Why Boon Totems Don't Work.
I'm going to get straight to the point: there are 4 survivors and 1 killer.
The reason hex perks work on killers is because they're one time use and survivors can split up. One survivor looks for the totem, one distracts and the others do gens (hopefully). The gamble of a hex perk is what allows its powerful effects since there's the chance that it could be gone at any second. That's why hex perks work with killers.
Boons are the exact opposite.
1 killer doesn't have the time to go all over the map snuffing boons. Sure, you could find one in chase and go back, but that's still a loss of time investment. Breaking them during a chase is a great way to give survivors distance or potentially lose them as well.
There's also the fact that you can basically use them whenever. It does take time to use, but a little time off of gens for free healing is extremely worth it. Now everybody has an indefinite medkit to use whenever. This erases pressure since all that happens now is survivors run to the boon and heal. Instead of taking the time from their allies to get a heal, they heal while everybody else progresses the game.
Normally you want to build up pressure to snowball, but you literally can't do that if everyone is humping a healing totem. There is no room to snowball anymore because whenever you hit someone and switch targets they already healed themselves before you get the down. Boons create a lose-lose for killers. You either take time from juggling survivors to snuff it or you just let it be and watch your pressure vanish. Both are equally terrible.
And that's just Circle of Healing.
Shadowstep is arguably not as bad, but when paired with Iron Will you will lose the survivor unless you just charge at them like a bull. Looking for blood trails on some maps is a nightmare. Most of the time when you do find them the blood pools are already fading. And yet again if you snuff the totem you lose the survivor anyways.
Boons really just need a limit on how many times they can be placed. Maybe once per totem. The main issue is that survivors can use it as many times as they want and the effects are way too good to allow that constantly. While also demanding a time investment that the killer doesn't have.
inb4 "it takes 24 seconds to do so it's balanced"
Comments
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For the love of God, just let me break the boon so that I'm rewarded for going out of my way to get rid of them. Dealing with shadow step and circle in a strong building is ridiculous. They shouldn't get free guaranteed value from the perk indefinitely.
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I agree. Boon totems should stacks. Starting at 4. 1 stack should be ready for every survivor with boon totems.
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I kind of wish they just glowed through walls so the time you spent looking for them was minimal. You can technically achieve that with a Shaman build regardless. But I do not want to run hex perks.
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Alternatively, I could go for kicking it breaks the totem, and survivors need to rebuild the totem (24 seconds) to reactivate it
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I'd be fine with Boons as they were (28m radius and stacking) if there was some mechanic which either meant once the Boon was stomped out, then that player no longer has that perk for the rest of the match (like a Hex), can no longer Boon that particular totem, or there is a consequence.
But re-booning stuff is just tiresome. As survivor, the game becomes infinitely easier for me, with a safe haven away from killers and easy heals, and as a killer having Boons that can be lit and re-lit anywhere, anytime, with no bad repercussions except a very short time to relight them again .. it's just not a balanced perk and needs readjustment.
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I also think that snuffing out a Boon over a Hex should relite the Hex
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It's really not that hard to take a boon out of the game. You literally get an audio cue when you're nearby. Boons are fine the way they are.
Also I'd like to point out once the new chapter hype has died down, less and less people will run them because they're not as good as the current meta perks.
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The only way to remove a boon out of the game is to tunnel the person using boon totems out of the game.
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healing boon replaces self care very nicely and boons the whole team x2 speed self care. self care is a must on bad teams and solo.
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Are we gonna ignore how loud the boons are? They’re so easy to find
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It would be pretty funny if you could turn boon totems into hex totems. Like that would be the vulnerability in using them, yes you could turn a totem, but the killer could spend a few seconds and get renewed life on a hex xD
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Finding and blessing a dull totem takes time but doesn't progress the match for survivors. Killer can break it fast, so breaking it makes the survivor waste even more time setting it up again.
Blessing a hex totem takes much longer than cleansing it (almost twice as long), so there's still a benefit from just cleansing it to get rid of it. If you're running Thrill of the Hunt you can make it even slower to bless it, and running Undying helps you catch any survivor who try to bless a dull totem.
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Pretty conveniently ignoring that it takes one out of four survivors not progressing the match. The others are doing just fine.
The break action is fast, but finding and navigating to the thing are not necessarily so. If it takes five seconds to do so that's twenty survivor seconds. So the net total time loss comes out in the survivors favor.
