Bad Perk University: No Mither

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 the survivor meme perks: No Mither, otherwise known as Hex: DBD Hard Mode. This perk already sounds like a bad deal just looking at its description at a glance. Right off the bat, when you equip this perk, you start the trial injured and you remain Broken for the entirety of the match. In return, you get three "benefits". You don't leave pools of blood anymore, your injured sounds are 50% quieter, and you can pick yourself up off the ground in a similar vein to Unbreakable. Now some players may say to themselves, "are these things really worth being one-shot the entire game?" The answer is: it's complicated. Let's break down each upside the perk has, the first one being "not leaving blood on the ground". Personally, I don't see this so much as an upside as much as a way of minimizing the liability you make yourself to your teammates. If you still bled from injuries, this perk would be completely not worth using, so it's there to make sure you don't leave a trail everywhere for the killer to follow you. It is worth noting however that you don't leave blood EVER, meaning the Hemorrhage status effect has no effect on you, and you also don't bleed when you're in the Dying State. So if the killer just so happens to slug you and you crawl away, the killer won't have any blood to follow in order to find you. There's an obvious problem there, but I'll get to it. Next, the 50% reduced injured noises. Right away you'll say, "well, Iron Will gets rid of injured noises completely, so what's the point of only reducing the volume?", to which I have to explain that there is a distinct difference. Iron Will doesn't reduce injured sounds when you're in the Dying State (or at least it's not supposed to), while No Mither DOES. What this means is that if you are slugged and crawl away, the killer will have a harder time finding you again as not only do you no longer bleed, but you're also quieter on the ground, so hiding in some tall grass might save you from being picked up. (I know what you're going to say, I'll get to that part, I promise!) Lastly, being able to recover from the Dying State. I would say using the perk by itself, this is the main appeal of the perk. Being able to pick yourself up off the ground is a very powerful ability. The reason Unbreakable is so strong and is currently meta is because slugging is an important aspect of Killer gameplay, as it's one of the few tools of applying pressure that's universal to all Killers. Whether you're a high mobility killer like Billy or Blight, or a chase oriented killer like Clown or Bubba, slugging is something all killers can do when hooking a survivor isn't possible or will take too long and can't be afforded. So being able to counter that and waste the Killer's time and effort, even just once, is extremely powerful, especially when things go bad and everyone or almost everyone is on the ground. No Mither does this as well, but to a lesser extent. Normally recovering takes 32 seconds, as well as needing another survivor's help to finish recovering. If the Killer slugs you and you have No Mither, that's water off a duck's back to you. You can take those 32 seconds to pick yourself back up again, with no help needed.

So why is this perk bad? Well, remember how I kept mentioning slugging? If you have No Mither, you can be certain the Killer will NEVER slug you and make sure to pick you up immediately after downing you. Why is that? Because the Killer knows you have the perk, dummy! They see it right at the start of the match with the Broken status! And because the Killer will pick you up right away, there goes the main strength of the perk, and you're left with two benefits that hardly do anything for you. That's really the fatal flaw of this perk, how obvious it is. Any killer who has played the game for longer than 10 minutes is going to understand what it means when a survivor is Broken at the start of a match, and from there they know to simply never slug you.

There's also the obvious downside of being constantly injured. No matter how you slice it, you essentially have one health state forever. One mistake in a chase (or outside a chase even) and you are screwed. I don't care how good at looping you are as a survivor, if the killer is moderately skilled at what they're doing, eventually it will come down to a 50/50 mindgame, and eventually you will make a mistake and get hit. No Mither greatly decreases the margin of error you are allowed to make in this regard. And if you hate when killers "tunnel" you in matches, be prepared to actually get tunneled, because running No Mither makes you easier prey. Why wouldn't the killer go for the easier target that's out in the open or in a dead zone? Not to mention all the ways killers benefit from No Mither gamers. Plague and Legion don't even need to go to the trouble of injuring you with their power. Any killer using Thanatophobia will laugh at you. Oni thanks you for making his life easier, good job idiot survivor running No Mither. And if for some reason more than one survivor is using No Mither, these problems are exacerbated even more. Let's face it, No Mither is essentially a handicap. Whatever benefit you would get from the perk, especially with the self-recovery, you'd just be better off running Unbreakable, along with your other three meta perks that every survivors runs these days because they just want an easy time bullying baby killers. Running no perks would probably be more beneficial than running this perk. But I'm not here to tell you that this perk is irredeemable or unusable (I haven't even gotten to perks like This is Not Happening or Unrelenting), I'm here to tell you, a survivor of the fog, how to use this perk in the best way possible.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? Well, I'll tell you what NOT to do with the perk, since that's a smaller list. The good thing about No Mither is that it actually synergizes with a surprising amount of other perks, so you'll only have to change your playstyle slightly. It's not like perks like Mettle of Man where if you want to get value out of the perk, you have to go out of your way to do so. (I'll go into more detail about this in a future post, but don't go out of your way to proc Mettle of Man.) But before I talk about synergies, here's what not to do. Don't use Self-Care (or any self-healing perks), don't bring Babysitter or Object of Obsession or any other perks that draw attention to yourself (you shouldn't be using Object of Obsession anyway unless you hate fun), and perhaps most importantly, don't be aggressive when using No Mither. This last point may have a bit of contention and you might be hesitant to even follow that advice, but in my eyes, No Mither does not enable you to act as bait and take hits for your teammates, at least not if you don't know what you're doing. This is a perk that should be used to lay low and quietly make progress towards the objective.

