Bad Perk University: Up the Ante and Slippery Meat

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. Are you ready to cover another absolutely terrible perk? How about two of them? Yeah, welcome back to another double lesson, because I really don’t seem to care about my mental health when trying to make these perks function. I’m doing it for all of you, my pupils, no need to thank me. Today we’re covering the luck based flunk perks that are Up the Ante and Slippery Meat. First, we’ll talk about the one that is simply useless on its own. Up the Ante starts with 3 tokens, one for each of your teammates. These tokens grant 3% Luck to all survivors, for a total of 9% as long as everyone remains alive. Yeah...that’s it. What even is Luck in Dead by Daylight? Oh I’ll get to that. Oh just you wait…

So why is this perk bad? Do I even have to tell you why? Fine. Even if you knew nothing about how Luck works in Dead by Daylight, you’d think that 9% is a measly number. For such a small amount, you’d hope Luck does something game changing, right? NO. NO IT DOES NOT. The only things Luck affects are the chances of unhooking yourself when you’re first hooked, and freeing yourself from a Bear Trap. There seems to be a common misconception that it also affects the rarity of items you find in Chests, it doesn’t. That’s something that’s completely tied to Plunderer’s Instinct, and was going to be tied to Hoarder as well. Plunderer’s increases the chance of finding rarer items, and Hoarder was originally going to decrease the rarity of items in chests (please implement this devs). So in other words, when considering that Luck bonuses are additive, that’s a 13% chance of unhooking yourself, something that should be done as a last resort and something you shouldn’t be able to do consistently without a perk with conditions such as Deliverance. Also, a 25.67% chance of freeing yourself from a Bear Trap, something you also shouldn’t be able to consistently do because:

1. It negatively affects one Killer, namely Trapper, in a not insignificant way because escaping on your first or second attempt can mean the difference between going down or being able to Dead Hard to safety.

2. It also completely does not matter if the Trapper knows what he’s doing and makes sure you step on a Bear Trap while he’s chasing you, practically ensuring you do not have time to even attempt to escape from the trap.

Why does Luck even affect something like that? That’d be like if it gave you a chance to not get hit by Doctor’s Shock Therapy or not get instadowned by a Chainsaw. There would be riots in the streets. The reason Slippery Meat was even reworked was so that it wouldn’t specifically affect Trapper. Oh right, Slippery Meat...ugh.

Slippery Meat, aside from the frankly suggestive name, is such a confused perk. It grants you 3 more attempts to unhook yourself, on top of the 3 you get by default, and the chance to unhook yourself is increased by 4%, doubling the chance of unhooking yourself. Trust me, that’s not saying much.

So why is this perk bad? It’s at least slightly more usable than Up the Ante, but that’s not a compliment. The odds are still stacked against you, and even if this perk was a straight upgrade to Deliverance and allowed you to unhook yourself no matter what, you’ve used the perk one time and that’s all you get. It’s still an improvement over its older versions where it gave you a better chance of escaping Bear Traps, which was dumb, but this current version is still dumb, so it’s not saying much. Yeah, the developers came to their senses in realizing that perks should not be designed to counter one killer specifically, but didn’t do the same for the Luck stat as a whole, for some reason. Ace’s perks as a whole are just confusing to me. They don’t synergize with each other in the slightest, and I mean come on, there’s precedent for synergistic perks already even with the oldest survivors in the game such as Claudette and Jake. They’re thematic, yes, but at what cost? Open Handed is the best perk, but does almost nothing on its own. Ace in the Hole is a fun perk for item farming, but still quite luck based and isn’t for serious escape attempts. Then we have Up the Ante, just sitting in the corner, poisoning our bloodwebs. Slippery Meat too, which is even worse because you can’t just not level up Ace to avoid it, it’s been there since the beginning. Monstrous Shrine too. Yes, you! I’ll get to you, and you will feel my wrath! Ok...give me a moment. I may have gone off the rails just a slight bit…

