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In Support of Orion: Even when something seemingly has no effect is when it’s usually working best.
Players of DBD will forever limit their ability to grow and get better at this game if one cannot look beneath the surface of most of this game’s mechanics by embracing some abstract thinking, broad thinking, and insight into the nuances of BOTH roles in this game.
As @Orion summarised briefly in their recent post, when something usually isn’t giving the commonly expected effect, is usually when it’s giving its BEST effect. Thinking/anticipating how your load out alters your opponents behaviour is key.
I’ll throw around some examples here that Orion didn’t use, so you can better understand the train of thought.
Dragon’s Grip - If it never (or rarely) gives off a notification, guess what? It means survivors are allowing a gen (or gens) to regress for at LEAST half a minute without being touched (or some survivors have calm spirit). That’s HUGE. So even when the perk seemingly has “no effect” anymore, it in fact DOES have an effect in making survivors paranoid about touching regressing gens (particularly on high mobility killers).
NOED - just say you got to endgame and your NOED DOESN’T activate. This tells you the survivors spent considerable time searching out every totem before popping the last gen. This may still not feel great, but with the survivors having spent that time doing so, you probably got downs/hooks/pressure before that point that you may not have been able to achieve had it not been for the extra time the survivors spent searching for totems.
Any Hex Perk - pretty much the same as above. So many killers lament how quickly some Hexes get cleansed, and playing the match with less perks. Guess what? Perks don’t win you matches. Your skill, wit, and a combination of how quickly you end chases and how distracted you keep the other survivors OUT of a chase are what determine if you win or not. So a cleansed Hex STILL provides YOU a benefit: at least ONE survivor floundering around hunting for that hex totem.
I’m not going to on and on with an extensive list of perks or add ons.
The point is that usually when something no longer has an effect is actually giving you the BEST effect if you’re smart enough to understand the opponents altered behavior and then think about how you USE that information.
Edit: damn auto correct. What the hell is “Clam Spirit”?!
Comments
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Mindbreaker - its effect is so wonderful, yet never obvious.
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I agree. (I hope you’re not being sarcastic, because I genuinely really like the perk after spending significant time with it the past few months recently).
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Monsterous shrines 0.01% unhook chance decrease chance can be the difference between a survivor kobeing and not. And i think kills them like 2 seconds faster so it can prevent a hook rush in some cases.
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There’s another I acknowledged benefit of Monstrous Shrine that mentioned in Orion’s other post: The perk creates urgency in the other survivors. My meaning: it gets them (at least one) off of gens much quicker to get the save. Sometimes survivors spending a few seconds less on gens can make all the difference in this game.
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I'm serious, I'm currently trying to run this perk in every ghostface build because its perfect for that kind of killer
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Ok, I’m glad you were sincere.
Yeah Mindbreaker is another perfect example of there being more to the perk than meets the eye. It definitely alters the behaviour of survivors running exhaustion perks.
With how common Dead Hard is, Mindbreaker can actually be a gen stall perk.
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People really sleep on a majority of the perks in this game and stick to the meta. That’s why it frustrates me so much when people pick up perks like Any Means Necessary almost an entire YEAR after it was released and squeal about how good it is.
I have a different build on every Survivor, and I plan on doing the same for Killer in the future. Each of them have different playstyles and roles on the team. Sometimes they work wonders, sometimes I simply don’t get the chance. It’s just part of the game.
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Dragon's Grip is probably a bad example. Most people will still be sitting on a gen regardless. There's too many pallets and windows to be worried about not being in range of one in time.
The Hex note is also not quite accurate as it's assuming they wasted time looking for it. 90% of the time the spots are hidden so bad you just run into it while walking towards a gen anyway.
Perks don't matter because skill is what wins games?..yeah but by that logic why ever talk about another perk for the entire existence of the games life because skill is what matters. That's kinda a superfluous statement.
I get what you're trying to say and it's a decent point I just think you're making quite a stretch with your points and examples.
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Also No Mither permanently gives no blood trails so if ya combine it with ironwill and leave close to no scratch marks your pretty much undetectable by normal means. Also says ######### you to stridor spirit. Personally sometimes worth being one health state. (Unless its a oni).
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Dragons Grip. Mmmmmm. I get it maybe once a trial, and after that I just get 40-50 seconds of free regression every single time I kick a generator because everyone's scared Blight's gonna come knocking.
Insidious. I don't want to talk about it, but you can guess what happens when you Insidious facecamp once.
Sloppy Butcher. Personally, I think it's the best killer perk in the game. Either it slows down healing quite a fair bit (and thus gets you additional distance when you're heading somehwere you know a healing survivor is) or a bunch of people are injured and you have insane map pressure. Or you get actual genrushed, but there's nothing to stop that.
Dark Devotion. The chaos this perk causes indirectly. If it was just the Undetectable status, it would be so much worse.
WGLF. Use it once and the killer gets mega paranoid and often stops slugging.
Obsession perks. They allow DS to affect trials it's not even in.
Those are just some of the perks I don't use for their primary effect. Well, except Insidious, I was just messing around with that one earlier.
Edit: also, perks absolutely win trials, and they're probably the largest factor for many survivors thanks to the second chance meta.
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Ok, you’re right. I didn’t explain my points as best as I could.
We’ll use a meta example: Ruin doesn’t mean anything if the killer fails to pressure gens (I know you know this. I’m not being patronising. Promise). But a killer that takes it a step further and starts thinking about how Ruin alters survivor behaviour and anticipates it, I.e. the urgency to return back to a gen that had significant progress on, that they were previously chased off of, is highly usable information for the killer.
