Hot take about the meta: Most Perks are actually really good.
Most Perks, Survivor and Killer, have their place in the game and are actually solid. Even ones that everyone loves to call F tier meme trash still fill a particular purpose and fill it well.
The reason people don't use them isn't because they're bad. It's because they're not Decisivebreakable Soul Hard Timedrenaline Burst or Hex: No One Escapes Ruindyingveillance's Endfury and Chili.
I'm saying this because I see people complain about the meta being stale and, Survivors in particular, not getting good new Perks that often. But they do get good new Perks often, it's just that they're always completely overshadowed by the meta of forty seven extra lives per player.
The meta won't be shaken up by new additions to the game; the will only change when the current meta gets nerfed because the current meta is just so damn powerful.
(Frankly this is mostly true for the Survivor meta, but if the Survivor meta gets nerfed then I'm sure the Killer meta will, which I'll be fine with because then needing to run seven billion stall Perks won't be literally necessary against Survivors with half a sense of coordination and gen efficiency.)
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I don't have/use any of those meta perks, but I can definitively tell you that a lot of them are just useless. Most make so little difference that you may as well be perkless.
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The Killer meta is alot more restrictive, but I agree. However, when you are against good opponents and all sides are tryharding, the meta is so stale. But in a casual setting, basically anything except Distressing and No Mither goes.
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Most non-meta Perks take effort to use.
Most people aren't used to putting in effort to get use out of their Perks because the meta doesn't require that.
Most people do not know how to get use out of good Perks.
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So the logic here is that because perks have situations that they are kinda useful and they all technically provide a positive it means that they're good but other perks are just way better. I think you're mixing up good and the idea that all perks can be used to a certain degree of effectiveness.
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I mean to be fair, for solo Q, the meta is practically required sometimes if you are serious about winning.
People are always complaining about camping/tunneling but how do they not expect it when the team pops 2-3 gens in the first couple minutes? A lot of the time my second chance perks are there to cover for my team's mistakes just as much as my own.
Here's an example: A teammate is getting camped to death on 2nd stage, and there's not enough time to genrush at that point. Maybe you are the only one in position to save them in time. They used all the pallets nearby, so you inevitably go down trading for them. Now when you come off the hook and are tunneled, you have nothing except DS.
I do the standard BT/DS/Dead Hard/Iron will combo if I am coming in to play. If I don't have BT, I am accepting my team might get camped to death, resulting in my own death. No DS is saying you are ok with getting tunneled, getting farmed off the hook, or having literally no chance to escape the basement sometimes.
You don't need them, but you must like dying a lot to the desperate and/or malicious tactics killers can employ if you are not running them.
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I wouldn't go that far. There are more than a few Perks that are genuinely terrible, like Camaraderie, Hoarder, Predator, and Repressed Alliance. But even Perks like Solidarity and Aftercare are really, really good and useful if you take the time to use them.
And don't trash No Mither. Combining that Perk with Blood Pact and Desperate Measures + Botany is like one of the best solo builds in the game.
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I pray you're joking, because No Mither is only good against The Twins
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No, it's just that most Perks are actually good and most people don't realize that because a handful of Perks are just better.
It's like comparing a 9-milimeter pistol to a 10-milimeter pistol. The 9mm is just fine, but the 10mm is objectively more lethal and accurate.
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No, I'm not. Try that build sometime. It's genuinely incredible.
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Isn't the killer meta less restrictive, though? Survivors are all basically picking 4 out of the same 5/6 perks. Killers at least have some better diversity because of how perks synergize with killer powers.
I'll hear people say that survivors have more freedom because they have more time to waste, but that's not true. The only thing that's different is that one survivor wasting time only wastes 25% of the survivors' time, while a killer wasting time wastes 100% of the killer's time.
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The thing is, only 1 perk is really devoted to how the Killer's power works. There are some exceptions, like Trapper, Hag, and Clown, who don't really get incredible value from Ruin Undying, but otherwise it's just Ruin Undying, Alternatively, Corrupt is a must pick, BBQ because the grind is dumb, then at least 1 gen regression and then MAYBE you can use a perk for your power. It's less about "oh, Killer meta is so restrictive" it's moreso "oh, Killer players need one of these 2 combos to contest with gen times".
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There's a lot of perks that are almost good but are ruined by weird/unnecessary conditions.
Steve's perks are a great example.
Babysitter: Unhooking someone makes them leave no scratch marks. Cool. You see the killers aura. Cool. Killer sees your aura. Hold on, why?
Second Wind: Upon getting off the hook, you auto heal after 30 secs. Awesome! But you're broken and can't be healed otherwise. Alright, fair enough. And it only works if you first heal someone else a full health state by yourself. Wait, why is that necessary?
