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A Reflection on Hex Perks, Totems, and the Like.
Hex Perks.
A, shall we say, unique game mechanic.
I'm going to try my best to avoid personal bias here, but for perspective, I do not like Hex Perks. In my personal opinion, they do not require skill and are very luck based. I am also speaking from a rank 1 Killer and Survivor standpoint.
Anyways.
First of all, totems should be changed from 14 to 20 seconds to cleanse. Pretty simple, give the Killers a 6 second buffer to totems. Just a general thing.
Now on to the MEAT of the discussion; the Hex Perks.
Hex Perks grant you very powerful abilities but their totems can be easily destroyed very quickly.
Let's break it down even more. Each Hex Perk is slightly different, but can be categorized. There are three types of Hex Perk: Immediate Benefit, Activatable, and Tracking.
- Immediate Benefit - Ruin, Haunted Grounds
- Activatable - Third Seal, Devour Hope, Huntress Lullaby, No One Escapes Death
- Tracking - Thrill of the Hunt
So, given these perks and how they work, which ones are in the meta, or seen in many games?
Ruin, Haunted Grounds, and NOED.
The other 4 are seen mostly in very rare builds. But why are these 3 the only ones seeing the most use?
Pressure. These 3 perks give the Killer a LOT of pressure. Ruin will slow generator progress until destroyed, Haunted Grounds and NOED allow for snowballing downs, which creates pressure because survivors are either hiding or slugged.
The other four either take time to have the effect (And in the time being taken to build up the effect, the totem is destroyed), or is THoT and only serves a purpose if you're going to be puppy guarding your totems, in which case is nearly impossible to protect all game and simultaneously build up your activatable hexes. Which makes is nearly useless. Nearly.
This begs the question though, what makes a perk deserving of being a hex?
This is very much up to personal opinion, but I think that a perk shouldn't be a Hex unless it REALLY slows down the game, like Haunted Grounds, Hex Ruin, or NOED. I think I better way to describe it is; you know the feeling you get when Haunted Grounds pops and you don't know where the Killer is? If a perk gives you that feeling, it should be Hex.
Given this, I don't think Third Seal or Thrill of the Hunt should be hexes. Their effects remain the same, just not Hexes.
However, I do think Huntress' Lullaby and Devour Hope should stay hexes. Why? They still give you that "feeling", at least when they have 3-5 stacks. It's just that it takes a lot of time for the perks to start doing that.
So, they should be buffed. I think that, first of all, they should both only require 4 stacks to reach max i.e. 4 unhooks for Devour and 4 hooks for Lullaby. Second, they should not appear as a hex until the perk has 1 stack.
Survivors should not be notified of the perks (until stack 1), and once the perks reach 1 stack; they will appear on any random totem still on the map like NOED.
Given the stacks change, certain parts of the perks will have to be changed though. Minimally. Devour would remain the same, except you can Mori people at 4 stacks. Lullaby wouldn't change that much, other than each stack represent 25% less warning time for a skillcheck, up to 100% at 4 stacks; as opposed to 20% per stack.
Comments
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Can you give us a short summary/tl;dr?
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Some hexes aren't good enough to be hexes, lullaby and devour should require 1 less hook and they should take the position of an avaiable dull totem when they actually activate( like noed)
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Activatable Hexes should be very powerful, and only appear once the first stack is gained.
Third Seal and Thrill of the Hunt should become normal perks because they don't fit the Hex standard.
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Either not have them active until they gain the stack or just nerf them and remove hex perks tied to totems.
Maybe add more totems that passively give a notification every so often to the killer when someone is in a certain radius. Every 30 seconds? Survivors would be forced to cleanse totems to avoid alerting killers to their location, it would force a secondary objective as well as give survivors extra Blood points. Ruin would get a nerf/buff in that it wouldnt be able to be destroyed in first 20 seconds but not have as good an effect.
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have to disagree. in what way would it be fair to cause permanent blindness? a permanent status affect of any kind would be dumb (except hemorrhage, that is useless). I dont even want to think about facing a ruin and thrill high mobility killer, their totem would literally never go down. devour deserves to stay as high risk/high reward as it now, trying to make it low or medium risk/high reward wouldn't be balanced due to the power it can give you.
totem spawns just need to be improved, honestly
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If Blindness is actually that detrimental to your Survivor gameplay, I would try practicing Survivor more. Auras are aren't a given for survivors, they're an added benefit. You can play perfectly fine without them.
And, seriously, what is the difference between a high mobility killer with ruin+thrill right now? From the Killer point of view, he would protect the totem(s) either way. Thrill as it is right now just doesn't let the Killer know which totem is which.
Also, to put it into perspective; Devour's risk/reward looks like 10,000/100. I don't think it's very fair as it stands from the Killer's perspective. Due to how easily a totem can be destroyed paired with the fact that the perk does literally nothing until 2 stacks, it's not a balanced risk/reward.
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it's not my gameplay that I'm concerned about when it comes to permanent blindness, it's the gameplay of solo survivors and newer players.
obviously protecting 1 totem would be a lot easier than protecting 2, the chance to coordinate cleansing both totems at the same time would be lost as well. it would be way too feasible to keep the hex you want up with a hexless thrill.
and considering the exposed and mori potential of devour, I'm fine with those odds.
like I said, totem spawns just need to be improved. I shouldn't be able to spawn inside shack for there to be to be a hex on the windowless side of it 2 feet away from me
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Some hexes aren't good enough to be hexes, lullaby and devour should require 1 less hook and they should take the position of an avaiable dull totem when they actually activate( like noed)
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I disagree. I think better spawning spots would be a more suitable solution than making Devour Hope etc. only lit up when the effect takes place.
Third Seal has to remain a destroyable perk. Otherwise slugging would be insanely powerful against a team of solos. As soon as you've hit all 4 survivors, you could start slugging and there's basically no chance that the survivors would be able to pick each other up.
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