping (I bet a lot of killers would gladly trade an occasional hook dropped in their face for an overall longer match time).
2) New "fall apart" functionality: as sabo hooks go currently, you pretty much get an all or nothing benefit...but what if there were an ever so slight passive benefit, like, maybe a slight chance that a hook that's been partly sabotaged will fall apart when a survivor is hooked on it. What I suggest is a 0.04% per sabo complete percent chance for a hook to break under a survivors weight after being on the hook for 3 seconds (and an additional break chance every 5-10 seconds after that). the 0.04% would roughly equal a 4% break chance (actually 3.96%) when the hook has been previously sabo'd to 99%, with the 3 second delay giving time for the killer to walk away from the hook or distracted by other survivors (not only that but it would give you at least a fighting chance with playing with random players that have no interest in coming to your rescue). It would also be worth considering having luck stack with this chance, which would give a passive benefit to luck builds like Ace's default skills. (last note, I think when the hook falls apart both the survivor who is on the hook, and the last person to have sabo'd the hook should get a blood point bonus unless its the same person).
3) Spare parts: when sabotaging a hook, give an ever so small chance for the survivor to remove a few random parts from the hook and add it to a tool box if they have an open add-on slot. unlike normal add-ons these are same match only add-ons, so grinding for add-ons won't be an option, but this would also allow an opportunity to add toolbox add-ons that wouldn't work for normal play, such as "combustion muffler" which will negate the effects of a failed generator skill check one time (no killer notification and no loss progress).
Well hopefully that wall of text makes at least a little sense, but I'd love to hear other peoples ideas and get feedback on this (although I'd super love it if even one of these changes made it into the game 
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Comments
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1) I'm all for this one. I do get skillchecks a lot at the end of it which mess up the whole thing, so having a button press to break it is something I can get behind.
2) Would have to see that in a PTB or something to see how it would work out. If not it could just add some sabotage percentage onto hooks that have been used. Say X % is added onto the bar on the hook that's been used. It's a used hook so it would make sense.
3) That could be good too, though new addons would have to be made for it to make sense to me. You wouldn't be pulling out a hacksaw from a hook to make sabotaging go faster after all.
Overall, some nice suggestions and I like your enthusiasm with the ideas. They're not too insane but some good QoL changes that could see some use in testing them out.
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