The Strange Case of Shoulder the Burden, the META perk that nobody uses.

Remembering back to when Doomed Course released, this perk was easily the most hyped part of the chapter, a perk that let people trade hook states around, which could help Survivors keep their teammates alive if used correctly. There were two prevailing opinions, on one side you had killer mains decrying this perk as flagrantly overpowered and would serve to further divide the power gap between the high tiers and low tiers, on the other you had Survivors mains being extremely happy they had a additional anti-tunnel option that was at the very least interesting to use.

There was a 3rd opinion however, that being my opinion, the opinion that this perk is not worth the code it’s written on or the space it takes up on the perk list, people on DC’s launch were calling it the newest Meta perk, calling it game-changing, calling it whatever, and then about a month later the perk’s use rate promptly fell off of a cliff and everybody moved onto the next supposedly meta defining perk. My opinion has slightly softened but since Doomed Course came out I have seen StB used a grand total of 7 times up until I tried using it myself to see if I was right or not, 5 of which ended in a Killer victory, and all of them happened within the first 2 weeks of the chapter’s launch, I have legitimately never seen it used since except when I was running it, now that could be down to me just simply playing less because ARC Raiders and Monster Hunter have me firmly in their grip, but it does raise a question.

So, if Shoulder is so strong and meta defining, why isn’t it used more?

Let’s first start by seeing what the perk does. If you have StB equipped, you can press an alternate button to unhook a Survivor, doing this will transfer that Survivor’s hook state to you, make you scream, and Expose you for 60 seconds. On paper this feels like a fair trade, keeping a player in the match for longer at your own personal expense, played well it can heavily tilt the match in the Survivor’s favour, played poorly it can give the Killer a free kill.

Let’s be clear on one thing, I am not saying the perk is bad, what I am saying is that the perk is not worth using and is kinda overrated.

Let’s first list the perk’s weaknesses that I feel a lot of people overlook before moving onto why it isn’t worth using.

Reason 1. StB has a massive amount of risk to it.

With the vast majority of Survivor perks in DBD, there is minimal risk to either you or your team if you misplay. Perks like Deliverance or Unbreakable for example, you might get caught out first or the killer might not be slugging aggressively, in which case they don’t do anything, or you could be running something more obviously risky like No Mither or Weaving Spiders, perks that have strong effects on paper but carry a large amount of risk to yourself that make them not as good as they could be. Shoulder, to me, fits into the latter category. A lot can go right with the perk, but a lot can also go wrong. The killer might find you during the 60 seconds of Exposed and down you easily, your teammates might get the unhook before you can, the killer might just be playing in a way that makes the perk impossible to use or just not effect the outcome of the match that much. In the few scenarios where it goes right Shoulder is great, but in my opinion a lot of people tend to overlook the many scenarios where it can go horribly wrong.

Reason 2. Opportunity Cost

Something I feel not a lot of people really consider is the fact that every perk in DBD has a opportunity cost, running a perk for situation X might leave you out of luck if situation Y happens, in DBD's case you could bring a perk dedicated to anti-slugging, but that means that slot isn't used for a different perk to make healing faster, or some anti-tunnel, or something to help in chase, etc.. It also means that slot isn't being used by a different anti-slug perk that might work better in a specific scenario, Unbreakable only works when YOU are downed, versus WGLF which works when your teammates are downed, they both do the same thing, just in different ways.

Shoulder is, primarily, a anti-tunnel perk, which means it's competing with the likes of Babysitter and Decisive. Now, in pure mathematical terms, Shoulder is better then DS in this niche, DS only benefits the user, becomes inactive if you do a objective, and is disabled in end-game, Shoulder can be used on 3 other people, is always active until it's used, and can be used in end-game. The problem I have with it comes from the aforementioned risk involved, the worst DS can do is you missing the skillcheck and the perk doing nothing, as stated before the worst StB can do is get you killed early and give the killer the chance to snowball. You're trading something that is virtually guaranteed to work for you and you alone in exchange for something that could potentially swing the game in your favour or completely ruin any chances at a survivor victory.
There is also something to be said about real life costs. Now that Halloween is out of the game DS is a common perk findable in the bloodweb for everyone, StB is a DLC perk that requires you to either spend money or grind the Shards needed to unlock Taurie, then grind the BP needed to prestige her to unlock it for your preferred Survivor. A free perk compared to a perk that costs time and/or money, not exactly a hard choice for a new player that might not stick with the game long enough to want to buy a DLC.

Reason 3. StB does literally nothing for you as a individual player.

Many of DBD's best perks benefit the user, which then tangentially benefits the team by keeping you alive longer or completing a objective faster, however there are also plenty that don't do anything for you as a individual player and are centred around helping your team directly. Perks like Botany, Reassurance, BT, Leader, etc. Shoulder is a perk that falls into the latter category, you give up a hook state and risk dying early to keep a teammate in the match for longer. This in and of itself isn't a problem, however, as previously stated, no other perk in the game carries the same amount of risk that Shoulder does, remember, using this perk wrong can give the killer a free win, which makes the fact that it doesn't help you avoid this risk in any way on its own particularly risky and often requires building a perk loadout around it in order to minimalize that risk.

