Bad Perk University: Dead Man's Switch and Furtive Chase

Hello class, welcome to Bad Perk University! I'll be your professor for today, and we'll be going over the worst perks The Entity has to offer and see how to make the most out of them. Today's going to be pretty special. Welcome to the first double lesson, where we'll be covering two perks at the same time. Why? Because these perks are pretty much only ever going to be used together, and I won't have the chance to talk about them otherwise. There may be more double lessons like this in the future, so stay sharp! The two perks I'm going to cover today are Dead Man's Switch and Furtive Chase. Let’s start with the one that’s…slightly more useful: Dead Man’s Switch. At a passing glance it doesn’t sound too bad, until you really think about the details. When you hook the Obsession, for 45 seconds after that, if any survivor lets go of a generator, that generator gets blocked until the 45 seconds has elapsed. There are a couple things of note here. First of all, it only works when you hook the Obsession, so if you bring this perk and have no other perks to complement it, or if there’s no survivor using Decisive Strike, you’ll only get to use this perk three times. Second of all, it’s 45 seconds from the moment you hook the Obsession, not 45 seconds from the moment survivors stop repairing generators. This pretty much means that by the time you hook the Obsession and go search the generators to patrol and pressure survivors off of them, most of the duration will have passed already and you’ll block the generators for maybe a few seconds.

So why is this perk bad? Simply put, the effort you sometimes have to go through to proc the perk is not worth the potential value you’d get out of it. It can also be confusing as to what the purpose of the perk even is. Is it for slowdown? I mean, technically, since blocking generators prevents repairs on them, but there are so many better perks for that purpose. You’d be better off using Thrilling Tremors as a slowdown perk. Is it for regression? Well, no, because blocked generators don’t regress, so no pairing it with Ruin. Is it for tracking? Honestly, it might be. When you manage to proc Dead Man’s Switch and happen to come across a generator that then gets blocked, you know for a fact that survivors were on that generator, and you should quickly scan the area for them and chase them. What’s the point of that? It’s one thing to find a survivor working on a generator and chasing them off, but it’s another thing to also block off that generator so that while you’re chasing a survivor, another survivor can’t go back to the gen and start repairing it again. I believe this is the main appeal of this perk, and that can be good on killers that thrive on constantly being in chases to apply pressure. I am of course talking about high mobility killers like Billy, Spirit, and Blight, but even killers that are simply strong in chase, such as Clown or Trickster, can benefit from Dead Man’s Switch. It’s definitely not worth only having the effect three times though, and that’s where we have to talk about...Furtive Chase...*sigh*

Furtive Chase is a perk that sounds so close to being good, but it just isn’t worth it. Every time you hook the Obsession, you gain a token, up to 4 tokens, and for each token your terror radius is reduced by 4 meters while you’re in a chase. So at 4 tokens, if you have a standard 32m terror radius, your terror radius gets reduced to 16m while you’re chasing a survivor. As an additional effect, when a survivor unhooks the Obsession, they automatically become the new Obsession. Just like with Dying Light, when the Obsession dies, you lose all your accumulated tokens, and can only gain new tokens if a new Obsession is made somehow.

So why is this perk bad? EVERYTHING! Everything about this perk is to its detriment! Right from the start, you wonder what you’re even meant to do with this perk. The main function of the perk, making your terror radius smaller during a chase, just doesn’t seem very practical. Compare it to the perk Monitor and Abuse. That perk makes your terror radius bigger during a chase, but smaller outside of a chase. It’s a very good perk because it gives survivors less time to react to your approach. The bigger terror radius during a chase is mostly a downside but that also has some applications of its own, like pairing it with Infectious Fright. With Furtive Chase however, I don’t think I need to tell you that having that smaller terror radius gimps perks like Infectious Fright.

Most people who are crazy enough to try running Furtive Chase use it for the slightly less niche utility of Obsession changing. When a survivor unhooks the Obsession, Furtive Chase makes them the new Obsession, and that can be a strategic way to get more value out of certain perks like Save the Best for Last or Play With Your Food. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the use of Furtive Chase’s main function, and I may have come to a conclusion about it. By having your terror radius be smaller during a chase, you can pretend to chase one survivor, and if you hear another survivor working on a generator nearby or just distracted by something in general, you can quickly change your focus to them and get the drop on them. Even that’s quite a stretch and I just don’t see that strategy working very often. Myers’ terror radius is 16 m when he’s in Tier 2 Evil Within, and even then survivors usually have time to run away unless they don’t see him approaching. In the many times I’ve attempted to use this perk in a build, at least the amount that my sanity would allow, I’ve gotten the drop on a survivor because of the perk ONCE, and even then I think they were just greeding the generator, and would have done that regardless of whether or not I used Furtive Chase. If Furtive Chase could reduce your terror radius during a chase to 8 m or even remove it entirely, I can actually see this strategy work more often. But the most insulting things about it all is that:

1. You have to build up this incredibly niche effect, 4 tokens just to make your terror radius 16 m during a chase

2. You completely lose the effect if the Obsession dies

One other thing that’s really bad about the perk is rather subtle, but it makes the perk completely unappealing when you realize it. Because you need to hook the Obsession to earn tokens, because you can’t just keep hooking the same Obsession otherwise the survivor dies and you lose the effect, because the perk changes the Obsession when another survivor unhooks the Obsession, it encourages you to hook each survivor one at a time, instead of trying to get one out of the game as quickly as possible. Generator repair speeds are already not in the killer’s favor, especially when all four survivors remain alive, so if you go out of your way to hook Survivor 1, then Survivor 2, then Survivor 3, the generators will be done by the time you get to Survivor 4. So yeah, the method you have to use to get any sort of value out of the perk is completely antithetical to the most optimal way of winning killer matches, which is admittedly tunneling a survivor out of the game, unfortunately. Yes, by the time you get 4 tokens, you’re all set and don’t need to do that anymore, but in the end you’re still using Furtive Chase.

