The calm spirit “buff” is an absolute joke and needs to be addressed

Reposted from reddit because i thought it would be more likely for a dev to see it here.

TLDR Calm spirit’s “buff” is almost objectively a nerf, and it‘s pathetic that such a weak perk was somehow made worse due to a massive oversight, even after an EXCESSIVE amount of feedback from the community.

I could talk about how ######### awful this “buff” is forever. I dont mean to hop on the hate train because I think this patch isnt as bad as it seems, but this is genuinely THE STUPIDEST perk change ive ever seen. 

Blessing with CS:

This particular part is absolutely baffling. You will be throwing by using this perk with your boons. Blessing is already practically silent. There is ZERO reason to ever use this perk if you are bringing COH, which is already one of the strongest perks. Lets assume you successfully boon in an area close enough to the killer where having it be silent is helpful, which is a rare situation. They will still know a boon was created by the loud thunder sound AND constant the wooshing sound around the totem. The killer has to be to be far away enough from the aoe wooshing sound but also close enough that silence is helpful. This will realistically NEVER happen. The entire point of “buffing” this perk was to convince more people to use it. However, just this ONE detail immediately will make even less people consider it.

Opening chests with CS:

Firstly, calm spirit will NOT stop the noise of the chest opening once you finish unlocking it, so it is not actually silent. Opening chests is already often a waste of time. Most people will not go out of their way to open chests because they can already bring any item with any addons into a game. Opening a chest next to the killer is almost unheard of if you are actually trying to win. You should not be opening chests in the first place if you are close enough for the killer to interrupt you if they hear it. Doing this silently will not be helpful. For some reason, they decided there needs to be a downside to this, because doing a SIDE objective silently is apparently not balanced. If anyone happens to bring this perk, they will be deterred from opening chests due to it taking 3 extra seconds. 

Cleansing with CS:

Silently cleansing may sound helpful at first, but remember it is extremely easy to tell if a survivor has calm spirit. If the killer knows you have this perk, they will be paranoid that you will be cleansing their hex right next to you. They WILL take an extra second to check if tbey suspect you are in the area. With that in mind, taking 30% longer to cleanse a hex (often even longer with thana being popular) is absolutely a detriment. There will be plenty of times where you simply can not cleanse a contested hex because it takes too long. You are giving free slowdown to the killer, and you might need a teammate to cleanse it for you instead, which becomes even more irritating in solo queue. Once again, this perk does not inherently make the entire process silent. When you complete the cleansing action, the totem makes a loud breaking noise, which calm spirit does not get rid of, so it isnt even truly silent. 

Keep in mind that calm spirit does not stop your grunts of pain, so the silence effect only works if you are healthy or have off the record. Even while healthy, you will still make breathing noises. So, in total, this new effect does not actually fully silence ANY of the actions listed. Even if it did, it could still be argued that the downside made the “buff” detrimental. The new effect sounds like a completely different perk that was scrapped and thrown on this one because they didn’t know how to change it. If you want to have the cute little effect of not scaring birds away that might alert the killer from the distance, you need to put up with the risk of slower cleansing, along with limiting any boons from your loadout.

The midchapter perk overhaul was a step in the right direction but many of the changes made little to no sense. I want to mention botany knowledge because I haven’t seen anyone talk about its recent change; since the previous patch they increased the healing speed by 17% but decreased the efficiency by 53%. It can be argued that this is not a net buff to the perk at all. The same goes with overcharge. Just because the perks were a bit strong on the PTB does not mean you need to make them arguably worse than before, or in the latter case, weaker than before the buff in specific cases.