So with those out of the way, allow me to give you the one, very overlooked reason why Shoulder is not worth running.

Shoulder The Burden is entirely reliant on your teammates being good at the game to generate value. This is where I'm going to get uncharacteristically cynical, so be warned.

Lets say you hop onto DBD SoloQ, you have roughly 2000 hours, you've been playing for a while, know how to play against most of the roster decently well, and have a good amount of gamesense. You load into a lobby and get paired with 3 other solos, the first is a Ada with roughly the same hours as you, the second is a Dwight with 5 hours total playtime, he got the game literally this morning, has no idea what he is doing, only has tier 1 perks, and hides in lockers the nanosecond he hears the killer's TR, and the third is a Sable with 1000 hours doing her adept, not exactly the worst thing in the world but still not ideal. You load in, the map is Father Campbells Chapel, you hop on a gen, and then you hear Kaneki's TR. The Ada DC's instantly because of course she does, you get chased and go down about 30 seconds later, the Kaneki BMs and hooks you, and you see the Ada bot on the other side of the map, Dwight in a locker, and Sable in the basement using Weaving Spiders. The match ends in less then 10 minutes and you find the Kaneki was running quad slowdown and doing a winstreak to impress the 7 people that watch him on Twitch, game ends, you move on.

Let me ask you a question, dear reader. Would you have used Shoulder The Burden to help any of these three other players? If your answer is yes, congrats, you have infinitely more faith in SoloQ teammates then I do.

The above scenario is strictly hypothetical and very much so exaggerated, most people you get in SoloQ aren't that ridiculous, but the point remains that the only way Shoulder is able to get value is for your teammates to be competent, which, more often then not, just doesn't happen. I played a small session to get a idea of consistently I as a purely SoloQ player could make use of this perk and you want to know what happened? I never had a chance to use it in over half my games because either my teammates unhooked before I could, my teammates were actually just useless, or I did get to use it and they died 30 seconds later anyway. You have no idea how infuriating it is to take a hook state for someone, that person to look you dead in the eyes, and then they run into the Killer anyway because it's Blight and they don't feel like playing that match out.

Now, is this the fault of StB itself? No not really, but at the same time, if a perk is meant to facilitate teamwork and actively requires you to sacrifice yourself to help other people, what exactly are you supposed to do when the people you are sacrificing yourself for are either next to useless or are actively trying to die anyway? Not use the perk? The perk that takes up 25% of your loadout and could have gone to literally anything else that would have benefited you more? Are you starting to see why I don't think this ######### is worth using? Yes, I am being cynical, yes, most of these problems are solved by just getting a friend to play with you, but that doesn't change that, in SoloQ, Shoulder is more often then not a waste of a perk slot, it carries too much risk and its ability to get value is almost entirely out of the user's control. I do not like perks like this, and its use rate reflects that.

These same problems apply to perks like Duty of Care and Last Stand btw, remember when people were screaming about how overpowered DoC was prior to the PTB? Wanna know how many people I saw using it on launch? One person, ONE.PERSON, and that doesn't even count because I was that person, I was the only guy on Orela's launch trying to seriously use DoC, and I got almost nothing out of it, and Last Stand? I have genuinely never seen it used outside of TWD's launch week when it made you invincible when vaulting. Lemme repeat myself, the perk that people were theorising was going to be extremely annoying was only used when it was BUGGED TO MAKE YOU INVINCIBLE, and as soon as it got fixed its use rate also fell off of a cliff and has legitimately never done a damn thing in any match I have played since it got fixed.

Stopping myself before I go off on a rant, what is the conclusion? Shoulder The Burden is a good perk in the wrong game. It is designed to keep players in the game for longer in a game where the majority of people either do not know what they are doing, don't care to know, or are trying to go next anyway because they're up against Kaneki for the 8th time that day and don't want to deal with it. The only way this perk will ever see a uptick in use rate is if a switch gets flipped in the DBD playerbase's collective conscious and people decide to start taking the game seriously.

But, is this necessarily a bad thing? Well, I don't think so, in fact I want more perks like Shoulder, perks that, while yeah are difficult or outright random to get value out of, at least encourage unique playstyles and can have massive rewards, big playmaker perks that can go amazing right or horribly wrong make matches more fun and keep them from being entirely one-sided stomps, we should have more then a tiny handful of perks that have that sort of potential, I just want those perks to be reliant on the user being good rather then relying on other people, appealing to what the majority of people want gets boring, especially when all they want is strong stuff that generate free value for existing.

TLDR: Shoulder is a good perk in the hands of people that know what they are doing, it's just bogged down by the fact that the DBD playerbase, at large, don't know what they are doing or don't want to play to begin with

G'night