Hooks vs. Slugs. Which Tactic is Best?

Hooks allow for permanent preassure while slugs allow for temporal preassure.

If you are a killer that has to manage a resource, you are more likely to slug.(Oni, Plague, Pig, Myers)

If you are a killer that has low cooldowns and easy access to it's killer power you are more likely to hook (Hillbilly, Bubba, Nemesis, Demo, Dracula, Spirit)

Simple answer? Your views on the actual benefits of hooking are skewed. Examples: Friends till the end can work on its own and you don't need to combine it with others for it to do its job well enough while Make your choice is entirely incorrect.

I have to admit, this whole debate about hooks no longer being worth it has completely blindsided me and I have no idea where it comes from.

I do see a big list of perks that you can avoid by slugging here, but over half of those are specifically tools against camping or tunnelling so those aren't really relevant to the discussion, and a good chunk of the remaining ones aren't really so strong that they really warrant trying to avoid on the killer side- and that's the only real direct pressure to slug instead of hook that I'm seeing here, unless I'm missing something? Everything else just seems to be talking about the extra benefits of hook perks not being good enough.

What's often missing from these discussions, I've found, is the actual direct benefits of hooks before perks even come into play. Maybe it'd be most constructive for me to provide my understanding of the benefits of hooks, and then you can clarify why you think that no longer applies in the current state of the game? Here's that understanding:

When you get a hook, you suddenly have a springboard to start spreading your pressure. The strongest pressure that a killer can get, short of a dead survivor, is to have someone on the hook- they are immobilised and incapable of doing generator repair, and they put time pressure on the survivors to get up and rescue them, moreso than a slug. A hook state is 80 seconds, and a bleedout takes 4 minutes, so the time pressure is much heavier from a hook than a slug.

When one survivor gets up to rescue their teammate, you - the killer - should already be chasing a third, leaving only the fourth survivor able to do generators freely. Finish that chase quickly, and you start the cycle again, keeping up pressure that survivors have to react to or they'll lose immediately.

The whole point of spreading hooks is to keep up that cycle of constantly forcing survivors to react, and pulling them away from generators to do it. Slugs do achieve a similar goal, don't get me wrong, but less so and without the direct progression towards your goal that hooks provide.

I'd also like to point out that you mention killer nerfs and survivor quality of life, but… killers get buffs and quality of life too, all of which is geared towards leaving the hook because that's the basic expectation of fundamentally competent killer play, it's just how the game works. You even mention Furtive Chase in your post, which is one of those buffs!

As an aside, that Furtive Chase/Nemesis build is a fun one I use too, but it is a bit of a gimmick if you're putting all your eggs in that basket. If you want to increase your chances of winning, you should probably consider a slowdown perk or something for chase instead of Play With Your Food, which I don't think even works in this context, since it requires dropping chase with the Obsession when you need to hook the Obsession to activate FC.

In order:

1: So, part of what makes this argument not land for me is that it sort of implies that the act of hooking is itself just a timesink, and not something you get a benefit from… but you do get a benefit from it. You're spending those few seconds each time to make survivor generator efficiency plummet afterwards.

Because hooks are better at immobilising survivors (they cannot move from a hook, they can crawl towards their teammates if slugged) and provide a much sharper time pressure, any damage you do to the survivor team while someone's on the hook adds up to exude far more pressure than just leaving someone on the ground.

2: You're right, I fatfingered that. Hook timers being shorter bolsters my point, though. It's the time pressure that matters more than the immobilising, since slugging provides comparable-if-slightly-weaker results from immobilising but significantly worse results from the time pressure. Survivors have to react much sooner for hooks compared to slugs, since bleedouts take so long- as they should, to be clear.

3: See point one, hooking isn't a wasted timesink, it's time spent to achieve a benefit.

4: So, I said this in the main post, but how many of those perks actually are there for punishing just hooking?

