Perks that help counter the Boon meta?
So I was thinking about it recently and realized that Pyramid Head has two niche perks that actually really help in countering Circle of Healing and Shadow Step (Somewhat).
Forced Penance and Deathbound, both of which have no cooldown at all which is nice.
Forced Penance allows you to inflict Broken on survivors who take protection hits which helps negate Circle of Healing for a while and Deathbound can reveal the position of survivors who are healing up in a Circle of Healing as long as you're within 32 meters of them which isn't too difficult if you're tracking them.
I've yet to try these but I'm going to next time I play killer. The only problem is making space for them since I do love my spread of BBQ + some regression..
Additionally Bloodhound has been helping me track survivors via blood through Shadow Step and Iron Will and Haunted Grounds is always a great choice for anti boon help.
Honestly just the Exposed status effect in general counters so much in this game. But yeah, personally I think Forced Penance might be the better choice since a lot of people try to tank hits then run off to heal themselves in CoH. When Overcome hits live especially I think this will be an even more prevalent play style and I think FP could help with that, what do you all think?
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imo Deathbound won't actually help, most people who use COH will just heal themselves and they can do it without a medkit. I do like the idea of using Forced Penance though.
Fearmonger/Mindbreaker might actually help a bit - It inflicts blindness which hides the boon totems aura (Meaning they'll not see it at all times). You could also use third seal/blindness addons to hinder their ability to track where the boon is. Not fool proof but it's an idea
Save The Best For Last is actually a good perk that helps against COH for a reason you might not realise - it helps you chew through health states quicker, so survivors being healthy isn't as big of a deal. Again, not fool proof but it does wonders
If all else fails, you could just slap on thrill of the hunt by itself to slow it down. It'll make snuffing totems mean a bit more since it'll take longer to re-boon them.
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The perks you're mentioning are bad perks and don't counter the boon meta.
All you're really looking at helping is ToTH and that's essentially it. Even then its effect can be pretty mediocre and relies on rng.
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Plaything works quite well. As does Devour Hope.
TOTH is...ugh. It always seems to get cleansed super early.
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Yeah I agree on Deathbound. It's actually a bit lackluster, I wish it did more. But Forced Penance I think people are definitely sleeping on.
Also yes! Lately I've been using Fearmonger a lot more it's honestly so good.
And I love using STBFL on some of my killers. Once you get to maximum stacks you can absolutely shred through people it's unfair. I can't wait to pair it with The Artist once she's live.
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I guess I should clarify that I'm looking at perks that help play around the effects of boons rather than directly counter the existence of them like toth.
I know these perks are not very good but I still think forced penance has some potential to be a very nasty surprise for survivors who think they can take hits for their teammates and get away with it unpunished. Like I said I'll have to play with it and see how it goes but I think it can definitely influence the way people play, kinda like how MYC and Starstruck make people play around them differently.
Again though, I find it really difficult to make room for even one of these in my build since I usually stick to traditionally strong perks so, yeah.
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There are definitely tools to help against CoH specifically, but if you're looking for perks that are more about giving you an edge against boon totems in general, there are three that I've found, to varying degrees of efficacy.
Thrill of the Hunt: Decent slowdown, especially against someone trying to bless a hex. It doesn't lose tokens when a totem is blessed, so it's permanent slowdown until it's cleansed- with the downside being that... it's a hex, so it can be cleansed pretty easily.
Undying: Gives you auras on anyone trying to bless a dull totem, which at minimum means you know where that boon is if you don't have the ability to go interrupt. Can be paired with Thrill to make the slowdown last longer. Downsides are... again, it's a hex.
Plaything: Much less of a counter, to be fair, but if the person who's affected isn't one of the ones on the team with a boon, they have to break it and ensure that their teammates can't use it for boons later. Similarly, people who do have boons are probably going to want to bless it and not break it so they don't waste a totem, meaning that you're wasting more of their time. You are at the mercy of decent spawning, though.
As for CoH, Exposed and Broken help.
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I'll go ahead and tell you that Forced Penance is a trash perk in almost all scenarios. You are not going to play a match where it's worth running. I get what you're going for and it sounds good on paper but that's not how it works in reality. You will be lucky if you even see the perk activate a single time during a match. Rarely do you get body blocks and even when you do, Forced Penance isn't going to be a game changer.
Starstruck is a meme perk. You don't run it because you want to win.
MYC is actually a decent perk in general. This is the only one I'd actually say is an alright pick up.
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I'd actually make the argument that Circle of Healing is destroying heal-based perks like Deathbound.
