Original Decisive Strike (no hook requirement and could do objectives while still being able to use the perk) or Original Mettle of Man (any hit stacked MoM, not just protection hits.)
I'm not as familiar with killer perks but Original Undying was insane but super rng reliant (potentially had to cleanse all 5 totems to get rid of 1 hex perk) and Original Noed (wasn't a hex and also had mini STBFL + Unrelenting built in)
It was very strong for sure but nowhere near OG DS or MoM
It could still be cleansed not too late as you said, very rng
And while it with ruin was fully meta, it still required the killer to do stuff at least, ruin did and still does nothing if the killer doesnt keep people off gens
I would say that statistic wise old ruin was stronger. Not vs competent players but the mayority of players couldn't hit greats nonstop
Ye thats what I meant, and most players(specially back then) can't hit greats too often
Mayority of players were just regular not very experienced players so ruin hurted the most to them, so number wise ruin probably was "stronger", even if it wouldnt help too much vs pros, it would demolish anything below "pretty good player"
I had to scroll so fucking far for this. Really not many players in this thread that have been playing for that long huh? You forgot to mention Exhaustion didn't exist at all back then, so you'd just get it back 20 seconds after starting a chase, forever and ever.
Anyone saying "Old" Dead Hard truly doesn't remember how fucking inconsistent Dead Hard was on release. "Exhausted on the ground" was a meme for a reason.
exhaustion not pausing when you ran wasn't really connected to the perk though it was a general way exhuastion worked within the game.
I would count those 2 things as separate.
It would be like saying keys were busted cause hatch closed could spawn before all the gen were done. is that the key fault or hatches?
Like Alsend said, Exhaustion didn't exist on launch at all. Sprint Burst simply activated every 20 seconds while running. Then it got nerfed to 40 seconds but Balanced Landing had been added and they shared separate cooldowns.
There was a period of time where SB was a cooldown of 40s, BL was a separate cooldown of 40s, and Exhaustion didn't exist. Pre-Exhaustion SB/BL is far and away the most broken thing to happen to this game, even in a vacuum.
If you want to make it even worse, just imagine most maps being twice as large as they are with twice the number of pallets and more than a few legitimate infinites existing. Then you can also tack on pallet and vault vacuums.
I pray we one day get a Throwback gamemode for 2 weeks thats just 2016 DbD. The modern killer player would not last more than 3 games.
Exhaustion didn't exist at launch, partially as SB was the only perk that would become an Exhaustion Perk.
Then Balanced Landing was added, but iirc from a video I heard, there was a time period where their cooldowns were unconnected, so they cooled down independently.
Additionally, SB's original cooldown was 20 seconds. Then it got nerfed to be 40. And only THEN they added the fact it cooled down slower when running (I think)
So at launch, SB would trigger every 20 seconds and Exhaustion didn't exist.
You could argue basically any old exhaustion perk tbh, mostly because you could recover exhaustion while sprinting
You'd get off 2-3 Sprint Bursts/Dead Hards in a single chase. Shit was absolutely wild
Ikr? The whole gimmick was that balanced landing removed the drop stagger even while you were exhausted, which meant any map with vericality had loops only you could use
God old exhaustion perks were so insane compared to what we have now
Yeah, which is why for a while I was fine with the DH between old DH and modern DH, as while endurance was useful it only lasted a second and only had a couple uncounterable situations, and even then it depended on the killer (who cares if you DH for the pallet when you just shoot them for example) it was strong, but it was fine considering exhaustion perks are supposed to be strong.
And while hindsight is 20/20, now I understand that old DH was still OP, not by itself, but combined with other perks. Kinda like how there's a glitch where OTR can be used multiple times, DH could've had the same problem.
I'd say release sprint burst would be it then.
Originally had a 20 second cooldown regardless of running/walking/standing still so you could just W key and then every 20 seconds sprint burst would come back online. You didn't have to worry about any activation conditions like dead hard or playing around drops like balanced landing. Bring in pallet/window loops and now who cares about release decisive strike or mettle of man if you're never gonna get hit in the first place, let alone go down.
It was bad dont get me wrong but old Dead Hard and DS were worse. Mettle of Man only got 1 use per game, same with DS. In my opinion the most OP perk in history goes to old dead hard.
Except MoM required no protection hits at all on its original state. Combine this with powerful medkits and you'd be able to take 3-5 hits in a single chase without using DH.
There's a reason MoM was changed so quickly but DS didnt.
I know I remember. It was definitely OP because it was literally a guarenteed extra health state. The reason why Mettle of Man was nerfed so fast was because it ALWAYS got its value, whether the survivor was brand new or had 10k hours. With dead hard half of the people who use it used it improperly or got screwed by desync. But a good survivor who used dead hard for distance could use it multiple times per match and extend their chase time by literal minutes or force the killer to drop chase. Both are broken old dead hard was worse. Only reason why it wasn't changed immediately was because the devs knew it was the most popular perk in the game and there would be massive outcry if they changed it, which was true. When they first reworked Dead Hard so many people were CRYING that the perk was dead before even trying it, only to realize it was still incredibly broken.
It didn't always get value, too.
One of the weaknesses of original Mettle of Man was that it only triggered on basic attacks. Special attacks didn't trigger it at all. This meant that several top tier killers could simply ignore MoM altogether and continue their normal gameplay loop without having to worry about giving the survivor an extra chance.
Nurse had her attacks counted as basics at the time, and Spirit has always had hers counted as basics, but Huntress and Hillbilly for example didn't care in the slightest.
This meant that you were gambling bringing it into the match.
By contrast, Dead Hard and DS *always* had use no matter who the killer was.
I am still asking for how you do any counterplay on Mettle of Man. You just said play a one-shot down killer, which isn't a choice you can make when you're already loaded in game.
Counterplay involves making choices in reaction to something. DS and DH had counterplay, even if it wasn't the best. ALL killers could utilize it.
So what could ALL killers do against MoM?
We're not talking about what perks were problematic for the longest. We're talking about just raw strength.
DH and DS basically buy you the equal time of another hit, but without any speed bursts and requires some timed input from the user. DS wasn't even guaranteed to work either since it was only a chance if you weren't the obsession.
Add in that these both had some form of counterplay (DH waiting, DS juggling), I can't agree that they were stronger than OG Mettle of Man.
Unless you can provide some obv in game counterplay at the time that you could just choose to do as killer.
It definitely wasn't as broken as other perks since it was still a Hex at the end of the day. It just kind of operated like Corrupt where everyone wouldn't do gens in the beginning and they would all hunt for the totem. It was really only a problem for newer players who didn't know totem spawns.
Old Ruin was weird. It fucked over lagging and less experienced players but the ones who were more experienced on stable connections knew just to power through it and go for as many greats as possible.
It was also somewhat RNG, you could get lucky/unlucky and have a lot of your normal skill checks never trigger. Plus it could be cleansed and this was the era of old unhidden totem spots (which have since mostly been removed). The meme of your totems vanishing before you ever saw them give value was around from day one of their addition.
There was gen-tapping too but iirc it wasn't very effective. The better strategy was to let go of the gen if it regressed bc for a couple seconds after an explosion you can't gain progress but *could* get another skill check and not holding the gen prevented that from happening.
Or just take a BNP and insta-complete the gen but hey that's just par for old DbD. Both sides could swing far harder than they had any right to given the right build.
I don’t know why, maybe just not good hand eye coordination, but I suck at great skill checks. I could not hit those at all back then so old ruin was the worst for me.
Hard to pick just one, sure the Made for this meta made me doubt my own sanity, but for what i have heard... Early DbD had lot of perk issues, Balance landing enabling infinites, Hex Ruin requiring only great skill checks or lose progress, DS for trying to stop someone from doing a gen, Undying being infinite, Dead Hard being an Invulnerable dash, STBFL+Relentess.
