No Way Out: is it time for buffs to survivor end game perks?

Honestly I'm pretty sure wake up doesn't really counter it I actually think wake up only shaves like not even 3 seconds off a door

I still think no one left behind could use a rework to make it a more effective perk and have a place in builds by giving it an effect during the trial and after the exit gates are powered

hope just needs a small buff

and wake up needs some changes

so heres my suggestions

No one left behind, Whenever a generator is complete gain a token, each token grants 5% increased healing and unhook speeds, once exit gates are powered these bonuses double and your aura is revealed to all survivors and their auras are revealed to you for the rest of the match. This perk also grants a 50/75/100% bonus to altruism points at all times.

Now the perk builds up during the trial, and activates sooner making it no longer a waste if the trial winds down earlier since now you have some minor speed boosts to those altruistic actions and bonus points

Hope, when the exit gates are powered gain a 7% haste effect for 100/110/120 seconds, this timer is paused if you are hooked, carried, or in the dying state (but you don't gain the speed boost in the dying state) \

The perk being able to be paused keeps it strong and changing the scaling factor to the timer helps it stay useful across all theirs with the same strength just shorter durations

Wake up, You open exit gates 15/20/25% faster, while you are opening an exit gate all survivors auras are revealed to you and your aura is revealed to all survivors, the auras of exit gates are always revealed to you, while by an exit gate with another survivor wake up reveals itself to other survivors it also reveals itself while showing them your aura (like the kindred icon they are told when its active and when you are nearby at an exit gate so they know to move over for you to open the gate)

Additions to the perk (since its a paragraph)

more speed, seeing other survivors auras, and notifying other survivors you have the perk while active and while nearby them at the exit gates so they let you open the gates

This makes the perk more team oriented and hopefully would make it more viable for uncoordinated play

I think changes like these would make endgame perks for survivor much more viable and well rounded, especially since not all matches reach end game they might as well count when they do, or have a more active effect on the match before endgame

Wake Up

I think Wake Up is the one that is heavily in need of a buff. It's extremely situational and sometimes doesn't even work. It's not a bad perk, it's just not that great. I'd buff it to 25%.

No One Left Behind

No One Left Behind I feel needs a rework. Unlike Wake Up this perk is completely useless, even during the EGC. Here's my concept of a NOLB rework I had on another thread!.

Oh and also, edits are in bold.

It is inconceivable to leave someone behind.

• Gain a 30/40/50 % Action Speed bonus to Unhooking and Healing other survivors, including yourself.
• After unhooking a Survivor, the Auras of all other survivors that are not performing actions are revealed to you for 4 seconds.

No One Left Behind grants 50/75/100 % bonus Bloodpoints for actions in the Altruism Category.

The bonus Bloodpoints are only awarded post-Trial.

This pretty much makes it the same as ever without needing to open any exit gates or powering them, but removes the action speed bonus to healing others. It also shows the auras of other survivors not doing generators after unhooking someone, just to make it a teeny bit useful for seeing how well the others are doing. Oh, and it makes the bonus bloodpoints work similarly to BBQ's, as shown in the last sentence. Plus we need more bloodpoint farming perks anyways.

The healing bonus was kinda pointless and really made it much more packed than Botany Knowledge, so instead of nerfing the action speed bonus I decided to remove the healing speed bonus so that it only benefits the unhook action, but still allows you to unhook survivors quickly.

Hope

Hope... this one is interesting. I'm not sure how we'd change it, but we can definitely be creative here. Here's my idea:

The growing odds of a successful escape fill you with hope and give you wings.

As soon as the Exit Gates are powered, you gain a 4/5/6% Haste Status Effect for 120 seconds.

Each time you manually complete a generator, gain a stackable 0.8% bonus to the Haste status effect when the Exit Gates are powered.

I tried not to go too overboard on this one, but to be fair it's only temporary, plus it's already situational.

Like what?

Adrenaline is still a meta perk.

Hope is extremely powerful. It's only rare because it's extremely circumstantial since you need to be the one chased, not downed, on a gate, etc.

No One Left Behind? I... okay, yeah, this one needs a buff. Idk why they thought changing the condition to the gates needing to be opened was a good idea.

Wake Up is just... why would you run this? Exit gates already open pretty fast. But let's say the numbers were buffed to 30%. What would you get? 20 is lowered to... 15. It's just not worth it. Just use Spine Chill. It'd need a complete rework and I'm not even going to try spit balling ideas.

