Bad Perk University: Hangman's Trick

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. Forgive me if I sound particularly frustrated this time around, because there is barely any positivity left in me after trying this perk out. I’m talking about Hangman’s Trick. This perk just baffles me in its design and I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would ever use it.

Hangman’s Trick sounds as terrible on paper as it does in practice. Whenever you’re carrying a survivor, you see the auras of any survivor that is within 6m of any hook on the map. You also get a noise notification when a survivor is attempting to sabotage a hook.

So why is this perk bad? The information you’re meant to get from this perk is just not worth it. 6m is an abysmal range for an aura reading perk. I know this perk used to have a much larger range, accidentally making it better than BBQ and Chili, but it never saw the light of day. Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s meant to show you the aura of whoever’s trying to sabotage the hook you might be going to. OK but, why would you need a perk for that? If they’re trying to be successful in sabotaging the hook, they’re going to do it when they see which hook you’re moving towards, which usually means they’re within vision, which means you already see the survivor that’s sabotaging your hook. Do you really need aura reading for that? Noise notification? Again, you can see them doing it. You don’t need a perk to tell you that. It is worth noting that you can see auras incidentally, like survivors healing under the hook or survivors going for a hook save. I guess that’s nice, but that would be nice information to know BEFORE I’m carrying a survivor, not WHILE I’m carrying them, because clearly I’m already busy with something. The few times I used this perk that my sanity would allow, I have never gotten useful information from this perk, if any. And I have had so many matches where every survivor was using Dead Hard, it boiled my blood. Let’s just say, my experience with this perk has been wholly unpleasant, and I wished I was using any other bad perk I’ve talked about so far. Any of them. The funny thing is, this perk would have been more useful in the old days of DBD, when hooks took a while to sabotage. Survivors would have stayed near hooks long enough for the perk to do something. But the perk was different back then too. Instead, it made it so hooks regenerated after 10 seconds. The shocking thing is that that would be a better effect for the perk to have instead of what we have now. Well, not the 10 seconds thing, the hooks regenerating faster. If it were something like 8 seconds or even 6 seconds, it would be a nice counter to sabo plays. What happened here? It’s like these versions of the perk were designed out of order. Did a time traveler go back in time and swap the design ideas as a prank to the developers?

So how do we make the most out of this perk? The only thing I can think of for this perk is as a supplementary perk, not the one that does most of the work. You’d bring other, better aura reading perks like BBQ and Chili, or even Thrilling Tremors, as your main information, and Hangman’s Trick would give you incidental information that may help you, but usually won’t. I also think of the Agitation, Mad Grit build, maybe with some Iron Grasp. The thing is though, that build’s enough of a meme already, do you really want to throw in Hangman’s Trick and make your life miserable? You want a fast way to decrease your morale and destroy any hope you have of trying to have fun in DBD while everyone else uses meta perks? Throw Hangman’s Trick into any build, but especially this one. The aura reading you get from this perk does not help you in any way when using this build. The whole point of Mad Grit is to hit the survivors that try to bodyblock to prevent the hook. Maybe you could use it to know when a sabo is happening and you won’t make it in time? Again, you usually see the survivor sabotaging the hook, so you can already know whether or not you can make it. I could have talked about Mad Grit instead of Hangman’s Trick because I feel like it would have given me more to talk about. But no, I have to make a separate post about Mad Grit someday!

Seriously, that’s all you do with Hangman’s Trick! Just use it to know when a survivor is sabotaging a hook. That’s all it’s good for, and it’s not even necessary to have the perk to know that! You want to know the part that broke me when trying to make this perk work? When I sent myself to every indoor map in the game and still got my face kicked in by every meta survivor perk in existence, because I thought “Hey, indoor maps tend to have hooks that are clumped closer together. Maybe I’ll get more frequent aura reading that way.”. But no, that didn’t happen! All it did was reinforce the fact that I’m being a moron, going to all this effort trying to use Hangman’s Trick. I never want to use this perk ever again! I already got my Adept Pig achievement, I don’t need it anymore!

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? Give it its old effect of bringing hooks back faster, make it take like 8 seconds, and buff the aura reading range to 10m. That’s it. I really don’t care enough to suggest much else. It wouldn’t be a great perk, but the faster hook respawning would be a far more useful effect at least. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go try out a more fun perk, like Streetwise. Thank you for coming to my lesson, but I don’t blame you if you didn’t. See you next class!