So how do we make the most out of these perks? Is there no hope for them, and do we just remove them from the game? Well, hold on, there is a way to make them work. The reason I wanted to cover both these perks at the same time is because when paired together, they help to offset some of their downsides. When Dead Man’s Switch is paired with Furtive Chase, you have more opportunities to proc Dead Man’s Switch because of the changing Obsessions. Likewise, Dead Man’s Switch is a more suitable reward for hooking the Obsession, which means there’s incentive to go for Obsession hooks and build tokens...kind of. The perk Nemesis is a much better way of switching Obsessions, and it makes newly created Obsessions suffer from the Oblivious status, so I’d highly recommend that perk. The fourth perk slot is a bit of a freebie, but there are a couple options to make the most of this unconventional build. Make Your Choice is good if you want to try to build up tokens quickly, since the Make Your Choice target, when unhooking the Obsession, will also become Oblivious because of Nemesis, so you can try to get the drop on them that way. Thrilling Tremors is a pretty good idea as well. It blocks off generators that aren’t being worked on, allowing you to see which generators ARE being worked on, so you can know which generators to pressure after hooking the Obsession. You might be surprised by this next suggestion: Huntress Lullaby. Yeah, remember this poor girl? The reason this perk can work is because of a specific aspect of Dead Man’s Switch. It blocks off generators when a survivor lets go of the generator while the effect is active, right? Missing a Skill Check also blocks it off, so bringing a perk that makes survivors more likely to miss Skill Checks can actually be favorable. The last perk I can recommend for this build is...uh, Ruin. Yeah, what a surprise, a strong meta perk is good in a build. But the reason I recommend Ruin in this particular build is because the perk setup as a whole is designed around one idea: spending less time kicking generators in favor of constantly finding survivors to chase. Ruin already lets you do that, so you might as well throw it in there. Hey, even if it gets cleansed, you still have Dead Man’s Switch to fall back on. As good as Pop Goes the Weasel is, you still have to go out of your way to kick the generators, and for that reason, I don’t recommend you use it in this build, tempting as it may be. This build doesn’t work all the time, and if I’m being honest it usually doesn’t work, but it’s actually a nice change of pace. It trades regression and slowdown for chasing pressure. Since neither the survivors nor the killer can interact with a blocked generator, the only thing left for them to do is to chase each other, and isn’t that what both people want? To be more engaged in the match instead of holding M1 all game?

Closing thoughts, how do we make these perks better? I’ll be honest, I do have some hope for Dead Man’s Switch. It seems like a perk that can be somewhat usable, as niche as it is. If the perk is ever made too strong, it can prevent survivors from effectively working on the objective, which should be avoided. On the other hand, I have much less hope for Furtive Chase. This perk likely needs to be reworked from the ground up because its concept is just so flawed, but I’ll still try and come up with way to help it. For Dead Man’s Switch, I don’t mind its restriction on only proccing when the Obsession is hooked, it’s a way of grounding the perk so that generators don’t get blocked off left and right. My problem is that the 45 second duration of the effect is pathetic, considering that the generators don’t get blocked for that long. I’d make it so that for those 45 seconds, the moment a survivor lets go of a generator, that generator gets blocked for a flat 45 seconds. So what I mean is, even if there’s one second left on Dead Man’s Switch and the survivor lets go, then the generator is blocked for 45 seconds. If that’s too strong, you can change it to 30 seconds or something, but the point is to make hooking the Obsession much more meaningful.

How about Furtive Chase then? This one is rather difficult, since I feel like no matter what you did to change this perk, people just wouldn’t run it in favor of other stronger perks. There are two ways to approach reworking this perk. Either keep the theme of the perk, or change the theme of the perk entirely. Oh right, what is the theme of this perk anyway? If Ghost Face’s flavor text is any indication, Furtive Chase is meant to “make his chases unpredictable”. I guess it would make chases unpredictable if it were actually any good, but it isn’t. So here is my suggestion in regards to reworking the perk while keeping in theme with its intended use.

1. Keep the effect of smaller terror radius during a chase, but remove the token requirement and subsequently the loss of the effect on Obsession death. The fact that you need to build up tokens to get this extremely niche effect is insulting, so I’d just remove it entirely. There wouldn’t be any incentive to hook the Obsession anymore, other than to turn someone else into the Obsession, but you’d actually have the opportunity to get the drop on survivors. You could even make the terror radius effect even smaller, like 8 m, but that might be a little too strong. So this is what the perk would look like now:

You become obsessed with one Survivor.

You lurk in the shadows, eliminating your victims one by one.

While in a Chase, your Terror Radius is reduced by 12/14/16 meters.

When a Survivor rescues the Obsession from the Hook, that Survivor will become the new Obsession.

You can only be obsessed with one Survivor at a time.

Ok, that was a lot to take in, I know. Next time, I’ll cover just one perk again. But should there be any perks that need twice the discipline, I’ll be there to do them justice. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!