Will the reworked Dead Hard remain an Exhaustion perk and if so, why?
Following the update, I don’t actually understand how Dead Hard is meant to meaningfully function now, especially as an anti-tunneling perk?
You’re limiting it to a hypothetical maximum of two activations per trial and it’ll do little to discourage tunnelling straight off the hook as survivors already have basekit Borrowed Time and won’t be able to use it back to back if they’ve already suffering from Deep Wound.
Admittedly, if they get away and mend then it can be saved for later as normal, but it makes even less sense to be an Exhaustion perk than Overcome does, with its limited potential for activations unless you’re going out of your way to be hooked or the killer has no trouble hooking you (in which case it won’t make much of a difference).
The only reason to keep it an Exhaustion perk when it goes live is to limit its functionality into absurdity. Exhaustion was fine when you could only use it every 40 seconds (less with Vigil) or even up to 6 times with this initial PTB revision but not now where some games may never allow it to activate if you get an instant 1st stage sacrifice as the last survivor.
With the proposed activation on being unhooked or self unhooking, Dead Hard needs to either regain it’s old invincibility frames (which is unfair to Trapper) or lose the Exhaustion effect, unless the intention is to make it the weakest Exhaustion perk by a decent margin.
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thats really easy, so you cant run it get its bonus and then lithe away.
DH is still strong for a good player, its endurance on command if you met the requirements.
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It’s still going to be meta with this change, it still needs to be an exhaustion.
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I don’t see how it’s going to be meta if they keep it an Exhaustion perk AND have a charge requirement that may never happen if you’re a better looper than the killer or get your 1st hook as the final survivor.
How meta is Decisive Strike these days?
I’d argue D-Strike will be stronger than Dead Hard if the latter goes live in this revised state.
The point is that Dead Hard’s Exhaustion aspect won’t interact with its charge requirement, being unhooked or self unhooking clears any Exhausted status and so keeping it an Exhaustion perk is purely to prevent its use alongside other Exhaustion perks and to interact with killer Exhaustion effects.
So why would anyone choose this twice nerfed Dead Hard over Mettle of Man or Off the Record or Styptic Agent?
Why not just use any other Exhaustion perk, none of which have charge requirements (beyond being healthy for Overcome) and can all activate every 40 seconds or less with (multiple) Vigils?
Having multiple activation requirements on a perk that isn’t even guaranteed to work in the first place isn’t balanced, nor will it stop those of my fellow killer mains who’ll keep complaining about Dead Hard as long as it exists in any form.
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I was fine with the original PTB Dead Hard, which go easily give 0 activations of the perk the entire match. That was a massive nerf, that the perk deserves, since it's been the most complained about survivor perk for so long.
The huge un-nerf of DH is what I'm not fine with. Giving every DH user 2 free activations is a huge un-nerf, and DH should be reverted back to the original PTB version, or it needs to be nerfed more so it's at the same nerf-level as the original PTB DH.
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This second revision GUARANTEES that a survivor won’t have DH active on your first chase with them, that’s huge and something I don’t think’s been the case in the history of the perk’s existence?
Also under the previous revision a dedicated player could easily get enough safe unhooks for a respectable 3 uses, if not the full 6. Now their potential for DH uses is 1/3 of that at max, provided they’re unhooked twice, which is even less guaranteed than them safely unhooking others.
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A dedicated player, in solo q, would likely need to waste a bunch of time hovering near injured survivors, and hovering near the survivor when they are hooked, to ensure that none of the other survivors get to the hook before they do. And if two survivors decide to be dedicated, then there will be even more wasted time not doing generators.
The more likely scenario is the average DH user, that will likely just be repairing generators while other survivors are chased, and might miss out on unhooks if they aren't near the hooked survivor. Regardless, a perk where someone actively needs to go out of their way to ensure activations (and still might end up with 0 activations), is much less appealing than a perk that gives free activations.
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Your first mistake was thinking that DH was an anti tunneling perk.
It's not. Anti tunnel perks usually have a maximum time limit on their use and deactivate themselves on doing a conspicuous action. Dead Hard doesn't have either of those stipulations.
It'll function exactly as it does on live except that it won't be available during your first chase.
The reason it is still an exhaustion perk is so Survivors can't have both Dead Hard's 3rd health state and Sprint Burst because that'd be broken.
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All you have to do is equip Empathy or Kindred, sometimes if you want to get value out of a perk, an info perk is the easiest solution.
Taking it further, a traditional DH (team) player could be trying to take hits to prevent others getting hooked, because their build is about avoiding being hooked themselves.
Regardless, unhooking people to get value out of perks is nothing new, you don’t equip We’ll Make It and then complain you didn’t get a boost to altruistic healing when you never went for the unhook.
