How to bring Circle of Healing in line with other Boons
Circle of Healing has been a divisive and problematic perk for a long time. A lot of hard number nerfs have reduced its significance, but it is still far more powerful than any other boon, so much so that it holds a similar role to the Nurse in that boon balance decisions have to be based around whether or not it will make CoH too strong, instead of how it affects boons as a whole. In my opinion, here is why; it works best if the killer is never near it.
Boon perks have the balance of the killer being able to snuff it out to take away all the time of it being set up. But that balance makes perfect sense when you consider the other three boons:
Dark Theory gives a speed boost. When do you need the speed most? When the killer is nearby.
Shadow Step hides scratch marks and auras. When do you need those hidden most? When the killer is nearby.
Exponential lets you get up from being slugged. If you got slugged, you were either near a killer who is going on a slugging spree, or you crawled across the map to reach it.
The other three are balanced BECAUSE they have to be near the killer to get real value, so the killer is aware there is a boon nearby and gets to choose to deal with it or not. Circle of Healing, however, can be set up across the map in a location the killer will never go to, and it gets all its value right there. You can give your entire team self care by putting it in a location so far away from the active gens that the killer throws by going over there. To bring Circle of Healing more in line with the other Boons, make it so the ability to heal yourself only activates once the killer has been in range of the totem once. It can still serve as a rallying point to the survivors to know to go there to get slightly faster healing even if the killer never goes.
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Exactly, My problems with Boons as Killer is never really the perks, it all has to do with what CoH is far more useful effective in as you can be in the corner of the map and get insane value at any time. Especially stacking it with healing perks and medkits.
If only it COH gets a significant nerf in which you can only heal within both the Boon Radius & killer Terror Radius as well. Or better just simply remove all the healing bonus and just make it a self care only Boon perk.. or even simply making it a teammate Boon perk, that has both Empathy & We Make It effects while in the Boon Radius (removed the self care, give the ability to reveal injured Survivors to every Survivors in the match, teammates can come over and heal up to 50%; the perk also get weaker as Survivors died or escape)
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Circle of Healing is a good perk but it's not nearly as bad as it was when it first came out. If anything I win matches sometimes because the survivors are messing around too much trying to set and reset that Boon instead of doing something more useful.
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So essentially you want to make the Boon less problematic based on where it’s placed on the map. Even tho where it’s placed can continually change as long as there is a dull totem. This will essentially drive down the pressure for the Killer to look for said totem and keep their focus on chases, hooking, and gen pressure. I’d disagree. Survivors have enough secondary pressure from enough Killer perks and abilities that force survivors to put their primary objectives on hold. I don’t see why Killers shouldn’t be placed in the same situation. Either deal with the totem or focus on your primary objective.
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Boons just need restricted in their number of uses or require x number of actions to get access to use it. This would let them make the other boons more impactful since they can't be spammed as much.
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“This one is for the players who think they can hit every Skill Check,” says Aram. “When it comes to Skill Checks, new players tend to miss them a lot while experienced players hit them with ease. We wanted to see how easy it really is. We playtested it, and we had a bunch of very experienced players missing Skill Checks because they were greedy for the bonus – which is exactly what this Perk is about. Oh, you’re good at Skill Checks? Prove it. There’s a stacking bonus, but you must chain Great Skill Checks that get progressively harder.”
“I only tolerated that degree of complexity because I found the Perk super interesting,” he notes. “If a Perk is hard to understand, you have to be satisfied with its potential.”
boon perks are suppose to be perks that reward the survivor for memorizing dull totem locations. what would be the point in booning a totem where you get no rewards? that's what other boon perks are. boon totems with lackluster situational reward.
Its sort of the same idea with hyperfocus. what would be the point in hitting consecutive skill-checks if the rewards for hitting check simply are not there? Like what is the difference?
this is large reason why a lot of perks in dbd create a stale meta because there is little reason to use a perk if the reward simply are not there. at the same time, if you make a perk have high reward, but it has low skill-cap, then the perk becomes over-popular because it becomes best option(See old dead hard for example) since everyone can use the perk and get high reward. Its just that dbd is simple game where creating a perk that has high skill-cap is unnaturally difficult because of simplicity of the gameplay. you want the perk be consistent for the user that is good at using it, but not effectively consistent that its game-changing effect for everyone that uses it.
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as "in line with other boons" you mean bad?
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I think it's still the most overpowered perk in the entire game because even at 0% it would still be the most powerful perk in the game. It doesn't really matter how long healing takes, the fact that you can hide and self heal is insane.
However, I wouldn't be for nerfing it. Just nerf totems in general, and then buff the other boons.
