Useless perks how would you buff them?

This is a post I made on reddit over a year ago:

Not exactly a major buff, but a buff nevertheless.

Cam is actully a very good perk

My Suggested changes:

Monstrous Shrine:

Buff the perk to - Survivors have 3 less escape attempts, and sacrifice progresses 25% faster when hooked in the basement.

Explanation - 25% of 2 mins is 30 seconds, or subtracting 15 seconds from each hook phase so 45 seconds per hook phase total, adding in the fact that unless the survivors bring in Slippery Meat or Deliverance, they'll have to be rescued by their teammates... This makes being hooked in the basement a much more dire situation than current Monstrous Shrine.

Sometime after Hag came out the devs doubled the hook time from 1 min to 2 meaning survivors used to only have 30 seconds per hook phase, And current monstrous Shrine was designed with these the old timings in mind but was still underwhelming even back then. This suggestion is a sort of middle ground between how hooking used to be in the early days of the game, and how it is now, while only applying to the basement hooks, and finally giving Monstrous Shrine the buff it needs to be a threat that creates urgency for the survivor team.

Spies From the Shadows:

Overhaul the perk to - The Crows no longer respond to your presence, the yellow auras of any crows within 24/30/36 meters of you are revealed upon being disturbed. Disturbed crows are 100% louder to you within that range.

Explanation - This proposal gets rid of the confusing/annoying explosion sound notifications and replaces it by making the crows noisier so you can differentiate between them and a gen popping, you get no false signals since crows no longer respond to you, and they basically become little signal flares to tell you where survivors are. If this change were to happen, Spies would become an overall better tracking tool, and really fit the description of the perk which says: "The Crows found in the world can communicate directly with you." Besides, survivors still have 2 perks that defeat this: Calm Spirit & Urban Evasion, as well as the crouching mechanic, so it's not like this would be an un-counterable or broken change for the perk. If they also put some more crows in dead zones, that would be nice for helping this perk gain a better level of consistency and usefulness (Seriously, Rotten fields features no Scarecrows, but the crows completely avoid the corn field... wtaf?).

Surge:

Remove the cooldown and the Basic Attack requirement.

Explanation - Honestly this has been hotly debated in the forums since Surge came out because the fact remains that in order to activate Surge at all, you have to successfully down a survivor while within range of a gen. Chasing and downing a survivor with Basic attacks takes enough time as it is, especially if they were healthy when the chase started, and the minor 8% damage Surge does if it activates is hardly consequential since it would take 12 survivor downs in order to achieve a stacked 96% damage to 1 or more gens. PGTW does 300% damage to gens in the same amount of hooks, and Ruin Does more damage per second without needing to down or hook a survivor. While this won't improve the overall damage Surge can do, removing the basic attack requirement will at least allow killers with damaging powers to get some use out of it making it more universal to the killer roster, and removing the cooldown will allow it to become a slightly more consistent annoyance to survivors. It won't make it any more powerful than any other existing gen defense perks, but at least it would be more useful.

Oppression:

Remove or significantly lower the cooldown.

Explanation - This perk doesn't even add extra damage to the gens it affects (unless survivors fail the "Difficult" skill check), only applies the base regression rate, and can randomly target gens that have 0 progress on them, but for some awful reason the devs decided that it was so powerful that it deserved DOUBLE the cooldown time (80 seconds) of Surge? At least Surge won't activate on gens that have 0 progress... Why does Oppression deserve such an excessive cooldown time? If it's because of the skill check, that's a laughable annoyance more than anything that could be considered a threat to any decent-good survivors, and only becomes a problem against noobs, who honestly rank up and gain skill fast enough that it's pretty much a moot point to keep it so laughably underpowered.

Fire Up:

Buff the perk- Increase it from 4% to 5%.

Explanation - This is a ridiculously underpowered perk because in order to gain any benefit from it, the killer has to sacrifice the objectives they are supposed to protect, in other words "lose the game". It's designed to give killers a slight edge in chases in order to try and protect the last gens from completing. The overall problem however is that 4% amounts to 12% when 3 gens are completed, and 20% when all 5 are done, meaning that they gain Brutal Strengths chase advantage on pallet breaking only after the survivors have completed all of the gens when there's not many unused pallets left in the map, and Bamboozles vault speed advantage when there is only 1 gen remaining. This doesn't help the killers in their desperate attempts to stop the final gens from completion at all, and by the time it's reached its maximum potential, the survivors are already rushing out the gate.