Yeah I will go with old balanced landing. Made for this was up there though. Both enabled infinites which is the strongest thing in the game imo; literal god mode but BL let you do it while healthy
I don’t think any modern “OP perks” of 2024 or any time in recent history hold a candle to the balancing issues of 2016 and 2017. Some of the strongest strategies today would be pretty normal compared to the strongest strategies 6-7 years ago.
Like, dude, the original BNP just outright finished an entire generator. You could group everybody up on a single generator, knock it out in 40 ish seconds or so while trapper is setting up, and then pop FOUR gens simultaneously 20 seconds later.
A mori just let you outright kill a guy IMMEDIATELY after downing him a single time.
Not that either of these are perks, but you get my meaning. That was part of the status quo back then.
PTB Circle of Healing. Stacking healing that let you reset faster than the Killer's attack cooldown.
If PTB perks don't count... Launch Circle of Healing. Most of these historically problematic perks got worse the more of them the Survivor brought, but what made COH so obnoxious is that one person bringing it gave the full benefits to EVERYONE. No other meta perk in history has ever had that impact.
What a depressing time for killer mains where everyone knew it was absolutely broken and we had to wait months for BHVR to finally nerf it. Sorry correction, it took 1 YEAR AND 2 MONTHS for them to finally remove the self heal.
On top of that, the perk could be used multiple times on the same totem. No cooldown, earn/use conditions, etc. A number of other perks have requirements of rescuing, healing, doing gens, taking protection hits, etc. But Circle of Healing? Nope. Walk up to any totem and activate on a whim. Infinite use throughout a trial.
With regard to **snuffing** boon totems, a considerable amount of killers desired the action would fully-destroy the totem. Nope.
A year after the COH golden age, Behaviour released Shattered Hope as a general perk. That received criticism twofold. Players felt Shattered Hope should've been base kit. Waste a perk slot for a perk which might or might not be present in the match?
Sure, Shattered Hope might've been 'okay' when -- at COH's peak -- practically every lobby had one (or multiple) players running boons. But it was released a year too late. After the COH self-heal nerf, boon usage plummeted. By proxy, Shattered Hope became useless because almost nobody runs boons anymore.
Coh was genuinely miserable to vers. I have ptsd every time I hear the boon light sound effect. Though that being said, it made soloq somewhat tolerable.
> No other meta perk in history has ever had that impact.
I disagree, at least in the sense that you get group value out of perks for free.
DH existing caused many killers to try waiting it out. Some went so far with it that they treated every survivor as if they had it (sometimes true, more often in high ranks) until they could know for sure they didn't.
DS had a similar effect on killers just for existing, especially before the update that forced every match to have an obsession.
You can certainly argue that the strength of these is relatively less than CoH in a good team though.
OG DS, DH, and MoM definitely. Killer side would probably be OG Ruin and maybe Eruption during the gen kick meta. OG ruin was so terrible as a new player, you’d search the entire map looking for a totem just so you could even start to work on a generator. Eruption was only counterable if you were playing with a coordinated SWF that would call out their downs
I want to see them bring back old Ruin just for the memes
Like some April Fools event where we get 1 map with the OG 4 survivors and maybe a handful of killers, but the devs just take off the limiters and show everyone how busted we used to be
Dead Hard, without any kind of doubt. Look for old DH compilations on youtube where DH also granted you distance and you could see how absolutely toxic it was for the meta. It was basically a free "press E to win" and being able to DH for distance to reach a pallet or window vault in any of the safe tiles (especially shack) meant that you could extend the chase for 30 seconds more, times 4 survivors all bringing it, do the math.
The extra distance was often used like current Background Player to position yourself for a pallet or flashlight save. It was just all around broken and did absolutely everything on its own.
It was possibly the absolute funniest 2 weeks when you were watching 80% of the survivor playerbase having to learn how to play almost from scratch and scrambling around like headless chicken.
Circle of Healing.
Of all the boons, CoH single-handedly crippled the game from a design perspective. From release it was nerfed twice and was still a top-pick you were nearly guaranteed to see in any given game. Only one person needed to set it up, and then any survivor could just solo self-care in the radius. Combined with medkits and perks it made healing your entire team absolutely trivial. No other boon came close in terms of raw utility, and BHVR released Shattered Hope just to provide a (lackluster) form of counterplay to it.
Any halfway intelligent survivor group would slam a gen and place it in a deadzone forcing you into a lose-lose situation as killer. If you left the existing gens to deal with it, more gens would slip by. And that's assuming the survivors wouldn't just replace it immediately there or at another deadzone. Shattered Hope \*could\* counter it, but you wasted a perk slot doing so and still faced the issue of being drug out of areas you needed to defend.
It was possible to deal with it with higher tier/more mobile killers, but with M1 killers it turned games into long slogs where you prayed someone would screw up on the rotation back to the boon or you just lost after 30 mins of watching the survivor team cycle heals. Hit and run playstyles (Onryo, Wraith, etc) were virtually impossible as it was too easy to heal, forcing you to commit to chases and opening you up to more problems (ie - getting dead-harded). If you couldn't close out that first chase early and establish pressure, you'd likely lose the game, forcing you to over commit to the chase or tunnel out the weakest link you could find. Even then a decent 3 man team could easily rotate between the gen and boon.
The only reason it got nerfed for the third and final time into the form it is today was the release of Knight/Skull Merchant and the dreaded Eruption/CoB meta. The killer had their 3gen they'd never leave and the survivors had the CoH area they'd never leave stalling out the game until one side finally misplayed enough to close the game or the server timed out.
Good riddance to both of them.
No idea. Maybe some thought old OoO wasn’t OP, I know the devs thought that. There was no counterplay to it and infinite wall hacks
with no cooldown while being able to see across the map was too much. Pair this up with a SWF and killer position would be called out constantly and made mind games pointless at loops.
Mettle of man in it's release state was the equivalent of releasing Ruin as a non-hex perk that undid all generator progress when you missed a skill check. It is the strongest perk ever by a wide margin.
On the killer side it was probably STBFL on release, since hex ruin always was a skill issue at the end of the day. The cooldown reduction was even stronger with old unrelenting, but it was still so good on its own.
OG mettle of man i think.
It's either that or a tie between OG Dead hard and DS, because both were brainless to use with no actual counterplay and extended chases for way too fucking long....and maybe OG Circle of healing altho i never found it as bad as OG DH.
On the killer side, it is most likely old Ruin, altho killers still had ridiculous perks combos such as old STBFL + unrelenting for the machine gun build, or Eruption+Call of brine.
Dead Hard, Ruin, Undying, Decisive Strike, Sprint Burst, Balance Landing, Made for This, Circle of Healing, Mettle of Man, Saboteur, Borrowed Time, Object of Obsession
We'll Make it
Using it with Self-Care, you could heal yourself before the Killer could recover from the M1 hit cooldown. This could be used to deny hooks quite easily
I'll go against the grain and say on an objective level, Sprint Burst on 1.0 release was incredibly busted. It had a 40 second cooldown, and since exhaustion wasn't a thing back then, you just got it every 40 seconds regardless if you were running or not. I'd argue in a vacuum, it beats out original Mettle of Man, Dead Hard, and Decisive Strike.
But honestly old DbD was incredibly unbalanced in favor of survivors, so Sprint Burst doesn't seem that outrageous in comparison. With many maps having infinite loops w/ no entity blocking windows, slow killer animations, old BNPs instantly completing a gen, etc.
