Bad Perk University: Autodidact

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. Let me pose a question to you, students. Which role do you believe has more terrible perks? Survivor or Killer? I’ll give you my perspective on the matter. Number wise, I would say survivors have more bad perks than killers. Because the meta options are so strong, and there are objectively more survivor perks than killer perks, having a perk that’s very weak or even situational is often looked down upon. Quality wise, I say killers have it the worst. Even some of the most bottom of the barrel survivor perks like Lightweight or Up the Ante, I can see a survivor getting a little benefit out of them, especially since it’s not just their 4 perk slots in play, it’s the other 12 perks of their teammates. So one survivor running an off meta perk (usually) won’t bring the team down much. For killers though, it’s just themselves. They have their power, 4 perk slots and 2 addon slots. Killers also have strong options, as well as some off meta options that can be strong on certain killers, but it makes the weaker options even worse. You can’t afford to bring a bad perk because you’re going up against 16 perks, as well as whatever items and addons the survivors bring. Also voice coms, if the survivors particularly dislike you. The worst survivor perks in the game don’t compare to the worst killer perks in the game, because at least survivors have the option of voice coms, despite the game not designed to be played that way. Monstrous Shrine is already a terrible perk as it is, but that fact is exacerbated by all those other factors. What point am I trying to make here? Well with today’s perk, it’s a perk that I really want to like more, and while it puts a smile on my face to see it used in a game, I don’t recommend more than one person using it. Autodidact. I hate to do this to this perk, but it needs addressing.

Autodidact is a really cool concept on paper. This perk takes effect when you heal a survivor without a medkit. When doing this, you have a -25% progression penalty when you land a Skill Check, meaning you will actually lose healing progress. You also lose the ability to earn Great Skill Checks. In return, each Skill Check you land will give you a token, up to 5, and for each token, you gain 15% healing progression. In less technical terms, you gain more healing progress the more tokens you accumulate, and at 5 tokens, the amount of healing you do with Skill Checks becomes immense.

So why is this perk bad? Autodidact’s fatal flaw is honestly those first two Skill Checks. Having your healing progress reverted in any capacity sucks. Usually that only happens if you mess up a Skill Check, but with the first two Autodidact Skill Checks, you don’t even have a choice. You have to land them and face the regression. This is pretty bad because if you’re in a situation where you’re just about to finish healing your teammate when the killer is approaching and you get a Skill Check, you pretty much have to abandon that teammate and hope the killer doesn’t go for them. Worst of all, if you’re trying to heal a slug off of the ground and you get a regression Skill Check, that can mean the difference between getting them back up or having to abandon them to be picked up by the killer. The other bad part of Autodidact is the Skill Checks themselves. Skill Checks, notoriously, are random, and usually inconvenient. They don’t show up when you want them to, and when you don’t want them to show up, like when you’re just about to let go of a generator, they do show up. Autodidact’s entire function revolves around these things. And remember, there are 5 of these Skill Checks you have to hit to obtain the full benefit of the perk. Depending on your luck, that can be easy to obtain, or impossible. In my personal experiences, by the time I even get 4 or 5 tokens, half my team is already at the exit gates waiting to teabag the killer. So while this perk can be a saving grace to a bad situation, more often than not it just seems to let you down. Autodidact refers to a person who is self-taught, who makes an effort to learn a subject without formal education. But all they’re teaching themselves is how much of a fool they are for thinking a perk that relies on a hidden number generator will help them out of a jam.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? The main appeal of Autodidact is reaching those 5 tokens to achieve the ultimate healing Skill Checks. Like I said before, the amount of healing you do with Autodidact can be absolutely ridiculous. When you actually get Skill Checks for it, it counters many killer perks that revolve around healing. More specifically, perks that make healing slower. Sloppy Butcher, or anything that inflicts Mangled, are not only countered with a burst of healing progression, the slower healing speed actually works to Autodidact’s advantage, since it means you have a better chance of getting a healing Skill Check. This is also true of Coulrophobia, not that a whole lot of people were using that perk, but still. Thanatophobia, while not affecting healing itself, encourages survivors to heal in order to return repairing speeds back to normal, and Autodidact can quickly handle that. However, it’s kind of wishful thinking for a killer to be using those perks in the first place, since they’re not meta perks. So what we need to do is increase the odds of getting Autodidact Skill Checks, and that naturally involves finding teammates to heal.

