Dead Hard is in dire need of a rework/nerf.

I agree that this perk needs a change, but what is your idea..?

I think at this point, DH is perk that only really affects older m1 killers. All of the newer killers have some kind of anti loop option that makes DH less impactful IMO.

Rework, maybe. Nerf, no.

DH isn't terribly effective. It gives you greater accessibility at the cost of less ground covered. The reason why it's so maligned is beecauseeit's very in-your-face, while perks like sprintburst or lithe are much more subtle but give you greater value. It'll help you get a few extra loops, but not as much as lithe, balanced landing, or sprintburst will. It's cocky, it's annoying, it's Matthew McConaughey, but it doesn't back it up with much.

I wish it would just give you a few invincibility frames instead of propelling you forward. 9/10 times the survivors who use it only want to extend themselves to a loop when the original intent of the perk was to essentially be a protection hit im pretty sure.

Honestly no I think the opposite. Aside from Trickster Twins, Blight, PH and Slinger are all very heavily punished for missing their power. Victor gets kicked, blight juices up again, PH miss animation takes years, slinger has to reload. If anything DH is more effective against the newer killers.

Dead Hard is fine. I face that and SB almost every match with not much of an issue.

Yeah I agree, the pallet bug made me play a lot less because of how boring it made games :/

I love how people are complaining about Dead Hard but yet Smash Hit (a perk that literally ends any chase) no ones complained about yet.

Yes they are.

Although Dead Hard is very annoying to go against, I think the perk is fine the way it is.

i think the problematic part about Dead Hard isnt its effect, but the activation requirement behind it.

Think about it, every Exhaustion Perk is ment to cover a certain scenario, a specific nieche: Lithe for fastvaults, Balanced Landing for dropping off of things, Smash Hit for Pallet Stuns, Head On for hiding in Lockers and Sprint Burst for the beginning of a chase (doesnt really have much of an activation requirement, therefore comes with the drawback of not allowing you to run outside of chases without wasting the Perk).

but what does Dead Hard have?

its "requirement" is that you are injured. being injured however is something that is guaranteed to happen once each chase (unless its your very first chase and you get oneshot - afterwards you have "fullfilled" the "requirement" for the rest of the trial though). So its basically given to be active every time the killer chases someone without the Survivor having to do anything for it.

And not only does the Survivor not have to do anything to get it active and can play the game just as they would always do, it also activates whenever the Survivor screws up. With other words, its a direct reward for failure, something that, funnily enough, is always used as an argument against Hex: No One Escapes Death. Now i dont want to dip into that whole "Us VS Them" mentality here, i just found it a bit ironic.

okay, so what if it doesnt require the Survivor to perform any specific action, Sprint Burst doesnt do that either, so why is it a problem with Dead Hard?

well, the main difference is, that Sprint Burst isnt as "for free" as many say it is. For a Survivor to Sprint Burst away from the Killer, they had to not run prior to their encounter, otherwise they'd be at risk of being exhausted when the Killer finds them, leading to them not having any Exhaustion Perk at all. With other words, the Survivor trades their ability to quickly traverse the map for a headstart in chases. Or they trade their headstart in chases for quicker map traversal. Dead Hard doesnt have any such downside to it, you can just use it whenever you please, as long as you havent just used it before and are still exhausted ofc.

and there is the second striking difference between the two: Dead Hard is activatable at will. The Survivor can actively choose to activate Dead Hard at any point in a chase. This leads to the Perk being much more controllable than a Sprint Burst, much more accessable. like i said before, Sprint Burst only covers the very beginning of a chase, Dead Hard on the other hand allows its user to use it at any point they fear they might have screwed up.

