Is NOED fair ?

Personally it is. If every survivor spends about a minute a match looking and cleansing the perk becomes invalid.

Additionally, and the main reason I find it balanced, when using it you are playing with 3 perks for the most of the game, not 4. This is a significant disadvantage in some cases. Additionally most good survivors will change ‘most of the game’ to ‘all of the game’.

It's definitely a game changer, but i like it. Makes it worthwhile to sacrifice some time off the gens to clear totems out. Gives a good adrenaline rush otherwise on the endgame chat. High risk high reward I'd say, so i think it's fair.

I would say no

While it is true you can "counter" both DS, and Noed in a certain sense it is not true counterplay, unlike having a hunch a killer is running Nurse's Calling so you begin to heal well out of Terror Radius, or BBQ & Chili incentivizing you to hide within the range of a hook survivor, inside a locker, or even positioning yourself behind a generator, or a survivor running Dead Hard so you make sure to time your swing so that it still catches them, or sprint burst so you know not to swing at all despite how close you get, there is no concrete counterplay for perks like DS and Noed.

Hex: NoED

What I mean by this is in the case of Noed, there are absolutely no indicators that they are running it, you could go out of your way to try and cleanse every totem on the map however this can be extremely difficult and nigh unrealistic due to multiple factors. For one and most obviously it is impossible to coordinate this kind of information as a solo survivor, you will only ever know for sure how many totems you've cleansed. You may stumble across another survivor cleansing a totem and you can add it to your mental count, or even go around keeping count of every destroyed pile of bones you find, but this is hardly reliable and more importantly: efficient. At this point you begin to waste time, which could prevent you from even completing the last gen in the first place.

This also leads to a second factor which is time efficiency, if you spend too much time going around cleansing every totem, keeping track of every pile of bones, yadda yadda yadda, if the trial is a close race between the killer and survivor, you choosing to try and find totems more often than not becomes more of a hindrance than using that time to repair a generator. This is why we would see survivors just grind and slog through pre-nerf Ruin, because looking for the actual totem or trying to get to it (especially if a killer is being protective of it) would only end up doing more harm than good because it would waste time. Now you're telling me to go around cleansing dull totems that have no use (unless you're on the BP grind) wasting time, putting the completion of generators and thus your own teammates and yourself at risk especially in matches where the killer is putting a great amount of pressure, every single match on the off chance the killer is running Noed?

Third and lastly, why does it waste so much time in the first place? Because some totems are just impossible to find to begin with, depending on the map you can be absolutely screwed as soon as you spawn in because you never found the 1 dull totem in an obscure corner of the backwater swamp. It is simply not viable to go out and seek out every totem on every map because they can be notoriously difficult to find, though veterans will be aware of the more notoriously well hidden RNG spots a totem can spawn such as next to a fire barrel, masking the audio, or inside one of the tall hedges on the Badham preschool maps, it can still feel like you've combed an entire location and come up with zilch.

Hex: NOED Concluding

So sure, if all three of these conditions have been met in the best case scenario: You're on a "good" map that doesn't have too many really bad spots to find a totem, even if you're on a traditionally "good" map there aren't any totems hiding in cheeky spots like inside tall hedges, or next to a fire barrel, you're either an SWF or somehow coordinate with your entire team how many totems you've cleansed as a solo or just keep track on your own individually (somehow), and the killer isn't good enough that he's not capitalizing on all this time you've spent not doing generators to apply a significant amount of pressure and deal a lot of damage to the survivors in said trial. Then yeah, sure, it's "counterable". But when I put it that way all of a sudden it doesn't sound the same does it? Now it's no longer it's "counterable" it's "it is counterable in specific circumstances" which is just complete bull.

Decisive Strike

As for DS the issue isn't quite as spiderwebbed and it's a lot more simple, the popular "counter" method is just "Don't tunnel? Lol". The killer obviously will try not to tunnel however, survivors know this and will actively play aggressive in such a way that forces a killer to tunnel or completely concede a certain amount of pressure. A killer can deliberately go out of their way to chase someone else off the unhook, and then out of nowhere the same survivor comes running in to take a protection hit. The killer was clearly chasing someone else, not tunneling, and yet still managed to down the same survivor either purely by circumstance or because that survivor forced him to. At this point the killer is left wondering "has it been 60 seconds yet? Do I pick her up now? .... Now? How about now..?" forced into a guessing game that can either get you an easy hook, or lose you an entire match.

Now, one might read this and think "one hypothetical scenario does not an overpowered perk make" but this was not my point, my point was told at the very beginning "actively play aggressive in such a way that forces a killer to tunnel or completely concede a certain amount of pressure". It is extremely easy for a survivor to force the killer into a situation where they quite literally don't have any other option. It allows them to be bold, make bad mistakes, and still completely get away with it because they get the magnetic repulsing forcefield that is DS, they can be finishing repairs on a generator in your face and you are not allowed to do anything about it because "DS".

(Decisive Strike) Concluding

These perks are not fun, they aren't skillful, they are hardly ever high risk, and they are not exciting, if anything they are only to those who run them and enjoy getting second chance ez wins. You'll never see my eyes widen, be genuinely surprised, and maybe even think "I did not see that coming" when hit by a DS, instead you'll hear me sigh and think about the previous five matches that I've seen this perk be abused to it's fullest extent.