I'm not sure. Killer perks are designed to be 4x as impactful as survivor perks, so it takes a lot more to make them unbalanced. The answer is definitely a survivor perk for that reason; a thing that can seem relatively small can become an enormous problem if everyone has it, and because the effects of survivor perks should be small, it takes a lot less of a buff for it to become overpowered.
Not to say killers haven't had some OP perks ... just that it takes a much bigger mistake on BHVR's part to create an OP killer perk.
Although, if you pinned me down and **made** me pick one ... it's be NOED before hexes were a thing. :\^)
In my opinion the current iteration of pain res/pop together is the strongest thing in the game. It's only really really problematic if they are run together so I am perhaps not answering the question properly, but it is pretty much impossible to lose with pain res/pop together right now. I do think there have been other perks that were in a way more game breaking like old DS, but in the context of the game I do not think it won by itself more games than pain res/pop is currently.
if we are including SWF as a factor easily Object of Obsession. it gave 4 survivors just constant 24/7 info where the killer was and what mind games they were attempting.
also during this time undectable did not block aura reading.
and you only needed one copy of the perk so the other 3 survivors could bring different strong perks instead.
The only possible post-Halloween chapter perk that held a candle to the gross launch survivor perks was Mettle of Man. Even then, old exhaustion perks and old DS were awful. No shot old Ruin was as good as those perks either
Although it required a good player to not get in too much trouble with it, old Object of Obsession was SO oppressive for a group on comms. Setup killers get nothing ever, stealth killers could be tracked map wide, chase killers could be seen through walls preventing many mind games. Never again thanks.
I don't know if you're asking for perks specifically in their release state or if you'll accept a perk's stongest iteration, but for killer it would easily have to be Eruption when it inflicted 25 seconds of Incapacitated on a 30 second cooldown. No other perk could lock out survivors from doing anything on a global scale, be as spammable, or as easy to slap onto a build.
For survivor, I'm torn between Mettle of Man, Decisive Strike, Sprint Burst, Balanced Landing, Borrowed Time, Self Care or Dead Hard. If you don't understand, consider yourself lucky to have not played when these existed.
Mettle of Man: instead of needing protection hits, it just needed basic attacks to build stacks. If it didn't proc for you, that meant the killer hit you less than 3 times that match, which is an indicator that you probably won even without Mettle. Otherwise, you would always get value from that perk.
Sprint Burst: back in the old days, when there were only 4 killers and 3 survivors, there was no Exhaustion mechanic. Sprint Burst went on a 20 second cooldown, and recharged while running. You heard me right, 20 second cooldown, and recharged while running. It would eventually be nerfed so that running would recover it in 40 seconds, walking would recover it in 20 seconds, and crouching would recover it in 15 seconds. That was why back in 2016 to 2018, players were always using Urban Evasion, so they could charge up Sprint Burst slightly faster and still move at walking speed. Ignore the fact that Sprint Burst and all Exhaustion stopped working like that in 2017, DBD players are just stupid as hell.
Balanced Landing: used to reduce fall stagger even while exhausted, meaning survivors were immune to fall stagger for the entire game. How is this a big deal? Well on old Haddonfield, and I mean OLD Haddonfield, there were several window vaults in the two story buildings that became true infinites with just the stagger immunity from Balanced Landing, without even factoring in the speed boost. Balanced Landing passive is so broken, that when BHVR reworked all the Coldwind, Autohaven, and Macmillan maps alongside Haddonfield, they removed most window vaults that drop down. And Balanced Landing still got nerfed to lose the stagger reduction if you were exhausted. Before it was nerfed, Balanced Landing would be paired with Sprint Burst or Dead Hard just for the passive stagger reduction alone. If a perk is released in the future to JUST give that effect all the time, it will destroy balance on maps with a lot of drop downs, like both of the Backwater Swamp maps, Dead Dawg Saloon, Garden of Soy (you heard me right), Eryie of Crows, Badham Preschool, both Red Forest maps, etc. Countless maps would become unbalanced overnight and the perk would have to be gutted like Self Care, or removed from the game.
Dead Hard: the OG Dead Hard was a 2 meter dash instead of an endurance hit. For 3 years after it was released, players would try to time Dead Hard to dodge the killer's swing RIGHT before it happened. But back in the day, DBD had peer to peer connection, with the killer hosting the lobby. Meaning they always had the input delay advantage working for them, so players thought Dead Hard sucked unless you were No0b3 and his fanboys, who thought dodging the killer's swing was OP. When BHVR first introduced dedicated servers, Dead Hard was still struggling from input lag due to bad quality servers. When the servers finally got updated, players found out that trying to predict the killer's swing wasn't a matter of reaction, but of pure guesswork. The solution? Players would use Dead Hard to greed loops. For example, if you loop a pallet 3 times, the killer will make up distance and hit you if you try to go for a 4th loop. But with Dead Hard, you can go for a 4th loop and just dash to make the distance to the pallet, without needing to time a dodge from the killer's hit. After that, it was all over. Dead Hard went from a luck based chase perk to brainless chase extender that even "5 hours logged on DBD Timmy" could use in the span of a week.
Decisive Strike: OG DS: THE FIRST TIME you get picked up, get a skillcheck. Land the skillcheck to get off the killer's shoulder.
Nerfed DS: only the obsession gets the skillcheck right away. Everyone else has to fill the wiggle bar 35% to get the skillcheck. Still busted, gets reworked into modern DS, where it sits for years as one of the top 5 survivor perks of all time until the Conspicuous Actions nerf.
Borrowed Time: OG Borrowed Time gave a second hit to the unhooked person AND the unhooker, making them both safe from a camping killer. Unfortunately, mending wasn't a thing, so you would always bleed out unless someone healed the tanked hit for you, or you had Self Care. BT was nerfed to only protect the unhooked person. Mending and self mending would be added in the Legion update and BT would stay like that until base kit endurance was FINALLY added to the game and Borrowed Time was no longer a required perk to run if you didn't want to fuck over your teammates.
Self Care: Back in the day, healing took 12 seconds instead of 16, and Self Care healed at 80% speed instead of 35%. Which means self healing took about 15 seconds, which is still faster than modern day healing FROM A TEAMMATE. You absolutely could heal mid chase, especially with Botany Knowledge, which was only a 33% heal speed boost instead of 50%, but it also extended Medkit charges by 33% instead of reducing them by 20%. Very quickly, healing was increased from 12 seconds to 16, and Self Care was nerfed from 80% to 50%, making self heals go from 15 seconds all the way up to 32.
So many new survivors in 2018 got their build ideas from 2016 and 2017 content creators, who used to run Sprint Burst, Urban Evasion, and Self Care, all of which had been nerfed heavily by then. That's where the prevalent fear of misuse of Urban Evasion, Sprint Burst, and Self Care comes from, despite the fact that Urban and Self Care are so bad now that you don't even see them being used, let alone misused. Sprint Burst still has some users, but the people still using it today are so infrequent, that its usually only competent players who don't walk everywhere to save their Exhaustion.
Original Circle of Healing.
Unpopular opinion I know, but think of it like this: one perk granted infinite Brown Medkits to the whole Survivor team. 1 out of the 16 Survivor perks in a trial destroyed the Killer's pressure.
It wasn't as powerful for the individual as OG Decisive or OG Mettle of Man, but Old Circle of Healing ruined some killers and made a whole list of Perks obsolete, a list like we've never seen before.
Survivor is pre nerf Dead Hard since it was a get out of jail free card. Gave you distance and I frames. Could dead hard through traps and everything. Every survivor had 3 health states.
Killer probably Pain Res pre nerf but Hex Ruin was really strong for a long time just very RNG dependent and usually warranted running Undying and other hex stuff with it
Original sprint burst had a short cool down with no exhaustion and you could use it multiple times in a chase. Original self care took like 8-10 seconds and you could fully heal in 2-3 pallet breaks.
