Whispers shouldn’t proc on Hooked survivors.

Whispers is a killer perk that sees very little use and has also not been updated since version 1.0.5! So seeing as we are now in version 9.3.0 I would love to explain how I use the perk, the issues with it and how I would change it.

Whispers is a flexible and reliable killer perk with low stakes and proportionate strength. It asks nothing of the player and in return rewards them with vague but ultimately helpful information. I believe it shines in few very specific scenarios already but I believe it has a lot more potential than its current strength leads on.

Two scenarios in particular where Whispers can be helpful is at the start of a trial and near the end of a trial. Now that all survivors spawn close together, this perk will alert you to the location of the whole team. This saves you from doing a full map sweep just to have a gen repaired before you even find the survivors! Additionally, as survivors start to thin out and you are left in a trial with less and less survivors, Whispers will start to play a much bigger role as the information becomes much more important and the Whispers procs will be more precise. This becomes especially true when patrolling 3gens and Exit Gates, and can save you from doing a 2 minute march between gates when the RNG odds may be stacked against you. What you will come to find is that Whispers is generally excellent for combating stealthing which is a very underrated and strong survivor technique!

Personally, my favourite way to use Whispers is on killers who require some form of setup, particularly on The Executioner. When I’m approaching a gen Whispers is my queue to start leaving trails at loops that are adjacent to the generator so I can increase the odds of a survivor becoming tormented. This same tactic can be used on killers like Trapper, Skull Merchant or even Hag.

And speaking of playing these killers, you’ll notice I didn’t list any high mobility killers, and that’s where Whispers shines again. Whispers allows low mobility killers to patrol gens faster, by shortening their patrol path as Whispers will not activate when approaching gens that aren’t being worked on and conversely, will activate long before you can even hear a gen being repaired.

Unfortunately there is one thing holding back all of these wonderful qualities and actually severely inhibiting the utility of this perk and it’s very simple. The problem is that Whispers currently activates on Hooked survivors. This means that so long as you’re within 32 metres of a survivor on hook you receive no information whatsoever from Whispers because the hooked survivor will proc the perk permanently until you’re no longer in range. This is what I believe is holding the perk back from being viable.

In case you’re thinking “This sounds abusable or like it could potentially be problematic and enable camping.” I can explain why that is not the case. Yes, disabling tracking for hooked survivors would allow killers to have a general idea if there are any survivors stealthing for the unhook. However if we take into account that the range for building up the anti-facecamp meter is 16 metres it would mean that for the killer to not activate this whatsoever they would have to circle the hooked survivor carefully only gathering information on survivors within 32-48 metres of anywhere near the hook. Furthermore let’s not forget that Whispers in this scenario can only give you vague information compared to things like aura reading which I will get to very soon. The most you will know is that within 32 metres all around you, that there is a survivor… somewhere… This is why all in all I believe that this proposed Whispers buff does not help to enable camping. (And also why do I need whispers to tell me that there’s a survivor on hook? I can see their aura permanently bro)

So why Whispers?

For starters, Whispers has many innate qualities to it that already make it an appealing option. Not only is it entirely free and global and comes on every single killer without having to prestige anyone but it also is a perk with no conditions, cooldowns or limitations. You can absolutely use perks like Barbecue & Chilli if you’re okay with only seeing auras more than 40 metres away and once every unhook, or you can even use perks like Friends Til’ The End or Alien Instinct to see the aura of just one survivor every hook. That is until any survivor has Distortion, or a nearby locker, or even has Off The Record active. Whispers simply just… whispers! That’s all there is to it. Its simplistic and easy to use nature combined with its support for macro gameplay is what makes me fall in love with this perk. Whispers isn’t for the fast paced killers of the world who need auras and need them now, it’s for strategic methodical killers who rely on macro knowledge to better outsmart survivors to the win. 

I hope you take my feedback on board and listen to players like me who love your game dearly and furthermore care about these ancient relics that remind me of the days of old DBD.