Spread NOED across Totems
Trading early-game utility for a dramatic increase in pressure at the end leads to the most “horror-film-like” moments in the game - the sudden drop in your stomach as you discover how you played into the killer’s plan all along. Except NOED isn’t fun to play against. It isn’t too strong, but feels like a safety net that requires no input from the killer to function.
There are all too many stories of survivors cleansing 4 totems before being NOEDed and camped, and equally as many of a clueless survivor happening upon your totem after the final gen, leaving you with mere seconds of perk use. A change like this may be positive to the game:
A Hex rooting its power on hope. You are animated by the power of your Hex Totem when the Survivors are on the verge of escaping.
Once the Exit Gates are powered, the hex is applied to all remaining totems. Each active totem causes survivors to suffer the exposed status effect for 30 / 33 / 36 seconds and your movement speed to increase by 0.8 / 1 / 1.2 %. (i.e. up to a maximum of 180 seconds and +6% speed)
These Hex effects persist as long as the related Hex Totem is standing.
"And the beast became faster and more powerful as if The Entity's shadowy whips were lashing at its back."
To clarify: Cleansing any totem before 5 gens would mean the killer only gets 144s of exposure and a 4.8% speed buff once 5th gen pops. Cleansing another after the 5th pop would instantly drop the killer's speed by 1.2% and cut the remaining time exposed status by another 36 seconds. Yes, this means that totems may to share effects, but NOED has always worked differently.
Why this would be positive:
- Reintroducing a timer, if a long one, discourages using NOED to camp.
- Allowing survivors to mitigate the effects if they cleanse throughout the game means that being diligent and cleansing 3 or 4 totems will actually help you.
- If the killer ends up getting a powerful trigger of 4 or 5 totems, there’s useful counterplay which can incentivise survivors to act altruistically and cleanse, instead of viewing the game as a lost cause and focussing on the escape.
- Gives killers a less binary perk usefulness, and encourages survivors to spend time cleansing, which adds non-invasive slowdown (a gens’ worth if they do them all).
- The perk will be almost as strong as before, but a lot more consistent in how useful it is to killers
- Killers get a secondary objective in defending multiple totems come the late game, a skill not currently useful in many builds despite the litany of perks that can help (and would be buffed by this change)
Interested to hear commmunity thoughts here.
Comments
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Just do the damn bones and you wont have to worry. NOED is an anti-genrush perk. All BHVR has to do is just implement a damn totem counter so that doing bones in solo-q isnt so awful
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^
This
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I'd agree if the totems were more consistently placed, but unless you KNOW you got all 5, by cleansing you're just making NOED more likely to spawn in the god-forsaken corner of the map that no-one went to the entire game. Unless you get a lot of info about the hexes in play that survivors don't usually (and maybe should) have, it's often better to make a note of the locations and then check back later. It is a good tool when looked at as slowdown but only as a bandaid. None of that really changes the main point though, because the main point is that it's just not FUN to go against.
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You DO know Totems have set spawn points, right? If you're having that much trouble figuring out where they are, run Small Game and/or Detective's Hunch. SG also has the benefit of warning you about traps set by the Trapper, Hag, Freddy, and Demogorgon
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