Your Top Five Most Desired Perk Balance Changes
I had this post cooking before the announcement that next midchapter will have 45+ changes to various perks (including the universal pool, which is exciting), but really I think that announcement only makes this even more of an appropriate topic to raise.
Put simply: What perks do you want to see changed the most, and how? Buffs, nerfs, full reworks— I always like reading people's posts with lists of changes, so I'm crowdsourcing a bunch more to read!
For the sake of interesting discussion though, I'm going to put one restriction on pitches: No reversions. It's more interesting to think of new changes for perks than just undoing older balance changes, so that's where I'd like to focus.
So then! What are your top five most desired perk changes?
Comments
1: Making invocations not utter trash.
2: Nowhere to Hide - lock it to the gen.
3: Change Thrill of the Hunt to an entirely new perk (given its name, probably something bloodlust related) - give a buff to totem in how long it takes to complete, but survivor progress doesn't instantly vanish, instead slowly decays.
4: Eviserate the concept of teamwork perks.
5: Being you said no revisions - DS now doesn't stun the killer, but blood/ichor/machine oil goes flying everywhere and the killer goes into a berserk rage swinging wildly (including random use of power) and out of control.
remove the Terror Radius requirement for Treacherous Crows; everybody else gets to pre run with SB/Lithe+ Finesse+ Vigil, but yall are terrified of Lil ol me with No Mither, a crow and a prayer.
I feel like dissolution is a perk that should probably see some kind of rework. My immediate thought is that it should slowly decay drop pallets until they break (like, over the course of a minute, maybe? Its a bit hard to gauge the strength of a perk that doesn't exist, so time can be varied down or up as needed). Currently, the perk is either useless or creates no-win uncounterable situations for survivors, and is one of the few perks still in the game that I'd call broken by design, regardless of winrate.
Oh, and swap literally every single restriction off of Nothing But Misery over to Blood Favor, including the M1 requirement to get value. Absolutely baffling that shutting down all pallets in a large area is just 'here you go lad' while a 5% hinder after a hit takes 4 years and an ID check at the gate to activate, nonsense design philosophy.
As for the other two, the 4 th one I'd like to see Detective's Hunch increase its timer and reveal the killer's aura as well, as it stands its just a worse version of essentially every other area info perk in the game, at least after the map changes lost its main gimmick.
5th would be a rework to Vee's Road Life, which would be: For each great skill check on a generator, gain a token up to 3. Each token increases heal speeds on other survivors by 20%, so capping at 60%. When you finish healing a survivor, road life transfers half of its current value to that survivor for X amount of time (A minute ~ 80 seconds seems like it'd be reasonable), then loses all tokens.
Off the top of my head?
Potential Energy, I love the concept of this perk but I think the stacks you should be able to hold needs to be increased to like 40 or 50. I love the idea of being able to be sneaky and punish killers who only protect the three gen for the whole game.
Circle of healing, it's just trash now, seriously I think besides illumination this is hands down the weakest boon there is. Which is a shame because it used to be good and worth the investment of setting it up but now it's just a joke. At the very least it should impact self healing speed like botany.
Deadline - like the idea of it but needing to be injured for just an extra 10% skillcheck chance is insanely dumb. Just remove the injury condition so it could be at least a little bit more useful.
Both Invocations - Seriously just remove the permanent broken effect and give them some numbers buffs. Maybe like 13~16% for weaving spider and make crows give everyone the effect of no longer triggering crows.
Specialist/chest perks in general - I really like the idea of chest builds. But the devs really need to stop being scared of making them usable. I think that doubling the value from each chest perk would be perfectly fine.
Change the Hyperfocus Stakeout combo, which means either nerfing or reworking one of these two perks so they are not busted when paired together.
Change Devour Hope to where its not activated at the very start of the match, only after you get your first token
Buff Fire Up to 10% instead of the usual 6% maybe if thats overkill 8% will be fine
Buff Genetic Limits to 12 seconds of exhaustion.
