Change ideas I would make to Skull Merchant's perks

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Azulra
Azulra Member Posts: 399
edited March 23 in Feedback and Suggestions

As most of us should know by now, Skull Merchant's perks aren't very good and it's not because of their effects, but rather because of some of the design flaws that come with the perks. These are my change ideas for these perks and each change will have an explanation after it to give my reasoning for why I would make these changes. Feel free to give some constructive criticism to these change ideas as it is welcomed to see thoughts on my ideas.


Game Afoot(current version):

  • Whenever you hit the Survivor with the highest cumulative Chase time, with a Basic Attack, they become the Obsession.
  • While you are chasing the Obsession you gain a 5% Haste effect after damaging a Generator or breaking a Breakable Wall/Pallet for 8/9/10 seconds.

Game Afoot(my version):

  • Whenever you hit a Survivor with a Basic Attack they become the Obsession.
  • While you are chasing the Obsession you gain a 5/10/15% faster action speed for both damaging Generators and breaking Breakable Walls/Pallets and for vaulting and you gain a 5% Haste effect for 8/9/10 seconds after performing the damage/break action.

Explanation: The first change you'll notice is that I removed the "highest cumulative Chase time" feature from the perk and this is for two reasons where one is because this can just simply make changing the obsession with the perk a little annoying and the second reason is because I've found that this feature promotes tunneling so that you can force the obsession to change to another survivor which no perk should naturally encourage tunneling. You'll also notice that I added in an action speed bonus effect to make triggering the perk's Haste effect slightly faster so that this perk feels more like a chase perk. The faster action speed for vaulting could be removed if it is too much though since it's not necessarily a needed change.


Thwack!(current version):

  • After hooking a Survivor, Thwack! activates.
  • The next time you break a Breakable Wall/Pallet all Survivors within 28/30/32 meters of your current position will scream and reveal their Aura for 4 seconds.

Thwack!(my version):

  • When you damage a Generator or break a Breakable Wall/Pallet all Survivors within 32/34/36 meters of your current position will scream and reveal their Aura for 2 seconds.
  • After Thwack! is triggered the perk will enter a 60/45/30 second cool down.

Explanation: The first, and most noticeable, change I made to this perk is the replacement of the perk charge from hooking survivor feature in favor of a cool down. The reason I have behind this is for the fact that the perk's effect doesn't feel like it is strong enough to justify it to be like Pop Goes The Weasel where you need to hook a survivor to activate it for a singular use. The second change I made to the perk were slight value changes for the range of the perk and the duration of the Aura-reading. This change can be reverted if needed due to how minor it is though.


For Leverage I have three ideas for the perk where one(my favorite change) is the most complex change and the other two changes are relatively simple, but all three ideas could potentially prove to be a good change to the perk. Yes, Leverage is a good perk in terms of its effect, but is, ultimately, dragged down by both its activation trigger and effect duration. Each idea will have its own little explanation as well.

Leverage(current version):

  • Each time you hook a Survivor, Leverage activates and gains 1 Token, up to a maximum of 10 Tokens.
  • For each Token, the Altruistic and Personal Healing speeds of Survivors are reduced by a stack-able 3/4/5% for the next 30 seconds, up to a maximum of 30/40/50%.

Leverage(idea #1):

  • Each time you hook a Survivor, Leverage activates and gains 1 Token, up to a maximum of 10 Tokens.
  • For each Token, the Altruistic and Personal Healing speeds of Survivors are reduced by a stack-able 3/4/5% as long as a Survivor remains on a hook and the effect lingers for an additional 5/10/15 seconds once there are no survivors on a hook, up to a maximum of 30/40/50%.

Explanation: The main changes made in this version is that the effect is constant as long as there's at least one survivor on a hook and there's a little lingering effect which will give effective healing slow down both before and a little after an unhook.

Leverage(idea #2):

  • Each time you hook a Survivor, Leverage gains 1 Token, up to a maximum of 10 Tokens and activates after an Unhook action is performed.
  • For each Token, the Altruistic and Personal Healing speeds of Survivors are reduced by a stack-able 3/4/5% for the next 30 seconds after an Unhook action is performed, up to a maximum of 30/40/50%.

Explanation: The purpose behind this idea would simply address the flawed activation trigger for this perk due to the fact that survivors commonly heal the most under or near hooks that they just rescued from so by time the survivors would be healing there'd only be roughly 5-10 seconds left on this perk if you are lucky enough. Also this idea would essentially turn the perk into the opposite version of the survivor perk called "We'll Make It."

Leverage(idea #3):

  • Each time you hook a Survivor, Leverage activates and gains 1 Token, up to a maximum of 10 Tokens.
  • For each Token, the Altruistic/Personal Healing speeds and Generator Repairing speeds of Survivors are reduced by a stack-able 3/4/5% for the next 30 seconds, up to a maximum of 30/40/50%.

Explanation: This is, by far, the simplest idea. This is just an alteration to the current perk to make it so that even if the survivors aren't healing they'll still be slowed down with the generators. This alteration to the perk is mostly for if BHVR don't want to do major perk behavior changes to Leverage while still giving it a worthwhile effect to justify the flawed activation trigger of the perk's current version.

Post edited by EQWashu on

Comments

  • Blueberry
    Blueberry Member Posts: 13,238
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    The problem with Leverage is it’s a small percentage for a high requirement. High cost/low reward.

    Either keep the percentage low but literally remove the timer. So permanent 5, then 10, then 15 ect. So very weak at the start by better as it goes on.

    Or

    That percentage needs to be like 30% + at least for 45 seconds + to all.

    So we’re either lowering the risk or raising the reward. It’s currently complete trash.

    Your versions make it better, but it still looks very weak.

