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Am I the only one who thinks boon totems are fine?

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Comments

  • Oiry
    Oiry Member Posts: 218

    I do believe boons are more or less fine, except for the fact that snuffing is inefficient and the killer has no way to counter any of the boons. CoH is an exception to it. I think its vastly overpowered, BUT.

    Let's assume that from a statistics perspective all boons are okay and in fact balanced. 2 problems still

    1) The perks are meta-shifting and in some maps do nerf certain killers. A great example is Twins. They added Exponential and CoH, but never actually buffed Twins. We can argue that they did buff Plague (CoH), but I don't think this is a good approach. it is a potential balancing issue, that no one really looks into at the moment. Without nasty totem spawns it may be okay, like Swamp corner-totem spawn, but it's very easy to find central boon locations. CoH also barely depends on the area, unlike its 2 counterparts.

    2) From a game design perspective you can argue that Exponential motivates to not slug. I personally don't think slugging is bad, but people have expressed their concern. However, CoH makes the hit n' run strats less viable. The strats I did like to play as and play against. CoH by itself is enough motivation for me to just tunnel because that is the way to counter CoH. This is what the current design motivates.

    Also the last question. If CoH would make people able to self-heal in 16 seconds without healing speed buff and the perk would have a 60-second cooldown on it after being snuffed by the killer, would you still consider it a good perk? I would. I would probably even use it. That's how insanely good it is.

  • Pulsar
    Pulsar Member Posts: 20,783
    edited January 2022

    ay can someone delete this since the guy I responded to got yeeted?

  • VikingDragonXii
    VikingDragonXii Member Posts: 2,885

    Thrill is not a counter and what totem builds.....Thrill was the only defense Killers had and now it's pointless to waste a Perk slot....what made it good was the notification when a Hex was being messed with.....

  • Lat0
    Lat0 Member Posts: 92

    They could do one of these 3 simple things to them

    - Reduce the range to 16m

    - Remove the self-care ability

    - Remove the 100% speed buff

    Then they would be strong but still balanced

  • cantelope
    cantelope Applicant Posts: 343

    Its a problem when there are multiple and a nightmare on maps with multiple floors as they go through them.

    I dont mind one. Two can be fine if the map is mostly flat. Three or rpd/game and it's just boring. Everyone is just going to tank hits and run to boon.

    Otherwise yeah, they're fine. It's an idea that would have worked better if there was a way to stop multiple Survivors taking it. Almost as if it's a half baked mechanic tossed into a perk slot.

  • GrimReaperJr1232
    GrimReaperJr1232 Member Posts: 1,703

    Hold up, hold up...

    1) Did you just say "Play Plague to counterplay." That's hard countering, not counter play. Counter play is, they have X, so I'll do Y to play around it.

    2) Did you just say Devour Hope was op? NOED, I get, but... Devour Hope?

  • zarr
    zarr Member Posts: 996

    They are definitely vastly more fine than it is regularly being made out to. The mechanic in and of itself is entirely unproblematic, which Shadow Step and Exponential go to show - people barely even use them, because they are simply not good enough to compete for slots with better perks. If anything they mostly only see use alongside Circle Of Healing, because then the survivor is spending time setting up Boons anyway - may as well get additional value doing so. But without using COH they also wouldn't even consider using the others.

    If BHVR actually nerfs COH in all the ways you can usually see suggested, it too will stop to see frequent use. COH is the first survivor perk in years to have had a notable impact on the survivor perk meta again, so I for one am not a friend of the idea of nerfing it into yet another not-nearly-good-enough perk to throw onto the pile of the many other such perks and going back to seeing the same handful we have been for years.

    The Boon mechanic itself is in fact even beneficial for killers: Survivors have to spend time running around, searching for totems, and blessing them. All that just to get their perk effect up, when non-Boon perks of course do not come with that requirement. And then in order to make use of that effect, they have to yet again spend time traversing the map. And if the killer snuffs their totem, they have to spend even more time setting it up again. All this time away from generators and running around the map is something that prolongs the round and creates more chaos for killers to capitalize upon.

    Of course, snuffing a Boon takes time too, it is regularly only time-efficient if you do not have to go out of your way too much to do so, and I do think snuffing should be a little more impactful for that reason. Destroying the snuffed totem may be a bit much, but they could definitely put a cooldown on the respective player's Boon perk(s) afterwards, or even make it so that that player cannot bless that same totem for the remainder of the trial.

    And yes, since Boon effects benefit the entire team, the time spent setting them up can be made up for over the course of a trial, but it's not as clear-cut as people like to assume either. People (wrongfully) assume Self-Care is a bad perk, and well, you spend a lot more time finding and blessing a totem and then healing yourself with COH than you do just Self-Caring on the spot. And while you and other survivors can of course then keep coming back there to heal, in any scenario where a survivor is spending more than 8 seconds traversing the map to get to the Boon radius, they are not healing faster than they would be with Self-Care (8 seconds running to the Boon, 16 seconds healing, 8 seconds running back). The only upside the Boon in this scenario has is that other survivors do not have to have Self-Care equipped, freeing up perk slots... but that is obviously not something non-4-player SWFs coordinate, and so on the contrary, not only will you still have people spending slots on perks they would not necessarily need, but they may even spend slots on Boon perks themselves, which then have diminishing returns and can be even more "wasted" slots (and time). Add on top of this that the literal "circle of healing" is also a circle killers can expect survivors to run off to and heal within and as such try and capitalize upon, and it's clear that even COH is not unthinkably broken or anything.

