Traits Explained & Tiered

Some of the traits are more complicated than would initially appear at first glance. This guide will cover the traits' uses, listed in the order I typically pick them up.

Preface

Every perk is useful, and none of them are explicitly bad. This guide is to detail the intricacies of some of the perks I've seen people not fully understand, but I have formatted it in a descending order of the order I typically pick them up to make writing easier and clickbait you into reading the guide. You fell for it!

Let me know if you have any information about the traits that I forgot to include, or maybe didn't even know about at all.

Game Sucks Without Them

These perks are always picked up before anything else.


Kiteskin: Reduce damage from falling by 50%.

Kiteskin is one of the strongest perks in the game, and it only costs a single upgrade point. At a glance a new player might not see the use in reducing fall damage, but the reduction is enormous and there are many situations where you can utilize it. It allows you to quickly move around both in and out of combat, and take unexpected approaches.

Jumping out of second story windows deals anywhere between literally 0 and very little damage. Jumping off the top of tall ladders is likely to only break a small health chunk, at the worst. You can quickly retreat from a bad position, even while injured, where you'd be stuck dead without the perk. You can quickly push someone else who's in a bad position. You can attack from weird angles, or even firing while airborne if you feel lucky or are using a shotgun.


Dauntless: Thrown explosives can be defused when interacting with them.

Dauntless is much easier to make frequent use of than you might expect. If someone is cooking a bomb to throw at you it probably won't help, but any bombs that are either uncooked or only barely cooked can be defused, and it's very easy to defuse chokes with it. I Dauntless choke bombs thrown onto teammates constantly and I've never seen anyone actually try to cook the choke before throwing it. They'll just throw uncooked chokes that get Dauntlessed 2 or 3 times in a row, then they can't try to extinguish any more and have to actually push if they don't want their teammate to burn. I'm not sure if they just don't know Dauntless is a perk and think the chokes are bugging or what, but nobody has ever countered my countering of their countering of my countering of their camping.

It can also extinguish your own bombs if you miss and they land at your feet, or extinguish things like flares & fusees. It can be helpful if you're burning people but don't like the light, or if someone actually fires those at you for some reason.


Decoy Supply: Restock all types of Decoys from ammo crates.

Decoy Supply makes it so that whenever you use an ammo box, it will fully replenish all of your decoys. All 6 or 7 blankfire decoys, all 12 or 13 decoys, and all 3 or 4 decoy fuses will be replenished. This both allows you to use these items rather freely, and allows toolboxes and hunters to more often give other items such as medkits. All of this for only a single point is incredible to anyone who utilizes these items, although if you aren't using them obviously the perk is worthless.

High Priority

These perks are universally useful and very frequently picked up after Kiteskin.


Assailant: Increases melee damage of throwing knives & throwing axes. Also lets you throw world melee weapons.
Unlisted: Changes animations of throwing knives & throwing axes' melee attacks.

Assailant only costs one point, and it's great. It's very loadout dependent, but I bring throwing knives instead of a melee weapon so it's perfect for me.

With throwing axes it allows the heavy attack to cleave groups of enemies like the heavy knife. You can combine this with the knuckle knife to get the best of both worlds.

With throwing knives it allows the melee attacks to actually deal damage, becoming just as good as the knife. The knife is extremely stamina inefficient so it's a bad melee weapon and most of the time you'll want to just throw a knife and pull it out as you pass over as usual. But in certain PvP situations you might not have time to briefly slow yourself to do the throw, or risk hitting the grunt's arm, so having a normal melee for emergencies can sometimes be very useful.

1.15 also made it so that Assailant lets you throw melee weapons you find in the world like Tomahawk, but Tomahawk's always seemed like a joke perk. I'm not sure it's particularly useful.


Doctor: Doubles the amount of health restored by first aid kits.

Doubling the heal of a medkit both doubles the speed at which you heal and doubles the max amount of healing you can carry. Doctor + Physician makes you have a ton of healing that you can do very quickly, but having neither almost makes it so that you can't use the medkit for healing in combat.


Physician: Reduce the time needed to bandage.

Medkit heals super slow without Physician. Not much else to say, other than vitality shots being able to somewhat make up for not having this perk, and "bandage" means using your medkit and not stopping bleeding. I don't think it affects world doctor bags, either.