Are you trying to imply that perks like Wake Up and No One Left Behind are in any way useful in more than 1% of matches?

Hopefully a lot of end-game perks get a buff, because right now, there's no reason to take one over the perks that allow survivors to get to the end-game at all.

End-game perks should have a stronger-than-normal effect given the player is without a perk for the majority of the match. The new No Way Out feels appropriately powerful since it's taking up a Gen-slowdown slot for an exit-slowdown or an equally valuable perk slot.

Adrenaline is fine as it is, since it rewards doing the objective. It's a nice, balanced perk.

Wake Up in its current form needs a few things, as it's only a Remember Me counter. The numbers need to be higher so it takes 5 seconds off a non-Remember Me door. The aura reading on doors should also be a team-wide effect, so if one person brings it to the trial, all remaining survivors get to see where the gates are.

To really give Wake Up a powerful use it either needs to be like Open-Handed and give the gate powering speed boost to all survivors (Non-stackable, only need one Wake Up user in a team) or keep the Wake Up user with the faster time, but have the perk live up to its name and the Wake Up user can't ever fall asleep in Freddy matches.

One path is a great utility perk for the team that everyone appreciates in Solo Q and SWF. The other is more of a selfish perk, but only has a 1/24 chance of truly being effective and turning an M1 killer into more of an M1 killer.

No One Left Behind should activate when all generators are completed. Right now, EGC is like 1% of the match experience and at that point, there's usually no reason to heal since everyone is rushing out the exit gates.

Hope is okay. Pausing while being in the dying state or on hook would be nice. It would be interesting if Hope had a stackable debuff on the killer that essentially gave survivors an extra percent or two. NOED would still cut this down, but NOED's speedboost would only be around half as effective by then, and 110 killers are still slightly faster too.

Yes, and you?

But we could discuss endgame perks as a whole. Not separately.

Both sides endgame perks should be incredible stong and possibly turn around the match. Simply, because they are useless during most part of the game and might never even come to play.

One Hope buff they could do is making the timer start only if you're not hooked or being carried and making it wait like Adrenaline.

The problem with endgame perks for survivors is that they are much better off using perks that help get to that point to begin with. Giving up slots for perks that do not help at all until and unless you get to the endgame, which you often might just not, is an obvious risk and liability. So the fact that most endgame perks are terribly lackluster on top of that is just doubly unfortunate.

No One Left Behind is pretty much a joke. If they really want to constrict its use to the EGC phase, its effect should be much, much more impactful, such that its user can actually single-handedly make clutch rescue plays happen. Give it the old Borrowed Time effect that protected both the rescued and rescuer, make the unhooking and healing speed 100% faster, have the healing speed also apply to self-heals, ... I am of the opinion that both Borrowed Time and Decisive Strike should not work in the EGC, so having rescue perks specific to that phase instead would be interesting.

Wake Up! is comparably as awful as NOLB. The gate auras are a Quality-of-Life thing at best, and the 15% increased opening speed translates to not even 3 seconds. Some ideas: make it so you can see other survivors' auras when they are on a gate switch as well, have the opening progress of a gate indicated by its aura's colour intensity, reveal the killer's aura to the user when they are opening a gate, make it so the exit gate switch lights turn on later into the process, ... Still not a great perk since it's still very situationally limited in being able to have much of any impact on a round, but this way it is at least much more reliable in helping in situations where one needs it.

Left Behind and Sole Survivor are two more albeit more special cases of "endgame" perks. Both actually even more awful than the first two. I think they should be reworked entirely to not rely on teammates being dead, and there's a variety of possiblities for this that I've talked about elsewhere before. But I won't go into that since it won't have to do with the endgame. But I'll bring up a cool Sole Survivor concept I've seen recently at a later point.