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- Boon totems and Hex totems should be at least equal in strength but boon totems are far and away superior. They can be used an infinite amount of times and cannot be countered except by taking time either from chase or finding other survivors to stop them. At best if this mechanic was going to be implemented hex totems should have been buffed to compensate. For example, like DeadHardly said earlier to give the option to either bless or cleanse, which should have been something that was thought about in the design process.
- If a totem is blessed that contains a Hex then the Hex should be returned after removing the blessing.
- Actually had a perk that could somewhat counter this mechanic (Thrill of the Hunt) gutted and removed the only part of the perk (ironically also a Hex) that gave cause to anyone wanting to run it in the first place. Why remove the notification aspect of it. It doesn't matter if it takes more time if the killer doesn't know you are doing it anyway,
- Doesn't matter if they are loud if you can't either get to them or would just waste time doing so.
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Few reasons why you're wrong on your assesment:
1: 4 boon totems arent even close to being as powerful as 1 hex totem, this alone makes it worth for killers to snuff out a totem if it's starting to impact their progress. You kinda WANT survivors to bless totems as often as they can, the more they bless, the easier your game becomes.
2: You would need 5 heals per boon totem for circle of healing to have a benefit, you would literally GAIN time if survivors heal less than 5 times per blessing. So free healing isnt really worth it. It's only 2 seconds better than selfcare, and going to a specific point in the map to use selfcare is known to not be beneficial for survivors. You would want to use self-care as close to other teammates as possible so you could pre-heal to save time. Having a boon totem that has every bad thing of self-caring in the corner of the map being only 2 seconds more efficient(14+16=30 seconds, selfcare takes 32 seconds, that is excluding the time it takes to run to that boon) if used once, is extremely inefficient for survivors. So Circle of Healing is only beneficial if used more often than 5 times. Often it's faster to just heal under the hook, than it is to run to the boon and get healed there.
3: Long standing boons are only long standing because they are in area's where survivor objectives are not. This often means that survivors would need to run further away from the objective to heal up faster, then run all the way back, when they could remain closer, heal up with normal speeds and then go back, which in a lot of scenario's is also faster.
As for shadow step: footsteps are quite easy to track. Blood might be a bit harder, but the maps where blood is hard to track, footsteps are also much louder.
If you cannot trace survivors by footsteps because you dont hear it, here's what you need to do: Go to audio, crank that ######### up to 100%, then lower the audio of your headset/boxes/volume mixer accordingly. Just like the FOV in DBD, the Audio works a bit weird. Having 25% audio means you cannot hear hex totems unless you are up close, even if all your other sound sources are 100%. If you have 100% audio, you CAN hear hex totems, even if all your other sound sources are 25%. That audio also applies to footsteps.
As for the 24 seconds, that only applies if survivors are cleansing hex totems, and yes, that is much more balanced than before as it's nearly twice as long as normal(meaning survivors are essentially cleansing the totem and then blessing it, rather than simply blessing it).
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For those saying that boon totems aren't that powerful, if a survivor has both perks then after blessing the totem they are effectively gifting all three other survivors with Distortion, Lucky Break and Self-care with infinite repeats and, for those other three survivors, zero cost in either time spent or perk slots taken.
How is adding effectively 9 extra perks to the team not massively OP? It's said that the boon totems don't take long to snuff but consider the poor slow killers, and in particular the territorial ones like Hag and Trapper. Having to trudge all the way across the map and leaving their trapped areas just to prevent insta-reset is a huge loss of time and momentum/pressure.
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Killers move faster than survivors, if a killer takes 5 seconds to go there, it takes a survivor 7 seconds to go there. Then blessing a totem is 14 seconds while the killer only takes 2 seconds. But why would you go to a totem that survivors arent using? Circle of Healing only becomes a threat once it has 5 heals on average. As survivors need to run to that totem and heal up, often being faster if they just stood still and get healed. So Circle of Healing is only really good for healing yourself. Considering the average time to enter the aura of a boon, you're going to essentially face a bad version of Self-care, using the worst mechanics you can use when using self-care(going to a corner of the map to heal yourself with self-care is a terrible decision regardless of the situation, Boon totems only work if you go to a specific point of the map, especially since boons in the center of the map will only be a waste of time)
Boons are only good if they are easy to access, but easy to access boons are also easily accessed by killers. Thus, boons only really work if they are far away from the killer's patrol route, but in that scenario, its often faster to slightly go out of that patrol route to heal up, than it is to run all the way to the boon to heal up. Meaning boons are only really good for self-caring, and at that point, Circle of Healing is arguably worse than Self-Care.
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Thank you for pointing that out.
I can't believe killers are still complaining. What we have here is a survivor, not doing the objective, but looking for a hard to find totem to give them ability to heal. That's too good to be true for killers.
