Bad Perk University: Huntress Lullaby

Hello class, welcome to Bad Perk University! I'll be your professor for today, and we'll be going over the worst perks The Entity has to offer and see how to make the most out of them. Today, we're going to cover one of my favorite Hex Perks in the game, but also the most tragic one: Huntress Lullaby. This perk sounds really cool on paper. It adds an additional 6% regression penalty to failed Repairing and Healing Skill Checks and every time you hook a survivor, the warning sound for a Skill Check becomes more and more delayed until the survivors get no warning whatsoever. For reference, a failed Skill Check has a regression penalty of 10% and pauses any progress for 3 seconds, making it a total of 16% regression when using this perk. Make no mistake, this hurts. When survivors fail Skill Checks, they lose a lot of time, and the loud noise notification that follows means you'll be coming for them real quick.

So why is this perk bad? Well, it's not really a terrible perk. Far from it. People underestimate just how disorienting the delayed Skill Check noise can be, and if the Killer is keeping up the pressure, it's another grievance they have to put up with. There are a couple problems though. The first and most obvious issue is that this perk is a special perk known as a "Hex". This means that when you bring this perk to a match, a random Dull Totem in the map becomes lit and turns into a Hex Totem. The Hex Perk you bring remains active for as long as that Totem stays intact, and becomes disabled if a survivor breaks it. So the deal here is that you have a perk that's incredibly strong (Supposedly...I'll get to you Blood Favor) that comes with the risk of being disabled for the rest of the match. Whether it gets cleansed early or late into the game is determined by the survivors' ability to find the totem. Totems are a bit of a complicated mess, so I'll address it later. For now, we'll talk about another problem. This is a Hex that affects Skill Checks, but in theory, survivors can still hit every Skill Check no matter how difficult you make it. It would be hard, but not impossible. This is kind of an unspoken caveat to this perk. If the survivors you go up against are godlike computers and hit every Skill Check, this perk isn't affecting them at all, since the real effect of the Hex is the extra regression that occurs on failed Skill Checks. Thankfully, this is just in theory. In practice, survivors will always miss Skill Checks every now and again, even without things like Huntress Lullaby to make it harder, so we can kind of disregard this and assume that survivors will be affected by the perk at least a couple times.

But let's talk about the last problem with this perk, one that I don't think a lot of people really catch on to. To get the maximum effect of the perk, the muted Skill Check warnings, you need to hook survivors 5 times. As strong as this perk can be, especially against beginner players, I think this is a bit too steep of a requirement. 1 Token of Huntress Lullaby is barely a hindrance, 3 Tokens is a bit more like it, and you could argue that 4 Tokens is actually better than 5 Tokens, since the delayed Skill Check warning can be more disorienting than a Skill Check that simply randomly appears on the screen. In my opinion though, muted Skill Checks will always be the final form of this perk, since even with a delayed warning, the sound will still alert you to an incoming Skill Check, but with no sound warning, it means you have to stay on your toes and not just doze off. Let's be honest, when you're not being chased by the Killer, the game can get kind of boring when all you're doing is holding M1 for a bunch of actions. Simply put, 5 hooks can be a tall order when the survivors get notified upon getting a Skill Check at 1 Token, and with the way Totems are in this game, it can easily be destroyed within a couple minutes, and that's being generous. I'm not against Hexes getting cleansed early, that's the risk you run when using these strong perks. But considering Totems can still spawn like this:

(This is in the reworked Autohaven maps, by the way. Seriously why are totems allowed to spawn like this?)