Every anti-camp and anti-tunnel perk is out, they don't count for this conversation since you can hook and still easily avoid them. We should also make sure we aren't giving anti-pickup perks too much weight here since they, too, can typically be avoided fairly easily (and the ones that can't are unbalanced, not a fair element of the game, like Flashbangs not being avoidable by looking at a wall- that's a problem itself regardless of other context) even while going for hooks.

That leaves us with a few perks for self-unhooking, one of which is practically throwing (Small Game), one of which is extremely situational (Wicked), and the last of which is strong but not something the average player can make much use out of (Deliverance). None of these are particularly popular, so the risk of encountering one is quite low. Not exactly compelling all on their own, so are there any others?

Well, there's some miscellaneous perks like Resurgence, Breakdown, and Dead Hard. Those are good, for sure, none of those are bad perks… but enough to outweigh the significant advantages of getting a hook? I don't think so, personally. Progressing my objective and damaging survivor generator efficiency with hooks is more than worth a quicker heal, a broken hook, and a limited attack parry potentially being in play, as far as I'm concerned.

At most we have five perks you'd realistically avoid this way, only one of which is even potentially game-swinging enough to warrant it. Is that really enough pressure to avoid all the benefits of a hook?

To be clear, I'm not saying "never slug, slugging is worthless". I'm specifically responding to this idea that just turbo slugging is inherently better than hooking, obviously leaving a survivor on the ground sometimes is worthwhile.

And can gain no permanent pressure doing it.

You don't have access to arguably some of the best killer perks in the game and don't activate regression or slowdown.

This is also hard countered by what some people consider the "most difficult category" of matches, since SWF with comms can just say "he's camping my body, stay on gens", or "he's leaving me, so you can get me up", or even "I have unbreakable, just leave me".

Getting the survivor back up means you have no pressure again, and have also made zero progress toward your objective. You don't have a permanent hook stage, and you've basically made no progress in the match.

It's the killer wasting time, which is interesting that killers suddenly have all the time in the world, and don't need slowdown suddenly. I guess it just depends on what you feel you need to say to get X thing changed that you don't like.

What people are looking at, and hoping for, is that this is more effective against solo q. So, good job identifying a pub stomping tactic that only serves to inflate kill rates and your MMR until you eventually go up against the group that can counter it. Then cry on the forums for nerfs because you can't just slam your face on the keyboard and win anymore.

Well, if all you want is to get a viable understanding of how to play the game and stand a good chance of winning, that's something I can help with.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that it isn't necessarily about builds, it's about playstyle. Perks and builds can absolutely help and I'll talk a bit about them in a minute, but we need to be careful not to start implying that going for spreading hooks is the absence of a strategy— it's a strategy itself, just like tunnelling or slugging, with the difference being it's a much more stable strategy that won't be nearly as vulnerable to balance changes. If you learn the fundamentals instead of crutching on one specific cheese strat or perk choice, you're not gonna be hurt as much if that cheese strategy or strong perk gets nerfed.

It's also not necessarily about specifically getting 12 hooks every match, there are pretty legitimate reasons that might not happen even if you're making sure to hook players and you're making sure not to tunnel anyone— take, for example, matches that reach the endgame where two survivors go down back to back and both die on their second hook instead of their third. That's a pretty reasonable thing to happen and not something we're necessarily trying to avoid, so "12 hooks" isn't our goal, spreading hooks is our goal.

I've already laid out the fundamental idea: Hook a survivor, chase a second survivor, drag a third survivor off gens. This dismantles gen efficiency, and directly progresses to your objective, as well as giving you access to more perks to use on your end if you want them. Making sure not to be around the hook and to be occupied with something else as quickly as possible cuts out huge swathes of survivor perks you might be worried about here - even aggressive survivors that want to bodyblock with their Endurance can't do it if you're halfway across the map chasing someone other than the unhooker.