So how do we make the most out of these perks? You already know that since this is a double lesson, we’re going to be pairing these perks together. But that’s not enough! Not in the slightest. Because that’s only giving you a 17% chance of unhooking yourself, and that’s simply not enough. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to forget trying a build like this in a solo queue match, because throwing in all your chips is not enough. You’re going to have to bring your friends into this and have them throw in all their chips. Then and only then you’ll MAYBE make the meme build work. What are we going to do? Have all four survivors run Up the Ante and Slippery Meat, and bring the best Luck offerings bloodpoints can buy: Vigo’s Jar of Salty Lips. When everyone pours in all their Luck, both in game and in real life, you can stack Luck to 48%, meaning that along with Slippery Meat, every survivor now has a 56% chance to unhook themselves, which is practically a coin flip. Hey, there’s still the chance of failure, but along with the 6 attempts you’re given, you now have a sporting chance and you know it was made possible with an absolutely ridiculous amount of memeing. At the very least, you can be assured that the Killer you go up against will be very confused, and that’s the true moral victory. As for perks to synergize with Up the Ante and Slippery Meat...do you actually care about synergies? We’re already grasping at straws with this as it is. Breakdown, Off the Record, Second Wind, really any perk that works after you unhook yourself, anything other than Deliverance since that would be redundant. The “”””appeal”””” of Slippery Meat is that you get to unhook yourself without being Broken for 60 seconds with the stipulation that you might not get to. And at least if you use those perks I mentioned before, you’re at least using a perk that’s better than Up the Ante and Slippery Meat.

Closing thoughts, how do we make these perks better? I’ll start with Slippery Meat. I’ll be perfectly honest, I would cry no tears, not even tears of joy if Slippery Meat were suddenly removed from the game and out of our bloodwebs. Even if the perk were any good, we already have a much better designed version of that perk in the form of Deliverance. It is perfect really, you have to unhook someone else to earn it, and there’s a significant drawback to unhooking yourself. It’s designed such that one or two survivors running it can change the tide of a match, but it would be foolish for all four survivors to run it, since one of them would simply not get to use it. The only thing I can think of in that scenario is maybe one survivor run Slippery Meat in place of Deliverance so that when they get hooked, they can still use Deliverance Lite to save themselves. Bottom line, Slippery Meat treads territory that is much better handled by Deliverance, and I am simply not interested. But if we absolutely must have Slippery Meat in the game, it must not remain the way it is. It needs a compete rework. If we’re going with the theme of unhooking, maybe it can be something like this:

Increase the speed at which you unhook survivors and are unhooked by 20/25/30%.

It’s not much, but it’s leagues better than what we have now. Having a perk like this along with Desperate Measures can potentially mean you can go for risky unhooks and maybe make it out with your skin intact.

How about Up the Ante then? It’s not the perk that needs to be changed, if you ask me. 9% Luck is almost nothing no matter what Luck does, but if Luck meant something potentially game changing, then maybe 9% wouldn’t be so bad. What should Luck do instead of the extremely niche and confused effect it has currently? I think it should make Skill Checks happen more frequently. How would the game calculate that, I have no clue, but it’s an immediate improvement over what Luck does now. Just think, you could bring Up the Ante or Luck offerings to increase the occurrence of Skill Checks, and thereby increase the frequency of Great Skill Checks, which benefits the team. But it would technically be a neutral effect, since if the Killer brings Huntress Lullaby or Unnerving Presence, that might be a bit concerning. Depending on how the game would calculate that, you could also maybe buff the perk’s value from 3% to 5%, so it would be a 15% increase in personal Luck as long as all your teammates are alive. Again, it’s not really Up the Ante that needs fixing. The reason Up the Ante sucks is because Luck as a whole sucks, so if you just make Luck better, then players would start using Up the Ante more. It’s kind of amazing the things you learn and appreciate when scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s kind of like, “Yeah, I kind of suck at programming, but at least I’m not the game designer that made Slippery Meat.” But I don’t want these two perks to stay bad, that’s not why I make these posts. We can always move forward and make changes for the better, but the first step is to actually start. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class! Please don’t gamble students, you don’t know when your luck will run out.