Necromancer: Using Dark Sight, revive a downed partner at a distance, though at the cost of a small amount of health (25 meters).

Necromancer doesn't always help, but when it does it is insanely useful. For only 4 points it's well worth the investment. If your teammate dies in a bad spot and the enemies aren't being aggressive, you can just stare at him while hiding for a few seconds and up he goes. Doing it immediately is expected and likely to just get him farmed, but if you wait a bit it usually works. You can also use Necromancer while moving, so you could do most of the revive then just as it's going to finish run up and start jumping in front of him to try to bodyblock bullets aimed at him. This is very risky, but could work.

Just keep in mind that Necromancer makes noise while you're reviving, your teammate will gasp as usual when revived, your teammate will get spawnkilled if you revive him infront of an enemy or in traps when he doesn't have the proper effects, and reviving him injures you. It's only 25 damage, so a regen shot + vigor or single use of the medkit will recover it. Or just waiting if you have a big health chunk.


Vigor: While in Dark Sight, doubles the rate at which health & stamina regenerate.

Vigor greatly increases the speed at which you recover, and pairs well with a regeneration shot to allow infinite healing which would otherwise be rather slow without Vigor. It's great for conventional melee-based takedowns of bosses, healing off mistakes made in PvE, or quickly recovering health in PvP when people aren't pushing you. A common strategy is taking two vitality shots until you get Vigor, to then replace one with a regeneration shot.

Weapon Specific (Important)

These traits are either useless or far less useful if you don't have a certain weapon. But when you do have that weapon, they're just as important as the traits in High Priority.


Whispersmith: Reduces noise when selecting equipment.

Whispersmith drastically reduces the sound you make for switching equipment, which is always somewhat useful. But I treat it like a Bomb Lance perk, since I did some testing and equipping the Bomb Lance without this trait is 14 decibels louder than a tornado siren. It's a very bad idea to let the enemy know when you're pulling out the powerful close range weapon.


Bolt Thrower: Reduced reload time for crossbows.

Bolt Thrower doubles your reload speed with crossbows. Not much to say, other than it's a huge increase for a cheap price.


Levering: Faster rate of fire from the hip when using lever-action weapons.

For only 4 points Levering turns the Terminus into a oneshot spamming monster. Winfields become machine guns at closer ranges while still retaining their head popping ability with ironsights (Although the Centennial is a bit inaccurate, limiting its range). The accuracy on non-Terminus levering is improved if you tap fire instead of hold, and if you hold still as you fire.



Iron Eye & Scopesmith: Remain in iron sights/scope view after firing a shot with an applicable weapon.
Unlisted: Almost always increases rate of fire while aiming.

These are both the same perk. They increase your firerate and make it easier to aim. Depending on the weapon the increase ranges from non-existent to extremely huge, but either way it's only 2 or 3 points. Keep in mind that you don't need to ADS for shotguns (and doing so is somewhat detrimental) unless you're using slugs.


Hundred Hands: Increases the damage of a Hunting Bow shot at full draw by 10%. Also reduces sway whilst at full draw, and allows use of arrows in melee attacks.

Hundred Hands slightly increases the damage of the Hunting Bow, allowing fully charged arm shots within 6 meters to be lethal (the bleed will kill them very quickly within an extra meter or two). It also reduces the sway at full draw and gives bows a very slow 105 damage melee attack with the default or poison arrow (allowing it to be the only poisoned melee in the game), although unfortunately you can't stab people with frag or concertina arrows and die a glorious death.

Because arrows don't penetrate limbs, oneshotting someone's arm is absolutely enormous when you're close enough to do that, removing the technically-not-luck-but-pretty-much-is nonlethal arm shots that can cost you your life. The range that this happens is admittedly very small, but the perk is also very cheap, and it will provide a little bit of a range increase against players and a flat 10% increase in damage against bosses & meatheads.

Medium Priority

I might pick these up after getting most/all of the above perks.


Quartermaster: Can equip a medium slot weapon in addition to a large slot weapon.