Scott just made a video about that, where he covers why Dead Hard is so much more hated than Sprint Burst is (i recommend you watch it if you havent already) and its because of exactly that. Survivors use Dead Hard to cover up their mistakes, which means the Killer puts a lot of work into his chase and the Survivor can just negate all of it by pressing E. Thats why it feels so unfair for the Killer, which i can absolutely understand and back up.

and because i know someone is going to bring this up:

yes, 99%ed Sprint Burst exists. This effecively gets rid of the Perks uncontrolability and allows its user to use it very similar to how they would use Dead Hard. However, there is one big difference: The Survivor is forced to no longer participate in the trial in any way that would be useful to the team and instead needs to be the one being chased. As soon as they start any action, such as repairing a gen or just simply walking, they would once again fall back to Sprint Burst being a headstart Perk. So when the Killer knows they have Sprint Burst and sees them begging for attention, they can basically hardcounter the 99%ed Sprint Burst by ignoring the Survivor and instead focussing on the others, leaving them with two Survivors not on gens.

So in short: Dead Hard is a Survivor Perk that activates uppon failure and is commonly used to then prevent a second failure for absolutely no cost on the Survivors side.

or, in reverse, its a Perk that activates uppon the Killer doing well and then punishes the Killer for doing well a second time without the Survivor having to put much into it.

It turns any chase from outplay survivor -> hit, outplay survivor again -> down into outplay survivor -> hit, outplay survivor again -> use up Dead Hard, outplay survivor again again -> down, pretty much a third health state at that point - for absolutely zero cost on the survivor side of things.

Additionally it promotes some very annoying playstyles where that bonus health state basically makes it so Survivors never have to heal and instead can just immediately jump on gens, as being injured is actually much stronger than being healthy in todays meta (thats not soley the fault of DH, but its one of the main reasons for it).

so, long wall of text above, but what was i trying to get at?

TL;DR: Dead Hard as a Perk needs to be given an actual nieche to cover, much like all the other Exhaustion Perks already do. Either that or it needs to have an significant downside to it that balances out the very strong effect it gives.

I think the best way of doing so would be to completely scrap the current activation requirement of being injured and replacing it with something entirely new that makes the activation of the Perk more predictable for killers and less free for Survivors.

My first idea would be to make it so the Perk activates uppon being X seconds in a chase without being hit. This would cover the whole "being injured is just as, if not stronger than being healthy" point, the "DH being activatable at any point in time" point, aswell as the "Survivors dont have to do anything to "earn" DH" point by making the Perk a late chase Perk that can be used to keep up your momentum after you already did a good job at keeping the Killer at bay, aswell as giving the Killer a way of avoiding the Perk by not sticking with chases for too long. Thats just an idea though.

Funny cause I only get bloodlust after DH is used during chase. They can both go if its on me.

Just bait it out? Yea just do bones, just face the wall to not get blinded and just pick up your item again if Franklins bother you. That logic can be applied everywhere.

And as for your auto aim on killers? It makes you miss more than hit and frankly, 99% of killers are asking for a setting to turn it off cause it makes you aim into wall instead of survivor during vaulting animation sometimes.

And as for predicting hits or whatever was that? From killers POV hits look normal, its latency issue and not something people have control over

That said, DH cannot be reworked without being nerfed to the ground or even buffed in some aspect so we should probably keep it as it is.

How many times did you see it?

Outside of the very first day of the All-Kill chapter release, where people did Adept on Yun-Jin, I never see Smash Hit in my lobbies.

people who say "just bait it out" don't realize how dead hard is actually used, when used correctly dead hard has no adequate counters, it's a free health state

But that wouldn't give salvation 👉👈

About a month ago I had a full 4 man using sprint burst and that was way more aggravating than dead hards. All they did was leave gens the moment they heard my terror radius. I only won because of a 3 gen but barely. It took so much pressure away when they would just sprint burst away and I don’t want that to be the meta of dead hard gets nerfed. Mainly because then killers will complain about that.

In my opinion Dead Hard is fine, shouldnt get changed.

Go back and compare the old maps with the current maps. You'll notice a big difference.

If that's what you really think then okay.