And ultimately they’re not free activations if you’re losing a hook state for them, they’re a consolation prize.
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1) Altruistic DH isn't common. A survivor usually needs to be in point blank range to bodyblock, at which point the killer would be in range to just tap M1 instead of lunge. And many of the higher tier killers with mid range attacks (e.g. Blight and Wesker) can usually just go around someone that is trying to bodyblock, unless that person is blocking a narrow doorway.
2) Unhooking people to get value isn't new, but notice that We'll Make it isn't meta either, because it is a situational perk. Original PTB DH absolutely would have had a much lower pick rate than new DH
And yes, they are still free activations, because they aren't earned, and happen just from playing the game. A survivor could just spend the game repairing generators, not bother with unhooking anyone, and still get activations. It's the amount of effort required that counts.
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It’s hilarious that the vibe of many of your replies is that you don’t believe the average survivor (or at least you as a survivor) really cares to unhook others and yet the latest iteration of Dead Hard is wholly dependent on the user being unhooked to get their ‘free’ charges :D
And even if you plan on self unhooking through something like Deliverance or Slippery Meat, it’s only going to give you 1 ‘free’ charge at best, not the hypothetical potential for 6 (or more) the previous 2 iterations allowed.
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Most survivors wouldn't care about a hypothetical 6 or more potential. With the original PTB version, they would quickly notice that some of their games ended up with 0 activations, and would drop the perk.
Also, we know the new DH isn't really worse than the original PTB version, because these forums aren't flooded with complaints that DH got "double nerfed in one PTB". And considering that survivors went from "the PTB dead hard is awful" to "thanks BHVR for listening to feedback", we are very sure the new DH is a huge un-nerf compared to the original PTB version.
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See, I’ve always considered Dead Hard an inherently selfish perk, but with great potential for altruistic use like with MoM.
But the lone wolf types, the type who aren’t out there unhooking and healing others, I immediately begin to doubt they’re worth unhooking, especially when they likely won’t do the same for me and so they aren’t getting any ‘free charges’ out of me unless it was too early in the game for me to see how they really play.
And so despite what you might think, those ‘free’ charges still need to be earned and you earn them by showing me and the more jaded of your solo teammates that you’re worth unhooking.
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The only way the previous iteration was problematic (from my perspective) is if someone was farming charges, denying others the chance to earn them, yet even then, they couldn’t farm charges from their own unhookings.
And here’s the thing, despite winning ‘the most used survivor perk’ several years running, more recent stats show it’s only equipped by 1/3 survivors, down from its 3/4 popularity of years past and so the probability of multiple Dead Hard users competing for charges isn’t that high, meanwhile SWFs can always plan around it.
Now, this doesn’t stop randoms unintentionally denying the Dead Hard user charges, but this is the same problem plenty of other unhooking and also totem related perks have and so with the previous iteration’s potential for upwards of 6 charges, I didn’t see the possibility of not getting max charges as making it weaker than the current iteration that requires that you’re not abandoned on hook.
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And please, any change that doesn’t completely remove Dead Hard from the game will be considered as an advantage to survivors, the community is full of people who talk nonsense.
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So you can't run it with another Exhaustion perk, simple as that.
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I don't think it's healthy for the game for a perk to have more than 1 condition to only active (with a situational effect) , even more so when it comes to an exhaustion perk
I see that at best people may start using DH with another exhaustion perk, but save DH exactly for the EGC using it as a kind of Mini Off the Record, but still very risky and not worth spending the slot.
I think that at this point it's more worth reworking DH, but keeping the perk concept, and as I won't repeat myself, here's my proposal:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/306524/just-one-idea-about-the-dead-hard-rework
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And as I’ve already discussed, that doesn’t work from a balance perspective now it requires being unhooked to activate, when being unhooked clears Exhaustion.
Mettle of Man isn’t an Exhaustion perk, Off the Record isn’t an Exhaustion perk, Borrowed Time isn’t an Exhaustion perk using a Styptic Agent doesn’t inflict you with Exhaustion and so on, nor do any of the other Exhaustion perks outside of Overcome needing you to be healthy, have a secondary activation requirement that caps how many times you can use it a trial.
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Mettle of Man has a much more difficult activation requirement and you don't get to choose when it goes off.
Borrowed Time doesn't affect you.
Off The Record doesn't need to be an Exhaustion perk because if you get any value out of the perk, you get Deep Wounds anyway.
A Styptic Agent is a one time use add on, with a set duration timer, that consumed the item it is on.
These are all really, REALLY bad examples.
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They’re not REALLY bad examples, they’re alternatives, especially as Behaviour is promoting the latest Dead Hard as an anti-tunnel perk.
