Why was Surveillance so underused in the Undying + Ruin meta?
I've gone against so many undying and ruin killers and I almost never saw surveillance used. Even in comp tournaments I saw surveillance not be used with undying+ruin but instead bbq or tinkerer. I don't get it
Tinkerer is nice but it only is telling you when a generator is at a certain percentage, sometimes it's too late depending on the distance. Surveillance is giving you perpetual information on when a generator is being worked on or not.
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Because discordance and tinkerer are better. That’s about it. I’ve seen some spirits do it with surveillance but that’s because with the busted mother daughter ring + amulet combo she can patrol 4 gens in a single phase.
Surveillance depends on the survivor leaving the gen to activate, while tinkerer activates when it's 70% done.
That means if the survivor never stop repairing since the start of the game, it will never glow white nor yellow for you as killer. Besides, the yellow aura only stays up for so long and there's no notification. So if you don't pay attention to all gens, you can miss one that's being repaired.
And on top of that, Pig is a paid killer, while Hillbilly is for free, so it's easier to get Tinkerer than Surveillance.
Edit: I just wanted to make clear that Surveilance doesn't mark any generator that begin to be repaired from 0 (since it's not regressing). It will only tell you about ones that had at least some work on it when the survivor started working on it.
Well irdk but theres only one thing i can think of Pig is a licensed killer and ppl don't wanna buy her with real money and Surveillance barely goes into the shine and hag and blight are original dbd killers which can be unlocked from farming iridescent shards. (Btw i got hag for free with my ps4 edition (now ps5) (And when i heard of blight i farmed iridescent shards and got him) (I never really used hag or even lvled her up and when i heard of ruin undying i decided to do so)
It would have been but it got preemptively nerfed by the developers before undying ever went live.
If it was the pre nerf version where a fully regressed gen still has the surveillance aura effect it probably would have been used.
You need to kick the generator to activate surveillance. The kick animation generally isn't time well-spent; if you chase a survivor off a generator, you're going to want to secure a hit instead of stunning yourself for two seconds for some measly regression that can be undone in about 5 seconds.
Because Surveillance is completely dependent on Ruin staying active to be strong. If they actually cleanse your totems, you'll be begging for Discordance or Tinkerer
No, surveillance shows all regressing gens no kick needed. I've used this combo plenty
Oh, it works with Ruin? I haven't been using Ruin/Undying since I don't have Undying. I've been using Surveillance on Ghostface combined with Pop Goes the Weasel as a weird middle-ground between Whispers being able to find people at the start of the game and Discordance for mid-round knowledge. It lets me hear survivors at the beginning of the match to stalk them, and then also lets me have intel on gens I'm going to be kicking anyways.
Yeah 100% though it won't be worth it much longer with the Ruin/Undying nerf, I'll use use those 3 perk slots for a whole new build I guess
Good build you got, you should see how you feel about putting Oppression somewhere in there, that's the only perk I can imagine making surveillance truly useful after the ruin nerf
Discordance is total garbage and actually more obvious to the survivors than surveillance is, tinkerer is near broken or just pretty good depending on what killer you're playing.
Naturally tinkerer is the most used one of these since other control perks have conditions while tinkerer is unavoidable
Also to answer your question OP
The Ruin/Undying meta only lasted 4 months, it's gone now so you'll prolly see killers bringing Devour/Undying way more often, meaning surveillance is back where it used to be for most, in the garbage.
I was a fan of the combo if you couldn't tell lol
I don't have Oppression :\ Don't want to spend money on Twins chapter. I run Surveillance / Pop / Nurse's and am currently flexing the fourth perk into Devour. I'm almost wondering if something like Dark Devotion is better on Ghostface since his power is on such a long cooldown and does not refresh on Marked kills.
I don't know what Surveillance was like before the nerf but I find it really useful now. I never have trouble keeping track of the auras of generators
Tinkerer I can somewhat see, and how is Discordance better? I'm confused. I do use Discordance in an undying+ruin build (discordance and surveillance, as an example) but as a substitute for surveillance I don't see them as equal. But I do play Freddy a lot and can use bait teleports to see which generators are being done even if I don't run someone off a generator myself
Also, Discordance can be countered and is easily known by survivors with some game sense. Surveillance can't be countered.,
Pig is a licenced killer so I understand that. But otherwise I don't get it personally. When I use Surveillance I never have issues keeping track of the colours of the generators, even on large maps like Red Forest. It just gives so much information, and it is paired well with tinkerer and stuff, and discordance is nice as well, but I don't get people who think BBQ is more useful in that combo. The only requirement is to run someone off a generator, which sometimes the survivors do that themselves to heal or save.