Quartermaster allowing you to bring a medium slot weapon instead of a small slot can be a great improvement, but the small slot weapons are already great. The Pax, the Scottfield Spitfire, the Uppercut, the Lemat, the Hand Crossbow, the New Army/Officer, and the Conversion are all very good choices. But it does let you get something like a shotgun, stocked pistol, Mosin Obrez, Uppermat, or Hunting Bow.


Frontiersman: Carried tools can be used one extra time.

Frontiersman gives +1 to the capacity of every tool. It's already worth it just for the extra medkit, although 7 points just for that isn't exactly a bargain. It granting an extra medkit in addition to an extra knife, extra axe, extra decoy fuse, extra four derringer shots, extra choke bomb, etc is what makes it worth grabbing.


Resilience: Your hunter is revived with up to full health.

Resilience letting you revive with 125 health is great. You do a weird get-up animation so people are likely to hit suboptimal regions like a limb or gut, and many guns can't even deal 125 without a headshot. Once you revive you can immediately start doing evasive or offensive actions. It also lets you safely revive through most traps.

It doesn't make reviving risk-free, but it greatly lowers the risk.


Packmule: Receive an additional tool or consumable when looting players or opening item boxes.

Packmule causing toolboxes and corpses to give twice as many items is often very useful. It can turn 1 medkit into 2 medkits. Turn a hive bomb into a hive bomb and a flashbomb. Turn a throwing axe into a throwing axe and a medkit. With the recent addition of a consumable toolbox that you can bring, this trait became even more powerful. If two members of your team have it, you can make a single consumable toolbox grant four items.

The best part is definitely getting more medkits.


Vulture: Always able to loot dead hunters, even when they have been looted by other players.

Vulture lets you loot corpses two people already looted (but not burned hunters), which is for trio players and rats. I'm neither of those, so I never get it. But if you're in a trio, one of you should be getting Vulture so that you can all resupply things like medkits off of hunter corpses. Can be useful in a duo if you stumble upon any corpses, but I find that to be very inconsistent at best and the value questionable.


Lightfoot: Vault, fall, and climb ladders silently.

Lightfoot went from the best and most universally useful perk in the game to a rather average and situational perk. Jumping makes a noise, and landing makes a noise, so all it does now is make vaulting, climbing, and falling without first jumping quieter (and if you take damage from the fall you still grunt). Useful, but 5 points for that is a bit pricey.


Conduit: Get a health and stamina boost when picking up a Clue or closing a Rift.

Conduit gives 3 minutes of infinite stamina & a full heal whenever you or a teammate picks up a clue. The full heal can be useful in doing things like tanking a meathead hit as you grab the clue he's on, and the stamina boost helps you traverse the map. Grabbing a clue outside a boss lair before entering it will give you far more than enough time to kill the boss with infinite stamina.

Weapon Specific (Unimportant)

These are more weapon specific traits, with me picking them up at the same time as the Medium Priority traits.


Fanning: Faster rate of fire when using one handed single-action pistols.
Unlisted: Only applies to hipfire. Not sure why it explains that for levering but not fanning.

Fanning is one of the best perks in the game. But, it's expensive. And other small slot weapons can be very powerful with or without it. So I don't really think it's very necessary to rush obtaining it, but I still often will because it's very fun to use. Like with levering, the accuracy can be greatly increased by tapping the fire button & holding still before firing.


Silent Killer: Reduces the sound you make when performing melee attacks.
Unlisted: Removes the charge-up sound for heavy melee attacks.

Silent Killer removes the inhale charge sound for readying a heavy strike, and removes the scream when you perform any melee attack. Killing AI still causes them to make death noises, but those are much quieter than your screams, and not screaming also hides what you killed them with and your position. The removal of the inhale for readying a heavy attack could potentially help with meleeing hunters with something like a bomb lance or bayonet.


Ambidextrous: Quicker reloading of matched pairs, and custom clip reloads for semi-auto pistol sets.

Ambidextrous is pretty unnecessary. Akimbo weapons have so many bullets that you'll often kill the people you're fighting before needing to reload, and even if you don't you'll probably be able to safely reload without this perk. But if you really like paired weapons the extra reload speed isn't too bad.


Steady Aim: Weapon sway gradually lessens when you're looking through a scope.

