New Unhealthy Gameplay Loop Survivor Laziness

Even the times it doesn't break first, generally what happens is your Ruin breaks and reappears somewhere else and then the next totem broken is Undying. I feel like only about 1-5% of the time (from the killers side) do you actually go through MULTIPLE totems before Undying is broken.

Totems are getting different looks on the reworked maps which helps them blend in. I've almost walked by a totem because it blended into the box on a LT wall on MacMillan.

Disturbed Ward is certainly an outlier for bad totem spawns, but Corn maps also have out in the open totems. They are just covered by corn which can help prevent them from being immediately spotted a mile away.

The issue I have is when I go to find totems the killer isn't just sitting around afk. They are patrolling gens and often times slugging repeatedly at 5 gens. This results in an untenable situation for solo survivor teams. When two teammates are hooked/slugged the priority isn't to be doing totems. It's to be doing saves/resetting the team. Doing totems at that point is detrimental.

I've been recording my games and every game with ruin undying involves slugging at the start. My teammates try to go for saves and it comes to a point where totems cannot be done. Even when totems do get done it turns out you did the ruin totem for the 3rd time and you have to go look for it again while the killer is slugging everyone else and it kills your team. It's made a majority of my games with ruin undying extremely unfun despite me equipping perks to help find totems and helping my team.

The issue is that time is a very hindering restraint. I don’t think it’s because survivors want to be lazy.

Running around the map like a headless chicken to find bones ends up buying time for the killer, because now you aren’t doing a gen.

To make matters worse, sometimes the killer will get a crazy good totem spawn, and that hex will never be cleansed.

Games end way to quick for people to cleanse bones and do gene at the same time, it’s a risk taking time to scout the map for totems as you aren’t doing the main objective. Not to mention that sometimes the killer wasn’t even running a hex perk, and you might be responsible for people dying or gens not getting popped quick enough.

The point is every match I've had has involved that. That's why you get complaints about ruin+undying. It's not fun at all when you load in knowing if they have ruin undying you most likely will bleed out or have under 10k points with only a gen or two completed.

It's fair to hate something, but if someone is saying "Nerf this/Get rid of this" because that's their playing style and refuse to try and counter it, that's where the problem lies. I personally hate it when NOED activates, but I start the match thinking that the killer has every perk so if I see a totem, I break it.

I get that DBD is unique, but that doesn't mean you can just say "I'm not going to do a side objective" than {bad word} and moan about how something being powerful and saying it needs to nerf. Especially when by doing the side objective you counter it. That makes no sense. "Hm. I don't feel like doing the side objective. OMG THE KILLER HAS SOMETHING POWERFUL THAT WAS COUNTERABLE BY DOING THE SIDE OBJECTIVE! NERF NEEDED! GET RID OF IT! But I'm still not going to do the side objective."

...no.

I'm not saying you specifically do this, but that's the argument at hand.

This is exactly why I think totem cleansing should be reworked so that if you let go of it it will regress slowly like a generator, rather than going straight to 0 instantly.

If they changed totems like this I actually think Ruin Undying wouldn't need to be nerfed.

I guess you have a fair point. I just feel like it would make more sense if totems worked this way but that's just me lol

I do agree, I feel like undying is the offender here as it just does too much in one. Like you said, maybe give the aura reading from undying to thrill of the hunt (Which would really make more sense anyways than the annoying noise notification it currently has) and then suddenly undying is more balanced but still gives other hex totems second lives.

Since you don't care I feel like I can have a conversation about this. Personally, I feel like killers only bring it if they are new to the killer and feel like they might need that buffer or they're just newer to killer in general. I feel like it's design was made so that people can play killers they're newer at and still feel like they have some form of a chance. There is one change I think should be made to it for sure though. If you just happen to have a good round NOED will still activate if you close the hatch, I think it should be more like Rancor where all 5 generators have to be done.

I personally only use it on Nurse and Plague. Those are the only 2 killers I find myself struggling with so I use NOED to help myself a bit. I don't use it because I'm trying to be awful, I'm using it because I feel like it could help me get a kill. Personally I can understand the reason survivors hate NOED. I hate it to when playing survivor and it does feel cheap. It's why I mostly try to avoid using it, except for those 2 killers I mentioned.

Totem spawns are a huge problem. Let me explain myself, as someone who mostly mains survivors and is ALWAYS doing as many totems as possible.

Around 6/7 months ago, I got so tired of NOED that I decided I would be doing all totems by my own if that was necessary. I usually play SWF so many times I can count on my friends to do some bones, but when I play solo Q I mostly have to rely on myself only. So, back then, I started learning totem spawns. Every totem spawn in every map. I carries Detective's Hunch around, sometimes also a map, solely for this purpose. I watched some videos about totem spawns in specific realms to memorize them. Overall, it's a huge task and I am still learning (yes, even after all these months) but I have generally grasped where most totems spawn in each map.

Having all this knowledge, I can say quite a few things about totem spawns. Because some of them are so good, and some of them so bad, that it's ######### crazy. I believe that the pinnacle of totem spawn balance lies on Grave of Glenvale. Totems do not spawn out in the open, but you will be able to find them as long as you're looking for them and you're not in too much of a hurry (say, there's a teammate on the hook and NOED is up). There's very few "bad" totem spawns in this map, say the one in the windmill, the one in shack and the one in the main building (which can be tricky because there actually a lot of totem spawn spots in that saloon, lol).

There's two particular maps that have insane totem spawns, at least in my opinion. Part of this is due to the fact that I easily get lost in those maps, and I probably end up checking the same places multiple times without realizing. These are Hawkins and Lery's. Very few weak totem spawns (gates for both maps, Demogorgon thingy and upper floor for Hawkins are the only ones I can think of rn), and many strong ones that are hard to spot per se, and even more if you take into account that everything looks similar in that map and it's hard to pinpoint which places you have already checked and which ones you have not.

