Overview
This guide will have some useful tooltips for noobs to avoid getting trolled, killed, and scared in the heat of the Phasmophobia ghost hunt.
Avoiding the Scares.
Avoiding the scares in Phasmophobia isn’t always easy– especially in the higher difficulty, but there are some good ways of ensuring that you’re prepared for the scares when they come.
First and foremost, know that your items won’t always perform their desired function. In my experience, different kind of ghosts respond differently to deterrents. Smudge sticks will make certain ghosts hostile, despite ostensibly being a pacifier for others. I once had a friend die during a demon hunt after saying the name “Jesus”. (May just be poor timing, but I thought I’d share it anyhow.)
Be aware, also, of what triggers your ghost to become hostile. Some ghosts don’t like crowds, some ghosts don’t like people to be alone, but a great majority of ghosts don’t seem to like being called by their name. Read the whiteboard thoroughly before heading in, as it will often hold useful information about what your ghost doesn’t like. And heaven help you if you are messing with a Demon, because you don’t even have to goad them into attacking– they’ll often do it for no reason at all!
Keep an eye on your sanity as well. Often you can hear bumps, creaks, footsteps, car alarms, and phones ringing before the ghost goes on a hunt, but if you’re running into the house with less than 20% sanity, you are making yourself a huge target for the hunt, and can very easily wind up dead. Keep sanity pills on hand and return to the truck often to monitor your sanity and increase your chances of survival.
Avoid Being Trolled.
My best advice to avoid being a victim of trolls in Phasmophobia is simply to play with friends. Generally speaking, you can trust that you know if your friend is behaving suspiciously. However, it’s much harder to account for a stranger’s tone of voice, behavioral patterns, and goals for the game.
A common method for trolling in Phasmophobia is hunt-baiting. This can include several kinds of behaviors including refusing to split up, refusing to go in alone, refusing to group up, repeating/chanting the ghost’s name, and anything else that might inherently anger the ghost early and often. You might as well close the mission if you get someone who won’t stop doing these things. They’re simply wasting equipment and endangering players for their own amusement, which isn’t my idea of a good time.
Another BIG thing you need to watch out for is someone insisting on returning to the house even when players have low sanity– not just insisting on going back in, but insisting that you should come too.
Once we had all three pieces of evidence but just a couple of objectives to complete, and everyone in the party was at 30% or lower sanity. All of a sudden, the new guy says we have to go back in (he’s at ~ 10% sanity, mind you) because it won’t hurt us to do so. “I’m at 10%! Don’t worry, he’ll attack me!” And after a lot of considering, two of us decided to go in with him. He goes into the ghost room and begins chanting the ghost’s name, running in circles around the room and trying to force a hunt.
I am not ashamed to admit I’m kind of a ♥♥♥♥♥ when it comes to horror games and suspense, so of course I say “This is stupid, we have no reason to be trying to get attacked. I’m going back to the truck” at which point he reluctantly agrees to come back with us and end the mission. Here’s the kicker– When we got back, I noticed one of our three bottles of sanity pills was missing and all of a sudden, his sanity was much higher than ours.
He had coaxed us back into the house in hopes of getting us attacked, and if I wasn’t such a scaredy-panda about this kind of game, I would have been the one to fall victim to it. (I had 20% sanity after he swiped the pills, meaning I now had the lowest sanity.)
I can see this being a huge draw for potential trolls in Phasmophobia, and I want other noobs to know that these kind of douchebags do exist. Play with friends as often as possible to avoid being taken advantage of, because this guy could have been far more disruptive in our game. The only reason he didn’t was so he could try to make a fool out of less-experienced players.
The Golden Rule
I shouldn’t have to re-hash something most of us learned in or before preschool, but the current climate of gaming and society as a whole has made it abundantly clear that a vast majority of you still haven’t internalized this idea yet, so here goes.
If you want to see fewer trolls in your games, the single best thing you can do is not be one of them. I don’t know what games you’ve played or life situations you’ve been in, but I’m sure that all of us have examples of someone being incredibly rude to us at some point in our life, and that we’ve felt some catharsis in carrying on the tradition by doing it back or doing it to someone else.
But you’re wrong in your assumption that you’re the only person who feels this way. Every person you troll in-game has the idea in their head that it would be fun, or in some way admirable if they weren’t the only one who fell victim to it, and feel clever when they do it to someone else.
If you can be the bigger person and simply not play with and not entertain people who behave this way, you can make every gaming community you’re in a better one.
Upon Reflection
Consider this section an edit as of March 15th, 2021.
I’ve deleted a lot of comments from people, mostly just ignorant people trying to spark an argument or negativity, but some asserting the things I’ve said in this guide aren’t true, and looking at some of the early remarks, I agree that I’ve misrepresented a few things based on my (at the time) limited knowledge of how the game works.
So here’s the rundown of stuff I got wrong.
1. There isn’t a noticable effect of ‘deterrents’ making ghosts aggressive. You’re free to experiment, but I don’t believe that ghosts become aggressive from the use of smudge sticks, crucifixes, or salt.
2. Ghosts do not default to the person with the lowest sanity– for all that I can tell, the game makes a check every 30-60 seconds to decide if the Ghost decides to hunt, and your sanity is a percentage used to help decide whether it does or doesnt, 100% obviously being the least-likely and 0% being the most likely.
– NOTE: While Sanity isn’t always used to determine who gets targeted, not all ghosts will go after just anyone they can reach. Certain ghosts pick a player and target them for a given hunt– some ghosts will never even attack other players. (I learned this by having a ghost walk through me to reach a teammate running behind me). I wouldn’t put it beyond the devs to implement a system where some ghosts do exclusively attack the player with lowest sanity, but I can’t definitively prove that they do.
Happy hunting!