Buff STBFL basic attack cooldown to 5% instead of 4%
This one is not part of the list but i though of this rework for this perk. Change Hysteria to where if a survivor see's another survivor within 12 meters they both scream while also keeping the oblivious effect
Ahh why not earn some ire
old dead hard, old dead hard, old dead hard, old dead hard, old spine chill
Survivors: (Pretty much all the unique mechanic)
Invocation: Spiders - completely remove the broken and bump charges to 15. Travel time to basement, danger of basement and invoke time are already enough downsides. By the time you set that up you can do a single gen + weaving spiders get high value only when rushing to basement early game, uninterupted and without killers have blocking perks. You finish invocation as killer picks up with thrilling tremors and boom, nothing happened for you wasting time.
Invocation: Crows - remove tr requirement, give all survivors calm spirit and bump aura reveal to 4s. Again remove broken.
Boon: Illumination - will now reveal all auras like extraordinary perceptions do (hatch, pallets, windows, chests, gens, teammates, killer, items)
Cross-examination - When you follow light mark, the killer is revealed to you as addition to elusive (now it's more secured perk so it can get buff)
Teamworks - be permanently shown in HUD same as open handed to all survivors
Killers:
Compromised gens - rework it so it activates when someone stops regression and throw cooldown on it, buff help wanted to 40 %
Scourge hook: Hangman's Trick - increase aura reveal to 24m, prevent scourge hooks from being destroyed
Scourge hook: Monstrous Shrine - increase dying speed to 30 %, make it work without you being 24m away and deactivate it if anticamp bar is filled by 30 % and more
Scourge hook: Pain resonance - decrease damage to 10 %, make it work on every hook, remove the boring scream so the forever pain res dms meta ends
Shaking thunder - now decrease stagger, similiar to balanced landing. Upon landing you gain 2 tokens (max 2) that you can spend to increase your lunge
Potential Energy - Make it so you only lose half your tokens when you get hit rather than all of them.
Bite the Bullet - Make it apply when someone heals you as well as when you heal someone else.
That's all I can think of from the top of my head.
I'm glad to hear you're excited for the upcoming perk changes! And thank you for kicking up this thread :) I'll keep an eye on it to pass feedback on to the team!
For those of you responding, I'd love to know one thing especially about perks you'd love to see changed: WHY would you like to see the perk changed? It's one thing to voice the result you'd ultimately like to see, but it's especially helpful to understand why a perk is causing friction for you.
Bite the bullet should effect mending as well (no brainer).
Iron Grasp should not be a perk that helps you get to further hooks, since Agitation basically does that already. What it should be is a perk that allows you to keep survivors from making pallet saves.
As stated, Nowhere to Hide should stick to the generator, not the killer.
Major change is I would get rid of exhaustion and Gen slow down perks all together. I'd have a dedicated team that balances Gen speeds and pallet density based on killer strength.
I'd also just consolidate and or eliminate many perks all together. We don't need 200 perks for each role at this point.
I'll expand my list a little.
Invocation - They're a good concept, but an incredibly poor design. They'd add a lot to the game if they were actually viable to run.
Hexes - They are feast or famine, either way too powerful on certain killers/builds, or an absolute waste. At the extreme end of Thrill of the Hunt it doesn't feel like any progress can be made, and a game where you can't advance isn't very fun.
De-standardizing Hex/Invocations/Boons - @Firellius covered this pretty well but I'll add on. With the addition of Diminishing Returns, while I disagree with its implementation, I agree with the core game problem being the way certain things can stack. A problem with the design around these concepts has always been if you're going to go for it, go all the way (full perk load out). All of these elements would be much easier to balance if they didn't stack on top of each other.
Nowhere to Hide - The aura read traveling with the killer is not just too powerful (which it is), but it ruins any sort of stealth feelings in the game.