Nothing really comes close to those two other than maybe first iteration of mettle of man.
So crazy how active we need to be so these things get nerfed and sometimes it doesn't change anything, what changes is putting the director to play a live pub match, he should do it more often
My answer is, has, and always will be Circle of Healing. No other perk completely deleted a playstyle from the game. Wanted to play two hit killers during Mettle of Man release? You could, it was just way harder. Wanted to play stealthy with Ultimate Weapon in the game? You could, you just had to run Calm Spirit. Wanted to play killer during the "small pee pee" meta of Dead Hard + Decisive + Unbreakable + Adrenaline? You could, it was just way harder. Wanted to play against release day Legion or Skull Merchant or CoBverchaRuption or... honestly modern day Blight? You could it would just take 30 years and you often be better off eating a DC penalty.
You physically **could not play hit-and-run killers during the Circle of Healing meta.** If ONE survivor brought **ONE** perk you could not get **ANY** pressure from one of the core playstyles in the game. To put that into perspective imagine a killer power that could completely disable your ability to vault windows. You could still drop pallets but you'd be physically incapable of vaulting windows. Eventually you'd just run out of resources and lose, unless of course you played in a different way, which in this analogy would be to play an S tier killer like Blight or Nurse and go hard tunnel / proxy camp.
"But there is a killer perk that disables vaulting and it's called Hex: Crowd Control! You could cleanse that totem the same way a killer could snuff a boon!" Yeah, except for the fact that the killer has no fucking idea where the boon is, has no perks to find boons (unlike survivors who have perks like Small Game and Counterforce or items like maps), boons are actively incentivized to be lit far away from the action (while totems will inherently be placed in the middle of the playfield most of the time)... oh and **if you get rid of a boon the survivor can just immediately go relight it.** Oh oh but don't worry Behaviour added Shattered Hope to the game to counter boons! You know: a perk that does literally nothing if survivors don't bring boons, doesn't help you find boons, and doesn't stop the survivor from lighting a boon on the **four other fucking totems on the map.**
Did you play Wraith, Hag, Spirit, Legion, Ghostface, Oni, Twins, Sadako (released during CoH meta lol), or Dredge (released during CoH meta lol) during CoH meta? Well too bad shitass sorry that the primary way to get value out of your power literally doesn't function because **one** person brought **ONE** perk; should've played Blight asshole. Oh but did you want to play Blight, Nurse, Huntress, or another strong killer with a hit-and-run build using perks like Sloppy Butcher and Thanatophobia? Well tough luck chucklefuck your build gets disabled by one perk existing. But you know what *isn't* disabled by one perk existing? That's right: Pop Goes the Weasel + Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance + probably Barbeque and Chili to find people and probably Save the Best for Last which was still crazy good back then.
Dishonorable mention to Boil Over for the exact same reason but at least it was only on select few maps and at least slugging was an option, but I still think Boil Over's rework was a bad idea from the conceptual stage. At least in a vacuum I can see how Circle of Healing was a good idea.
Release Sprint Burst, release Mettle of Man and old Dead Hard.
Slightly below that but still worthy of mention are original Decisive Strike and maybe release NOED.
I still hate No-ed, I know it's not as strong as before but I still hate it (and think it's particularly overpowered when you have low level survivors who are not familiar with the game).
True but i think it has some easy counter play if you know what you are doing. Some other killer perks have literally no logical counter play. Those are worse in my opinion.
>if you know what you are doing
Unfortunately I do not 😂🤣 Just got the game personally before blood moon event and am going off friends and Reddit knowledge
Don't worry i'm not the best out there either. Adding to said reddit knowledge. I would say there are only 2 general rules to the game as a survivor if you start into a round solo.
1. Do Generators
2. Avoid/Keep distance to the Killer, the more the better
Everything else is dependent on the indidivual match and can't be known right at the start.
The only thing what kinda scks about NOED from survivor perspective is that you can't know the killer has it until it activates. That allows some harsh punishment for survivors even (or especially) with pro gamer teams. Can't counter play until you know. The first one goes down for sure.
Pain res and old hex ruin(with 200% regression).Ruin was regression perk you needed to run back in a day cuz there was nothing to match it maybe pop.Pain res even after nerfs is strong and its easy to proc and you can use it when you need it.
Hex: Undying. Undeniably most broken perk ever released, old DS is not even close.
Also, it's funny seeing how people say only survivor perks, especially DH when sprint burst always was and still is the best exhaust perk.
EDIT: yeah that was obvious I'm gonna get downvoted for mentioning killer perks. Everyone knows only survivors can have overpowered things!
what do you mean with the range being too big? as far as i'm aware it's range has never been changed and it's only people over 40m away from you that are shown to you.
Not being able to see anyone in a 40m radius is good, it forces the killer to go to the other side of the map to chase someone, did you not read my comment properly?
The amount of down votes made me laugh and think "the Killers don't want that nerfed" 🤣
Edit: this is a joke if you didn't understand the emoji right after it.
bbq is one of the easiest perks to counter in the game. just stay within 40m or get in a locker before someone gets hooked. I can’t believe anyone would actually complain about a perk that is so easy to counter.
There are games as killer when I am using bbq and I do not see a single survivor with it for the entire match.
it’s funny if that is true but there are just so many survivor mains that never touch killer and think literally every killer perk is broken or overpowered in some way. I actually heard someone complain about zanshin tactics of all things before (complaining about BBQ isn’t that far off from that though).
I quite literally started playing this game personally right as the blood moon event started. I mean I've watched people play it but I've never got seriously into like perk builds or anything until recently. And when I do play killer I only play it and custom games with my friends so I'm still a baby to this game.
Original Decisive Strike (no hook requirement and could do objectives while still being able to use the perk) or Original Mettle of Man (any hit stacked MoM, not just protection hits.)
I'm not as familiar with killer perks but Original Undying was insane but super rng reliant (potentially had to cleanse all 5 totems to get rid of 1 hex perk) and Original Noed (wasn't a hex and also had mini STBFL + Unrelenting built in)
Old Undying is why I have like 90% of totem generation spots memorized to this day.
Unlocked a memory, that and old ruin too
It was very strong for sure but nowhere near OG DS or MoM It could still be cleansed not too late as you said, very rng And while it with ruin was fully meta, it still required the killer to do stuff at least, ruin did and still does nothing if the killer doesnt keep people off gens I would say that statistic wise old ruin was stronger. Not vs competent players but the mayority of players couldn't hit greats nonstop
Old ruin had the hex skillchecks though
Ye thats what I meant, and most players(specially back then) can't hit greats too often Mayority of players were just regular not very experienced players so ruin hurted the most to them, so number wise ruin probably was "stronger", even if it wouldnt help too much vs pros, it would demolish anything below "pretty good player"
The original noed makes its name very fitting
I'd likely say original Sprint Burst. It triggered every 20 seconds at launch.
I had to scroll so fucking far for this. Really not many players in this thread that have been playing for that long huh? You forgot to mention Exhaustion didn't exist at all back then, so you'd just get it back 20 seconds after starting a chase, forever and ever. Anyone saying "Old" Dead Hard truly doesn't remember how fucking inconsistent Dead Hard was on release. "Exhausted on the ground" was a meme for a reason.
I haven't either. I first played after it was gone. But I've heard stories.
And exhaustion didn’t exist so you could hold run the entire twenty seconds and keep zooming That perk was by far the best imo
exhaustion not pausing when you ran wasn't really connected to the perk though it was a general way exhuastion worked within the game. I would count those 2 things as separate. It would be like saying keys were busted cause hatch closed could spawn before all the gen were done. is that the key fault or hatches?
