Bad Perk University: Mettle of Man

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, we’re going to cover a perk that’s shrouded in infamy, but is also a case of, “Wait, someone actually brought that perk? What?” I am of course talking about Mettle of Man. When this perk first came out, it was grossly overpowered, and every survivor and their ancestors used this perk along with Decisive Strike, Dead Hard, and all the other meta perks of the apocalypse to have health states and second chances forever. It was a dark time in Dead by Daylight, one that nearly made me quit playing the game for good. It wasn’t the first dark age, and I know it won’t be the last. It has since been reworked though, and is now a shell of its former overpowered self, to the point where nobody uses it in a serious capacity. I have never seen a perk fall from its high horse that hard before. Even with how overpowered Decisive Strike used to be and how many nerfs it has had, even that perk is still meta. Mettle of Man sounds like a really interesting idea for a perk. After taking three protection hits, Mettle of Man grants you the Endurance status effect. This effect is special compared to other perks that grant the Endurance status, like Borrowed Time and Soul Guard, since you don’t have to mend afterwards when it activates, and it specifically works when an attack that takes you from the Injured State to the Dying State hits you. Some people might be confused about this part, but basically, if you’re healthy and you get instadowned by something like a chainsaw or the Exposed status effect, Mettle of Man won’t protect you from it. If you’re injured when that happens though, Mettle of Man will protect you. After tanking a hit with Mettle of Man, the next time you heal up, the Killer can see your aura as long as you are farther than 16m away from them. Then, once the Killer inevitably downs you again, Mettle of Man turns off and the process starts all over again. By the way, Mettle of Man is an Obsession perk, meaning if you run this perk and no other survivors are using Obsession perks, you will be the Obsession at the start of the match.

So why is this perk bad? The effect itself is potentially very powerful. Anything that grants you an extra health state is incredibly powerful, since it lets you waste more of the Killer’s precious time. The problem with Mettle of Man is how you earn it. Now, this perk used to be activated by simply getting hit by the Killer’s basic attack, so it was incredibly easy to get, and the majority of Killers had no way of getting around that, which is what made the perk overpowered. But now that you have to get protection hits, it’s much trickier to earn now. To clarify, protection hits occur when you take a hit for another nearby survivor who is injured. This can happen by running in front of the Killer and taking a hit for a survivor who is about to go down, or taking a hit while the Killer is carrying a survivor. The latter is definitely the easiest way to get protection hits, the game will always acknowledge you taking a hit there. In the former case however, the game can be rather particular when it comes to being “near” an injured teammate. Yeah, most of the time I take a protection hit and the game recognizes it, but if I stray just slightly too far from that threshold, it doesn’t work. Supposedly, you have to be within 10m of the injured survivor for it to count. In the heat of a match, I’m definitely not keeping track of that sort of thing. There’s also a short cooldown to how often you can earn protection hits (3 seconds), but this only really matters if you take hits against a Killer that’s using Save the Best for Last. Just keep it in mind. But the real reason the perk is pretty bad, along with its strict activation requirement is the penalty you get after activating it. Having your aura revealed to the killer in any capacity is dangerous, because it gives perfect information about your whereabouts. Once you tank a hit with Mettle of Man and heal up, you are in near constant peril until the Killer downs you, meaning you have to be on the alert all the time and be careful not to accidentally lead the Killer to your teammates. With the way Mettle of Man used to work, and how blatantly overpowered it was, this penalty made sense, since it gave the Killer a way to track you down and potentially get revenge for you running a brainless, uncounterable perk. Now though, it just seems unnecessarily cruel for a perk that’s rather difficult to activate.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? I may have mentioned this in previous posts about certain perks and the mentality you should have when running said perks. Actually, this applies to most perks when I think about it. But anyway, the best way to use Mettle of Man is in an altruism build. The current version of Mettle of Man pretty much encourages it, so if you’re trying to use Mettle of Man like you used to, this perk isn’t for you. But above all, the best way to use Mettle of Man is...don’t use Mettle of Man! Now wait, hear me out! I’m being serious. You see, an incorrect mentality that many players have is that when they bring a perk in a loadout, they absolutely have to get value out of it or else it isn’t worth their time to equip it in the first place. I can understand what they’re trying to say there, but you know what? Most of the time when I bring Decisive Strike to a match, I end up never using it. Does that mean that perk isn’t worth running? Every other survivor seems to still be using it, so that’s clearly not the case. Since I’m on about Decisive Strike, here is my perspective of it. I see it as a “just in case” perk. Just in case the Killer decides to be scummy and try to hook me twice without giving me breathing room, this perk is there to give me another chance. It’s not there for me to be immune to hooking for an entire minute so I can do whatever I want. *cough* *cough*. Similarly, Mettle of Man should be seen the same way. Don’t run the perk expecting to get use out of it. Most matches you won’t end up needing it anyway, or even need to take a single protection hit in some extreme cases. Mettle of Man should be seen as another “just in case” perk. Just in case you need to take protection hits, you can use those to benefit yourself, to save you from going down when you’re injured. Simply put, DO NOT go out of your way to proc Mettle of Man. You will throw the game if you try this. So now let me tell you how you should use Mettle of Man without being a detriment to your team.