Same goes for a lot of killer perks.
Trail of Torment for example.
Booting a gen makes you drop heartbeat until the gen stops regressing. Siiiiick. But the gen is highlighted to all survivors. Yeah ok, that seems fair. And there's a cooldown before you can use it again. Wait, why? Shouldnt it be one or the other?
Meta perks are meta because they don't have unnecessary downsides that limit their effectiveness.
There's so many perks that are aaaaalmost really good but collect dust cuz they're just not quite good enough.
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I see what you mean but I feel like most of them are a still bit lackluster in performance. Like hangman's trick, that perk could be a great if it had at least a 4 meter increase buff. 6 meters is just way too short and they were way too quick on that nerf it got.
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"Babysitter: Unhooking someone makes them leave no scratch marks. Cool. You see the killers aura. Cool. Killer sees your aura. Hold on, why?"
Have you stopped to think about how the Perk is called "Babysitter"? The goal of the Perk is to take the pressure off the Survivor who got unhooked and apply it to yourself. Because the Killer is going to be applying pressure to someone and you just caught his attention by unhooking his sacrifice; might as well be you he pressures instead of the guy who is now one hook stage closer to dying, right?
People get upset that Babysitter tells the Killer to chase you when that is literally the point of the Perk. I don't understand why no one can grasp that. Babysitter is only bad if you can't loop or otherwise effectively divert the Killer. If you can, it's really, really damn good. People complain about tunneling so much but then clown on the literal best anti-tunneling Perk in the game. It baffles me.
"Second Wind: Upon getting off the hook, you auto heal after 30 secs. Awesome! But you're broken and can't be healed otherwise. Alright, fair enough. And it only works if you first heal someone else a full health state by yourself. Wait, why is that necessary?"
Because if it had no activation requirement, it would just be a free autoamtic heal whenever you get unhooked. Literally no time will be wasted trying to heal. For no penalty.
And healing is, like, really, really easy to do unless you're going against Plague. Second Wind is fine.
"Booting a gen makes you drop heartbeat until the gen stops regressing. Siiiiick. But the gen is highlighted to all survivors. Yeah ok, that seems fair. And there's a cooldown before you can use it again. Wait, why? Shouldnt it be one or the other?"
I don't have an answer for that one. Trail isn't good lol
"Meta perks are meta because they don't have unnecessary downsides that limit their effectiveness."
The limits to non-meta Perks don't make them not good; the limits make them require thought and effort to be made effective, something that the meta doesn't require.
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Tell that to mettle of man and no mither.
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Been there, done that.
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Most of the time I've seen people use mettle of man, to get any use they essentially have to devote the match to get that perks to work.
And no mither...
Why would you do that to yourself?
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I run babysitter with distortion to make it do what I want and find it way more effective that way. So I disagree there.
For Second Wind, i've made a thread about it before that the condition should be the same as Aftercare's. In that you only need to complete a heal. If someone has even started self care or a second survivor runs in to help, no perk. It hold back the perk too much for it to be consistently reliable.
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"I run babysitter with distortion to make it do what I want and find it way more effective that way. So I disagree there."
Then you're not using the Perk for what it was designed to do. You're just making it into a worse Dark Sense at that point.
Get better at looping. Then you'll get better at using Babysitter.
"For Second Wind, i've made a thread about it before that the condition should be the same as Aftercare's. In that you only need to complete a heal. If someone has even started self care or a second survivor runs in to help, no perk. It hold back the perk too much for it to be consistently reliable."
That I agree with. But healing people really isn't that hard. Didn't get the full heal? Go heal someone else. Easy.
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I would disagree that killers need to run certain combos in order to contest with gen times. Why are kill rates ~68% at red rank and higher than the overall kill rates if killers are having trouble doing well against good teams? Either good survivor teams are rare compared to good killers or killers are able to hang just fine. Anecdotes aren't very useful, but I don't run meta builds on my killers and I do just fine at red rank.
I just think it's a poor argument to say that killers need meta builds in order to have a chance when the assumption underlying this argument is that the survivors you don't have a chance against just sweat and run meta builds. If killers run fun builds against survivor teams running meta builds, they are at a disadvantage. Same goes for survivors running fun builds against killers running meta builds. I see no evidence that the game is survivor-sided to the point where this is truly necessary. If MMR goes live and all of a sudden we see the kill rate plummet for the highest MMR players I will happily eat my words, but so far this just feels like something that's just been repeated enough that people accept it as truth.
I feel that meta builds are only "necessary" for either side if the risk of being at a disadvantage in a match is more of an issue to you than not being able to experiment with your builds. There's no right answer here, but I'd rather experiment personally.