A perk I highly recommend you use with Autodidact is Empathy. You’re going to want to know where injured teammates are at all times, and when it’s convenient, you go over to them and test your luck with Autodidact. I also highly recommend you bring We’re Gonna Live Forever. Having healing progress regress when you’re trying to heal someone off the ground is the worst, and even though that faster healing does decrease your chances of a Skill Check, you’ll want to get them when that survivor is up on their feet anyway. As far as actually increasing Skill Check chances, there are only two perks in the game that do that. One is a killer perk, and one is a survivor perk. Unnerving Presence and Spine Chill, respectively. Good luck finding a killer that’s using that perk by the way. So that leaves us with Spine Chill. This perk is low key pretty ridiculous in the amount of things it can do. It makes all action speeds faster just for the killer looking in your direction within a certain range. That includes vaulting for some reason, even though the killer has to look in your direction when chasing you. And if they’re using Resilience on top of that, you’re going to be chasing them for a while. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about with Spine Chill. Spine Chill also increases your Skill Check chances by 10% when the killer looks in your direction. It also makes the Skill Checks smaller, but not by much. This is probably the only way to artificially increase your chances of getting a Skill Check, and even though Spine Chill will make healing faster, paradoxically decreasing your chances of getting a Skill Check, you can at least look at that as insurance for when you’re just about to finish healing a teammate.

As far as perks that supplement Autodidact, there’s something important to understand. Other than Spine Chill and We’re Gonna Live Forever, any perk that increases your healing speed is actually bad for Autodidact. Remember, the faster you heal, the less chance you’ll get Skill Checks. So you’re really banking on Skill Checks coming through for you when your team needs healing. I mentioned before in a previous post, but Solidarity is a good way of saving healing time, and when paired with Autodidact Skill Checks, the amount of time saved is incredible. Bite the Bullet is also nice to have a little more peace when healing. Blood Pact can also be nice when you heal up that quickly...kind of? Yeah, Blood Pact, when am I ever going to talk about that perk? Ah, someday.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? I really want Autodidact to get some love, because when it works, there’s nothing quite like it. But as long as it relies on inconsistent Skill Checks, it will always have problems. I think that’s alright, but there’s just too much going against it. A simple way to make the perk better is to reduce the necessary tokens to get the full effect to 4. Maybe not 3, I think that would be a little too easy to have ultra healing Skill Checks. More specifically, I’d reduce that healing regression penalty from 25% to 10%, simulating having one token of Autodidact already. A bigger picture way to make the perk more appealing is having a way to increase the chances of Skill Checks without perks like Spine Chill or Unnerving Presence. I mentioned in my Up the Ante post that I’d like it if Luck made Skill Checks more frequent. It’d be somewhat of a neutral effect, since more Skill Checks means more opportunities for Great Skill Checks, but it also means Unnerving Presence and Huntress Lullaby become more dangerous. Or you know what, just make it so Autodidact has 10% increased Skill Check odds. That would immediately make it better. One last thing I’d like for the perk is for your teammates to get a notification when you have Autodidact. See, something I didn’t mention before is that even a teammate healing the survivor you’re currently healing is detrimental to Autodidact, because it lowers your chances of getting Skill Checks. By letting your other teammates know you have this perk, they can make the informed decision to leave you two alone and do other things, so you can build up tokens and be more useful later on. And that’s it really. I never intend for perks to become meta when asking for buffs. Autodidact is kind of about the thrill of beating the odds and becoming the ultimate medic. Let’s hope it can someday do that better. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class!

TL;DR: Autodidact sucks because building up tokens can take a long time, and can regress healing at the worst times. To make it work more often, use perks like Empathy to find injured survivors and We’re Gonna Live Forever to offset the worst case scenario of Autodidact. Spine Chill and Solidarity are also good. To make the perk better, increase the chances of Skill Checks when using it, or reduce the required tokens. Notifying your teammates that you have the perk would also be a good quality of life change.