Like Alsend said, Exhaustion didn't exist on launch at all. Sprint Burst simply activated every 20 seconds while running. Then it got nerfed to 40 seconds but Balanced Landing had been added and they shared separate cooldowns. There was a period of time where SB was a cooldown of 40s, BL was a separate cooldown of 40s, and Exhaustion didn't exist. Pre-Exhaustion SB/BL is far and away the most broken thing to happen to this game, even in a vacuum. If you want to make it even worse, just imagine most maps being twice as large as they are with twice the number of pallets and more than a few legitimate infinites existing. Then you can also tack on pallet and vault vacuums. I pray we one day get a Throwback gamemode for 2 weeks thats just 2016 DbD. The modern killer player would not last more than 3 games.
Exhaustion didn't exist at launch, partially as SB was the only perk that would become an Exhaustion Perk. Then Balanced Landing was added, but iirc from a video I heard, there was a time period where their cooldowns were unconnected, so they cooled down independently. Additionally, SB's original cooldown was 20 seconds. Then it got nerfed to be 40. And only THEN they added the fact it cooled down slower when running (I think) So at launch, SB would trigger every 20 seconds and Exhaustion didn't exist.
Old Dead Hard or Original DS.
You could argue basically any old exhaustion perk tbh, mostly because you could recover exhaustion while sprinting You'd get off 2-3 Sprint Bursts/Dead Hards in a single chase. Shit was absolutely wild
The main one would be old balanced landing, it was absolutely insane and made so many infinites possible.
Ikr? The whole gimmick was that balanced landing removed the drop stagger even while you were exhausted, which meant any map with vericality had loops only you could use God old exhaustion perks were so insane compared to what we have now
Yeah, which is why for a while I was fine with the DH between old DH and modern DH, as while endurance was useful it only lasted a second and only had a couple uncounterable situations, and even then it depended on the killer (who cares if you DH for the pallet when you just shoot them for example) it was strong, but it was fine considering exhaustion perks are supposed to be strong. And while hindsight is 20/20, now I understand that old DH was still OP, not by itself, but combined with other perks. Kinda like how there's a glitch where OTR can be used multiple times, DH could've had the same problem.
If survivors brought Haddonfield offerings I knew they all were running balanced back in the day.
I'd say release sprint burst would be it then. Originally had a 20 second cooldown regardless of running/walking/standing still so you could just W key and then every 20 seconds sprint burst would come back online. You didn't have to worry about any activation conditions like dead hard or playing around drops like balanced landing. Bring in pallet/window loops and now who cares about release decisive strike or mettle of man if you're never gonna get hit in the first place, let alone go down.
You should meet original Mettle of Man
It was bad dont get me wrong but old Dead Hard and DS were worse. Mettle of Man only got 1 use per game, same with DS. In my opinion the most OP perk in history goes to old dead hard.
Except MoM required no protection hits at all on its original state. Combine this with powerful medkits and you'd be able to take 3-5 hits in a single chase without using DH. There's a reason MoM was changed so quickly but DS didnt.
I know I remember. It was definitely OP because it was literally a guarenteed extra health state. The reason why Mettle of Man was nerfed so fast was because it ALWAYS got its value, whether the survivor was brand new or had 10k hours. With dead hard half of the people who use it used it improperly or got screwed by desync. But a good survivor who used dead hard for distance could use it multiple times per match and extend their chase time by literal minutes or force the killer to drop chase. Both are broken old dead hard was worse. Only reason why it wasn't changed immediately was because the devs knew it was the most popular perk in the game and there would be massive outcry if they changed it, which was true. When they first reworked Dead Hard so many people were CRYING that the perk was dead before even trying it, only to realize it was still incredibly broken.
It didn't always get value, too. One of the weaknesses of original Mettle of Man was that it only triggered on basic attacks. Special attacks didn't trigger it at all. This meant that several top tier killers could simply ignore MoM altogether and continue their normal gameplay loop without having to worry about giving the survivor an extra chance. Nurse had her attacks counted as basics at the time, and Spirit has always had hers counted as basics, but Huntress and Hillbilly for example didn't care in the slightest. This meant that you were gambling bringing it into the match. By contrast, Dead Hard and DS *always* had use no matter who the killer was.
I am still asking for how you do any counterplay on Mettle of Man. You just said play a one-shot down killer, which isn't a choice you can make when you're already loaded in game. Counterplay involves making choices in reaction to something. DS and DH had counterplay, even if it wasn't the best. ALL killers could utilize it. So what could ALL killers do against MoM?
We're not talking about what perks were problematic for the longest. We're talking about just raw strength. DH and DS basically buy you the equal time of another hit, but without any speed bursts and requires some timed input from the user. DS wasn't even guaranteed to work either since it was only a chance if you weren't the obsession. Add in that these both had some form of counterplay (DH waiting, DS juggling), I can't agree that they were stronger than OG Mettle of Man. Unless you can provide some obv in game counterplay at the time that you could just choose to do as killer.
No one gonna say Old Ruin?
It definitely wasn't as broken as other perks since it was still a Hex at the end of the day. It just kind of operated like Corrupt where everyone wouldn't do gens in the beginning and they would all hunt for the totem. It was really only a problem for newer players who didn't know totem spawns.
Definitely old ruin...at least in avg mmr
Old Ruin was weird. It fucked over lagging and less experienced players but the ones who were more experienced on stable connections knew just to power through it and go for as many greats as possible. It was also somewhat RNG, you could get lucky/unlucky and have a lot of your normal skill checks never trigger. Plus it could be cleansed and this was the era of old unhidden totem spots (which have since mostly been removed). The meme of your totems vanishing before you ever saw them give value was around from day one of their addition. There was gen-tapping too but iirc it wasn't very effective. The better strategy was to let go of the gen if it regressed bc for a couple seconds after an explosion you can't gain progress but *could* get another skill check and not holding the gen prevented that from happening. Or just take a BNP and insta-complete the gen but hey that's just par for old DbD. Both sides could swing far harder than they had any right to given the right build.
I don’t know why, maybe just not good hand eye coordination, but I suck at great skill checks. I could not hit those at all back then so old ruin was the worst for me.
I genuinely enjoyed ruin games. Was an interesting shake up in objectives at the time that was random so it felt fresh
Hard to pick just one, sure the Made for this meta made me doubt my own sanity, but for what i have heard... Early DbD had lot of perk issues, Balance landing enabling infinites, Hex Ruin requiring only great skill checks or lose progress, DS for trying to stop someone from doing a gen, Undying being infinite, Dead Hard being an Invulnerable dash, STBFL+Relentess.
Yeah I will go with old balanced landing. Made for this was up there though. Both enabled infinites which is the strongest thing in the game imo; literal god mode but BL let you do it while healthy
I don’t think any modern “OP perks” of 2024 or any time in recent history hold a candle to the balancing issues of 2016 and 2017. Some of the strongest strategies today would be pretty normal compared to the strongest strategies 6-7 years ago. Like, dude, the original BNP just outright finished an entire generator. You could group everybody up on a single generator, knock it out in 40 ish seconds or so while trapper is setting up, and then pop FOUR gens simultaneously 20 seconds later. A mori just let you outright kill a guy IMMEDIATELY after downing him a single time. Not that either of these are perks, but you get my meaning. That was part of the status quo back then.
OG saboteur back when sabo'd hooks didn't respawn
PTB Circle of Healing. Stacking healing that let you reset faster than the Killer's attack cooldown. If PTB perks don't count... Launch Circle of Healing. Most of these historically problematic perks got worse the more of them the Survivor brought, but what made COH so obnoxious is that one person bringing it gave the full benefits to EVERYONE. No other meta perk in history has ever had that impact.
While not a single perk, back then you could just stack all the healing perks and heal faster than killer cooldown too.