My favorite method of using Mettle of Man is in altruistic anti hooking strats. I’ll go more into some of the perks I’ll mention here in future posts, to explain in more detail how to utilize them and make them better, but this is mostly focused on making Mettle of Man the most it can muster. Saboteur and Breakout are Mettle of Man’s best friends. When a teammate goes down nearby, that is when you spring into action. The moment the Killer picks up your teammate, Saboteur will show you the closest hooks to where they are, allowing you to make an informed decision which hook to run towards. Breakout helps your teammate struggle out slightly faster, but its real power comes from the speed boost, since it allows you to keep up with the Killer and get to the hook before they do. From there, it’s a matter of standing in front of the hook spot so that the Killer has no choice but to hit you to make you lose collision. After that, start sabotaging the hook so that the Killer has to hit you again to make you stop. If you’re fast enough, the hook will break before the Killer can stop you, and Breakout will hopefully have bought enough time for your teammate to break free. Now keep in mind, in most cases trying this, you will go down. And worst yet, if the hooks are close enough, the Killer might just find another one to hook your teammate on. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just how it is. What’s important however, is that you got two very easy protection hits, for doing what you could to prevent a teammate from receiving a hook state. If you want to improve your chances of making a strat like this happen, there are two things you can do. Bring a Petrified Oak offering that increases the distance between hooks, and bring a toolbox with increased sabotaging speed and/or the Grip Wrench addon that increases the time a hook stays broken. Your fourth perk can be your choice, but I have a few suggestions. My absolute favorite perk to run in this build is Flashbang. Flashbang is already a really fun perk to use, but when it’s used in a build like this successfully, there’s no other feeling like it. I run to the hook, take the first protection hit, and immediately drop the flashbang and start sabotaging. The Killer now has a difficult decision to make, continue to look in my direction to down me and get blinded, or look away for a brief moment long enough for me to break the hook and run away, forcing them to drop the survivor or find a different hook nearby. This does have its drawbacks though. If the Killer notices you have a flashbang in your hand, they’ll see it coming and not do anything rash, but Flashbang has the benefit of being a little difficult to see and making a rather quiet sound when dropped. I’m a pretty experienced Killer player, and I still get blinded by random Flashbangs just because I didn’t hear the survivor drop them. So that’s really fun, but there’s more. If you want to ensure your safety after sabotaging a hook, Dead Hard still exists. This one requires you bring the sabo toolbox so you can break the hook in time and still Dead Hard away. Okay, but what about after you get Mettle of Man to proc and you heal up? Aren’t you still having to deal with that aura reveal? Well, there is one perk that can help with that, but you’re not going to like hearing it. Sole Survivor...yeah…

Look, Sole Survivor kind of sucks, to put it mildly. I’ll get around to this perk someday, I’m sure. However, when you pair this perk with Mettle of Man, it has a pretty interesting synergy. Sole Survivor will hide your aura from the Killer at a range of 24m for every other survivor that’s dead. When just one of your teammates dies, Sole Survivor mitigates the downside of Mettle of Man by making it so your aura goes away when the Killer is within 24m of you, which doesn't sound like much, but it can often be enough to slink away if you play your cards right. Just hope you can still salvage the match with one teammate out of the game. Of course, with each teammate that dies, the effect increases by 24m each time, but by that point, you'd better have a backup plan of getting out of the trial somehow, because the sun is setting on you fast, and hiding your aura will only help you so much. By the way, since I’m not going to mention this perk again for a while, I’ll say this. Sole Survivor is yet another “just in case” perk, so keep that in mind for the future.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? We really have to be careful with changing this perk. We’ve already seen the monster it can be, and I don’t ever want to go back to the way it once was. First off, if we change nothing else about the perk currently, I’d remove the aura reveal portion of the perk. It’s just adding salt to the wound to a perk that already has rather demanding requirements. But then what would be the perk tiers? Personally I’m against perks having three tiers at this point in the game’s lifespan due to how monstrous the grind is, but if we must have them, I’d make it so you have to mend after proccing Mettle of Man. I know that the main appeal of the perk is that you don’t have to do that, but at the very least it would make it consistent with all the other perks that grant the Endurance status effect. So basically the perk would look like this:

After triggering your third Protection Hit, Mettle of Man activates and you are protected by the Endurance Status Effect:

Any damage taken that would put you into the Dying State from the Injured State will trigger the Deep Wound status effect, after which you have 10/15/20 seconds to Mend yourself.

Taking any damage while under the effect of Deep Wound or if its timer runs out will put you into the Dying State.

Mettle of Man deactivates the next time you are put into the Dying State.

Increases the odds of being the Obsession.

The Killer can only be obsessed with one Survivor at a time.

The only other direction I can think of to take the perk in is to keep the aura reveal, but lower the protection hit requirement to two. I can see this being potentially quite dangerous though, so I’m not too sure about it. Still, that’s the only other change that might be made without reverting the perk to its old version, and that will never happen. Look, I hate the old Mettle of Man, it was representative of everything wrong with Dead by Daylight at the time, but now I just feel sorry for it. I wouldn’t mind it being just a little better. That fact that it can enable altruistic plays like this in a way that feels fair is really cool, and it’s actually kind of a pleasant surprise to see someone activate it in a match. It’s like, “Wow, you actually managed to make THAT perk happen? You champion!” What will the future look like for this fallen devil? Only time will tell. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!

(I’m going to be working on an addendum for this post that covers more things I wanted to talk about with this perk, to keep this post relatively brief. I’ll see you then.)