Getting 5 hooks before survivors cleanse the Totem is about as likely as Clown not laughing a single time during a match. When all of these factors are combined, you get a Hex perk that's middling at best, and ineffectual at worst. Compare it to a perk like Devour Hope, a perk that also requires 5 Tokens, except in the form of unhooked survivors, to get the maximum effect. Said maximum effect is the ability to mori survivors, a ridiculously strong power that pretty much means you've already won the game. Even at 3 Tokens, the ability to one shot all survivors is incredibly powerful, and even if Devour Hope didn't end in being able to be moried, survivors will stop everything they're doing and scramble to find the Hex Totem. It might not be fair to compare Huntress Lullaby to Devour Hope considering the latter doesn't even reveal itself until 3 Tokens in, but the point to be made is that the Hexes yield vastly different rewards for a comparable amount of effort. While Huntress Lullaby only requires you to hook survivors, Devour Hope also requires you to hook survivors, but has an extra condition to let survivors be unhooked while you're far from the hook. One lets you kill survivors and get them out of the game, the other makes Skill Checks more difficult, Skill Checks that you can still succeed.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? Let's say for argument's sake that the perk manages to last a reasonable amount of time, but not long enough to get 5 Tokens. If you're dead set on making a build around Huntress Lullaby, there are perks that also make Skill Checks harder or present difficult Skill Checks as part of their function. Unnerving Presence and Overcharge are probably well familiar to you. The good old Impossible Skill Checks build. Before you go slapping this build on Doctor and going to town though, let me state some things. Unnerving Presence is another perk on my hit list that I'll talk about in more detail in a future post, but I'll say for now that it is pretty ill advised. Decreasing the size of Skill Checks is an objectively good thing, but increasing the frequency of Skill Checks can backfire if the survivors still hit them, and especially if they hit Great Skill Checks. The fact that the effect only applies when the survivors are in your terror radius is also a limitation. Overall, I'd say the amount of difficulty you would increase Skill Checks by is not worth the risk of giving more Great Skill Checks. You don't need to help survivors gen rush harder than they already are. Overcharge, on the other hand, is a reasonable idea. The Skill Check it presents is actually more difficult than people give it credit for, being smaller than a Decisive Strike Skill Check, and if you really wanted to pair it with Unnerving Presence, the Skill Check becomes even harder to hit. Remember that a missed Skill Check on a generator is 10% at base, and Overcharge adds 5% on top of that. When combined with Huntress Lullaby, the regression penalty of missing an Overcharge Skill Check becomes 21%. Dang. That's almost as much as Pop Goes the Weasel, and you don't even need to hook a survivor to earn it.

But we can go further beyond, there have been a lot of new perks added since then that we can add to our arsenal. Oppression is a fantastic pairing with Huntress Lullaby. The Skill Checks that are created by Oppression are very sudden if you're not expecting them, and when the sound warning becomes delayed or silenced, it's even more sudden and unexpected. Haunted Ground is also an idea. If you can manage to snowball off of a Haunted Ground proc, that's a couple more hooks for Huntress Lullaby tokens. There's one more perk we can include, one you may not have thought would be a good idea: Undying. Oh yeah, this bad boy. Killers may love pairing it with Ruin, but it also works as a good protection perk for Huntress Lullaby. If the upcoming changes to Undying are going to go through, you'll get to keep all your tokens when Huntress Lullaby gets cleansed, giving it one more chance before biting the dust. Time spent cleansing totems is time spent not working on generators, so they will always buy you time. Keep the pressure up, and survivors will be singing your song.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? Look, honest opinion here, as strong as Ruin is, as strong as Devour Hope can be, out of all the Hexes in the game, Huntress Lullaby still has a soft spot in my heart as my favorite Hex Perk. As much as it has struggled, as much as survivors underestimate or disregard its effect, as much as totem spots can suck sometimes, I still love it dearly. It's just such a unique and cool perk that affects Skill Checks in a way unlike any other. But I want to see it bloom, I know it's capable of so much more, so let's help it. A good amount of problems with this perk, and all the Hex Perks in general, come from the way totems are placed in the maps. While most totems are decently hidden or even TOO well hidden, there are totems that are placed near easily visible spots like near generators or insultingly, out in the open. In my opinion, given that not every Hex Perk is as strong as Ruin or Devour Hope, you shouldn't be able to easily find totems if you're not actively searching for them or using a perk to find them like Small Game, Detective's Hunch, or a Map item (Maybe having some totems be in plain sight is intentional, as a way to add risk to Hex Perks, but I still think it's silly). The best way to make Hex Perks just a bit more reliable is to rework totem placements and have a baseline standard to what makes a good hiding spot for a totem. Not in plain sight, but not locked away in an obscure spot either. As to improving Huntress Lullaby itself, I believe the primary issue with the perk is that it takes too long to build up for the reward it gives (It's a good reward, but not Ruin or Devour Hope levels of good). Quite simply, I would make it so the final effect, muted Skill Check warnings, is obtained at 3 Tokens instead of 5. Whatever decreased warning time to give to each token is up to the developers. You could even increase the regression penalty if you really wanted to, but it's not necessary at all. Considering all the perks and add-ons that give extra regression as well, it might become too much. With a max requirement of 3 Tokens, Huntress Lullaby would be in the perfect spot. It's a pretty simple perk when it comes down to it, so not a whole lot of changes need to be made. Really, just make totem placements better, that's what everyone's asking for. As for other Hexes (The Third Seal, Blood Favor)...they'll need a bit more help than that. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!