Well, enough time has passed, I feel I was right about Duty of Care...kinda.
So when Steady Pulse was on the PTB and Duty of Care was the latest community talking point, I made the following post.
I'm going to make a Judgement Call on Duty Of Care — BHVR
If you want the short version, I held the opinion that Duty of Care was not going to be a issue for a few factors.
- Healthy Survivors bodyblocking was a infrequent occurrence that only ever happened once or twice per match
- Getting multiple uses of the perk meant either constantly running to your teammates for heals or running a dedicated healing build, either option was inefficient in terms of doing gens and the latter option especially meant one less person on the team was running a Meta build
- Running DoC means giving up a perk slot that could have been used for something that benefits yourself like DS, UB, a Exhaustion perk, etc.
- DoC forces survivors to interact with the killer to get value from it, which I see as a positive because more interactions = more actual gameplay.
- Multiple killers and Perks either don't care about DoC, can nullify it completely, or actively benefit from it.
This was the opinion I held prior to Steady Pulse, and Duty of Care, hitting Live Servers, I ultimately wrote it off as another Niche perk that content creators would overhype, people would flock to it, fail to use it properly, and then completely forget about in the span of a month, it happened with Blood Rush, it especially happened with Shoulder The Burden, and I was full well expecting a hat-trick.
So, here we are now, Duty of Care has been in the game for about a month now, what's my opinion on it now?
Well, honestly? I feel like I was right, mostly.
This isn't to say I have literally never seen Duty of Care at all in my games, because I have actually seen it a lot, because I'm the guy running it in SoloQ, and honestly? I have to admit, the perk is actually really good when it comes off, in fact it's worked a lot better then I was honestly expecting it to, I have managed to buy my teammates a lot of time and even win games off of just a single Duty of Care use, which honestly was a surprise to me, I've become so jaded by SoloQ over the years that, prior to the match, I went into every game expecting my teammates to either have no idea how the game works, or go down in 20 seconds and go next. Since the patch I have actually had a genuine uptick in good SoloQ teammates that have been able to make use of the 6 seconds of Dramaturgy speed I give them.
While this is pretty positive, I do still think the perk is overhyped, at least partially, even with the build I run of Empathy, Strength in Shadows, Botany Knowledge, and DoC, I can't always activate it, sometimes the chase is on the other side of the map and I just can't get there in time, sometimes the chase is just in a deadzone and there's no resources for my teammate to use, sometimes I accidentally sandbag my teammate through bad pathing, and then sometimes the killer is Legion, Plague, or Oni and I just can't use DoC at all. Obviously a good chunk of this is down to SoloQ having zero communication, but it does still need to be said, I'd estimate that in the matches I've played, I can actually get DoC to activate at least once maybe 60% of the time, and of that 60%, it actually does something of notable benefit about 50% of time, it doesn't activate too often, but when it works, it works miracles.
As for the Killer side? Going to be honest I have never seen DoC in my killer matches outside of the first 2 days of the patch where people were going for Orela's adept, and after that I've just not really played Killer at all outside of 2v8, the few times I've actually played Killer I've only ever really played Kaneki or Legion, two killers who just do not care about DoC at all. The reason I haven't played Killer very much is pretty simple, I just have nothing to really do on Killer, I don't have any achievements to grind, I don't have any new strategies I want to play with, or Rift challenges to do, I did all of them on the Killer side already and I don't think I ever saw Duty of Care activate even once even when I was playing 1v4, and I can't really play for fun because Survivors are bring map offerings out in force and I have better things to do then play rigged matches (Delete Map Offerings btw I want that ######### gone, making them only 20% isn't good enough).
One thing I will definitely say though, trying to make Duty of Care work in SoloQ has actively changed my playstyle, I've noticed I am a lot less on gens, I am a lot better at actually bodyblocking effectively, forcing myself into chases has made me better at looping too, so, oddly enough, the best thing about Duty of Care is that it's made me better at the game, which I honestly think is kind of funny given that I mostly wrote this perk off.
So, yeah, Duty of Care is pretty neat, even if it is pretty niche and very blatantly not the SWF perk from Hell Killer mains thought it was.
G'night
Comments
I love it when the community gives a voice to something that clearly doesn't need it.
Duty of care for me since I saw this perk in the patch notes I already knew that it would not be so good, first that only swf can use it decently, second that the duration of the effect is very low, you will not get anywhere, it is as if surv had used 2 dramaturgy in the same chase, it is not so good, if the rod was 50% then it would be another conversation
if you want a better option, try using babbysitter with bt, trust me, these two together make the surv that got off the hook look like he's cheating, he gets 25% haste for 20 seconds, it's ridiculous, and there's still no mark or pool of blood, just ridiculous.
Another thing is that this perk is only good against low tier killers, if you use it against a high tier killer it won't change anything, he'll easily reach the survivor who took the haste