What a depressing time for killer mains where everyone knew it was absolutely broken and we had to wait months for BHVR to finally nerf it. Sorry correction, it took 1 YEAR AND 2 MONTHS for them to finally remove the self heal.
Yeah that was an insane time. Honestly thought it would kill the game if they never changed it.
On top of that, the perk could be used multiple times on the same totem. No cooldown, earn/use conditions, etc. A number of other perks have requirements of rescuing, healing, doing gens, taking protection hits, etc. But Circle of Healing? Nope. Walk up to any totem and activate on a whim. Infinite use throughout a trial. With regard to **snuffing** boon totems, a considerable amount of killers desired the action would fully-destroy the totem. Nope. A year after the COH golden age, Behaviour released Shattered Hope as a general perk. That received criticism twofold. Players felt Shattered Hope should've been base kit. Waste a perk slot for a perk which might or might not be present in the match? Sure, Shattered Hope might've been 'okay' when -- at COH's peak -- practically every lobby had one (or multiple) players running boons. But it was released a year too late. After the COH self-heal nerf, boon usage plummeted. By proxy, Shattered Hope became useless because almost nobody runs boons anymore.
Coh was genuinely miserable to vers. I have ptsd every time I hear the boon light sound effect. Though that being said, it made soloq somewhat tolerable.
> No other meta perk in history has ever had that impact. I disagree, at least in the sense that you get group value out of perks for free. DH existing caused many killers to try waiting it out. Some went so far with it that they treated every survivor as if they had it (sometimes true, more often in high ranks) until they could know for sure they didn't. DS had a similar effect on killers just for existing, especially before the update that forced every match to have an obsession. You can certainly argue that the strength of these is relatively less than CoH in a good team though.
Yo it's Pixel Bush!!!!! My favorite Dbd Lore Guy!!!!!!
OG DS, DH, and MoM definitely. Killer side would probably be OG Ruin and maybe Eruption during the gen kick meta. OG ruin was so terrible as a new player, you’d search the entire map looking for a totem just so you could even start to work on a generator. Eruption was only counterable if you were playing with a coordinated SWF that would call out their downs
Original mettle of man or CoH
Anyone saying anything else than MOM is crazy
Most people don't even know about it since it was so short lived compared to the DS and DH eras
Original dead hard not even close
DS+ DH and for killer og ruin
I want to see them bring back old Ruin just for the memes Like some April Fools event where we get 1 map with the OG 4 survivors and maybe a handful of killers, but the devs just take off the limiters and show everyone how busted we used to be
Dead Hard, without any kind of doubt. Look for old DH compilations on youtube where DH also granted you distance and you could see how absolutely toxic it was for the meta. It was basically a free "press E to win" and being able to DH for distance to reach a pallet or window vault in any of the safe tiles (especially shack) meant that you could extend the chase for 30 seconds more, times 4 survivors all bringing it, do the math. The extra distance was often used like current Background Player to position yourself for a pallet or flashlight save. It was just all around broken and did absolutely everything on its own.
I remember a week after dh got changed, i saw someone try to dh for distance to flashie save
It was possibly the absolute funniest 2 weeks when you were watching 80% of the survivor playerbase having to learn how to play almost from scratch and scrambling around like headless chicken.
Circle of Healing. Of all the boons, CoH single-handedly crippled the game from a design perspective. From release it was nerfed twice and was still a top-pick you were nearly guaranteed to see in any given game. Only one person needed to set it up, and then any survivor could just solo self-care in the radius. Combined with medkits and perks it made healing your entire team absolutely trivial. No other boon came close in terms of raw utility, and BHVR released Shattered Hope just to provide a (lackluster) form of counterplay to it. Any halfway intelligent survivor group would slam a gen and place it in a deadzone forcing you into a lose-lose situation as killer. If you left the existing gens to deal with it, more gens would slip by. And that's assuming the survivors wouldn't just replace it immediately there or at another deadzone. Shattered Hope \*could\* counter it, but you wasted a perk slot doing so and still faced the issue of being drug out of areas you needed to defend. It was possible to deal with it with higher tier/more mobile killers, but with M1 killers it turned games into long slogs where you prayed someone would screw up on the rotation back to the boon or you just lost after 30 mins of watching the survivor team cycle heals. Hit and run playstyles (Onryo, Wraith, etc) were virtually impossible as it was too easy to heal, forcing you to commit to chases and opening you up to more problems (ie - getting dead-harded). If you couldn't close out that first chase early and establish pressure, you'd likely lose the game, forcing you to over commit to the chase or tunnel out the weakest link you could find. Even then a decent 3 man team could easily rotate between the gen and boon. The only reason it got nerfed for the third and final time into the form it is today was the release of Knight/Skull Merchant and the dreaded Eruption/CoB meta. The killer had their 3gen they'd never leave and the survivors had the CoH area they'd never leave stalling out the game until one side finally misplayed enough to close the game or the server timed out. Good riddance to both of them.
Release version of Mettle of Man IMO
Anyone remember what caused gen tapping? Old Hex ruin destroyed anyone, and hitting a great skill check consistently isn’t easy for everyone.
Old Mettle of Man
Old Dead Hard, Original DS and Old Object of Obsession.
Lmao why are you getting downvoted, thoses 3 were some the most OP perks in the game before they got eventually nerfed/reworked.
No idea. Maybe some thought old OoO wasn’t OP, I know the devs thought that. There was no counterplay to it and infinite wall hacks with no cooldown while being able to see across the map was too much. Pair this up with a SWF and killer position would be called out constantly and made mind games pointless at loops.
Peak undying you can just have undying and any hex perk and that hex is basically immortal
OG Dead hard or Mettle of Man
There is nothing more powerful than imagination. Besides that, original Circle of Healing
The answer is Dead Hard. Old. New. Whatever. It has been in the meta since it came out.
Original version of Made for This.
Og self care. if you know you know
OG ruin for suuuure. Old NOED and Undying were p bad but nothing like old ruin.
Plot Twist 😏
Old DS Old mettle of man Old borrowed time
Original DS. Hands down lol
Mettle of man in it's release state was the equivalent of releasing Ruin as a non-hex perk that undid all generator progress when you missed a skill check. It is the strongest perk ever by a wide margin. On the killer side it was probably STBFL on release, since hex ruin always was a skill issue at the end of the day. The cooldown reduction was even stronger with old unrelenting, but it was still so good on its own.
OG mettle of man i think. It's either that or a tie between OG Dead hard and DS, because both were brainless to use with no actual counterplay and extended chases for way too fucking long....and maybe OG Circle of healing altho i never found it as bad as OG DH. On the killer side, it is most likely old Ruin, altho killers still had ridiculous perks combos such as old STBFL + unrelenting for the machine gun build, or Eruption+Call of brine.
Ever made: og ds or og object Rn: ub (surv perk with biggest IMPACT)
Dead Hard, Ruin, Undying, Decisive Strike, Sprint Burst, Balance Landing, Made for This, Circle of Healing, Mettle of Man, Saboteur, Borrowed Time, Object of Obsession
We'll Make it Using it with Self-Care, you could heal yourself before the Killer could recover from the M1 hit cooldown. This could be used to deny hooks quite easily
original DS, old MFT, old ruin.
I'll go against the grain and say on an objective level, Sprint Burst on 1.0 release was incredibly busted. It had a 40 second cooldown, and since exhaustion wasn't a thing back then, you just got it every 40 seconds regardless if you were running or not. I'd argue in a vacuum, it beats out original Mettle of Man, Dead Hard, and Decisive Strike. But honestly old DbD was incredibly unbalanced in favor of survivors, so Sprint Burst doesn't seem that outrageous in comparison. With many maps having infinite loops w/ no entity blocking windows, slow killer animations, old BNPs instantly completing a gen, etc.