So, what kind of perks and builds would we bring to make this strategy stronger? Let's take a look:

• First of all, one of the biggest flaws I often see in a player's gameplan, whether it's talking about their games on the forums or when I play survivor myself, is that they don't have anything for the early game. The very start of the match is when survivors are at their strongest, so if you want the safest chance to win, you need to have a strong start. The two best perks for this are Corrupt Intervention and Lethal Pursuer. Corrupt Intervention forces survivors to run away from the gens they spawn on, both delaying generator repair and forcing them to run towards you, and Lethal Pursuer allows you to pick the most advantageous chase by targeting either the largest group of survivors or the survivor that's the furthest out of position.
• Moving on from that, info perks are crucial. You really have your pick of which ones you like best, but the idea is to spend as little time as possible looking for survivors after a hook, and immediately get into a chase where possible. There are directly hook-based info perks that are the most obvious picks here, like BBQ, Alien Instinct, and Friends Til The End, but strong mid-match info perks like Gearhead can give you up-to-date info on where survivors are while you're chasing, meaning you can go there and have a better chance of finding them when you've gotten a hook.
• Chase perks, too, can be strong if you don't go overboard. Stacking your whole build into something like Spirit Fury/Enduring/Hubris/Brutal Strength can definitely be fun but it's a gimmick, it isn't a balanced build that'll reliably help you win games. Sprinkling in a few good perks that block resources (Bamboozle, Hex: Blood Favour, etc) or that help minimise your downtime/gain an edge in chase (Save The Best For Last, Coup De Grace, Brutal Strength) is totally worthwhile if you feel your chases are taking too long. Which ones you want are going to depend on your killer, and some killers like Nurse or Huntress don't really benefit much from any of them. On those killers, aura reading in chase (I'm All Ears, Zanshin Tactics, Predator) are better chase perks than the others.
• Next up is slowdown perks, and it's important not to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to run four of these. That can work, certainly, but it's a fragile gameplan and you have asked for something safer and more reliable. One or two to make each hook you get more damaging is absolutely worthwhile; the obvious best pick is Pain Res as it's the strongest killer perk in the game right now, but quite a few are viable. I'm personally quite fond of something like Gift of Pain paired with a perk like Agitation or Iron Grasp to better control where you hook someone, but since you've stated you play Wraith, I'll also mention that Eruption really shines on a killer that can attack multiple generators quicker than normal.
• There's also nothing wrong with endgame perks. The game isn't over just because the last generator finished and you haven't lost yet either; something like No Way Out can absolutely give you the extra edge you need to close out a match at the last moment.
• Finally I want to mention hexes, but only briefly. Hexes, in theory, can really bolster the basic strategy of spreading hooks because you can hypothetically get a fourth survivor off generators to take care of the totem… but realistically they don't tend to last that long, so I'm not going to hype up hexes as a safe, reliable, stable way of winning games. What I will do is say that specifically the perk Pentimento is quite strong in this capacity, as you can get some value out of a more obvious hex like Devour Hope and then get some slowdown out of it once the survivors cleanse it, for a minimal investment. Gens going slower gives you more time to generate pressure, which in turn makes them take even longer to finish.

With every perk that I've just mentioned, it's important to put them in the right context: Occupy survivors as much as possible by forcing them to react to time-sensitive situations like someone being on the hook. It's also important to remember that slugging is still a viable tactic to sprinkle in during games like this - I am not suggesting you quit slugging outright. If someone's hovering around for a flashlight save, for instance, you can absolutely leave that downed survivor on the floor to take care of the pesky flashlight wielder.

The final thing I want to mention is that, whenever you alter your gameplay in such a massive way, you should expect an adjustment period. You aren't perfect at a new character when you first pick them up, and adjusting your gameplay to fundamentally pursue different goals is much the same way. You might lose a little more at the start, but you'll be building better fundamentals that allow you to get far more value out of far more tools, without nearly as much risk of a single nerf ruining your gameplan.