Steady Aim gradually lowers the sway as you stare through the scope which can make it easier to aim certain scoped weapons if you hold an angle, but keep in mind that aiming through a scope for a long period of time opens you up to attacks from unexpected angles. Overall the perk is far less important than Scopesmith since it provides no statistical advantage, and only sometimes has the ability to possibly make aiming a little easier.

Low Priority

These are traits I'm unlikely to pick up, and likely to replace with better traits. But they aren't bad.


Serpent: Using Dark Sight, interact with nearby Clues, Rifts, Banishable Targets, and abandoned Bounty from a safe distance (25m).

Serpent can grab things that are dangerous, such as a clue guarded by a meathead, and also snipe bounties that are in undesirable locations. But bounties usually aren't just left laying on the floor, and clues are only rarely guarded by very dangerous AI which can usually be dealt with anyways and Conduit could deal with in addition to its other effects, so I don't usually get use of this perk.


Blade Seer: Bolts, arrows, throwing axes, and throwing knives are highlighted in Dark Sight for better visbility. Also applies to Beetle view (25m).

Blade Seer lets you see throwing knives, throwing axes, crossbow bolts (both sizes), and arrows in dark sight. It can be helpful to recover them, but you should usually be able to find them without this and just recover them from toolboxes/ammo crates when you can't.

Not The Best

I never buy these perks and will usually refund them if I get them.


Determination: Stamina recovery starts sooner.

Determination lowers the delay before stamina starts regenerating by about a second. It can allow you to swap to throwing knives after becoming exhausted with a melee, throw one, then swap back to the melee with enough stamina for one heavy attack (throwing a knife does not pause regeneration). But with even a small delay in any of that you'll have gotten the stamina back anyways without the perk.


Adrenaline: Instantly start regenerating stamina while your health is critically low. "Useful" after just being revived.

If your health is incredibly low Adrenaline makes you get all your stamina back. If you revive without Resilience you can immediately start meleeing, but that's not typically very useful.


Beastface: Reduce reaction range of animals (doesn't affect monsters like Hellhounds).

Beastface lowers the range at which sound traps trigger, but they aren't usually too difficult to avoid, and even when they do trigger it probably isn't a big deal.


Magpie: Receive three short effects when picking up a Bounty Token: Antidote, Stamina, and Regeneration.

Magpie's trigger conditions are so specific and buffs so ephemeral. When you pick up a bounty token, you gain regeneration, infinite stamina, and poison immunity for 2 minutes. What are the odds that within a short time of you grabbing a bounty you need to make use of these effects? Its best use case would probably be using the stamina bonus to just book it and try to run after snatching a bounty.


Pitcher: Increased throwing range for all items using the aim helper.

Pitcher increases the maximum throw range of the concertina bomb & big dynamite bomb from 15 to 17 meters, and all other throwables that use the aim helper from 22 to 27 meters. This is such a small increase, I'm not sure what situations it would be useful in, and I can only even notice a difference in the shooting range carefully looking at the arcs before and after grabbing the perk. The only throwables that could benefit from a range increase receive such a small one it may as well not be there.

Nooby

These can really help new players, but are made either far weaker or entirely pointless with more experience.


Bulletgrubber: Recover unfired round when performing partial reloads.

Bulletgrubber gives weapons that lose a shot while reloading slower reload animations that don't lose the shot. But almost every weapon that it benefits doesn't need it, since they can just reload immediately after a shot fired for free. The only exceptions are the Terminus (which only needs Bulletgrubber when also using Levering), the Bornheim (which has so much ammo & pickup rate that a single shot discarded isn't a big deal), and the Dolch (which it actually can be somewhat useful with).

If you're struggling with reloading after firing a shot, you can hold left click without releasing it to not cycle the next round and give you all the time in the world to press reload. But you obviously shouldn't just sit around with an uncycled & unreloaded weapon, and still press R quickly.


Gator Legs: Walk and sprint faster in deep water. Also make less noise while crouched in water.

Gator Legs provides a large increase to your movement speed in water, which is great. But its greatness is vastly undermined by the ability to simply jump through water. If you jump as you're about to enter the deep water, then spam space as you're about to land so you hop again while in the water (do not jump a third time) you'll retain your movement speed until you land after the second jump. For most bodies of water this will keep your speed for most if not all of the crossing.