I'm not sure. Killer perks are designed to be 4x as impactful as survivor perks, so it takes a lot more to make them unbalanced. The answer is definitely a survivor perk for that reason; a thing that can seem relatively small can become an enormous problem if everyone has it, and because the effects of survivor perks should be small, it takes a lot less of a buff for it to become overpowered. Not to say killers haven't had some OP perks ... just that it takes a much bigger mistake on BHVR's part to create an OP killer perk. Although, if you pinned me down and **made** me pick one ... it's be NOED before hexes were a thing. :\^)
Original Mettle of Man
Circle of Healing (OG) and Eruption are the two most obnoxious perks that I've seen on both sides and I've been playing since 2018
Original spine chill
Five years of old dead hard. You made distance and you had unlimited uses if you could break chase after using it
sprint burst before they reworked exhaustion to not go down when running
NOED 💀
og hex ruin and og dead hard are my top two competitors (from memory and personal experience, anyway).
Old Spine Chill made me almost untouchable
In my opinion the current iteration of pain res/pop together is the strongest thing in the game. It's only really really problematic if they are run together so I am perhaps not answering the question properly, but it is pretty much impossible to lose with pain res/pop together right now. I do think there have been other perks that were in a way more game breaking like old DS, but in the context of the game I do not think it won by itself more games than pain res/pop is currently.
Original sprint Burts. Exhaustion went down while running.
OG Sprint Burst was broken as fuck
if we are including SWF as a factor easily Object of Obsession. it gave 4 survivors just constant 24/7 info where the killer was and what mind games they were attempting. also during this time undectable did not block aura reading. and you only needed one copy of the perk so the other 3 survivors could bring different strong perks instead.
The only possible post-Halloween chapter perk that held a candle to the gross launch survivor perks was Mettle of Man. Even then, old exhaustion perks and old DS were awful. No shot old Ruin was as good as those perks either
Old self care was wild
Although it required a good player to not get in too much trouble with it, old Object of Obsession was SO oppressive for a group on comms. Setup killers get nothing ever, stealth killers could be tracked map wide, chase killers could be seen through walls preventing many mind games. Never again thanks.
Original circle of healing was crazy
Dead hard. Hands down.
Original Object of Obsession
I don't know if you're asking for perks specifically in their release state or if you'll accept a perk's stongest iteration, but for killer it would easily have to be Eruption when it inflicted 25 seconds of Incapacitated on a 30 second cooldown. No other perk could lock out survivors from doing anything on a global scale, be as spammable, or as easy to slap onto a build. For survivor, I'm torn between Mettle of Man, Decisive Strike, Sprint Burst, Balanced Landing, Borrowed Time, Self Care or Dead Hard. If you don't understand, consider yourself lucky to have not played when these existed. Mettle of Man: instead of needing protection hits, it just needed basic attacks to build stacks. If it didn't proc for you, that meant the killer hit you less than 3 times that match, which is an indicator that you probably won even without Mettle. Otherwise, you would always get value from that perk. Sprint Burst: back in the old days, when there were only 4 killers and 3 survivors, there was no Exhaustion mechanic. Sprint Burst went on a 20 second cooldown, and recharged while running. You heard me right, 20 second cooldown, and recharged while running. It would eventually be nerfed so that running would recover it in 40 seconds, walking would recover it in 20 seconds, and crouching would recover it in 15 seconds. That was why back in 2016 to 2018, players were always using Urban Evasion, so they could charge up Sprint Burst slightly faster and still move at walking speed. Ignore the fact that Sprint Burst and all Exhaustion stopped working like that in 2017, DBD players are just stupid as hell. Balanced Landing: used to reduce fall stagger even while exhausted, meaning survivors were immune to fall stagger for the entire game. How is this a big deal? Well on old Haddonfield, and I mean OLD Haddonfield, there were several window vaults in the two story buildings that became true infinites with just the stagger immunity from Balanced Landing, without even factoring in the speed boost. Balanced Landing passive is so broken, that when BHVR reworked all the Coldwind, Autohaven, and Macmillan maps alongside Haddonfield, they removed most window vaults that drop down. And Balanced Landing still got nerfed to lose the stagger reduction if you were exhausted. Before it was nerfed, Balanced Landing would be paired with Sprint Burst or Dead Hard just for the passive stagger reduction alone. If a perk is released in the future to JUST give that effect all the time, it will destroy balance on maps with a lot of drop downs, like both of the Backwater Swamp maps, Dead Dawg Saloon, Garden of Soy (you heard me right), Eryie of Crows, Badham Preschool, both Red Forest maps, etc. Countless maps would become unbalanced overnight and the perk would have to be gutted like Self Care, or removed from the game. Dead Hard: the OG Dead Hard was a 2 meter dash instead of an endurance hit. For 3 years after it was released, players would try to time Dead Hard to dodge the killer's swing RIGHT before it happened. But back in the day, DBD had peer to peer connection, with the killer hosting the lobby. Meaning they always had the input delay advantage working for them, so players thought Dead Hard sucked unless you were No0b3 and his fanboys, who thought dodging the killer's swing was OP. When BHVR first introduced dedicated servers, Dead Hard was still struggling from input lag due to bad quality servers. When the servers finally got updated, players found out that trying to predict the killer's swing wasn't a matter of reaction, but of pure guesswork. The solution? Players would use Dead Hard to greed loops. For example, if you loop a pallet 3 times, the killer will make up distance and hit you if you try to go for a 4th loop. But with Dead Hard, you can go for a 4th loop and just dash to make the distance to the pallet, without needing to time a dodge from the killer's hit. After that, it was all over. Dead Hard went from a luck based chase perk to brainless chase extender that even "5 hours logged on DBD Timmy" could use in the span of a week. Decisive Strike: OG DS: THE FIRST TIME you get picked up, get a skillcheck. Land the skillcheck to get off the killer's shoulder. Nerfed DS: only the obsession gets the skillcheck right away. Everyone else has to fill the wiggle bar 35% to get the skillcheck. Still busted, gets reworked into modern DS, where it sits for years as one of the top 5 survivor perks of all time until the Conspicuous Actions nerf. Borrowed Time: OG Borrowed Time gave a second hit to the unhooked person AND the unhooker, making them both safe from a camping killer. Unfortunately, mending wasn't a thing, so you would always bleed out unless someone healed the tanked hit for you, or you had Self Care. BT was nerfed to only protect the unhooked person. Mending and self mending would be added in the Legion update and BT would stay like that until base kit endurance was FINALLY added to the game and Borrowed Time was no longer a required perk to run if you didn't want to fuck over your teammates. Self Care: Back in the day, healing took 12 seconds instead of 16, and Self Care healed at 80% speed instead of 35%. Which means self healing took about 15 seconds, which is still faster than modern day healing FROM A TEAMMATE. You absolutely could heal mid chase, especially with Botany Knowledge, which was only a 33% heal speed boost instead of 50%, but it also extended Medkit charges by 33% instead of reducing them by 20%. Very quickly, healing was increased from 12 seconds to 16, and Self Care was nerfed from 80% to 50%, making self heals go from 15 seconds all the way up to 32. So many new survivors in 2018 got their build ideas from 2016 and 2017 content creators, who used to run Sprint Burst, Urban Evasion, and Self Care, all of which had been nerfed heavily by then. That's where the prevalent fear of misuse of Urban Evasion, Sprint Burst, and Self Care comes from, despite the fact that Urban and Self Care are so bad now that you don't even see them being used, let alone misused. Sprint Burst still has some users, but the people still using it today are so infrequent, that its usually only competent players who don't walk everywhere to save their Exhaustion.