  • Blueberry
    Blueberry Member Posts: 13,238
    edited March 23
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    Thwack I like your version. The perk isn’t good enough to require hooks whatsoever. Pallets are limited and so are gen kicks now.

  • Azulra
    Azulra Member Posts: 399
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    That's why I suggested to have the hook requirement replaced in favor of a cool down because there's just no reason for it to be like that.

    The main change ideas I made for Leverage wasn't exactly necessarily to make the perk stronger(besides from the 3rd idea), but rather to fix the flaws of the perk.

  • DrDucky
    DrDucky Member Posts: 675
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    The problem with your Thwack change is that it is just a side grade and too similar to Nowhere to hide to be changed this way. Other then that these are decent changes.

  • Rulebreaker
    Rulebreaker Member Posts: 1,510
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    Game Afoot: While we like the idea, it would probably be a problem with Rancor and Noed. Hit down mori, hit down mori, etc.

    Thwack: Iffy on the CD times but overall the change would make it much better.

    Leverage: If we had to pick one it would be choice 1.

  • Azulra
    Azulra Member Posts: 399
    edited March 24
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    If needed, the perk could be kept to exclusively walls and pallets. I just put on a generator activation as well to get it to activate more often.

    With your concern about the idea involving the Game Afoot change, that combo kinda already exists in AFK builds so it wouldn't exactly be anything new or different there.

    For your concern with Thwack!, I was discussing with a streamer (who not only plays DBD, but is also working on their own game making them suitable for these kinds of topics) yesterday after showing them this post I created and they had the same concern so I mentioned to them that if the cool down time were to prove to be too fast then it could be bumped up to 100/80/60 seconds if need be and they agreed on that cool down time being more suitable than the current one.

    Also it's nice to see that you prefer my favorite idea for a change to Leverage. :)

  • DerpedByDave
    DerpedByDave Member Posts: 47
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    Leverage: definitely needs a rework all of your ideas are way better then it's current state

    Thwack: I find is good on killers that can play around pallets like Wesker & chucky (or using knight's guards to break) you can save your thwack for a survivor with a flashlight then break the pallet while they try to blind u causing them scream mess up the blind and almost always get hit. So not sure about the gen kick thing as it could take away from that play style, but the perk definitely needs a bit of a buff overall.

    Game Afoot: the problem with switching the obsession on every hit is the perk would be way to oppressive with nemesis or Pwyf, It would basically guarantee 60s of oblivious and a 5% speed boost on every hit.

  • Crowman
    Crowman Member Posts: 8,917
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    Game afoot was already changed so the exposed doesn't apply til after the obsession swap. So unless the survivor is already injured, it's not a surprise rancor and the survivor team could constantly body block to get everyone out.

    Plus I believe game afoot only works with m1 hits so it won't help nurse.

  • Azulra
    Azulra Member Posts: 399
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    Thwack!: Another user also mentioned this concern and, as I mentioned to them as well, could have the new activation trigger removed if need be for balancing.

    Game Afoot: Nemesis isn't exactly all that great of a perk unless you are using the Nemesis + Furtive Chase combo so I wouldn't see a problem with Nemesis + Game Afoot if this change was made for two reasons: 1) 4 seconds of aura-reading after performing an M1 on a survivor isn't all that useful and 2) Oblivious can actually be useful to survivors while looping at high-wall loops since it'd make it easier to listen to the killer's footsteps. Plus it doesn't hide the killer's red stain as well so there's that-

    Leverage: Thank you for saying this :)

    They're referring to NOED as well because the way the AFK build combo works is that you just AFK the entire match until NOED is active, insta-down the first survivor you find with NOED, Game Afoot swaps them to the obsession, then Rancor allows you to perform a mori on them. For me, I still don't really see how changing Game Afoot as I showed would make this combo any worse than what it currently is besides the need of the killer to just AFK the entire match to use it properly.

  • Rulebreaker
    Rulebreaker Member Posts: 1,510
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    The problem would mostly stem from it more than likely becoming more common. The AFK currently would have to put in work to get more than one person as swapping obsessions requires getting stunned, blinded, hooking the current obsession, or hitting the survivor with the most chase time. This change as soon as that last gen pops, the first person hit gets killed, whether it was the current obsession or not. Theres no warning till their dead unless its a swf with the obsession saying "hey they got rancor".

    Again, we're just iffy on what the CD should be. We'd need to see in a live test but its still a good idea overall.

    Azulra covered our reasoning. Plus we don't care bout nurse, we care about the majority of the roster.

  • Azulra
    Azulra Member Posts: 399
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    I've just thought of a potential solution to your concern which is that Game Afoot could possibly have a new restriction coded onto it to not apply to survivors who have the Exposed status effect much like how it was updated in the past so that special attacks will not work with the Exposed status effect. Just like my idea I posted for my solution to FTP + BU (in case you didn't see that yet), I find adding restrictions to perks to prevent overly-unbalanced perk combinations is always a better solution than to just nerf perks(unless if the perk itself is the core issue such as like old MFT or current Background Player).

    Also, agreed, the only real way of seeing if these changes would be good or not is by putting them in a PTB to see if the general changes are good and if anything needs to be tweaked. As for the cool down, like I said, if the cool down for my idea to Thwack! is too short then it can be bumped up to 100/80/60 seconds because, typically, if a perk has more than a 60 second cool down players will start to complain about it and refuse to use it hence why Dragon's Grip, Oppression, and Trail Of Torment have such low usage rates due to their 80 second cool down timers.

  • Rulebreaker
    Rulebreaker Member Posts: 1,510
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    If the devs would do that then a lot of complaints would be down already...

    Regardless of that, not entirely sure it would fix the first down thing because of how the game technically works. Until some is hit they're technically not suffering from the exposed status. Or it's hidden. We're not sure, hence the maybe maybe not.