Bad Perk University: Corrective Action

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 the most recent bad perk I can think of things to talk about. Corrective Action. I actually love this idea for a perk. You start the trial with 3 tokens and can gain up to 5 tokens by landing Great Skill Checks. What it does then is that when you’re working on a generator with another survivor and they fail a skill check, this perk prevents the failed skill check from triggering and instead replaces it with a Good Skill Check, making it as if they never failed the skill check at all.

So why is this perk bad? The obvious problem with this perk is that it’s designed around failure. More specifically, it’s designed around the failure of your teammates. At least with Technician and Bite the Bullet, they have effects that are purely beneficial and don’t rely on making a mistake for them to function. Corrective Action meanwhile requires that another player makes a mistake, something purely out of your control. And if it’s a high mmr match, survivors aren’t going to miss skill checks unless there’s a rather extreme circumstance. The 5 tokens you can get from Corrective Action is honestly just laughable, as you’ll be lucky to use up even one of those tokens in a match. Every match, and I mean, EVERY match where I tried using this perk resulted in me not having to use the perk, winding up dead, or both. It’s not even like the perk has a bad effect or anything, but if you and your teammates are playing the game correctly, you’re not going to need this perk. Now maybe you’re thinking, “Oh, what about Oppression, Overcharge, or Huntress Lullaby? Corrective Action might help with those, right?”. Well, for most of those perks, no. Corrective Action only works for normal skill checks, so failing the difficult skill checks that Oppression and Overcharge apply wouldn’t be prevented. However, since Huntress Lullaby skill checks are just normal skill checks with the sound delayed or muted, missing those would be prevented. Is it worth bringing Corrective Action for that? Not really, no.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? Probably the best way to actually use the effects of this perk is using it when playing with a friend who’s extremely new to the game. They don’t have any perks unlocked besides the starting ones, they haven’t gotten the hang of skill checks yet, they don’t even know what looping is. By bringing this perk with you and sticking as close to your friend as often as you can, you can mitigate the fact that they’ll be missing skill checks more often than other players, reducing how much of a liability they’ll be. On the subject of playing with a new friend, it might be a good idea to ask your friend to run Technician. I know Technician is known for its detrimental effect of regressing generators even more for the minimal upside of not making a loud noise notification, but the smaller range where repairing sounds can be heard can be marginally more helpful. If you run Technician as well, you can both pair up on a generator and be a bit more stealthy, while also nullifying the main downside of Technician. For your friend though, you still have to land skill checks. Since Corrective action only works when you and a teammate are working on a generator together, Prove Thyself is an obvious choice. Prove Thyself is lowkey overpowered, allowing a pair of survivors to crank out a generator in roughly half the time. Even though the common strategy is to split up on generators to make it hard for the killer to pressure multiple survivors, if you’re trying to make Corrective Action happen, Prove Thyself will make it worth the trouble at least.

But why would you use Corrective Action with experienced players? Well, while it doesn’t happen very often, there’s one fringe scenario where Corrective Action is kind of nice to have. Getting a skill check while leaving a generator. We’ve all had this happen at some point. You’re working on a generator with someone and then the killer comes barreling toward you two. The other survivor quickly gets off the generator, but gets a skill check the moment he lets go, which naturally fails and regresses the generator. That sucks, right? If you have Corrective Action, you’ll at least prevent that from happening and eliminate a minor inconvenience from your match. It doesn’t work if that same scenario happens to you, but this is what happens when you have to grasp.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? The thing is, what this perk is supposed to do is good. Preventing failed skill checks is fine and everything. And I would probably be fine with this perk if it was a general perk that all survivors had access to, but it’s a teachable perk, one you have to unlock. This perk is themed around correcting the mistakes of other teammates, but not your own. That’s fine, but it’s a perk that basically does nothing for yourself and is designed around your team screwing up. The only real changes I’d make to this perk, if anything, is to make it work on any failed skill check, not just normal generator ones. To reduce how strong that would be, you could reduce the number of tokens to 3. But at the end of the day, it’s not a perk that has a lot wrong with it. It’s just an extremely underwhelming perk that you paid Iridescent Shards to unlock. It’s not game breaking like Circle of Healing or detrimental like Distressing, it’s just kind of...there. Oh well. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class! Hopefully we can talk about a more interesting perk.