Teamwork Perks - These probably won't change, but BHVR never should have leaned into something that was clearly SWF designed. It adds to the perception that SWF is 'cheating' because soloq would never have a chance to get equal value out of these perks.
DS - With BHVR abandoning anti-tunnel, OTR being nerfed, the anti-tunnel perk that exists should actually mean something big if it gets used. If we're going to solve tunneling via perks, then if the survivors guess right on the perk selection it has to mean a lot to have actual weight.
Hyperfocus - The skill expression on this perk is something the killer has no input on. If a person truly masters hyperfocus, they just win. Skill expression should allow input from both sides.
Chest perks - These are a great concept, but absolutely destroyed by the need to run chest offerings, which is easier to do in a SWF, but if you're in a SWF you don't need the benefits these perks give. Also any type of perk design that is based around offerings is a bad idea because its discourages people from running BP offerings and leads to toxicity.
Dying Light/Thana are the worst slowdown perks and are affected by Diminishing returns, both could be doing with a buff.
Deathbound is an interesting concept but the oblivious status just makes it a boring perk.
Dark Arrogance was only a synergy perk and no one is ever gonna choose it over bamboozle. Make the numbers super good 30-40%, i don't even care if you have to increase the downside to balance it.
Hex Scared To Death could easily have its activation condition reduced or not be a hex at all, same with Nothing But Misery which is an inferior Rapid Brutality.
Wretched Fate- Think it's a cool concept but why does a perk that only affects one survivor and can be taken away need to show it's aura. You know the whole idea with hexes is that survivors are meant to find them.
Huntress Lullaby- Think the perk would be better if it made skill checks harder to hit for survivors without taking all match to build up, 6% extra could be removed in exchange for making sc have no warning sound.
If you don't mind me being the annoying Question Guy™️ here, I'd love to dig into your point about invocations. Is there anything specific that stands out to you that makes them feel not viable?
The main reason why I want perks to change is that they are simply not worth bringing or are very high risk with low to no reward. Like potential energy is great but it's only 20 charges that can be deleted if you get caught by the killer. Which is fine, there should be some risk to using it. But only 20 charges on a generator is way too low. Or really any chest builds since while they are very fun and neat since you guys have nerfed most of survivors items into the ground and added a bunch of map clutter to make the item pool worse they have gone from a niche build to always worse than just doing gens.
I love them, if you check the stats on Treacherous Crows it's probably just my match history!
Weaving Spiders seems ok the main problem with the crows are the terror radius requirement and the heavy perk setup to work. I pretty much have to run Calm Spirit and Eyes of Belmont, so I really have 1 flex spot to work with. My friends refuse to use Calm Spirit so I'm the only bird friend in the lobby. Freeing up that slot with Elans idea could help, I never considered that idea but I worry that effect would be more powerful than the base perk itself so I think easing the terror radius restrictions would be a good first step.
I actually would love to see escape rates on the Invocations and boons I think that could make for some great water cooler conversation
Oh I can help answer the invocations question. They are high risk, high cost, for no real reward. Treacherous crows fundamentally does not work as a perk since when it'd be useful (in chase) the survivor is going to be setting the crows off instead of the killer. Also it being only two seconds is extremely short. The other issue is the requirement of needing a survivor in the terror radius because it could also be incredibly useful to see the killers aura if they are away from you but like it just does not work. Finally many maps just don't have many crows, like the new trickster map or the treatment theater. So not only are you wasting 60+ seconds doing the invocation for a perk that functionally does nothing but you also become permanently injured for the rest of the game making you a very easy target to tunnel out.
Weaving spider on the other hand is slightly better but still runs into the same issue where even if you get it set up it's not worth being downed and easily tunneled out of the game. Saving 50 seconds on a generator is nice but ultimately even the worst players are likely to last at minimum an extra 50 seconds in chase (over multiple chases) if they have access to both health states. So you aren't saving any time on generators, you can't help out your team in any situation where you need two health states like trading hooks, and you can't last as long in chase, this is also assuming that you aren't found by the killer when doing the invocation or in a worst case scenario the gens are blocked and you just get nothing out of the perk but all the costs.