Not with Undying and Ruin. You just run someone off a generator (or they do it themselves) and surveillance is activated. And what stun are you referring to? And what regression are you referring to? I don't quite get the point you're making
Surveillance isn't always about gen progression but allowing you to know where people are. Sometimes it's more valuable to know that rather than know what generator is being worked on to stop it from being done, if that makes sense.
I mean, you can use surveillance and discordance/tinkerer. And I don't see what you can do really anyway without any regression perks if ruin is gone, unless you had pop as a back up.
Did Surveillance really ever have a spot though? I rarely saw it in pub games, and even streamers that use undying and ruin never really used surveillance. The only streamer I've seen who regularly used Surveillance with undying+ruin is Fungoose.
Even still I enjoy pop+oppression+surveillance, it's fun
Most of the killer used discordance just as a addition to tinkerer. So you know when you see tinkerer that it is only one survivor and he needs 24sec for the gen. You cannot react to tinkerer with a no movement killer when you are not close and there are two survivor on the gen. Discordance covers this weakness.
Tinkerer is just better.
Undetectable + telling you exactly on which gen pressure is needed
For example you see 2 gens in yellow and go to one to scare a survivor of a gen that was 10% complete and then hear the other gen pop where 2 or more survivors were at. Tinkerer wouldn't have cost you that gen
On the builds I ran Ruin/Undying on, I moved onto running Surveillance and found it to be immensely helpful. I think it was/is a criminally underrated perk. It doesn't hold up nearly as well on a build without Ruin, but with it -- it provided huge value to me in pretty much every game.
With the Undying nerf, I think it's going to be used a lot less, and that's a shame. It's probably moving out of all of my builds now for that reason.
@kyogul
I'll say what no one else will. The only perk slot I could see Surveillance replacing in a Ruin/Undying build is BBQ as a tracking perk. And no Killer ever takes BBQ out of their regular build for a long amount of time because the bloodpoints are way too juicy to miss out on.
It was used in tournaments. In pubs players preferred BBQ because bloodpoints and tinkerer because it works well against solos and less coordinated teams.
I didn't see discordance and tinkerer used much as a combination. Normally tinkerer in isolation and then BBQ. BBQ I find pointless and doesn't aid ruin+undying, especially since people can hide in lockers or simply hide behind a generator's aura.
It's still a useful combination but I don't see why Surveillance was so underused, it gives valuable information throughout a game. It's not hard to use at all.
It depends on the killer I guess. I play Freddy a lot, so Undetectable status doesn't mean anything to me really. It does tell me how to prioritise which generators to go to, but I still always use Surveillance because I don't like aimlessly patrolling generators, and I don't like generators to progress that far and have to scramble to try and get survivors off of it before it's finished. So Tinkerer pairs well with Surveillance but I can't agree to say it's better than Surveillance on its own necessarily.
I think it has use with Oppression. An alternative build to Undying and Ruin I use is pop+oppression+surveillance. It's pretty nice IMHO.
Maybe it's because I'm not a big fan of BBQ and it has too easy counters but Surveillance is kind of required for me when I run undying and ruin. Without it it's not nearly as effective. Personally I prefer Whispers over BBQ tbh. I tried my best to get into BBQ but I got so tired of it when there would be several times, even several times in a given game, where people could be all over the map but there are no aura readings from BBQ because people are hiding in lockers.
Nice for BP but I guess I'm just a Whispers gamer.
Tinkerer is nice, and even better with Surveillance IMHO. Like Discordance and Tinkerer is not better than Tinkerer and Surveillance, when talking about undying and ruin. Surveillance provides infinitely more information and cannot be countered, much like Tinkerer, whereas players with a lick of sense can smell Discordance easily and render it useless, especially in SWFs/coordinated teams.
@kyogul
BBQ is only good at some killer. But all killer run it bc they need bloodpoints.
So most of the time one slot is reserved for BBQ. + the best combo ruin/undying/tinkerer.
Surveillance has synergy with ruin, but one big problem. You need to work for it. When you are winning, survivor has no chance bc they cant start a gen without you noticing. When you are losing some gens are done before surveillance triggers once.
Sure you could play tinkerer and surveillance together, but then you have two perks which do mostly the same.
cos Surveillance isn't a perk that plays the game for you unlike Ruin Undying Tinkerer