    And I mean, plenty of killer players are still winning many of their matches handedly even when COH is in them, me included, so it's not at all something that "breaks" the game just by being there. And this is of course something BHVR can see too: they can look at various stats of matches in which COH is present and in which it is not, and if they are not seeing great disparities between them, there is no global balancing issue with the perk, at least not one as severe as people claim. It is also telling that in a tournament where everything was allowed, COH did not see much of any use, and that even when people were bringing 4 toolboxes rather than med-kits.

    Nerf COH too much and people will just go back to Self-Care, med-kits, or not healing at all, and those things can not seldomly be more time-efficient for survivors than COH.

    COH is a super good perk, absolutely one of the best. But the overreaction to the perk is mostly because people had grown to vastly underestimate the value of healing up. I guarantee that if Self-Care had never fallen out of the Western meta and had been as ubiquitous as it still is even now in the Asian meta, the reaction to COH would have been more tempered, at least insofar that people wouldn't be so surprised how impactful being able to consistently heal up is.

    Perks have to be super good and among the best if they want to seriously compete for slots against other such perks. And COH actually fits that mark reasonably well - as it is tied to the Boon mechanic, it is not a power creep, and indeed has not become a staple in the meta, it is not meta-defining. I still have matches at high MMR in which not a single COH is present, and the same cannot be said to nearly the same extent for the usual, old suspects of DH/SB, BT, DS.

    That said, I do see issues with the perk.

    For one thing, SWFs as so often benefit disproportionally much, since they can coordinate loadouts to have a dedicated "Booner", and further coordinate where to set up the Boon and how to best make use of its effect(s). For that issue, I point to my wish that SWFs see loadout restrictions. Only 1 person being able to bring COH in a 4-SWF coupled with the snuff buff (destroy snuffed totem/apply bless cooldown after snuff/make player unable to rebless snuffed totem) would make it a lot more difficult for SWFs to benefit from it.

    Another issue is that it can enable ridiculous healing speeds when coupled with med-kits. The fix for this issue is simple: remove the 100% healing speed boost to any healing action other than its own. Whether it should still apply to altruistic heals is another question. I think if we implement a snuff buff and remove the synergy with med-kits, we should first look at how the perk performs before applying this further nerf. One reason why it not applying to altruistic heals is a little iffy is that then healing oneself within the Boon area is objectively better than healing each other, and that's just a bit of an odd and unintuitive interaction.

  • Archive512
    Archive512 Member Posts: 150

    Yes. Because being able to effectively bring a group medkit with decent healing speed (the one thing that is a downside to say, self care) being able to place it on a boon without s cool down then also forcing killers to waste time finding the boon to snuff it out only for it to be relit the moment you move away is the worst addition to the game. Now you have to account of the whole team effectively having a medkit along with whatever item they bring. However it has meant sloppy butcher is seeing a rise in popularity, but even so it should be that dull totems are broken or at the very least blocked by the entity for a while once it has been snuffed out.

  • tesla
    tesla Member Posts: 446
  • AnnaEliza365
    AnnaEliza365 Member Posts: 141

    I hate boons but not for the reasons that many people here do. It's a guaranteed way to get NoED to prock. In fact, every single game where the randoms bring booms we get NoED. Also the people who bring boons just run around booning different totems instead of actually doing the gens! I cannot tell you the amount of games that I have lost JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE BROUGHT BOONS

  • Yippiekiyah
    Yippiekiyah Member Posts: 488

    I just leave in the lobby if I see Michaela. Even then there is still around an 80% chance that there will be a boon in the game. As a wraith player if I hear a boon go up I literally just tunnel and facecamp the hell out them.

  • Kurri
    Kurri Member Posts: 1,599

    ... The perk that no longer gives you a notification when someone starts working on a totem, and hex totems that get destroyed when someone boons the totem?

  • YOURFRIEND
    YOURFRIEND Member Posts: 3,389

    No, OP, to answer your question. There are many many people in the world and any given thought or opinion you possess is certain to be expressed elsewhere.


    What you mean to post is "Here is my belief, please validate me". Try that next time. It's more honest.

  • Kaja117
    Kaja117 Member Posts: 3

    What if there was a SECONDARY OBJECTIVE! that survivors could do to "unlock" boons or something idk. Fits two shoes

  • gammatsunami
    gammatsunami Member Posts: 545

    Yes. The fact they work vertically, stack with med kits makes them insane on maps like RCPD, the new artist one ect

  • nicnc82
    nicnc82 Member Posts: 372

    Nope I do and I'm a killer main. They don't bother me at all. I still get 3 to 4 kills most games.

  • KnotEnthusiast
    KnotEnthusiast Member Posts: 464

    This is basically how I feel. Shadowstep is super annoying in certain buildings, but outside of those I think the concept isn't terrible. The problem is that CoH is so tremendously overtuned that it has tainted the entire concept. Having a very large area on the map that is permanently indicated to survivors where they can heal alone in 16 seconds (soon to be 18.5, huuuuge changes lol) is insanely strong, and dumpsters a bunch of killers, perks and playstyles that rely on survivors staying injured. If CoH kept the 100% healing bonus to others, but removed the ability to self heal, I would have 0 problems with it or boons as a whole.

  • nicnc82
    nicnc82 Member Posts: 372

    I never camp or tunnel survivors out with boons in the game and still get 3 and 4 kills 🤷‍♀️