Distortion Is Fine

Okay, so, couple things I want to clarify. These aren't necessarily tied one to one with the order of your points, but I'll still number them for ease of reading.

1: First, the pickrate issue. So, there are a hundred things that go into a perk's pickrate which aren't necessarily the perk's strength or design space, and plenty of good perks don't get picked for a variety of reasons. These aren't always even the perk's restrictions- sometimes perks are less played because they're part of less popular chapters and fewer people actually own them, or because they started out bad and never lost the reputation.

What I want here, what I'm saying is good in this specific scenario, is for a player who isn't being swayed by any external influences to look at the available perks and have good reason to potentially pick any of them, depending on what exactly they want. That doesn't mean an equal number of players will pick different perks, one is probably going to end up picked more often because players love to optimise and follow trends (and separately most players aren't actually interested in crafting builds + evaluating perks neutrally, they just slap on whatever seems strongest), but that each perk could be used.

There are two things that might stand in the way of a perk fitting this criteria, and it's lucky we're talking about aura blocking because both of them have applied in the past. The first is the perk just flat out not being good enough to warrant picking over its competition. For aura blocking, that's Sole Survivor. That perk does see some use, there are people in this thread arguing in favour of it, but it's just fundamentally less accessible and impactful than the competition.

The second reason is if the perk itself is fine, but it's heavily outclassed by something that does too much. That's where Shadow Step was, and why Off The Record was never picked for its aura blocking effects. Now that Distortion is no longer flawless, they all - except for Sole Survivor - have viable niches. Before, you'd only be evaluating them on their secondary effects because Distortion made their aura blocking obsolete, and that's why a lot of people think Shadow Step is bad when it really isn't.

One of those niches is probably going to be the most popular one. Right now, it's probably going to be OTR, assuming the drama doesn't pass and everyone just quietly puts Distortion back into their builds. That's fine. As long as an unbiased player can look at all the perks and think "yeah, I could use any of these depending on my build", that's a perfectly acceptable spot. Pickrate has absolutely nothing to do with this because pickrate does not inherently reflect the situation I'm talking about.

2: Next I want to talk about Botany Knowledge, because it's a reasonably good example of what I'm talking about in this regard!

So, what does Botany do? Fundamentally, it exists to increase your healing speed. That's pretty broad, so are there any restrictions and conditions that go on this effect?

Yes! There's objectively one, and I'd argue there's sort of a second.

The first, objective restriction is that it decreases your efficiency on medkits. This is a meaningful downside that exists to stop the perk from getting out of hand, which is especially true when we remember that it was given this restriction while medkits themselves were massively overtuned, and Botany itself increased your efficiency on medkits. That's a restriction and condition that goes on the broad effect.

The second one, the more arguable one, is the percentage of healing speed. 50% is high, but it's not the highest in the game- and the highest healing speeds in the game right now go on perks with more restrictions and conditions, like We'll Make It and Circle of Healing. We can see from this that limiting the effectiveness of the perk is a form of condition and restriction that can be used to balance something broad. This is easier to see in something percentage based like Botany, but Distortion's stacks actually being meaningful now is another example of that.

Don't get me wrong, Botany Knowledge is not restricted by very much and that's why it's one of the best survivor perks in the game, but your example of an unrestricted, unconditional effect actually does have restrictions and conditions.

3: I suppose the last thing I should mention is to repeat that the supposed power creep of aura reading is not axing stealth as a tactic, because there are tools that counter it.

It's also worth mentioning that aura reading isn't thaaaaaaat popular? The last official stats we got from February only have two aura reading perks in the top ten, both of which Distortion comfortably counter and one of which you don't even need to use tokens on once you know it's in place - that being Lethal Pursuer and BBQ and Chili. While we shouldn't be citing Nightlight with the same weight as the official stats, looking over there just adds Nowhere To Hide into the top ten, which once again is a perk that Distortion can counter + you can start countering without using tokens once you know about it. That perk is a little overtuned, though, nerfing that would be entirely appropriate.

There's always a risk you'll run into other perks, of course, you might get caught out by any number of things you decided not to build against - I always seem to run into hex builds only when I take off my totem perks, personally - but it's hardly an overbearing and oppressive presence in every single match.

Couple things:

1: Why would pickrate go up based on this? The average player is not unbiased, they're heavily biased, and that's okay. It's not that pickrates have diminished relevance, it's that they have none, at all.

