TL:DR at the top here because people seem to be misunderstanding: I’m only advocating for Decisive Strike to stay as it is now, except that it should be usable each time a Survivor gets unhooked. No other changes - make it two-use to make sure hard tunnellers do get punished for hard tunnelling.

The fated Decisive Strike nerf, being inevitable, has finally come. The perk is, after five years of terrorising the Killer role, at long last balanced and not an insta-win button. It now serves its true purpose - anti-tunnel.

But does it serve the anti-tunnel purpose enough? Let’s look at the perk as it is now;

Let’s take a look at that particular dotted point;

• Succeeding or failing the skill check disables Decisive Strike

What this means is that if you hit or if you miss the skill check, you cannot use Decisive Strike ever again for the entirety of the trial.

Sure the perk is anti-tunnel, but is it anti-tunnel enough? I have read discussions, and been made aware of the fact myself, that if a Killer is really and truly tunnelling a Survivor, that Survivor will be killed. There are no two ways about it - they won’t let the Survivor go unless it’s by the Entity’s feral claws, or the team’s competency to protect them to escaping.

A singular Decisive Strike proc won’t stop a Killer from tunnelling their one and only target. They’ll shake it off and get right back to it, they won’t let them go.

So my idea for the buff. And please don’t reduce yourself to “survivor main trash” or whatever petty insults there are to give. I play the game for fun, I play both roles, I use Decisive Strike because I’m oftentimes found first and tunnelled, and I don’t have to fear Decisive Strike as the Killer because I don’t tunnel and the signs it’s still active are extremely obvious. I know there’s been so many out-of-proportion complaints about the nerf, but this isn’t one of them.

Let Decisive Strike activate and be used each time the Survivor is unhooked. If a Killer is really and truly tunnelling a Survivor, should his victim really only get one single time to punish the Killer for it? If the Killer is hard tunnelling, the Survivor will die, so if anything the Killer should be further discouraged from doing it.

Now that Decisive Strike deactivates when you progress the game - repair a generator, heal someone, unhook someone, do bones, etc - and is a true anti-tunnel perk, because if you were really being tunnelled you couldn’t do any of the above, then it should be active every time the Survivor gets unhooked, and usable both times they can be unhooked.

I know, I know, the perk as a topic is a major issue and draws extreme contention, resulting in massive arguments about it. But what do you think about the idea? It won’t punish Killers who don’t actually tunnel - especially now the perk has finally been fixed - and will further punish Killers who actually do.

Edit: wording and some spelling errors.

edit2: People don’t seem to be understanding what I mean.

1. The ‘skill check’ DS mentions is the one a Survivor gets when they are getting picked up. You succeed it you escape, you miss it you don’t, and either way you lose DS for the rest of the trial, unless you don’t press the button.
2. The current DS deactivates when you interact with ANYTHING. It is nothing to do with skill checks on the thing you interact with - if you touch it, you lose immunity.
3. I’m saying DS should be usable for each time the Survivor gets unhooked, rather than being a one and done perk, to fully discourage and punish tunnellers. It is nothing to do with getting a skill check on an interaction. I will add the TL;DR.