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I never enjoy those try hard meta perks. The more fun meme perks are easy more enjoyable. Appraisal with ace in the hole, be looting items and keeping goods, never have to dump BPs into survivors again. Head on, Deception, quick and quite had its moments that just makes the 3 so worth it.
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Nah.
Way too many perks in the game consistently do absolutely nothing.
Countless perks are so bad that running them isn't any more effective than running no perks in the first place.
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The thing is, matchmaking is screwed and alot of survivors are boosted because ranking is horrible, so you have a ton of rank 15s at red ranks because they threw every pallet and so the game thought they were good. I guarantee that if this game ever had a full on tournament, where everything except moris and keys go, the game would HEAVILY be in the survivor's favour unless they are against a really good Nurse, and even then...
IDK. I think the problem is that to enjoy the chases and not just ditch them after 10 seconds without getting a hit, you HAVE TO run builds to help with that. I for one would be all for increasing hooks till death to 4 in exchange for 140 second gens.
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As a killer main I agree that most perks are at least ok. Some are better than others but most of them are useful enough that you at least get something put of them. There are a couple of exceptions like Monstrous Shrine which are simply terrible but the majority are good enough to use if you want.
That’s not to say Dying Light is as good as Pop Goes the Weasel or Ruin, just that if you want to play with Dying Light it can do something useful during the match assuming you are playing into it. It’s not great but it’s not totally trash, it’s ok.
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Ooh I would be really interested to see the results of a truly anything goes tournament in which the win condition is simple survival. Every tournament I've seen so far has ruled out a number of maps, add-ons, items, perks, and even playstyles (like camping, slugging, and even repairing while injured). They usually make the win condition something like BPs earned instead of focusing on how many survivors escape too, which of course changes how people play. If there were actually a competitive scene it'd be pretty useful to see how the top players on each side did against each other. Without that, though, or at least a good MMR system, it's really hard to say how balanced the game is at various skill levels.
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It would be interesting, yes, but this game is not tourney ready in the slightest. Even a game way more competitive like OW is so far from being competitive, much less DBD.
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No, they're good. If you're doing adept, chances are you're completely ignoring things like synergy (which let's be real, even some meta Perks heavily rely on synergy, so don't make that argument), or even just what you need to do to get use out of them to begin with. I don't know about you, but most of the time when I'm doing adept, I act like I'm playing Perkless because I just want to do the gens and leave for the sake of the achievement, or tunnel and 3-gen like mad for the merciless. That's on me for not actually using my Perks.
Doing "all adepts" doesn't say much. Try experimenting with the Perks and running new and different builds, then come back to me. If I found a good build for No Mither in solo queue, you can do it too.
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Well, that’s on you for not knowing how to get use out of them. I can understand running something that’s genuinely hot garbage like Camaraderie or Boil Over, but most Perks have genuinely powerful effects if you care enough to induce them. I’ve run entire builds centered around Perks most people consider bad and have saved time, pallets, myself, other players, et cetera with just a little bit of elbow grease.
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Meta and good isn't the same.
Meta stands for most effective tactic available.
Good is well just good.
Basically they are using the best they have to win.
As soon as one meta is outdated another one will come out.
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I’m aware. But it’s a very common belief here in the DBD community that the meta is the only good thing a given character has in this game.
”I only small pp/Ruindying because everything is trash” is something I hear a lot.
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Oh, I may have misunderstood.
Yeah I agree some people just think that you can only play with meta perks, if no meta perks then "I already lost" which from my experience it actually damages players more than it helps them.
I have ruin undying, I'm good to go!!! *They break both totems asap* "I already lost"
I have DS!!! I will play dumb to use it!!! *Complains about tunnel endgame*
Some people just think that Meta perks is the only way to win which is a common mistake these days imo.
Some people try to avoid improving at the game, something that I say when I use semi or full meme builds "I got outperked not outskilled"
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I agree. There's a few stinkers here and there. A lot of them landed in the Killer's base set though. Like... Insidious, Monstrous Shrine, and Unrelenting are just terrible. Distressing is only good with a lot of TR based perks. Iron Grasp does let you hold onto Survivors better but it doesn't give you back any time... Agitation is just flat out better. I like bluffing that I have other, better Hexes by bringing Thrill of the Hunt, but it's not actually all that good without more Hexes and Undying does that way better. Then... Spies from the Shadows is just kind of underwhelming.
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Wouldn't even say better. Every perk is situational. Both sides fall into crutch traps.
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Well Otzdarva disagrees with you, and I'm more likely to listen to him (as well as the overwhelming majority of the community) when he says most survivor perks are not worth running. You are mistaking "occasionally situationally does something" with "useful".
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