Ghoul: Killing monsters restores a small amount of health.

Ghoul makes you heal when you kill AI, which can be great for a new player who keeps getting hit by the AI and doesn't want to always be using their medkits to recover the lost damage. But once you get better it becomes a lot less useful. Perhaps sometimes you're able to snipe an AI while fighting someone and get a heal mid-combat, but it's far less reliable than other perks.

Gamer Clips

These are for YouTube videos.


Poison Sense: You can see nearby poisoned Hunters while in Dark Sight. Also applies to Beetle view (150m).

Poison Sense lets you see poisoned enemies when you're in Dark Sight. It's fun to try to wallbang people, pretty cool and rather cheap. But it's a gimmicky thing, probably more for fun than actually trying really hard.

Counters

These are cringe, so boring. "Oho, you used your Blue Eyes White Dumdum, but I had my trap card Pot of Bloodless face down in the defensive position!". They do literally nothing if you don't see someone use the very rare things they counter that nobody ever uses, and when someone does use those things you just counter them really hard without them even having the information that you're countering them and they're left to guess.


Bulwark: Reduce the damage from explosions and Bomb Lance harpoon attacks by 50%. Also shortens flash bomb duration by 80%.
Unlisted: Reduces damage from flash bombs by 100%. (From 1 to 0).

Bulwark reduces the damage you take from explosives by half. Due to the way damage falloff is calculated this is less than a 50% decrease in the lethal radius of explosives, but still substantial. Dynamite goes from 5 to 3.5 meters, dynamite bundles go from 6.5 to 5.5, big dynamite bundles go from 8.5 to 7, and red barrels go from 4.5 to 2.5.

Bulwark does not affect the damage you take from anything that isn't an explosive. Frag grenades, frag arrows, waxed frag harpoons (I believe), and sticky bombs (I believe) are not explosives, so Bulwark does nothing to protect you against those. It will, however, prevent standard bomb lance harpoons from ever being able to deal 150 damage to you, and explosive crossbows require a direct hit to the upper torso to deal 150.

It also lowers the duration of the flash bomb's blind from 5 to 1 second.


Bloodless: Bleeding will not escalate from light to medium or intense bleeding.

Bloodless greatly reduces the effectiveness of arguably the strongest debuff in the game. Any bleed applied to you will always be light, and never moderate or intense, lowering the damage you receive and increasing the speed at which you can stop the bleeding.


Salveskin: Reduces fire damage and burn speed by "25%", even when downed.
Unlisted: Prevents being immediately set on fire from a single incendiary bullet.
Unlisted: Actual burnspeed reductions are 33% for medium burning (3/s to 2/s) and 26% for heavy burning (4.5/s to 3.33/s)

Salveskin slows the rate at which fire burns you, which is probably the most common debuff since it also applies to your corpse that people might want to burn. Could help newer players with fighting Butcher. Lessens the effectiveness of fire crossbow & fire ammo, but I never see anyone use those.


Mithridatist: Drastically reduces the time needed to recover from poisoning.

Is Mithridatist even a word? It makes you poisoned for less time, but you shouldn't be struggling with the AI poisoning you, and hunters almost never use poison. Even when they do use poison they don't typically capitalize on its effect.


Hornskin: Reduces damage taken from blunt melee by 25%. "Useful" when fighting Armoreds and group of regular Grunts.

Hornskin is great for countering grunts and hunters chasing you down with the dusters or butt of their gun. Very dangerous foes.


Vigilant: Nearby traps and active Stalker Beetles are highlighted in Dark Sight. Also applies to Beetle view (25m).

Vigilant lets you see traps in Dark Sight, which can be very useful. But I don't often see people use traps, and when they do use traps they're always so predictable with them.


Poacher: Place and disarm traps quietly.

Poacher lets you place & disarm traps very quietly, but disarming traps making noise can be used as a bait to try to get enemies to push you thinking you're distracted with the traps.


Greyhound: Sprint at full speed for a longer duration.