What I want to see in general, and what I think we're a lot closer to with Distortion, is for the perks to be considered all viable if someone whose biases don't conflict with them is evaluating. There's absolutely no reason to assume that necessarily should be a high enough percentage of players to change pickrates, especially considering the observable bias against anything that's been nerfed recently nine times out of ten. There were people claiming Adrenaline was useless after it was nerfed, people are not neutral, rational actors only approaching perks based on how good they actually are. The "unbiased player" I invoked is a hypothetical, a way of conceptualising perks and their balance without falling into the traps of downplaying, common misconceptions, whatever. It's subjective but it obviously has to be, all game balance is necessarily partially subjective otherwise you're balancing just based on stats.

That's why I'm not claiming anything surrounding pickrate. I don't care about it, we can't meaningfully sway it with this kind of change unless they're very heavy handed changes. Shadow Step isn't picked for a million different reasons and only one of them will, sometimes, occasionally, be the fact that Distortion outclassed it. Balance necessarily must be considered as a separate thing to common perception.

2: While Distortion may have a chance to not activate, it's still obviously possible for something to be overtuned even with the restriction that it won't automatically activate.

If, say, Unbreakable healed you to full multiple times a match and also gave you a permanent +100% repair speed boost for every time you pick yourself up, it would obviously be way overtuned even considering that there's a very real chance the killer will never slug you and therefore you may never get to use it.

The fact that it isn't guaranteed is why Distortion is allowed to still be good and effective, but it being perfect is still overtuned. As long as it still blocks auras in at least reliable niches, which it does right now, the extra restrictions are not only okay, they're appropriate.

Also worth mentioning that Botany has become completely irrelevant to this conversation all of a sudden.

3: We're circling around the same fundamental disagreement here, but those are strong picks in their respective niches.

Part of the issue here is a general unwillingness, from everyone and not just you, to consider what auras you want to block. None of them are 100% effective against all forms of aura reading and that's completely okay, it's appropriate even. When you think about wanting to play stealthy, you now actually have to think about which perks you think are most damaging to your gameplan and then pick your counterpick respective to that. You don't even need to be going for active stealth to be thinking about that, frankly.

I don't expect that to change, obviously. Most players don't want to think about things at all, and that's okay. It just also doesn't translate to the changes actually being bad because the old thing doesn't work exactly the same anymore.

To clarify: Not only do I understand that, I've been arguing from that perspective this entire time.

Distortion does need to be better than OTR at aura blocking because that's all it does. It also needs to be slightly better, or at least more accessible, than Shadow Step because while Shadow Step is another aura blocking perk primarily (split between that and scratch marks being blocked), it has its secondary effect active no matter what. It should probably be about comparable to Sole Survivor, but it isn't and that's Sole Survivor's fault so that isn't too relevant here.

This is about the fourth time I've acknowledged that, and about the fourth time I've pointed out that it is. It's just got some gaps, which the other perks (except SS, yadda yadda) could now be considered more appealing for if those gaps are all that the player cares about.

The debate always comes back, it seems, to pointing out that aura perks are not universal and you should probably consider what you want to block before you bring a perk. Lethal and BBQ, as you mention, is a perfectly appropriate combo for Distortion to block- you block Lethal at the start, you're probably hit by the first BBQ, but the second is blocked by Distortion and now you know to avoid it without tokens. Distortion at worst is faltering at a single aura read and it's perfectly okay to sometimes be seen by the killer.

Another set of perks that would be appropriate to bring Distortion against would be things like I'm All Ears, Predator, and Zanshin Tactics, especially if you want to break chase. Distortion shines in this niche too.

What Distortion's weaker at is keeping you safe from auras consistently while performing an action, like generator repair or healing. That's a niche that Shadow Step fills, though, so if you find yourself wanting that most, you have an option there too. Distortion is the best overall, the others are specialist perks that can cover some of Distortion's gaps at the cost of being less consistent overall. This is perfectly acceptable as an outcome.

I'd disagree with that, certainly. That wouldn't be appropriate.

It also wouldn't be appropriate to add a token system to, say, Exhaustion perks, or something like Botany Knowledge. Nerfing perks isn't always appropriate, and the end result wouldn't always be okay. Distortion is fine after the change it received, the other perks you or I mentioned wouldn't be if they received comparable changes.