Popping the last cipher

Ok the main rule is: pop ONLY AFTER either the rescuer or chaired person gets hit. The whole point is to pop during the attack recovery, it’s way too risky to pop any other time unless you have VC. As you said, one of them would be down to half health after the pop but yeah detention exists so it literally doesn’t matter, for the exception of Mercenary, which comes to your second question. Usually, wait for the Merc to receive their delayed damage. ESPECIALLY if they already took two hits, wait until you see his delayed damage go up to 50%. You don’t need to wait for it to go 100 and he’s legit on the floor because yeah, the hunter can pick them up immediately.

In higher tiers, hunters with a second ability will try very hard to get a hit with their ability when one cipher is left and they suspect it is most likely primed. Obviously, so that they don’t have an attack recovery and can insta down the person after the pop. This is why survivors know to put all their attention into not getting hit by a skill, even if it means walking right up to the hunter. They absolutely need to force a basic hit at that point. Because you are in hound, it is likely other survivors haven’t had much practice with this and honestly it’s out of your hands. It’s something survivors learn as they rank up.

Even if the hunter hit the chair, so the rescuer didn’t get hit before pulling off the rescue, do not pop. Just be patient and wait for someone to get hit. I don’t want to make this too long but those are general guide lines. If you decide to start ranking again, more special cases will come up and popping the primed cipher can become trickier under some circumstances but for now, this is what I’d say…

/r/IdentityV Thread