Character overhaul

I've been thinking a lot lately about the amount of people unhappy about certain aspects of gameplay such as perks. It speaks to something that many people see as a core issue with the game in regard to balance. To me, one of the biggest problems has always been the teachable perk system. It's uninspired and obviously would lead to everyone gravitating towards the best perks until everyone is running slight variations of a specific build. It's the lazy way to let people customize their character. Many of the perks we have to work with are either obsolete or are a sort of training wheel for newer players.

Right now a survivor is just a skin for a meta build that's grinded for several times if you want your bloody skins. A special skin to show your willingness to repeatedly wipe your progress to do yet another blood-web. This was fine for the first couple years but it becomes more burdensome and boring as more and more characters are introduced.

This will be more geared toward overhauling how survivors work but my thoughts could easily be used to make changes to killers in similar ways.

So here are my thoughts on overhauling survivors. Teachable perks should be removed and replaced with a better system. Like killers, a survivor should have an innate ability. Their signature perk reworked into an ability they just have. Or an entirely new ability that fits the specialization of a character. Instead of tiers that increase or reduce a percentage, duration or distance you would have three variations of a perk to unlock. An example would be our speed burst perks. Instead of just reducing the cool down these perks would allow you to choose between either leaving no scratch marks for the duration, a longer speed burst or one silent fast vault. The idea being to change how a perk can work as well as eliminating the need for weaker more unused perks by working them into other perks. Reducing perk bloat and making perks more flexible and interesting.

Survivors would be broken down into specializations based on what they are best at like stealth, sabotage, aggression, healing, escaping, objectives etc. Let's just say Stealth, Fighter and Engineer. Each having their dominant focus but being able to overlap with another to a lesser degree. Character selection would be done by draft so not everyone is going to be the uber-survivor killers collectively groan at. It's kind of silly anyway that the entity snagged one meg but a full team can be four megs. Just a weird consistency issue. This would also help against multiple people looking exactly the same, making it harder for a killer to avoid tunneling if that's something they worry about.

Everyone would have their unique perks plus variations as well as perks/variations unique to their class and then common perks available to everyone. Items and common perks would still be unlocked via blood web/points but character and class perks and their variations would be unlocked through a sort of skill tree where chance is removed and you know what you're getting and roughly how long it will take. These would be unlocked with points earned from emblems. higher emblems would give more points. Even just upping the amount of shards earned would work. I'm not big on having 20 currencies but if they wanted to do that, fine.

Now, many would hate to lose their progress and start over. To that I would say, we do it all the time willingly through the blood web. If a game is better off for it, I'd get over it. They could also convert unlocked perks to whatever currency it falls under so you could rebuild right off the bat. Instead of the honor that is resetting progress for blood soaked clothes, implement a mastery system. I see no prestige in resetting progress. It should be tied to how well you play a character. Maybe even tie character perk variation to unlock at various mastery levels to simplify character progress.

Changes like these would doubtlessly create a need to remake the function of many characters to help make them more viable. This is something that is already needed. As more characters become available, many perks need to get more complex in order to add something new. Leaving older characters in a situation where their perks may become more and more useless.

So that's it. That's what I've got. What do you think? Is this or something like this a thing you think should be done? It's not unheard of for a game to overhauled. I think something big needs to happen before discontent grows to a point that the player base collapses. It's a great premise for a game but core aspects of it need be shaken up a bit. Or a lot. Give me your thoughts!