Greyhound lets you sprint longer before getting exhausted, and I believe the time it takes to fully recover your sprint stamina stays the same so it effectively increases your regeneration rate (correct me if I'm wrong). That isn't technically countering something, but in practice it's countering other people who have Greyhound so they can't run away from you so easily.

Changelog

- Updated all perks to 1.15. Lightfoot lowered from "Game Sucks Without These" to "Medium Priority" due to the Lightfoot nerf.

- Updated Decoy Supply, Conduit, and Bulwark due to game updates. Bulwark has been rewritten to give information about what it does instead of just saying it sucks, as it now no longer sucks. Conduit has been moved from "Low Priority" to "Medium Priority" due to its newfound synergy with teammates.

- Added exact values of Salveskin's effect.

- Rewrote Hundred Hands' section. Moved Hundred Hands up from "Weapon Specific (Unimportant)" to "Weapon Specific (Important)" due to learning that the increase allows close range arm oneshots.

- Lowered Pitcher from "Low Priority" to "Not The Best" due to seeing video confirm my suspicions that the increase is minimal.

- Rewrote part of Dauntless' section due to the flashbomb nerf, but it remains in gamer clips.

- Raised Doctor from "Medium Priority" to "High Priority" due to how many upgrade points you start with now.

- Raised Decoy Supply from "Not The Best" to "High Priority" due to it affecting all decoys now (and me learning about the usefulness of the normal decoys).

- Raised Dauntless from "Gamer Clips" to "Game Sucks Without It" because I was wrong and it's actually really easy to frequently make use of it, sorry. Nobody ever expects it so everyone acts dumb with it, even in 5 & 6 star games. Also raised Decoy Supply from "High Priority" to "Game Sucks Without Them".

- Changed some wordings.

[Cheggf]

Idk I haven't played much since the 1896 update since the UI is really bad and it reintroduced a lot of obnoxious bugs.

[E r i c k]

what about witness? what's the jury on that one?

[BlinkBlade]

@DerPhil thx

[DerPhil]

@blinkBlade You die your Hunter is gone. But I think until Rank 10 you are safe as a new Player. And there is a Trait (Death cheat) with that you don't lose your Hunter.
You can Respec your Traits but if you sell one you get the Cost of the Trait -1 back

[BlinkBlade]

do u keep the perks/traits when u die?
also if u unlock perks/traits can u get it back for free if u lose them?

[Cheggf]

The Conduit and regen shot changes slipped my mind, I've edited the guide to accommodate them.

I still think that Lightfoot is a good perk, but the situations in which you can make use of the silent climbing and falling are fewer than the situations in which you can make use of things like Physician, it's a bit expensive for what it does. It is a lot better than Serpent and Blade Seer, so I'll move it back up to medium priority.

Which is where most things are now, since I also moved Conduit up due to the team-wide change allowing much easier map traversal. Medium priority is pretty cluttered, but I think that's just indicative of the perks being well balanced

[DerPhil]

Vigor should be back higher again bc Regenshots got buffed with 1.14 and now with 1.15 they have a 5s Delay before starting the healing which is a lot.
Conduit no more activates while picking up the Bounty and only grants 3 min Stamina.
And Lightfoot is still one of the better Traits IMHO because the quit climbing & falling.
Anyway nice guide, well written and explained. Thank you

[Cheggf]

Tested out Lightfoot and it is really underwhelming for a 5 point perk now. Maybe if it was 1-3 points it'd still be good, but there is no way it's on par with the likes of Physician, Quartermaster, or Levering. Worth picking up with an excess of upgrade points, but it's definitely not the first pick every time like it used to be.

Also removed the part about Decoy Supply not affecting most decoys since they changed it to do that, and lowered Pitcher from low to not the best since I saw a video demonstrating the arcs backing up what I already thought about the perk.

[Cheggf]

It's mostly been updated to 1.15 now. The new art has been used, merged perks have been merged, Hundred Hands has been rewritten to discuss the usefulness of it, Hundred Hands has been raised from "Unimportant" to "Important", Vigor has been lowered from "High priority" to "Medium priority", and Lightfoot has been stricken through because I can't find anyone showcasing or discussing the changes so I have to wait for someone to get on to test it with me before I can judge how good it is, where it belongs, and what to write about it.

[Zaokllr]

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!