NOED has a clear counter condition and offers ample time to execute upon it. Even if the team (or you as an individual) choose not to go for those counter measures the risk of NOEDs activation can then be nullified by finding a single totem and cleansing it.

While I do not find NOED a fun perk to go against as it can snowball a match without much skill, I have to accept that I (if I wasn't contributing to totem cleansing) or my team are the reason it got what value it did.

So is NOED fair? Yes it is.

If each survivor spends one minute searching for totems, the perk won't be needed because the game will be over before the exit gates are powered.

@LALYTHIA I mean sure, agree to disagree I guess I can respect that, despite the fact I spent multiple paragraphs going over multiple different aspects of both perks explaining why they do not have clear cut counters and you just kinda went "Nah." But ok.. I can still live with the agree to disagree.

But if I were to take one more moment to focus on this bit before moving on, because I just can't live with that answer for the portion I wrote about DS because it doesn't work. You might stand there and reiterate "very clear very easy to execute counters" and for Hex: Noed I'll let it slide (agree to disagree and all that), but for DS I won't because my point was not that killers can't counter the perk by "not tunneling lol?"

My whole shtick behind the DS portion was, to put in layman's terms: Survivors have a counter for the counter. Survivors (especially and absolutely in high ranks) know that if a killer has the option they will deliberately go out of their way to avoid the DS, it wastes too much time for a killer otherwise. For the next short period of time these survivors are not responding with a "self preservation" mentality, they aren't slowly slinking off to a corner of the map to self care, they are immediately capitalizing on their brief period of invulnerability by literally being bold and working to finish generators that are over 90%, make normally unsafe unhooks completely safe with a combination of BT giving the killer absolutely no room to punish such a terrible play, take protection hits & / or bodyblock for teammates that are in legitimate danger of being downed and hooked especially in critical moments like running to an open exit (or god forbid a closed hatch because somebody brought a key for an early ez escape), Opening up an exit gate in your face, Cleansing a hex: totem in your face, going for a sabotage play while you're carrying someone on your shoulder in your face, the list goes on and ######### ON. And you still have the audacity to tell me that it is fine for survivors to play THIS aggressive because there's a TIMER?????

A survivor doesn't even necessarily need to be under the actual effect to pull any of these stunts off because merely acting like you're still under the protection of the DS timer is enough for killers to cower under your short 5'4 survivor butt. And at that point it's up to the killer and whether or not he's going to call your bluff, and as I've said before if he calls it wrong then he's completely #########.

This isn't even mentioning that a survivor can deliberately make interactions that make them far more open to being grabbed than downed normally. Everybody knows about the "survivor in a locker with DS tee hee" but a lot less seem to be aware of the fact this extends to anything and everything that causes a killer to grab a survivor. That means "Oh man, this survivor is about to finish a generator at 95% I have to do something about it immediately-" Whoops, accidentally grabbed, Decisive Strike, stunned for 5 seconds, that generator is done and she is long gone. "Oh man, this survivor is cleansing my Hex: Huntress Lullaby that I just got up to 5 stacks I have to do something about it immediately-" Whoops, accidentally grabbed, Decisive Strike, stunned for 50 seconds and she is long gone. "Oh man, she's opening a door when I have everybody on death hook I just need a little bit more pressure and I can't let her open that gate-" Whoops accidentally grabbed, Decisive Strike, STUNNED FOR 50 minutes the gate is open you've just lost all that pressure and 2 other people just escaped alongside her. This also extends to the many, many pallets and windows scattered across the maps, slow vaulting any of these can also net these unintended or forced grabs.

Now obviously, the answer here is "Just swing early and don't grab dummy?" Right? WRONG. The point here is that survivors will continually put themselves in interactions such as these where killers are more likely to grab you, all the time and let's face it killers are the ones under pressure to act quickly, instinctively, and on reflex here not survivors.

Perfect example: I was Oni on Rancid Abattoir, I caught a Jake who was working on the last generator and had it maybe around 90%, put him on a hook that due to rng was posted up right next to that generator barely 4m away, I turn around only to hear a survivor working on the opposite side from me and I round the corner of the gen immediately into an M1. I wasn't particularly going for a grab, but if I got one I wouldn't mind, turns out it was the injured Nea and I did grab her, also turned out that apparently completely unbeknownst to me because I was nowhere near her when she was unhooked (so not tunneling if I am to put it plainly) her DS timer had not run out. Hence why she completely ignored my presence, I ate the DS she finished the last gen during my 50 hour stun, triggering her Adrenaline and the Jake I had just hooked not 10 seconds before who also had Adrenaline.

So when you tell me DS has a "very clear, very easy to execute counter" I will use the same turn of phrase not when "this perk [is] abused to it's fullest extent" or as you basically put it earlier: "Nah."

Yes. It's fair. It's easy to counter. DO BONES.

Sorry, but anyone who says NOED isnt fair is just to lazy to find totems or is just an entitled toxic survivor main.

My opinion CHILL