For Borrowed Time, it’s giving someone you unhook a better chance of getting Deep Wounded if the killer chooses to tunnel them, which technically the newest iteration of Dead Hard doesn’t guarantee if they can’t Mend from a basekit Borrowed Time hit.
Off the Record is again a deterrent to being tunnelled off hook by extending that Endurance even longer, in addition to silencing you.
Mettle of Man is the other 3rd health state perk and unlike the latest Dead Hard you can get it without ever being hooked, just take 3 bodyblock hits to stall a potential hooking to charge it and it’s guaranteed to take a hit without worrying about mind games or lag.
Styptic Agent, like new Dead Hard, is something you bring into the trial that ‘might’ save you being downed once and hey, you don’t have to be unhooked first and it frees up a perk slot.
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You asked why it was an Exhaustion perk, and I told you. It is straight up more powerful than all the other examples for all the reasons I listed.
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It WAS more powerful, when it wasn’t restricted by whether randoms unhook you. Likewise, an experienced player who avoids getting hooked will get little to no power out of it and then the other Exhaustion perks don’t have a cap on their uses, making them more viable in general.
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The ability to negate a hit, at will, on your own terms, without a time restriction is more powerful, period. The activation requirement doesn't change the reality.
And if you are not getting hooked, you don't NEED Dead Hard. You are already bowling a perfect game.
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And that’s not something Dead Hard gives you :D
It’s not MoM or an extended Exhaustion effect, its a half second window subject to lag and mind games and now you have to be unhooked to even gain an attempt at its circumstantial effect in the first place, it’s not ‘on your own terms.’
And if you’re an experienced player who’s confident in your abilities, then why not swap Dead Hard for literally anything else, maybe something with half the limitations?
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If the new DH really were worse than the original PTB version, then these forums would have been flooded with complaints. And that would include survivors demanding the new DH change be reverted, if they really thought the original PTB version were better.
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I’ve already addressed this
Instead we have people complaining it still has value and as such, despite being the only Exhaustion perk with a cap on its uses and which is now 1/3 of the cap offered by its previous iteration, it needs more nerfs ITO until no one would ever dare use it, not even as a meme and no one will ever again attempt Adept David King because Dead Hard’s penalities need to be made so great as to make the Adept achievement impossible to do :D
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You didn't really address it. Considering how much complaining people have done with this patch, do you really think people would just silently sit back if they thought DH got nerfed twice in the same PTB? Do you think DH got nerfed twice this patch, but it's such a sneaky double nerf that only you figured it out, and everyone else is just oblivious to the double nerf?
Yes, we have people complaining it still has value. It could have been massively nerfed like the original PTB version, but now we get a watered down nerf that's not anywhere near as good of a nerf. The original PTB version was still usable as a situational perk for people that were dedicated to making unhooks (like you claimed to be), so people like you could still use it. The big difference is it would have been a situational perk and not a "everyone gets 2 free activations" perk.
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I don't think the Exhaustion is necessary from the angle of what Dead Hard now does, but that's only one of the reasons Exhaustion exists- it exists to limit the uses of a specific perk, and to prevent those perks from being used together, at least easily.
From that angle I think DH still having Exhaustion attached to it makes total sense. It's not hard to see that chaining together a Sprint Burst into a Dead Hard, or a Dead Hard into a Lithe, would be very impactful, even if the chain can only happen twice- because it's very strong those two times, and the other Exhaustion perk is still there for the rest of the trial without being deactivated the way Dead Hard is.
It's like how Iron Will has an Exhaustion element. Being able to chain together every perk in the game, without any restrictions beyond what any specific one perk has to activate in the first place, would create some pretty busted loadouts.
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As I said in the other thread, I think I’m just coming from a different perspective, one that others HAVE agreed with no less.
Again, the original PTB version wasn’t a significant nerf, it was just adding Deliverance style rules into the mix. Altruistic players still had no trouble earning similar uses of that PTB version to what they were getting with the current live version, which is 3 on average, equal to unhooking each of your fellow survivors at least once like a good team player.
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Shouldn't you be glad that when they nerfed this perk they still left it semi-useable, similarly to Eruption?
They usually nerf the strong perks into uselessness, like Ruin, but every once in a while they manage to actually balance a perk.
For what it's worth, for some perks the nerfs into oblivion were necessary, like CoB and Overcharge, since they had a very powerful effect that activated without any interaction with other players.
But I think this Dead Hard change is actually brilliant.
If you want to use DH, you either have to go without any exhaustion perk for your first chase, or you have to use another perk slot with a different exhaustion perk. (Brings back memories of when people used to run original DH and Balanced Landing in the same build a while ago.)
And as killer, your first chase with every survivor will nearly always require only 2 health states to down the survivor, ensuring that they won't be able to waste as much of your time at the beginning of the game, when the killer is at their weakest and the other survivors are slamming gens.
