If you hate Knockout, Lockers are your best friend

I feel like this a nothing solution. Most survivors slugged on the ground for the first time won't be aware of Knockout, and in the context of Solo Q a lot of players won't know the perk is in play until it's already working on them, wherein the annoying part of Knockout is that your teammates don't know where you are and you can't do anything.

So the crux of the strat already relies on teammates on comms or being psychic. You'd get picked up then hopefully, and now the question is whether the map you're on actually lets you play around lockers or if it's so full of deadzones you'd wish you loaded into a tombstone Myers match. Even then, why does a perks design encourage players to just outwardly avoid the game being played how it was meant to be played? Killers putting survivor into the dying state should be a natural part of how a standard match flows, Knockout turning it into something that needs to be avoided at all costs even at the cost of getting yourself hooked is simply asinine game design.

Inner Focus and Unbreakable are essential perks for me to take with this specific Knockout, Mindbreaker, Surge, Sloppy Butcher build going around at the moment. You still get a lot of decent use out of them in normal games which is a bonus.

Inner Focus shows the killers aura whenever somebody loses a health state. It also outlasts the blindness of Mindbreaker so as long as you stop doing a gen as soon as somebody gets downed, you still get enough of a look at the killers aura to know where the slug is. If you are against a teleporting or very mobile killer it may be advisable to let go of the gen a bit earlier so you get the aura closer to when the person gets downed.

Unbreakable is pretty self explanatory. Once you use it, you have to be a bit more cautious and use Inner Focus to help stay out the way of the killer for as much as possible.

Have a good few 4 man escapes against this build in solo queue now. It's satisfying as you know without it, you pretty likely would have got stomped.

Being able to stack multiple Shoulder the Burden on the same survivor, disproportionally rewards SWFs more than solos, because it is much much easier to coordinate this in a SWF with voice comms.

In fact, I'd claim the vast majority of the time that multiple survivors bring Shoulder the Burden to the same game, it is in a SWF with voice comms, because solo q survivors are way less likely to want to give up a hook state for a total stranger.

Beyond the fact that solo q really isn’t coincidentally bringing 4 shoulder the burdens to the same game….

1. Unless all 4 solo q survivors announce they all are bringing Shoulder the Burden (in a language shared by all 4 survivors), they might not even know they are supposed to rotate who makes the hook saves.
   
2. If the killer is camping and the survivors aren’t using voice comms, they might not be able to coordinate multiple survivors to help unhook, so that someone can bodyblock for the exposed survivor.
   
3. It doesn’t change the fact that the ideal number of Shoulder the Burdens in 3, with the 4th survivor having chase and anti-tunnel perks, with the survivors using voice comm location callouts, so the 4th survivor can easily coordinate bodyblocking (or otherwise know where the killer is so they can try to bait the killer into chasing them).

You know what’s sad? Most mechanics in this punishes solos more than SWF. That’s why this game can not be balanced properly. What’s a mere inconvenience to a 4 man SWF, can be devastating to solos. Add the amount of ragequitting/go next mentality in solo queue, and you have yourself one big hot mess.

The perk was not considered a problem until every other worthwhile killer perk and playstyle was nerfed. On that alone, I'm against the nerf. This is just complaining about killer, again, instead of the game state.

Blindness has always been a problem that massively affects solos more than SWF and it's something I've been wanting reworked for a while. It's just a more mainstream problem now, all focused on Knock Out due to the prevalance of slugging, when the actual conversation should be on solos, SWF, and why aura reading is not and has never been a suitable answer to the divide while Blindness remains unaffected. Knock Out is just taking the fall, but it's yet another symptom of an 8 year long problem buried beneath years of bandaids.

The problem there is that lockers typically (map dependent) aren't near gens unless it is like, killer shack. And if you are getting chased, ideally, you want to run away from gens, you have a little time before your down to plan being near a locker.

You said people can’t argue in good faith that it’s fine if things disproportionally punishes solo q.

And I’m saying people can argue that in good faith, because the general perception is that it’s fine when things disproportionally rewards SWFs.

I actually said you can't argue in good faith that it doesn't deserve a rework for the overall health of the game, because it disproportionately punishes solo and actively encourages a playstyle which bypasses the game's mechanics. I said 'disproportionately punishes solos more than SWF & actively encourages a playstyle which bypasses a large majority of the game's intended mechanics' because we are talking about Knock Out, not because it reflects the end of my opinion. When discussing a single perk, I am going to talk about the single perk. I do not think Knock Out in it's current state is healthy for the game, and will gladly take a return to far older metas (can we bring back 200% RuinDying, actually, now that Tinkerer's been buried) if it means the perk gets a rework, alongside other things such as Blindness as a whole, for the overall health of the game. My point is not just 'it's fine'.

You are arguing with someone who agrees with you, because the general perception is different. Glad we cleared that up.

Slugging survivors isn’t bypassing game mechanics.

The problem with slugging is that both sides of the game are sometimes stuck watching survivors bleed out on the ground.

And this is why I keep saying that if a survivor is slugged for 60 seconds, they should get teleported to a 2v8 cage. That fixes slugging for the 4k, it fixes extended Knock Out slugging, and it fixes survivors that purposely place themselves in situations where the killer can’t reliably get them to a hook.

Blindness affects solos more than SWFs.

We take that to mean that blindness affecting solos is bad. Instead, it just show SWFs breaking another game mechanic.

Also, I find it odd people didn't know Empathy was a direct counter to this perk. But I guess I shouldn't be. Lack of empathy is normal in DBD.

coffeecrashing says that you need to be 4 man swf to get use out of the perk. my counter-arguement is that you don't need to be a swf. you only need to equip the perk. Killer tunnel your teammates, once they hit 2nd stage, you use the perk on them and take a hook state off your teammate. now the killer gets **** in time management. a single usage of this perk is still decent value since a killer has to additional chase to get your teammate out. 4 man swf only removes the risk aspect of the perk because typical mindset to counter this perk is to proxy camp survivors on death hook then hook the fresh hook person into 2nd state. if everyone has shoulder burden, you can eliminate the downside of the perk and rush gens by hooking trading.

the perk gets even stronger vs killers that hook 1 person and slug. the 1 person that gets hooked has 3 additional chances instead of the 2. teams that run shoulder of burden+anti-slug perks are really tedious to play against if you adopt a hybrid play-style as killer. so this perk has now made me only slug or only hook and avoid hyprid play-styles. my problem is that i dislike slugging because most of the games that i have pure slugged, i have lost to good teams with 2E, 2 kills. so i don't favor said strategy but the perk punishes hooking. the teams that use the perk are kinda undefeatable.

The same could be said on killer perks that got gotta your just bias for your side

I see what you did there. lol.

Yeah I’ve been using empathy for a really long time as I find it to be a reliable source of info. Especially since it’s a free perk. But yeah it’s nice to see the survivor in chase so I know where it’s happening, I can see their animation if they threw a pallet down, I can see them working on gens or which gate they’re on and can take body blocks if need be.