Every time I use the boon, even if it is in an inconspicuous location, killers are drawn to it from their loud emitting sound. Hex perks should give off this sound to be fair.
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When writing it, I was considering the time that one survivor is wasting. If killer puts pressure and hooks a survivor, you'll have 1 survivor doing boons, 1 survivor on the hook, 1 survivor going for the rescue and 1 survivor on a gen, who should be your next target.
I have had matches where people run around for minutes just looking for a dull totem, so the "navigating to the totem" part can be said for both sides. Survivors don't have any noise indicator where totem is either.
You seem to also conveniently ignore the counters i mentioned to prevent boons from being useful. It takes 24 seconds to bless a hex totem, and up to 36 seconds with Thrill of the Hunt active. And with undying, you'll see any survivor trying to bless a dull totem instead and you'll have 14 seconds to get there and hit them.
If boons are so good that you think it'll be the new meta, then you can change your perks to counter that. It can be annoying to have to change your perks just to counter other people sometimes, but it's something both sides have to deal with.
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I agreed with everything you said up until the point when you said hexes should also make a sound. That'd be a bit too survivor sided, we break that permanently after all.
Since we can re-bless totems, i think it's fair that killers can find and remove boons easily, and that survivors have to work harder to find and break a hex.
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I just played several games as survivor and this was my conclusion about circle of healing specifically:
I think it either does close to nothing, or absolutely wins you the game and the killer has zero chance. Nothing in between.
For example: 3 gen on hawkins was impossible to lose because for the killer, it was either commit to a chase and lose the last gen, snuff the totems (which were far away) and also lose the last gen, or go back to the gen continuously (which is what he did) and every time he knocks a survivor off of it, they go heal themselves and come back 20 seconds later. Rinse and repeat until we won the game and we all escaped. There was NOTHING the killer could have done that would not have eventually lost him the match one way or another. Without that boon he had enough pressure and enough hooks prior to that point that he maybe could have made something happen. But with infinite med-kits, no way. We as survivors did not have to think at all, we could just literally play like bots and it didn't matter if we made mistakes or got hit because we could very easily undo it all.
People try to compare these perks to hexes and say "they're fine just snuff out the totem and they take time to set up". However, snuffing a totem far away from where you need to be takes too long and isn't worth it, and if you leave it up, it also isn't worth it because it allows survivors to reset while others progress the match. It's a lose-lose situation, and the setup time is more than made up for in healing times and how much longer a chase can be sustained with that extra health state. Not to mention that if the totem IS snuffed out, it can be re-blessed, which only takes 1 survivor to do, while the others continue to progress the match.
I also recall from the most recent Q & A stream someone asked "why can survivors re-bless totems indefinitely and hexes are one time use", to which the answer given to us by the devs was that boon perks were intended to not change the core flow of a match, while hexes do and are "strong". Thing is, while that may be a valid argument for shadow step, circle of healing absolutely DOES change the core flow of a match. Infinite med-kits are no laughing matter and you pretty much can't drop chases or play hit and run anymore because that survivor WILL be healed quickly. I expect the meta will shift to Plague and killers with instadowns or that can end chases quickly (eg. nurse), and I'm also expecting to see more tunneling, because that probably is the next best counter right now, even if it sucks for survivors.
I don't think shadow step is nearly as much of a problem. It's very good but it's not game-breaking OP. You can still follow blood trails if they're injured, and you as a killer can figure out that it's in play when scratch marks suddenly stop.
In general I like the idea of boon totems and that the devs tried to introduce some new gameplay around a new mechanic, but I feel like it was very poorly executed and rushed and needs to be reconsidered from the ground up. They also failed to take into account a lot of other things in the game that already interact with totems, such as DS not deactivating on a bless or how it directly interferes with other survivor perks that require cleansing such as inner strength or counterforce. The whole "cleansing vs blessing" thing kind of becomes an issue where one survivor uses their perk at the expense of the other (another thing that separates solo from SWF, which is not what we should be doing).
I'm probably going to stop bringing circle of healing as a survivor the same way I refuse to bring NOED as a killer if it remains like this.
And, as OP made a point of, there's one killer who is already on a massive time crunch. There are 4 survivors who can split up and look for hexes if they need to, and there can still be survivors on gens during all of that.
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Hexes already make noise. That's how you find them through walls. Listen for crackling.
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Do bones.
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hilarious and original
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Killer Hexes already make an audible sound when you're close to them. They make little clicking bone and fire noises as a matter of fact.
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