The main reason people would heal each other isn't because it's efficient, but because they couldn't heal themselves without a proper build. Now that Circle of Healing motivates people to heal on their own, no one will proc it and why should they? Healing others under CoH takes 8 seconds of both your time (16s total) and 16 seconds if you heal yourself. There's literally no difference in time between the two other than who gets the heal points, you or the other guy?
The only time you'd wanna heal someone else, especially if you know the killer has Deathbound, is if the killer is nearby and forcing you to heal someone before he gets there. But in that case Deathbound won't proc because the killer is too close.
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As for Forced Penance, does anyone actually body block nowadays outside of end-game collapse?
I rarely see it, unless a SWF is protecting someone I'm tunneling. Even then, I think the sight would be even rarer once they knew I had the perk after the first body block. At that point, I don't see this perk getting much use.
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Then as a random rant:
You have perks similar to Deathbound like Nurse's Calling, Blood Echo, Blood Hound, Coulrophobia, Dying Light, Hysteria, Scourge Hook: Gift of Pain, Sloppy Butcher, Thanatophobia. Not many of those listed perks were good in the first place, but Circle of Healing indirectly nerfs all of them by reducing the likelihood that anyone stays injured enough for these perks to work well at all anymore.
In the case of things like Dying Light and Sloppy Butcher, who reduce heal speed rather than give effects based on people being injured, they're also negatively affected because their heal speed modifiers have become insignificant.
Just look at Sloppy Butcher:
Sloppy Butcher used increase heal time by 4 seconds (16/0.8), which affected both you and the healer for a total maximum time wasted of 8 seconds per injury on the survivors side. If you tried to Self Care, your heal time increased to 40 seconds (16 / [0.5 * 0.8]) which was also 8 seconds of time wasted for the survivor side.
Sloppy Butcher under the effect of CoH now reduces self heal time to 20 seconds (16/0.8) for an extra 4 seconds of time wasted for the self healer alone. If someone else heals you in CoH it will only take 10 seconds total (16 / [2 * 0.8]), or an extra 2 seconds to heal for both you for a total of 4 extra seconds wasted on the survivor side.
Notice how Sloppy Butcher's mangled status effect literally got halved thanks to CoH.
I wouldn't be surprised if the other perks on that list whose effects are harder to calculate (Thanatophobia) are being hurt to an equal degree.
This one perk, from one survivor, which is infinite in use, and has so many other practical applications and time-saving benefits, is literally hard countering over 10% of killer perks for the entire survivor team.
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CoH is just in a state of being entirely broken and desperately needs to be nerfed in some or multiple ways.
It just has no counters currently.
It's like old DS on the Halloween chapter all over again, but whose impact is more subtle than flat-out denying killers a down.
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Dev's could buff PREDATOR killer Wraiths perk to show some scratch marks for half the normal time if A Survivor is in a Shadow Step Boon radius. But they don't think about Killer having perks that counter survivor perks so good luck with that!
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undying, thrill, haunted grounds, and bbq (I guess) can all help with boons.
Edit: Thanataphobia, too.
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Forced Penance has worked well for dealing with the Circle Of Healing, so that's a good perk to have if you end up facing it. Personally, Forced Penance is an under-rated perk.
Deathbound - on paper - looks like it could work, but the problem is it activates if you're 32 metres away, and by the time you get there, then they'd be long gone. May help with knowing the rough area of the Boon, but not sure if that's a good enough trade-off. I think it's worked, but because it's a perk that you won't know for sure how useful it is (you can only guess mostly if its had an effect), I can't measure its worth.
Perks that may have some use include: Sloppy Butcher, Devour Hope, Nurse's Calling and Bloodhound. But really it's more a case of ramming the pressure constantly on survivors.
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I like insta-downs. Like Make Your Choice or starstruck. They still need to heal for when you don't have the perks up, but some chases are cut in half.
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there is not a real counter to it...
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Not a perk but plague is feeling really good after the buff. If you run brown prayer tablet or her toe addon + hematite seal you can force survivors to always be infected which makes their perk slot for COH wasted.
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In short, you need:
- Instadown capability, either through your toolkit or perks.
- Ultra fast chase/down capacity (STBFL, Nurse etc).
- Plaything
- Plague
The problem is that you sort of have to build to counter boons every match on some killers, which is tedious and frustrating.
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Valid points. I'm primarily a survivor main and even I agree CoH needs to be nerfed somehow. 100% is just way too much at the moment for basically infinite uses.
Yeah I'm a Plague main but that's sadly just one killer in the entire cast who is very strong in this current meta. I'm experimenting with things like Bloodhound and Forced Penance on my other mains like Pig to try and find ways to help the rest of the killer roster.
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