The following strongest maps (not as strong as Hawkins and Lery's, imo, but still strong) are Silent Hill and The Game. Again, maps in which it's easy to get lost as a survivor, but that have many spots in which it's easy to see the totem without even looking for it, and also some memorable spots like the bathroom ones in both maps, the door ones in The Game, the 3rd floor one in Silent Hill to give some examples. Some other totem spawns in these maps are really well hidden though. And Silent Hill has an extra problem, which is that it requires you to check every area twice, because you need to check inside the classrooms and on the hallways, and in order to do this you usually need to go back lol.

Every other map in the game, except for perhaps the Swamp (a map that makes many non-totem-connoisseurs (?) struggle because of the edge of the map spawns and stuff) has very weak totem spawns. Coldwind, MacMillan, Azarov and Crotus Prenn are great examples of these. Easy to randomly see, a lot of memorable spots, so many identical tiles that have the same exact totem spawn, etc. I rarely struggle to find any totems in these maps.

Why am I saying all of this? Because maps and killers can drastically change how big of a task it is to actually find and do totems without throwing the whole game away. It's not the same finding all five totems in Lery's than in Shelter Woods. It's not the same to find all five totems against a addon-less Wraith than against a rank 1 Spirit with good addons. The game is about economy of time. You need to do your objective faster than your enemy can do theirs. Rank 1 Spirit players, from my experience, are extremely good at their objective. Add-onless Wraith players, usually not so much. Please don't "but oh my god survivors are so OP they can loop even a good Spirit player" because my point here is that some killers have it easier to do their objective fast than others. Not that you cannot win against the Spirit, lol.

All of this being said, I feel there are three totem perks that are the hot topic in these forums. The first one is NOED. I don't think NOED is OP as ######### as some others believe, but I believe it's a little bullshit. Because having to do five whole ass totems to MAYBE counter a perk the killer might not even have, feels a little bullshit to me. Don't get me wrong: most times, I will try to do those totems. I stopped being one of those "lazy" survivors you talked about who refuse to do more than one bone long ago. But you must take into consideration that doing five bones (yes! only five) can be A LOT sometimes. In maps where totem spawns are hellish, like Lery's, it can be VERY tough to find them all and at the same time be doing gens. You usually have to sacrifice a LOT of time to do this. And like I said, this game is about time management. The faster you do your thing, the better chances you have of winning. Now if you're on SWF it /is/ easier to find all totems and get rid of them. But this game isn't only SWF. Solo Q survivors exist and, well, like you said, survivors /are/ lazy many times. And I can't torture randoms on comms with my constant "do bones or I swear to ######### god" the way I do with my SWF team.

Then on other maps (Coldwind and MacMillan being the best examples, imo) doing all five totems is easy and you can actually manage to get rid of them ridiculously fast. I remember one particular game in Coldwind where I got rid of all totems within like 3 minutes of the game being started, lol. This is generally not the rule, of course, but my point is that overall (depending on the killer you're paired up against, of course) you can usually afford to do all bones in these maps if you're trying really hard to avoid NOED.

Now, the other two hex perks that people have been talking about a lot are, of course, the Ruin + Undying combo. Now there's a lot to say about this combo, because it can be somewhat useful to OP as ######### depending on many things. First: the aura reading grants some killers enough time to actually get to the totem and shoo the survivor away before they can cleanse it, for example Spirit, Freddy, Billy, Blight and Nurse can easily play off a play like this. You will think "well, but then survivors can distract these killers so that, meanwhile, their teammate can do the bones!!" and while this is entirely true, this requires survivors to be in some sort of comms most times. SWF is what I mean. That's the second factor when it comes to R+UD in my opinion: survs on comms can easily communicate to each other when it's entirely safe to do the bones. They can also entirely counter this combo by communicating and finding not only one but BOTH totems before cleansing any of them, then cleansing both simultaneously. Then, the killer won't be able to be in both places at the same time, and you'll make sure that you get rid of UD so you'll have to do only one extra totem max aside of those two. Easy, right? As long as you're on comms. And as long as, again, you're not in one of those hellish maps where totem spawns are so good that you usually spend too much time looking for totems, and when you finally find them it doesn't really matter anymore. That's the obvious third factor: maps. R+UD is a complicated combo to analyze in my opinion because it relies too much on RNG + these three factors I've mentioned above. It can be literally useless against good, communicated SWF with totem spawn knowledge. It's deadly if survivors can't manage to find the totems, despite actively looking for them (not being lazy!). It's also very RNG reliant because of the random map thingy, the particular totem spawns it will spawn in, and the particular place in the map that survivors will spawn at (because survivors often spawn next to lit totems, and that should definitely not be happening for ######### sake).

Why did I write this long ass comment that probably no one will read? Well, first because I love totems and any chance to talk about them I WILL take, lol. Secondly, because I wanted to bring actual insight into the matter, analyze it from all possible perspectives that I can think of, because I feel that very often the analysis that people make when it comes to this particular aspect of the game is superficial to say the least. And third, to bring my totem-cleanser, mostly-survivor-main perspective onto the table, because I feel that as someone who can definitely NOT be considered lazy when it comes to totems, I have a lot to say lol.

There is really no conclusion to this post. I just wanted to explain why both sides mainstream opinions are partly right and partly wrong when it comes to totems and hex perks. If you have read this whole bible, I hope you have some amazing DBD matches tonight and thank you for keeping up with me until now. Lol.