Boons

I like the concept of boons and even their power level (well, CoH at least; Shadow Step is vastly weaker for not masking survivor noises), but I wish there was a way for killers to permanently break a totem - even if that took considerably more time than snuffing it. It's fairly annoying when a totem ends up in an important tactical spot and it just turns back on every time you leave. You don't really have a viable option to deal with the perk.

Also that ringing sound feels like tinnitus and I'll often go to snuff Shadow Step even when I don't care about the perk because I need the boon to shut up. Wouldn't complain about a different sound being used.

its so hard play spirit nerf and then swf bring iron will and boon totem. why should i play ?

Sluzzy, is that you?

Seriously though, if a survivor takes both Boon Totems perks then their Boon area effectively gives the other three survivors unlimited Distortion, Lucky Break and a never-ending medkit for zero investment in time or perk slots. Having effectively 6 perks for up to 3 survivors for nothing plus a free item (effectively) isn't OP? It means that there's no value to switching away from an injured survivor. They are both completely broken.

I usually destroy boons when I'm looking for survivors and I come across one OR I down/hook a survivor, then I'll take a couple of seconds to destroy the boon. I really haven't had a problem with them so far.

24 seconds to bless a hex, then 16/2 = 8 seconds to heal equals 24 + 8 = 32 seconds and this does not factor in the time it takes to find a totem. which takes more than 10/20 seconds. At this point just bring self-care.

14 seconds to bless a regular totem, 8 seconds to heal = 22 seconds + the time it takes to find a totem which is more than 10 seconds. Selfcare is still faster.

And all this in a small radius around the boon. If you get injured on the other side of the map, assuming the killer doesn't instantly snuff the totem, you still have to traverse the entire map to get to your boon totem. Again, slower than self-care.

I hope monitoring also includes the possibility of them being buffed so they aren't actually useless, but likely monitoring only means let's see if we nerf them more.

Sadly, people don't take numbers/facts into accounts, just feelings. They believe boons are op and roll with it, even tho logically a heal from the boon totem takes more than a self-care heal. BUT the devs seem to respond to feelings and nerf things that are not objectively broken, just because a part of the player base feels that way because they want to feal that way.

I get why boon totems were introduced, to give survivors something else to do besides gens, a reason to go find totems, and to make solo teams a bit stronger. You could have one person running the boons and give buffs to your entire team within that area. Make it only a 24m area so that it's not too difficult to deal with, and it'll be balanced. I get it.

Here's the issue, it doesn't.

Let's take a look at Shadow step. It removes scratch marks and all aura reading abilities for killers while in that area. You would need 2 perks to accomplish that just once without the boon. So its 2 perks for the the whole team, at the cost of one person's one perk slot.

Let's take a look at COH. It gives you the self care ability with increased healing. You would also need two different perks to accomplish this on one person. This is also given to the entire team.

The problem with this is having perks that have the equivalent power of two perks, but for the whole team.

The issue, is this is great in theory for that one solo survivor that brings it for his whole team. But what actually happens most times, is one survivor wastes their time with totems for teammates that don't know how to play around it, so it doesn't get used very much and the game goes on like normal. It's the same issue with all strong perks. They're designed to give average to low tier players a better chance. But they rarely use them properly.

So what you have is very strong and abusable perks that get abused by really strong survivors and SWFs. Which is why in some matches they don't seem strong in some matches but unbeatable in others. How many times have you gone against average Survivors who dead hard into a wall and you smack them down while laughing? And then in another match one survivor loops you for 2-4 minutes because of a single dead hard.

Same thing here. One decent team running both totems on 2-3 of the survivors, while also using the meta perks, and you now have map wide super heals and no way to track them. So even if you hit someone, they just use any of the many line of sight breakers and they're gone. Then they heal to full. Even if you manage to snuff the totem, once you find someone and commit, another teammate will just go put it back up while the other two stack on gens.

So in short, the problems with boons is the same as always, balanced for low level gameplay, super strong and almost unbeatable at high levels of play. Luckily, the amount of times you get full sweat teams is rare right? Nope! SBMM made sure that you continue getting these same type of strong survivors that know how to abuse the strength of these perks. So then every game will feel unplayable.

I actually faced a team with just the Shadow step boons yesterday on springwood, they also had spine chill quick and quiet and iron will. There was 4 gens done in 3 minutes and I hadn't seen a single survivor. I'd patrol gens, but by the time I could get from one to another they'd be gone. Search the entire area and all lockers, nothing. Stomp out the totem, head towards the other gen I heard being worked on. Before I even get there the other totem is already back on, and run into the same issue, they're just gone. Snuff the totem after looking for them, kick the gen, look elsewhere. 3 minutes and 4 gens later without a single survivor seen.