So as we can see neither perk at even a cursory glance work in any scenario as both are more likely to get the survivor using them killed rather than help them survive. Even no mither is more likely to help someone since that can be paired with sabo or resilience, these perks just don't work on any conceptual level. The final nail in the coffin is the simple fact these take up perk slots which means it's taking up options from perks that are either better at the tasks these perks are for (fogwise/dejavu) or perks that are more fun to use since it's kinda boring to sit in basement and do nothing for a minute.
I went back and read all of the threads I could find that complained about Invocations to answer this.
The sum of their parts far, far outweighs the benefits.
-Being permanently broken is an absolute massive cost.
-Having to spend 60 seconds on it is wasteful, that's a giant amount of time that you are unavailable to the team.
-Going down into the basement is frequently out of the way (more time lost) and potentially very risky.
So you have a survivor who is unable to help their team, the progress they get from the invocation(s) would be better spent doing just about anything else, if they get interrupted they are in serious trouble (or even caught coming out of the basement after a completion), and the reward for this is becoming exceptionally weak.
The permanently broken is the most egregious and, bluntly, unappealing. The having to go to the basement is the most thematic and appropriate.
Let me put it this way, if as a killer I had the option to make a survivor permanently broken at the cost of 10 gen charges, I'd consider it. If I knew that would take a perk(s) slot away from them, plus they couldn't do anything else for 60 to 90 seconds (Invocation + travel time), I think every killer would take that. It follows a trend that every now and then we get survivor 'perks' that do more to help the killer than survivors.
To repeat a question I've said a few times in a different form - I'd love to know how the Devs thought Invocation perks were even close to viable.
Edit to add: I hope Invocations get reevaluated, because they are a cool concept. But we're coming up on two! years since we got one. Honestly, I think the entire community believes they are a concept BHVR has abandoned.
Rework Hyperfocus, it's supposed to be a skilled perk but with stakeout the value from Hyperfocus is basically free and Hyperfocus is not affected by diminishing returns, this perk combo is very strong for gen rushing and matches could finish in less than 5 minutes even with full slowdown, it's really hard to win against a full team with those two perks without tunneling (those 2 are really the only problematic gen speed perks), a normal match should last at least 10 minutes.
I would have said Stakeout but Hyperfocus by itself is often only used by subtle cheaters and if Hyperfocus remains the same perk without stakeout it would make it harder to identify and report cheaters.
Repressed Alliance - Allows survivors to unblock a gen once activated instead of blocking it.
Lightborn - Remove the full invulnerability to blinds, change it to a much faster recovery rate (like Enduring for flashlight blinds).
Smash Hit - Works on all stuns, so you can DS and zoom away.
Borrowed Time - Instead of extending the basekit BT, bring back the unhooker protection from old BT.
Gen Slowdowns - Add a global cooldown so you can't stack them any more.
Light born is a very weak perk which has only one purpose, I rather use slowdown instead of it so it shouldn't get changed and the smash hit one is too crazy imo.
Also the community manager asked WHY as well.
Hey,
here are some perks that I think need to see a change. I also added a change-idea to every perk to suggest you how the perk would become better for the game while still being useful (I also don't like to criticies something without any suggestion of how could it be better). Sorry if it's a bit long but I wanted to make sure you get the point of why these perks need a change. I'm not listing perks that need a buff since that would be way too much but I wanna list every perk that is currently unhealthy for the gameplay-loop and therefore needs a change. I also tried to keep it brief by getting straight to the point, so let me know if I should go into more detail because the reason isn't clear.
For the PTB Perks:
(I will give my feedback to these perks in the PTB Feedback section as well)
Survivor perks:
Killer perks:
dead hard should last longer but have startup frames so it can't be used directly on reaction to a killer swing, rn its totally uninteractive on the killer's side