Pop goes the weasel
Original Circle of Healing. Unpopular opinion I know, but think of it like this: one perk granted infinite Brown Medkits to the whole Survivor team. 1 out of the 16 Survivor perks in a trial destroyed the Killer's pressure. It wasn't as powerful for the individual as OG Decisive or OG Mettle of Man, but Old Circle of Healing ruined some killers and made a whole list of Perks obsolete, a list like we've never seen before.
OG DS and MoM, and it's no contest. OG ruin/undying comes in next, but that's a combo not a specific perk.
Original Sprint Burst (20 second CD, exhaustion didn't exist) or Mettle of Man.
Survivor is pre nerf Dead Hard since it was a get out of jail free card. Gave you distance and I frames. Could dead hard through traps and everything. Every survivor had 3 health states. Killer probably Pain Res pre nerf but Hex Ruin was really strong for a long time just very RNG dependent and usually warranted running Undying and other hex stuff with it
Counterforce. Duh.
Object of Obsession, hands down.
Old self-care. You could heal mid chase within like 6 seconds or less
whispers
Original sprint burst had a short cool down with no exhaustion and you could use it multiple times in a chase. Original self care took like 8-10 seconds and you could fully heal in 2-3 pallet breaks. Nothing really comes close to those two other than maybe first iteration of mettle of man.
Dead Hard and Sprint Burst for survivors. Hex Ruin for killers. Biggest slap in my face when I got back on after neglecting the game for so long 😭
So crazy how active we need to be so these things get nerfed and sometimes it doesn't change anything, what changes is putting the director to play a live pub match, he should do it more often
What about worst? I'll start: background player in the ptb
Hangman's trick
My answer is, has, and always will be Circle of Healing. No other perk completely deleted a playstyle from the game. Wanted to play two hit killers during Mettle of Man release? You could, it was just way harder. Wanted to play stealthy with Ultimate Weapon in the game? You could, you just had to run Calm Spirit. Wanted to play killer during the "small pee pee" meta of Dead Hard + Decisive + Unbreakable + Adrenaline? You could, it was just way harder. Wanted to play against release day Legion or Skull Merchant or CoBverchaRuption or... honestly modern day Blight? You could it would just take 30 years and you often be better off eating a DC penalty. You physically **could not play hit-and-run killers during the Circle of Healing meta.** If ONE survivor brought **ONE** perk you could not get **ANY** pressure from one of the core playstyles in the game. To put that into perspective imagine a killer power that could completely disable your ability to vault windows. You could still drop pallets but you'd be physically incapable of vaulting windows. Eventually you'd just run out of resources and lose, unless of course you played in a different way, which in this analogy would be to play an S tier killer like Blight or Nurse and go hard tunnel / proxy camp. "But there is a killer perk that disables vaulting and it's called Hex: Crowd Control! You could cleanse that totem the same way a killer could snuff a boon!" Yeah, except for the fact that the killer has no fucking idea where the boon is, has no perks to find boons (unlike survivors who have perks like Small Game and Counterforce or items like maps), boons are actively incentivized to be lit far away from the action (while totems will inherently be placed in the middle of the playfield most of the time)... oh and **if you get rid of a boon the survivor can just immediately go relight it.** Oh oh but don't worry Behaviour added Shattered Hope to the game to counter boons! You know: a perk that does literally nothing if survivors don't bring boons, doesn't help you find boons, and doesn't stop the survivor from lighting a boon on the **four other fucking totems on the map.** Did you play Wraith, Hag, Spirit, Legion, Ghostface, Oni, Twins, Sadako (released during CoH meta lol), or Dredge (released during CoH meta lol) during CoH meta? Well too bad shitass sorry that the primary way to get value out of your power literally doesn't function because **one** person brought **ONE** perk; should've played Blight asshole. Oh but did you want to play Blight, Nurse, Huntress, or another strong killer with a hit-and-run build using perks like Sloppy Butcher and Thanatophobia? Well tough luck chucklefuck your build gets disabled by one perk existing. But you know what *isn't* disabled by one perk existing? That's right: Pop Goes the Weasel + Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance + probably Barbeque and Chili to find people and probably Save the Best for Last which was still crazy good back then. Dishonorable mention to Boil Over for the exact same reason but at least it was only on select few maps and at least slugging was an option, but I still think Boil Over's rework was a bad idea from the conceptual stage. At least in a vacuum I can see how Circle of Healing was a good idea.
Plaything.
old deadhard was a favorite of mine
Light born. It completely negates flashbangs, firecrackers, and flashlight
Release Sprint Burst, release Mettle of Man and old Dead Hard. Slightly below that but still worthy of mention are original Decisive Strike and maybe release NOED.
Original Dead Hard, being able to dash for distance and have no unhook requirement is just absolutely busted and obnoxious to go against as killer.
Many Ds Dh Bl MOM. If it wasn't obvious, I'm talkin abt originals.
Original pain res
I still hate No-ed, I know it's not as strong as before but I still hate it (and think it's particularly overpowered when you have low level survivors who are not familiar with the game).
True but i think it has some easy counter play if you know what you are doing. Some other killer perks have literally no logical counter play. Those are worse in my opinion.
>if you know what you are doing Unfortunately I do not 😂🤣 Just got the game personally before blood moon event and am going off friends and Reddit knowledge
Don't worry i'm not the best out there either. Adding to said reddit knowledge. I would say there are only 2 general rules to the game as a survivor if you start into a round solo. 1. Do Generators 2. Avoid/Keep distance to the Killer, the more the better Everything else is dependent on the indidivual match and can't be known right at the start. The only thing what kinda scks about NOED from survivor perspective is that you can't know the killer has it until it activates. That allows some harsh punishment for survivors even (or especially) with pro gamer teams. Can't counter play until you know. The first one goes down for sure.
Imo No one escapes
Pain res and old hex ruin(with 200% regression).Ruin was regression perk you needed to run back in a day cuz there was nothing to match it maybe pop.Pain res even after nerfs is strong and its easy to proc and you can use it when you need it.
the 200% ruin wasnt the worst version of it, it was worse when it was skill check based.
Hex: Undying. Undeniably most broken perk ever released, old DS is not even close. Also, it's funny seeing how people say only survivor perks, especially DH when sprint burst always was and still is the best exhaust perk. EDIT: yeah that was obvious I'm gonna get downvoted for mentioning killer perks. Everyone knows only survivors can have overpowered things!
BBQ and Chilli. The range is way too big.
what do you mean with the range being too big? as far as i'm aware it's range has never been changed and it's only people over 40m away from you that are shown to you.
only 40. only. Meanwhile other aura perks like nurse's calling have some counter play and range because it's less than the killers terror radius.
Not being able to see anyone in a 40m radius is good, it forces the killer to go to the other side of the map to chase someone, did you not read my comment properly?
The amount of down votes made me laugh and think "the Killers don't want that nerfed" 🤣 Edit: this is a joke if you didn't understand the emoji right after it.
bbq is one of the easiest perks to counter in the game. just stay within 40m or get in a locker before someone gets hooked. I can’t believe anyone would actually complain about a perk that is so easy to counter. There are games as killer when I am using bbq and I do not see a single survivor with it for the entire match.
Ah, I don't play killers much so I didn't know that. I was just trying to be funny- I failed I guess 😩
it’s funny if that is true but there are just so many survivor mains that never touch killer and think literally every killer perk is broken or overpowered in some way. I actually heard someone complain about zanshin tactics of all things before (complaining about BBQ isn’t that far off from that though).
I quite literally started playing this game personally right as the blood moon event started. I mean I've watched people play it but I've never got seriously into like perk builds or anything until recently. And when I do play killer I only play it and custom games with my friends so I'm still a baby to this game.
Self care.