Items Discussion

I've been thinking on some things to myself about items and I thought, why not ask everyone else their opinions?

I'm more specifically referring to finding items in-game through searching chests.

All of my Dead by Daylight gaming experience, I've had a love/hate relationship with items and, more specifically, perk builds that center around scavenging items in the trial. Perks such as Plunderer's Instinct, Ace in the Hole, Appraisal, etc. I love the concept of just pumping out resources mid-trial to be utilized and, assuming all goes well, brought back to the hoarded collection. But at the same time, it can also feel like a massive waste of time for resources that might honestly not even be worth it, especially when running Plunderer's Instinct.

It might sound weird to say that given this perk is giving you higher quality items, but higher quality items can - and often does - amount to maps and keys. A map's not going to do much for you and while it's always exciting having a possible escape out of the hatch should things go wrong, I'm the kind of player who searches for resources for the team. You could say that a medkit to use on yourself is just as "selfish" a playstyle, but me healing myself makes me less vulnerable to the killer (hence buying chase time) and gives my teammates time to do objectives rather than patch me up. So, in the end, I find a medkit to be helpful to the team even if you're using it on yourself. A dull or skeleton key, however, does nothing for the team as a whole. And obviously, a broken key is worthless unless you're also running Ace in the Hole and happen to actually get an addon or two that do something.

Which kind of leads me to my problem with Plunderer's Instinct. Sure, it's awesome getting higher quality items when they're actually of an item type you want, but otherwise, it feels like more of a hindrance than an improvement. Maps aren't completely useless, but are often situational and a lot of players can locate the things they track. Keys are only useful for scrounging a surprise escape for one player at the end (unless, again, you're running Ace in the Hole and manage to get addons that work.) So that leaves flashlights, toolboxes, and medkits.

I'm really in no position to talk about flashlights since the only thing I can blind reliably is a Nemesis zombie.

Toolboxes are nice, of course, but if you get a lower quality one, the time you're saving on a generator is around the same time you spent opening that chest, and that doesn't include the time you took to run to that chest. Having a short burst of progress when you really need it can be incredibly useful, as Potential Energy can attest, but I feel like in many situations, looting a chest to get a toolbox will merely negate the time you spent finding and opening the chest. Sabotaging is always an option, of course, but I feel like to make that work somewhat reliably, you'd have to run a perk build revolving around sabotaging hooks.

So that leaves medkits, which I feel like (for a player like me, at least) are the only item worth looting a chest for mid-trial. If Pharmacy didn't have the injured requirement to activate it, I'd be running that perk waaayy more often. Not only does it guarantee the only item I see as worth spending the time to get, but it greatly reduces that time spent doing so.

As it stands right now, I feel like there's little incentive to actually hunt for items in a trial when you can just bring your own (likely superior quality) item that you have the option to shape your perk build around. Which I think is a shame, because while pumping out generators is obviously what needs to be done to escape, it's sad that other little "side quests," if you want to call them that, don't have much use or impact in the trial.

This is all just my opinion, of course. I'm really curious to hear what you guys think. :)