My prediction is that Dead Hard usage will drop for a little while then gradually rise, but not to the same level that it was before.
For what it's worth I play both sides, and give this nerf an A-. It could be better, but I'm not sure how. A very good perk balance!
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If you removed the Exhaustion then the change wouldn't be a nerf anymore.
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Everyone will run it if you remove the exhaustion requirement. It would become an extra health state that you get after every hook that you could also run with lithe/sprint burst. That's way too powerful my dude. Not running it would be like shooting yourself in the foot. It's not even a choice at that point.
With the exhaustion requirement, you have to choose, do you want one extra health state per hook, or do you want to be able to extend chases an extra 20 to 60 seconds depending on the map.
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No, I'm not glad at all, because I removed Eruption from all my perk loadouts because it's completely useless to me. Eruption's ability to regress or stall generators is trash compared to what it used to be. I also removed CoB and Overcharge from all my perk loadouts, because those are all trash compared to what they used to be too.
And I don't care if people can't use it on the 1st chase. I still potentially have to deal with 2 DHs per survivor that has the perk equipped, and since the DH's actual effect is exactly the same, it's just as unfun and awful as it currently is.
And it could be better if the original PTB version went live, where the person being unhooked doesn't get DH, so I don't feel an urgent need to hit them immediately after being unhooked.
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I disagree that being able to combine it with another Exhaustion perk is a problem when MoM exists, which doesn’t require skill to have it protect you and has no problem stacking with Exhaustion perks in live. Meanwhile as I addressed earlier, if Dead Hard is meant to be an anti-tunnel of hook perk, then Off the Record is just as reliable.
And as a Nemmy main, I literally deal with 3rd health states all the time without issue. Sure it sucks for M1 killers, but they all need proper reworks over nerfing just 1 survivor perk that overly screws with them, but the latter is admittedly the quicker and easier option.
Even without Exhaustion, it’s still permanently reduced to 0-2 uses, each of which you have to trade a hook state for, whereas the live version is only limited by Exhaustion and the previous PTB iteration could be used multiple times if you were altruistic and all without losing a hook state. That’s a sizeable nerf and one no other Exhaustion perk has to deal with.
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It's almost as if BHVR has realized that regression perks as a concept have been way too strong across the board, crowding out any other perk that doesn't slow the game down from ever being used, while making the mid/late game easier for killers and harder for survivors than they think it should be.
Meanwhile the DH nerf makes the early game easier for killers and harder for survivors, allowing killers to have an easier early game in exchange for a (slightly) harder mid/late game when taking the self heal nerfs into account.
Sounds good to me for both sides; more perk variety, less of a possibility of having 3 gens done before your first down, more encouragement to heal altruistically. I don't see the problem.
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Or the early game will be worse, because the killer won't have any great regression perks to slow down the generators. The DH nerf didn't happen in a vacuum. The gen regression perks were better than all the other slowdown perks, and they all got nerfed, but none of the other slowdown perks got buffed, so now killers are stuck with worse slowdown than before.
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That's the point...
If survivors can't heal themselves as quickly or easily, nor have a third health state from the get go, killers will have quicker access to best way to slow down the game: downing a survivor. And if you can do that more easily, you won't need to rely on regression perks as much, and therefore make do with the nerfed ones. Corrupt, Pop + Eruption, Sloppy + Jolt, Deadlock... hell, even Ruin + Plaything + Penti are all viable options. Or, maybe with this new patch, slowdown perks won't even be "necessary" anymore, but just another option for those who want them, with the end goal in mind of BHVR weaning killers off of their opiate "slowdown perk" addiction.
They're trying to adjust the game so that slowdown perks aren't considered needed anymore, but are still there for those who want them. Why don't you want that? And why are you complaining about a new meta that hasn't even had time to form yet?
The patch hasn't even been released and you're treating the nerfing of some quite unhealthy perks as a disaster without considering the "compensation" killers get in other areas...
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Many games are 100% altruistic healing, which isn't nerfed at all, which means survivors will heal themselves as quickly and easily as they currently do. And SWFs can use their voice comms to easily coordinate altruistic healing.
And no, BHVR gave up on trying to make slowdown perks not needed anymore. They had a great idea for a chase oriented meta, but that can't work when SWFs can heal each other in less than 10 seconds, and it can't work when survivors have easy access to 3 health states.
Dead Hard is super unhealthy for the game. A perk giving someone a 3rd health state means that killer will be encouraged either to tunnel DH users off the hook, or to tunnel anyone that the killer sees use a different exhaustion perk, since those people are likely to only have 2 health states. And do we really want survivors to feel like they are specifically being tunneled for only having 2 health states?
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