Adrenaline and Hope are already pretty worthwhile endgame perks, but they too could be improved. The problem with Adrenaline is that it is almost overpowered in SWF settings where survivors can coordinate its activation while being underwhelming in solo queue scenarios where it will often be of little to no real use even if it does activate, and worse, can sometimes even be to its user's detriment by causing the Exhaustion status effect (and by healing them, potentially robbing them of the possibility to use Dead Hard even after the Exhaustion status has worn off, which can be important against NOED and other instadown perks/abilities/add-ons). I don't necessarily think Adrenaline needs changes, but I would consider it an improvement if it were to be balanced more in its potential between solo and SWF settings. That could be achieved in a variety of ways, but one possible idea is to make it so it grants the 150% sprint effect on every generator completion, with 1 second for the first, 2 seconds for the second, and so on, then ultimately of course the 5 seconds on the last gen. As a trade-off, it would not heal a health state any longer, but also not cause Exhaustion. Of course, in that form it would not strictly be an endgame perk any longer, it's just a general idea. Hope on the other hand should just last indefinitely after the last generator has been repaired, the EGC already puts a timer on the endgame. The 7% Haste are actually really nice and can more consistently and reliably assist a solo survivor in their fight for endgame survival.

The problem with endgame perks for killers is that the player would of course prefer for a round not to ever even reach that state, and so they are usually better off using perks that help to try and win the game before it gets there. That said, as opposed to survivors killers are guaranteed to get value out of endgame perks if needed: either they win the round before it comes to an endgame scenario in which case it doesn't matter that they do not get to use their endgame perks, or they do not win before then, in which case it does obviously come to the endgame and any endgame perks they have can then provide value. But another problem is that the endgame is in the survivors' favour in any situation where you would even need perks to help you (i. e. where it's not only 1 survivor left), as they can quickly open gates which are difficult and not seldomly impossible to defend for the killer, and are then mostly safe. Particularly M1 killers struggle at that point because a healthy survivor can usually make it to an exit gate from much of anywhere on the map, with the hit sprint. So for a killer's endgame perks to really be worth using, they have to have notable and/or reliable enough an impact that actually allows them to still potentially turn the game into their favour. Currently, only NOED is notable enough in its impact to see frequent play as an endgame perk, and I actually find it to be a relatively healthy perk (on M1 killers, certainly), due to making the endgame much more interesting and dynamic, where otherwise a killer would often be incentivized to just camp a hook since they have no option but to try and secure that one kill.

Blood Warden is in a reasonably neat spot ever since its recent shadow buff where survivors cannot tell whether the perk is (still) active from afar anymore. That said, it is still an unreliable gimmick, so much so that it is more of a meme perk. I think the first 60 seconds of the perk should activate if the killer has hooked a survivor at any point after the last generator has been finished, rather than having to hook them when the EGC starts. The 60s would only start counting down once a survivor does open a gate, however. And then any consecutive hook the killer gets once the EGC has started should add another 10-30 seconds.

Remember Me should at the very least be returned to its original state of being able to add another 30 seconds to the gate timer. And then beyond that it could further increase the gate timer depending on how many survivors are still alive, with 10 additional seconds (so 40 if 2, 50 if 3, 60 if 4).

No Way Out is receiving a buff, which might already be enough to make it interesting.

A rework of endgame mechanics themselves could also help increase these perks' value, on both sides. One idea is to make it so that the gate switch progress regresses over time, preventing survivors from leaving them at 99%. That way survivors would much more often be forced to actually open a gate and trigger the EGC, putting them on a timer that the killer can capitalize on. Of course, if only one survivor remains, this would only add to make an already regularly almost unwinnable scenario even worse, so for those situations there is a cool idea I recently read in the context of a Sole Survivor rework concept: if the EGC is triggered and only one survivor remains in the trial, reveal the survivor and killer's auras to one another (outside of a certain range), and make it so that the survivor gets to escape the trial if they are still alive (in the healthy or injured state) once the EGC timer has run out (they instantly get sacrificed if they enter the dying state before then). This would encourage an interactive and tense endgame scenario where the killer has to try and catch the last survivor before the timer expires, and it would remedy the issues of how unfairly tilted that scenario can otherwise be due to gate spawns.

@TheClownIsKing What do you think about the no way out buff? I'm enjoying the perk on live but I'm not really gonna bother with the PTB as I need the BP, lol. Do you think it's gonna have any meta potential? or do you think it's just going to be a fun perk that's pretty good but not strong enough to compete with the meta?

They could rework No-one Left Behind into one of the new Boon totems.

A bit like NOED, it could activate on any remaining totem and highlight all survivors and increase altruistic actions as currently is. Likewise, the killer can break that totem.

If that works, then it could be really powerful for the final part for solo players.

That would definitely be nice.