So Ruin only gets its active/surface level effect from pressure, but survivors (until the Hex is cleansed) will “counter” that, and stop Ruin actively hindering them by doing all they can to get back on a gen. This is absolutely behaviour a killer can take advantage of.
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I'd agree that's a much better example lol. I don't mind the wording, I have a really bad habit of coming off as patronizing in my wording as well.
I think we can also apply this to things like DS, BT, Unbreakable etc. People tend to see them as being situational (even though they're not), because they only see them activate once every couple games. However, all those games that they didn't activate it was because the killer played in a specific (non optimal) way intentionally to avoid them from activating. IE your point in that they are giving you value that many don't realize.
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Dark Devotion is hands down one of the best designed perks in the entire game. Not to confused with “best perk”. Just excellently designed.
Like you said. It’s the pure chaos it causes.
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Absolutely correct. It all comes down to how something can alter your opponents behavior to your own (or your teams) advantage.
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Oh and ok, perhaps I was being way too literal with “perks don’t win games”. Poor wording on my part. I guess what I really mean is a perk doesn’t matter if the player isn’t being deliberate about how they use it, and doesn’t consider a perks many secondary effects (such as opponents altered behaviour).
Like the example I gave Blueberry. We all know that Ruin doesn’t do anything if a killer doesn’t pressure gens. It’s not enough to just equip it. It’s not “ez gg”.
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That's fair. Maybe it's better to look at it as "Perks win trials when you play into them."
Because they do, but it's not just because of the perk, it's because you did something to get use out of it. Like my all-time favourite and most run perk Sloppy Butcher, which by itself justifies me randomly switching targets all the time like the freaking lunatic I am, not because it slows the game down but because it limits the survivors options.
Or to use a more extreme example, equipping DS/UB and instantly sitting on a generator.
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i agree with pretty much all of that but some hex perks really do need a rework or a buff mainly third seal and retribution.
both those hexs dont help you in any significant way and even when their effect takes place it does practically nothing or there are better hexs to use. for example hex the third seal literally does nothing to good survivors who simply remember the direction of the notification bubble of someone getting hooked and unless you slug it does nothing but then why not just run knockout? retribution has such a weak effect that unless a hex is cleansed you get nothing noticeable from it, the only thing it can be reasonably be paired with is haunted grounds but that is basically a 1 time effect and you will get a down or two at most but then why not just run undying and potentially get multiple activations while protecting undying?
those hexs are just not worth running compared to other perks available that can give you more consistent or simply better affects.
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Playing both sides helps with perks etc for me. Thanks to NOED I use detectives hunch to find totems and cleanse them just in case there's a NOED, if I have NOED on a killer and it doesn't activate at end game I actually get happy because that means I've got them doing totems and they get extra BP.
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Numbers?!?
I got you
Monstrous Shrine at tier three will take 54.6 seconds to complete 1 hook stage, while making self-unhooked have 15% reduced luck and 9% bigger penalty for trying
What this does is make self-unhooks something survivors don't try to do in basement and makes survivors rush towards basement to prevent them from dying
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55 seconds, not 54.6. It's 60/1.09, not 60*0.91. I'm fixing the wiki now.
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I can take this one step further and say that the killer choice has something to do with this
Pig: Once a single survivor goes down (and trap is placed) survivors in a SWF will not complete a gen till either the survivor has searched two boxes or already taken it off/ or complete as many gen as possible to limit the opportunity for active traps... Solos will complete the gen and activate the trap anyway
Just one example
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Yo, is my brain humongous, if i don't use any totem perks in a totem meta?
I definitly agree, you have to watch the effect of some perks closely to discovery "hidden" effects.
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Just a little bit of rounding, then again Wiki doesn't usually update certain things
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Not rounding, it just wasn't calculated properly by the person who did it.
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That too, but what I meant was you just had to round it from the nearest decimal, making it 55...
Idk I hate math
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The ultimate example of a perk like that is iron maiden. You will only have like one person trigger it, as once survivors realize you have it, they will never go into a locker again. Overall, I think perks like that are great, but tend to be overshadowed by more meta perks. But when you get the right build for those perks, you can absolutely destroy the survivors.
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the perk is still nice on some killers tho mainly huntress and leatherface
On huntress it makes reloading way faster and possible in a chase without losing much distance.
On leatherface it makes lockers no longer counter his power, they hop in one you simply stop using your saw you don't even need to bump into the locker.
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That's what I've learned in my almost year of playing, I used to throw any old perks together, but now I actually read through them and think about making builds.
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Clam Spirit: you have an affinity for the shallow ones. Soft burbling noises and water spit are increased by 100% at all times.
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30 seconds of default gen regression only adds an extra 7.5 seconds to a gen. Pretty worthless imo
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Takes 2 seconds to accomplish, though, and you're assuming survivors have perfect timing, which they don't.
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Seconds count in this game as killer. That could be the difference between the gen being repaired, or the killer getting to that gen 7.5 seconds early.
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i think the best example of this is Decisive Strike.
you dont run the perk to get a stun every game. you run it to force an obsession spawn, making the killer fear that every single survivor has it and therefore playing nice instead of hardtunneling.
its easily got the biggest passive effect, yet a lot of people call it "useless" nowadays because "killers play around it and you dont get the stun anymore" - even though thats literally the effect you should want from it.
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