Stale Survivor Meta and an idea on how to increase build diversity! [Please Read]
Borrowed Time, Decisive, Dead Hard, Unbreakable, and sprinkle in the occasional Iron Will.
This meta build for Survivor has remained this way for YEARS and has remained that way because these perks all provide the same thing: Second chances. They punish the Killer for attempting numerous strategies.
The Killer downs you after you are unhooked and he either picks you up and gets stunned for 5 seconds or he leaves you and you get up for free with Unbreakable or a teammate. Killer is about to down you because you messed up but Dead Hard comes back in 40 seconds and you make it to another pallet/window and you extend the chase by an additional 30+ seconds.
Borrowed allows you to happily unhook in the Killers face and they can either hit you and have you become injured, hit the unhooked Survivor and they have to mend or they wait out Borrowed Time and down them, only to eat Decisive or they use Unbreakable. Throw in Dead Hard as well because why not?
And Iron Will just negates the entire damn mechanic of HEARING Survivors, which is incredibly strong and always active when injured. Not only do ALL of these perks provide second chances but they work perfectly together as well, this results in 16 perks in game that provide second chances on TOP of having perfect synergy.
It's BORING. It's not fun or engaging in the slightest, you are forced to respect these perks because if you don't playing as Killer results in you losing because you dared to think they WOULDN'T run these perks. Entire perks whose mere existence conditions you to play differently even if it's possible that the Survivor isn't using them at all is unhealthy for the game. This applies also to NOED.
So what do you do? Well, what about a ban list kinda like what card games do?
Perks get put into tiers of limited 1/2/3. A limited 1 perk means you can ONLY bring 1 perk in this tier, so you put them all in a hat and draw exactly 1. If you put 3 out of these 5 perks in tier 2 or 3, you have to choose 2 or 3 and abandon the other 2.
Example: Borrowed/Unbreakable/Decisive are all put into 2 limit. I choose to use Borrowed and Decisive, but I can no longer use Unbreakable.
Survivors can still use these perks, they just can't spam them across 16 perks and run the same builds every time. This of course applies to Killer as well, put Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer/NOED in Tier 2, and you can only run 2.
You choose which of these powerful perks you wish to use, but you must choose a more diverse build.
Comments
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The way to increase build diversity is to actually start creating some good perks. Adding arbitrary restrictions to the decent perks to force people to use the bad ones is a stupid idea. The only thing it will accomplish is to make people stop wanting to play survivor since they are forced to use boring, completely useless and unfun perks.
If there are more than 5 good perks then different people will pick different perks and builds will be different. But we can't have that because as soon as they buff a survivor perk killer mains lose their minds and bully the devs into nerfing it back into oblivion(looking at you, Lucky Break).
If you don't agree with this it just means you don't actually want "build diversity", you want to force survivors to stop using good perks and you are just using "build diversity" as a justification.
Build diversity != using horrible perks.
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Too many perks are useless or so situational that you won’t use them, This goes for both sides.
survivors have the downside of not knowing what other survivors are going to bring so you can’t have diverse builds like an unhook build or a distraction build. The only way to communicate is with the barely visible chat (that nobody uses). But, if they are a console player you have no way to tell them. So everyone will bring safe solo perks. In swf you may sometimes see diversity in perks like idk an object of obsession if they have good communication or a troll build like for the people and soul guard.
the changes that they are making to some of the perks often laughed at by the community are going in a good direction like babysitter or for the people.
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Like you said those meta perks are simply the most effective and universal perks in the game. Also so many other perks are just very bad and conditional.
I sometimes like to make a chest hunting build or a team information build, I play solo only. But the meta perks are just too good and rewarding for nearly any situation.
When I bring a chest build: Plunderer's Instinct, Ace in the Hole, Pharmacy, and Appraisal. It is nice to get a lot of potential quality items for myself and to leave for teammates, but when other survivors search chests before I get to them, my entire build is already less effective. If the killer finds me early suddenly I have to deal with a chase with no supportive perks at all. Worst is if you are found and focused most of the game and by the end of the match I just feel discouraged to use such situational builds.
But many of the other perks require ridiculous conditions to meet and are still very situational for when they are used. That or they work in very specific scenarios for a very short time, and do absolutely nothing the rest of the match.
Meta perks can be used whenever and almost as much as the survivors want which makes them the most attractive options compared to other perks.
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This would probably be too complicated of a system for BHVR to consider.
Another option is expanding things like Exhaustion. That alone means that you can only bring one of those perks, Sprint Boost, Dead Hard, Head On, Lithe, Balanced Landing. These perks still see a fairly healthy rotation among perk builds, even if some are a bit more common than others.
- Something similar could be done for Decisive Strike, Unbreakable, Lucky Break, basically any perk that get's a one-time use. It could introduce a new 'status' like Exhaustion that was a permanent affliction for the rest of the match but functionally didn't do anything, but using any of those skills would trigger it. Could call it... 'Fortunate', you scored a once in a lifetime 'lucky break' and you'll never be that lucky again. Managed to DS the killer, no more UB, you've spent your luck. I would also add Adrenaline to this one, and take off the Exhaustion. (maybe as a small consolation, the 'Fortunate' effect could increase your luck by 1% for the rest of the trial)
- Then a third option would be unhook procs. Borrowed Time, We'll Make It, Deliverance, Babysitter, etc. Only one unhook proc perk can trigger at any one time, and if you're running multiple unhook perks then either there's a priority system or it chooses one at random. While BT will probably still be the meta, at least survivors can't hedge their bets with BT and WMI/Babysitter, or farm an unsafe activation for Deliverance.
- There could probably be some way of making Iron Will and Distortion exclusive too, maybe Iron Will has 5 tokens, and whenever the killer comes within audible distance (24... 32 meters or something?) it consumes a token and you make no noise while injured for x seconds, probably at least 20, so it's still effective. But the catch would be those tokens are shared with Distortion, so if Distortion procs, then you lose an Iron Will token too. Throw in Appraisal too, as that's a token based perk.
So then you can only take 1 Exhaustion Perk, 1 'Fortunate' Perk, 1 Unhook Perk, and 1 Token Perk. Added to the upcoming limit of 1 Boon Totem Perk, and you've got a neat system of restricting perk loadouts without actually limiting what perks survivors can equip. You could always equip multiple Exhaustion perks after all, you'd just be screwing yourself over, and sharing tokens between Iron Will and Distortion would be gimping them both, etc.
Post edited by Seraphor on0
