How is Self-Preservation not just old Distortion?
I find it very funny that there was a giant debate for a couple a months about whether Distortion was healthy or not and I guess we decided it wasn't but then we reworked self-preservation to be an arguably better Self-Preservation considering the most common aura perks activate after a hook. Blanks BBQ, blanks Friends, will conditionally blank NTH and you get iron will on top of it.
I'm actually not complaining I'm pretty ambivalent towards the perk and sometimes use it myself and I think it's slept on big time rn, I just think how we got here is really funny.
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6.1.0 Distortion was pretty much active all game. It countered every Aura perk and add-on by just existing. I'm pretty sure it even recharged tokens while in chase even though the picture below says differently. It was also in the top 10 perks Survivors brought, I'm unsure about Self-Preservation though. They do need to release stats monthly.
If I where to nerf it I would add that Self -Preservation does not activate if you have less hook states than other Survivors.
Or make it affect all Survivors (similar to Open Handed) with the most hook states. To prevent tunneling.
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It's more random in its usefulness. Distortion was a guarantee and and the token wasn't used until an aura perk activated. SP is only active for a short while during a specific event. And, much like Distortion, killers not running post-hook aura likely won't even notice it. It shows up in plenty of my killer matches and hasn't affected outcomes (and i run aura). I still have eyes whether people have scratch marks or not. I believe it also doesn't block things that notify you of survivor whereabouts without aura.
Anything that's not Exhaustion or second chance should be welcome right not. People complain about meta perks all the time but even a mid perk that does something else comes out and encourages another playstyle and it becomes a problem. Not talking about this one so much, but it's a consistent thing and I'd like to have a little variety in playstyle. Sprint Burst and Vigil are my concerns as killer, not this.
If I where to nerf it I would add that Self -Preservation does not activate if you have less hook states than other Survivors.
They'll just get into a locker like they were doing without SP. This would also ruin the altruistic side of SP. I often see it run with unhook builds. People use the Elusive to get to the hook and fast heal with We'll Make It. If you take that away that makes the situation worse.
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I'm surprised some people aren't really using it considering it counters some of the most common perks in the game for mobility killers like BBQ or Friends Till the end. If everyone started using this perk, mobility killers would struggle a lot more.
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Call me old fashioned but back in my day we would just use our eyes and game sense to track down survivors. We didn't have all these auras or big pulsing red iconography shouting "Hey, over here!", we just looked for them and we found them. We practically have a quest marker system for killers in modern DBD compared to how it used to be.
If this is better than modern distortion then it isn't because it's super strong, it's because modern distortion has been nerfed into uselessness. It doesn't make survivors invisible, it just takes off the aura training wheels for a short time after a killer hooks someone. It's fine as it is.
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I hate it because there's this idea that chase has to be going all match with no down time, just ping pong between auras. some killers are just insufferable and exhausting having to stave off the whole game there comes a point when you just don't have the resources to deal with it. Like, what's a pallet or window gonna do against a Nurse? You need stealth in order to keep them busy without resources like by tapping priority gens and have them keep coming back
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It's more conditional, mostly.
Don't get me wrong, Self Preservation is a really good perk, good enough that a small duration nerf sometime down the line wouldn't surprise me even if I wouldn't push for it myself, but it's still restricted more than old Distortion was.
Distortion activates based on when the killer actually tries to read your aura, so it's impossible for any use of the perk to be wasted. Before, it also had the distinction of the token system not really mattering because you got them back fairly quickly and with very little downtime because being in the killer's terror radius is something that happens naturally.
Functionally, this meant old Distortion just turned off the concept of aura reading in 90% of matches you brought it. There were specific setups that could beat old Distortion, but they were the exception, not the rule.Self Preservation though, because it activates from someone else being hooked and has a timer, can have procs wasted wrt aura blocking, because it's not as good at stopping the killer from using mid-chase perks, or perks like Nowhere To Hide, things in that vein. It's very good at blocking hook-related auras, obviously, but it's weaker proportionally at everything else.
This actually puts it very nicely in line with current Distortion, funnily enough. That perk's very good at blocking early auras like Lethal and mid-chase auras like I'm All Ears or Predator, but it's proportionally not as good (but still worthwhile) at blocking off-hook auras since you need to be chased to get tokens back.
Self Preservation is the other way around. They're both strong, viable picks depending on what you want to achieve with your aura blocking, while allowing Distortion to still be the generalist pick that works more smoothly than its peers.Anti-aura is in a way healthier spot than it used to be, that's for sure.
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Self-preservation only works to counter two perks, I believe. Barbeque and Chili, and Alien Instinct (if you're injured). Otherwise, unlike old Distortion, you're still vulnerable to every other aura reading perk 30 seconds after your teammate was hooked. Such as Nowhere to Hide, Darkness Revealed, I'm All Ears, Gearhead, Weave Attunement, etc etc.
It definitely has as much utility as old Distortion in my personal opinion, a great alternative to use in the current meta. But old Distortion was far more powerful with 3 tokens useable at all times, it could counter every single aura reading ability/perk with basically no condition needed other than being near the killer for half a minute per token, which outside of stealth killers was incredibly easy to get.
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Thats why I dont often use perks like BBQ and Friends. One, because they do create a very brain-off gameplay loop, but also because they're so dodgeable. SP has its uses, but I run Weave, Nurse's and Lethal. It's not doing anything much against those. Even if an Elusive person is healing, I'll pick up the other with Nurse's. It's too situational to be concerning, especially against perks that were already easy to counter anyway. And even if it were strong, it needs to stay. There's too much aura in this game and not enough counters. And we're about to have Jason, whose abilities rip right through Elusive and basically any stealth perks.
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Not quite but Id still say theyre on the same level. In no way should the perk activate after every hook though. Makes perks like BBQ completely useless and Im a firm believer that nothing should completely nulify something else.
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Killers have it good these days. You can see Generator pistons from a distance and don't even have to waste time patrolling anymore with the aura aura aura and small maps.
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I think the devs decided initially to push stealth play out (hence the Distortion nerf), then somewhere along the line they backtracked on that idea and decided to bring in Elusive. I think the community demanding the freedom to play as they please probably contributed to it, but that's just my theory.
I think it's important to remember that not everyone uses aura perks, and there's plenty of us who would rather survivors bring perks like SP against us because it's then a wasted perk slot. Everyone is fair game when you're hunting them down the old fashioned way.
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I'm still over here wondering how Distortion was unhealthy. šµ
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I'm not sure why survivors are, on the one hand, complaining about killers running slow down perks, and then complaining about killers running aura perks. Like what gives? Are killers supposed to run no perks? What would survivors complain about then. Oh yeah, tunnelingā¦
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More like all of the complaints stem from camping/tunneling/slugging (and general lack of comeback mechanic for Survivor) and aura and slowdown only emphasize it.
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First aura perk was nurses and it was released on fourth killer and it helped a lot of times because everyone run selfcare then so not entirely true and thrn bubba came some year after with bbq and chilli and everyone was using that because of bonus bp plus aura.
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Because Distortion was more universally useful as it blocked the aura reveal and same time gave you information of the possible perk the killer was running to get that aura reveal.
Self-Preservation mainly only works on killers perks that give aura on hooking a survivor and some others right after hooking. It does not give survivor information if their aura reveal was blocked. Its more a blunt instrument when Distortion was the Swiss army knife and still is as you can still run it and get the information but charging the tokens is just more problematic.
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