However, if you bump it up just 1%... now we have a perk that gains Bamboozles advantage at 2 gens remaining, and Brutal Strengths at 1 gen remaining, with an added bonus to both if 0 gens remain. This would actually help the killers defend the final gens, and give them enough of a chase advantage if all gens are completed to try and stop the survivors from escaping. Suddenly this goes from an "underpowered" perk to a "Decent" one, and all it takes is a simple 1% boost in strength.

Insidious:

Overhaul the perk to - Reduces your Terror Radius and Red Stains Brightness by 5% for every 4/3/2 seconds you refrain from chasing or injuring survivors, upon reaching 100% reduction, you gain the Undetectable Status. Initiating a chase or injuring a survivor regains your TR and Red stain back to normal size and brightness in 4 seconds, once this has returned Insidious has a 40 second cooldown.

Explanation - This perk has been a bane on the game upon its release since it seems to have been specifically designed for the sole purpose of camping hooks. With this change however, a killer loses half their TR for spending 10 seconds away from a chase or injuring a survivor, and becomes Undetectable at 20 seconds. This is mostly meant for anti-stealth play, or for gaining a slight advantage in the early game wherein the killer is initially searching the map for survivors. Ultimately, it changes the perk from one encouraging camping, to one that rewards the killer with an advantage if the survivors are being too sneaky/evasive, and allows them to get the drop on survivors more often. The cooldown is necessary for this one because otherwise it would be heavily abuseable.

As for the survivors going up against this updated version, Premonition or Spine Chill still proc on stealth killers, so relying solely on the TR reduction is still no guarantee against those kinds of perks, and gives the survivors an advantage. Up until then, unless the killer has spent 20 seconds avoiding survivors, Aura reading perks like OoO, Alert, and Kindred still have an advantage for tracking the killer.

It all depends on the perk in question.

Take Lightweight. Scratch marks last 1/2/3 seconds less. I'd increase it to 2/3/4 seconds and reduce or even eliminate noises from footfalls.

Predator is pretty bad. Currently just makes scratch marks spawn tighter together. I'd change it to make them easier to see,kinda like Bloodhound, but for scratch marks. Then I'd have it make foot step sounds louder.

Autodidact: increases the chances of getting healing skill checks

No Mither: leaves 75% fewer blood orbs when facing Oni

Off the Record: gives a 3 second speed boost after being unhooked (does not stack with sprint burst)

Wake Up: wakes you up if you are asleep, cmon, it's in the name

Each time a generator is completed you get 2 more tokens while keeping the 3 tokens you start with

Lightweight can be an Exhaustion perk. maybe it can be similar to Sprint burst or Lucky break.

regain tokens by being undetected within,25 meters? of the killer or by escaping a chase,

Jeff's Perks aren't exactly "useless", in my opinion, but hey I'm gonna talk about them anyway because he's my favorite Survivor.

Honestly, completely agree with this. If we're keeping perk tiers though, how about making all tiers let you track every Survivor but make being hooked remove only 1 tracked teammate at tier 3, 2 at tier 2 and all 3 at tier 3? Another small idea I have for Aftercare is that it could also activate on protection hits and flashlight/pallet saves.

Also agree with this. There are plenty of ways you could regain tokens, but personally I think that some kind of altruistic action would work great as they'd pair with Aftercare well (especially if they added protection hits and saves to Aftercare).

As for Breakdown, I would say one (or multiple, idk) of these:

• It also breaks the hook of a teammate you unhook for the full 180-second duration.
• When you get unhooked, 3 other hooks on the map (random, doesn't choose already broken hooks) will be broken for 45 seconds.
• Let this count as sabotages and award you the BP for it (this one is just so that people can do the sabotage hooks challenges faster because nobody enjoys these challenges let's be real).

Surge: Less affected generators = Less cooldown, and remove the basic attack condition.

Oppression: 60s cooldown, and affect generators with the most progress.

Forced penance: Survivors who take a protection hit are inflicted with the incapacitated statut effect for 35s

Deathbound: Remove the 32m condition

Thrilling tremors: 40s cooldown, can activate if you have a survivor in your shoulder (like starstruck), instead of drooping and picking up the survivor

Fire Up: +5% mouvement speed for 25s each time a generator is accomplished

Remember Me: Remove the basic attack condition

Coulrophobia: Reduce the repair speed for 50% if a survivor is 10m away from the killer

Gearhead: Reveal the aura of survivor near generators (16m) blocked by the entity for 8s, 30s cooldown

for each survivor that dies in a trial increase the speed at which you repair gens by a percent.

I realized that too late, how embarrassing for me