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Behaviour continues their streak of lacklustre DLC with Tools of Torment. This update brings a new killer, The Skull Merchant, and 2 new survivors for some reason, Renato and Thalita Lyra, as well as a kind of new map, the reworked Shelter Woods. Lets talk the killer first, since that's usually the main draw of any of the new DLCs.
Her power is her 4 Drones. These do a million things that make them look complicated and powerful, but I'm going to boil them down to the basics, so you know why she sucks. She can deploy up to all 4 of them to patrol areas. They aren't hidden, and theres a big obnoxious orange ring around them that you and survivors can see to indicate where the drone's radius is. While in this radius, a survivor's aura is revealed to you, and if they spend too long inside, they become exposed, so you can one shot them. After a little while, the drones power down, and survivors can do a very simple input game to deactivate them. This adds a claw trap to the survivor, which lets you see where they are for like another 10 seconds until the battery dies and the survivor can remove it. There's a lot more minutia to it, but that's all you need to know for now. Her power boils down to info and camping, both things that other killers do better. Since she completely lacks mobility, shes worthless on bigger maps, and is a big pain in the ass on smaller ones since she can just get a 3 gen and maintain drones on them until one of you give up.
Her perks fall pretty in line with everything else, 2 are worthless, plain and simple, and the third one is a bit strange and has some potential. THWACK activates after you hook someone and shows you were everyone is next time you break a wall or pallet. Maybe if you're in an indoor map with a lot of breakable walls it could be okay if you have no idea where anyone else is, but there are so many better info perks, and 9 times out of ten you'll just burn this in chase when you already know exactly where the survivor is. Leverage gives you tokens that make healing slower every time you hook someone, but they don't do much, since while you CAN get up to 10, they disappear over time, and if you want anti heal you probably have sloppy butcher or thanatophobia anyways, 2 MUCH stronger perks. Her final one, game afoot, is the one redeemable one, but still not great. If you hit the survivor you've spent the most time chasing, they become the obsession. If you chase the obsession and break something, you gain a 10 second speed boost. If you can manage this well and juggle the obsession status effectively, I could see it being pretty good, but you'd need to build around it to really get the most out of it, and a lot of the time breaking through things isn't the best way to resolve a chase. Not terrible, but not great.
Our first survivor is Thalita, her perks are a nice step up from the abysmal killer offering here.
Cut loose is fun, after performing a fast vault, you have a limited time to chain some silent fast vaults together. This is mostly a meme perk in my mind, but paired with some other stealth perks on the right map, I can see it being pretty good. Friendly competition activates when you finish a generator with someone, giving you and anyone on it a small repair boost for a little while. On a SWF, this could be brutal for genrush builds, but you'd need to be coordinated to make it work at it's full potential. Her final perk is one of the 2 new "Teamwork" perks this DLC introduces, this one activating when you finish healing someone, giving both of you haste until you split up or get hurt. Not terrible, if you're the support guy on a team it could be nice, but typically its smarter to split up, especially if you're being chased, so the perk feels redundant. (It also feels really similar to blood pact? just weaker without the obsession requirement?)
Finally, we've got Renato, who is kind of a let down in comparison to his sister. He has an exhaustion perk; Background Player, which triggers when someone is picked up, and gives you a burst of speed. This is only ever going to be a meme perk for sabotages, and nothing more. It's sprint burst that you have no control over, and I don't ever see myself running it. Bloodrush sounds crazy on paper, allowing you to injure yourself while on second hook to instantly recover from exhaustion, and chain an exhaust perk back to back. This is assuming you get healed after being saved from second hook, and even then, it doesn't work with dead hard, and only works once per trial. So for 2 perk slots, you can sprint burst twice in a row once per match. Its a fun idea, but I don't see it being all that useful either. Finally, his teamwork perk, which activates when you get healed by someone else, and hides all of your scratch marks, as long as you're together, and noone gets hurt. Again, sticking together in chase is rarely, if ever, a good idea, and stealthing together is very difficult unless you're in a coordinated SWF. It's not totally worthless, but again it just feels like a lame gimmick perk that isn't very useful.
It sucks to see behaviour drop the ball again this hard. I'm noticing a lot of people, both online and in my circle of friends, that are losing interest in DBD, simply because of the lack of new interesting content. The Knight and the Skull Merchant are boring on either side, being built to drag out matches for as long as possible while camping, and with the same meta builds showing up in every match, and the lack of anything new to do after several years, its not hard to see why. I still really like this game, and I want it to improve, but even I'm finding it hard to boot up the game when it feels like its actively getting worse every time I do. I hate the people who just relentlessly spam the company with hate for anything they do, but its a symptom of an unhappy playerbase, and if they can't pick up the ball, this could very well be the beginning of the end of the game. If they need to slow down the release cycle, I would be happy to wait a few extra months if it means we get higher quality content.
HOOOOOOOOLY that skin tho god damn;;