Flipable Perks (A solution to strong perks without nerfing them)
So I've been thinking recently about our "meta" perks and why we use them. The very obvious reason is because they are the strongest and most efficient perks in the game. We use perks like Ds, DH, AD, and BT because they are damn good. They are simple, straight forward, and allow for survivors to be as efficient as possible.
This is also why on the killer side perks like nurses, BBQ, Ruin, PGTW, and NOED are used so heavily, because they work, and they work well.
So how do you get people to use different perks, well you give them equal or better options. A killer/survivor would be less likely to use perks if they have viable alternatives. This however brings up the problem of people seeing a perk that is good and just using it in tandem with the old perk for a broken mess of perk abilities. example would be people who ran pre nerf MoM and BT together so that unhooking was free. It was gimmicky but if people got it to proc then they could guarantee get a survivor off hook free of charge. There was nothing the killer could do.
There are also plenty of examples on killer side as well where perk synergy was too strong on perks that achieved the same result. running pre nerf Hex:Ruin with other perks like PGTW, Dying Light, and Thanatophobia would bring the game to a absolute crawl and would be basically unwinnable if the killer got an early kill or 2.
The solution too both of these issues though is that one of the mentioned perks was nerfed, both MoM and Ruin are shadows of their former selves and have been dropped from people toolkits because there are simply better perks to run instead.
This is where I bring in my idea so that we don't have to have strong perks nerfed or worry about power creep going way out of control. Flipable perks. Think of it like a coin, there is a heads and tails, while one side is facing up the other side is not active. you would have to choose before the trial which side is active.
what this means is that you combine perks together and can toggle through variations of the perk. take Borrowed Time and Mettle of Man. Those 2 perks can be combined into one that works like this.
Borrowed Time: You are fueled with an unexpected energy when saving an Ally from a Hook within the Killer's Terror Radius.
After unhooking a Survivor within the Killer's Terror Radius, for 15 seconds, any damage taken that would put the unhooked Survivor into the Dying State will instead apply the Deep Wound
Status Effect. The Survivor has 10/15/20 seconds to mend themselves.
Or you can toggle in the perk menu for a different variation of the perk.
Buying Time: You are fueled with an unexpected energy when saving an Ally from a Hook within the Killer's Terror Radius.
After unhooking a Survivor within the Killer's Terror Radius, for 15 seconds, any damage taken that would put the unhooking Survivor into the injured or Dying State will instead apply the Deep Wound
Status Effect. The Survivor has 10/15/20 seconds to mend themselves.
The only difference in the variation is on who receives he endurance buff. the unhooked survivor or the one doing the unhooking. What this allows is for players to have more agency in how their builds play. This idea both brings the corpse and idea of what MoM did back from the grave but also makes it to where whenever an unhooking interaction happens somebody is still unsafe. This means the player gifted with endurance needs to try and take a protection hit for the person who isn't safe. This allows for strong perks to exist and be created without them being combined with other perks into broken synergy.
A side benefit of this also is that it will shorten how many pages of perks we truly have. if we can combine perks together with perk variations we can take our 5 page list of 80 survivor perks and 72 killer perks down to a more reasonable number. One of my greatest annoyances is looking for specific perks in the pages of them that we have.
So that's the idea, would love to hear what people think and would also like to hear people try and apply my idea to other combinations of perks.
Comments
There are 2 flaws. 1st (obviously) each variation would have their best variation. Which still kinda makes meta perks.
2nd - what happens to teachable perks? You said about merging MoM (Ash) and Borrowed (Bill).
Oh and how would some other variations work? Can you give more examples?
@Milo
As to other variations its hard to think of right now but the requirements for a perk to get turned into a flipable perk would have to be that the perks have to achieve the same effect or be closley related enough. You cant say combine dead hard and DS because they do very different things than one another, but something like leader and prove thyself might work well as a flipable perk. Also of course there will still be meta perks but by making these perks be available but at the cost of another perk you can make stronger perks without breaking the balance of the game. if you noticed Buying Time is way stronger than even the best pre nerf version of mettle of man. The idea was a way to try and think about how to make very strong perks without breaking the game. By making stronger perks but controlling what perk combinations can be made, stronger perks can be made and the player will have more of a variety in what they could do and still be strong.