With that out of the way, let's talk about perks that go well with No Mither and strategies to make No Mither worth using. Right off the bat, you're probably thinking of Dead Hard. While yes, Dead Hard is a strong perk and synergizes very well with No Mither, word of warning. It is extremely predictable to run Dead Hard and No Mither together. If the killer was still guessing if you had Dead Hard or not, pretty much any doubt goes away if they see you have No Mither. Because of that, you should use Dead Hard not to dodge hits, but to gain extra distance (that's how everyone uses it anyway). Beyond that, the other Exhaustion perks are all viable alternatives to pair with No Mither, since they all essentially do the same thing: grant an extra health state. The one Exhaustion perk I would not advise using in this way is Head On, since it's far more risky than the other perks and the potential distance gained may not be worth it. That's not a hard no, however. If you're confident that the killer won't suspect a locker play, go for it. Another perk that is pretty much ubiquitous with No Mither is Resilience. In my opinion, this perk is non-negotiable. If you plan to use No Mither at all, you MUST use it with Resilience. Resilience increases a variety of action speeds while injured (which you always will be), and this turns you into what No Mither was likely intended to make you: a glass cannon. 9% may not seem like much, but many of those speeds stack with other perks, and it adds up. As for other perks, there's a lot that works. Windows of Opportunity to see vaults and pallets from a distance. Spine Chill so you don't get caught off guard by stealth killers. Iron Will if you really want to hammer in the silent injury. In the off chance the killer actually slugs you, Tenacity and/or Unbreakable. If you want to discourage or trick the killer into tunneling you, Decisive Strike (you were probably running it anyway). That last one might get you some ugly words in endgame chat, but it's not quite like Decisive Strike and Unbreakable where you waste the killer's time no matter what they do. By the time you recover yourself with No Mither, more than half of your Decisive Strike would be gone if it wasn't fully depleted. There's one last thing you can do to really get mileage out of No Mither, but this one's exclusive to if you're playing with a friend. A teammate with a flashlight that's good at using it is enough of a threat that the killer has to check their surroundings first, giving you time to potentially recover or even force them to slug you and chase after your flashlight friend. Again, so long as you lay low and work on generators each chance you get, No Mither becomes an efficiency booster. Play it right and it won't matter as much that you're always injured, because you'll always be one step ahead of the killer. You could say, you won't mither about the perk being a handicap, because it only makes you stronger.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? I want to say for the record that I don't want to make it seem like No Mither is a completely terrible perk. I actually think it's one of the most interesting survivor perks in the game. It changes the way you approach matches and forces you to make every chase count. No joke, I actually get better at chases when messing around with No Mither, since I had to be that much more attentive. That being said, I still think that even when making builds around No Mither, the downsides outweigh the benefits, and I think it's due to the simple fact that the killer knows you have No Mither right away. As far as buffs go, I don't want to make No Mither too strong. Good survivors are comfortable with being injured and still doing generators, so having a perk give that much more benefit for being injured can be dangerous. I think, if nothing else is changed about the perk, there are two things I would like to see changed about the perk. 1) Start the match healthy so the killer doesn't know you have No Mither right away. 2) Make the reduced injured sounds slightly better. So something like this:

Once injured, you are affected by the Broken Status Effect for the duration of the Trial.

You do not leave Pools of Blood.

Grunts of Pain caused by injuries are reduced by 50/60/75% at any time.

Grants the ability to fully recover from the Dying State.

The reason I wanted to make the reduced injured sounds better is to compensate for scenarios where the killer doesn't slug you. At the very least you get a slightly worse version of Iron Will. Note that the killer will know you have No Mither the moment you are injured when they see the Broken status. I think maybe you could make it so the killer doesn't get notified of the Broken status caused by No Mither, but that might be too strong. Pairing it with Unbreakable would probably become the new meta if it were the case. Recovering yourself from the Dying state, as good as it is, should be a last resort. If you get downed, expect the killer to pick you up, and I think that's fine. Always remember, No Mither is a "lay low" perk that asks that you try to avoid chases when possible, which against some killers you should be doing anyway. Bottom line, I'm not insisting that this perk become meta or anything (though it would be amusing to see that happen), I just want this perk to be a stronger meme that still has good application. It could be worse, you might be using a perk that doesn't even give you a noticeable effect. *cough* Up the Ante *cough*. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!