Hunt: Showdown Traits Ranked by What They Remove

Tier one: every build

Bulletgrubber stops a partial reload from throwing away a chambered round. On a single-shot or a small-magazine rifle that is not a quality-of-life perk, it is ammunition. Serpent lets you interact with clues and rifts through walls. Every second spent standing in the open at a clue is a second another team can see you, and this trait deletes most of those seconds. Iron Eye keeps you aiming while cycling a bolt action, which converts a slow rifle into something you can follow up with. Scopesmith does the same job for scoped weapons. Take the one that matches your primary and ignore the other. Gator Legs raises your speed in water. On Stillwater Bayou the map is mostly water, and travel speed is the resource that decides who reaches the lair first. Silent Killer makes melee quiet. Killing AI without a gunshot is the single largest noise reduction available to you, and it costs nothing but the trait.

Tier two: role-defining

Levering and Fanning are the reason lever rifles and revolvers are considered close-range weapons. Without them those guns are slow; with them they are a wall of lead at five metres. If you do not run those families, skip both. Quartermaster raises your weapon slot budget, which changes what loadout is legal rather than how good it is. It is the most build-warping trait in the game and worth points only if you specifically want a large weapon plus a medium. Physician and Resilience shorten the cost of being hurt: faster healing and faster recovery from a downed state. In a trio these decide whether a lost fight is a wipe or a reset. Vulture gives extra loot from bodies, which is an economy trait disguised as a combat one.

Tier three: solo only

Necromancer lets a solo player self-revive. In a trio it is close to useless, because a teammate can pick you up; solo it is the only insurance in the game. Its value is entirely dependent on how you queue, which is the clearest example of a trait whose rank is a function of your mode. Conduit and similar sustain traits reward objective play. Read them as economy: they save you a consumable, and consumables cost hunt dollars.

Tier four: the trap

Percentage traits that improve things you rarely do — faster trap arming, cheaper resupply, better decoy behaviour — cost the same points as Bulletgrubber and change fewer fights. Before you take one, ask how many times last session the situation it fixes actually came up. The tools and consumables page covers the other half of the loadout economy, because a trait that saves a consumable is worth more than one that saves a bullet. Every one of these traits is behind a rank gate, and the bloodline page lists the order they arrive in.