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Healing speed of the perk is everything. Say you could heal yourself with Boon but it took a full minute, it would obviously be so slow as to not even be worth using. But at its original speed it was too fast. So there must be a range of numbers where the perk is reasonable to use but not too fast between those extremes. The ability to hide and heal is strong, weak, or in between all depending on how long it takes.
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The ability to heal yourself is extremely strong no matter how much time it takes.
It's also one perk slot that works for everyone. it would be bad if it worked only on yourself, yes, but it's 4 perks at once.
That's exactly the reason CoH remained the God tier survivor perk even after its nerfs.
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Sorry but if you spent one full minute healing yourself that’s not a strong effect, that’s you throwing the game probably. And if four people did it it would be even worse for them.
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I say current CoH boon is already OK. I mean - it's good perk, but definitely not as OP as a lot of killers are trying to make it sound. Like have you EVER had a game where boons were used AND gens were flying? I seriously doubt so. It takes so long to move around the map to find the totem, walk into it, boon it and then heal... And hoping to not get interrupted by killer, because otherwise you lost your progress and spot (meaning killer will whack it all the time = VERY slow heal). The alternative is, that it's already standing - so you have to move thru whole map to get to it and hope killer won't see you injured and vulnerable. Hope he doesn't hear boon or if he does, that he will actually stomp it - instead of using as a bait to get to that wounded survivor every single time.
Now compare this to a good medkit. you get on average 1m less for each heal - provided you can solo heal only 2 or 3 times.
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Ive litterally at 18k hours never seen gens NOT fly with CoH, that's litterally the problem with CoH, survivors don't need to lose time finding each other to heal.
Again, if you're not rushing gens with CoH that's a skill issue.
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What does “rushing gens” have to do with what I posted?
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That was response to me. I said that there is no genrushing when CoH is in game as it is huge time sink IMO. But it seems I am in different MMR bracket, because I don't experience that one.
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Got it, he had it under my quote but I couldn’t figure out why. 🤷♂️
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If anything, the other Boons should be on par with CoH. CoH is fine atm.
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You're clearly in a different MMR bracket, that's true.
Because you litterally said the same thing he did.
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No, I said if you spend 60 seconds per heal you’re throwing the game, and if it happens multiple times its worse. Do you really think if it took 60 seconds to fully heal it would be good strategy to do it?
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It's 16 seconds to heal another survivor, which makes self healing a "normal" time of 32 seconds.
Which, yes, would be strong.
Trying to make up an exagerrated number doesn't change that being able to self heal is extremely strong yes.
Now, if it took 5 minutes, yes that wouldn't be very strong, what I'm saying is that to bring CoH on par with other perks it would need to actually be much slower to self heal. Which is obviously a lazy route to get to finally give the propre nerf CoH needs.
Honestly, they could simply bring it back to 100% but not make it unlock the ability to self heal.
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The ability to heal yourself is not extremely strong if it takes you the equivalent of a decade to heal. The goal of survivors is to repair the generators and escape. The more time survivors spend off gens, the easier it is for the killer to win.
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I actually don’t think it needs to be slower than self heal because its range limitation and set up time and travel to and from totems chips away at it compared to the flexibility self heal provides. It’s actual healing speed is probably about where it should be now, if it still needs to be slowed down it’s not by very much.
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That is literally the way every other boon works. It is less problematic for the killer based on where it is put, so it has to be placed strategically. CoH does not need to be placed strategically. It works anywhere, just better when it is far away. The other totems don't work unless they are close.
If it only worked for yourself, it would be self care. As it stands, it is four man self care.
A caveat to that is that the killer has to be able to get SOMEONE. If the totem is across the map, yeah it can take a minute to run there, heal, and run back. Even if two survivors are doing it, that is a lot of time eaten up. But there are two other survivors who can be doing gens. What I find more often is the game becomes a slog of me hitting people, not being able to commit because the other survivors have healed and come back, and could gen slam, but hitting them does the same thing. In order to safely be able to commit to a chase, I would need at least 3 of the survivors injured. But with CoH, you never get three survivors injured at once. That is why I think the ability to self heal with it should require the killer to have come into range at least once. All other boons require the killer to be in range to be useful, except possibly Shadowstep to protect from long distance aura reading around a gen.
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If time to heal is irrelevant to the power of a perk, then Self Care would like a word.
As it’s currently implemented IMO, CoH is strong but not OP, and definitely not without counter. Once found, you could stamp it out or use it to know where every wounded survivor is likely to run. This gets even better if you have perks that mess with healing or give aura info from it since your terror radius will encompass a large chunk of the boon’s area (if not all of it depending on position). Between my survivor and killer matches I think I’ve only ever seen 2 boon totems up max, and usually just 1 (if any) so it’s not like 3 or even 4 totems is something commonly contended with.
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Make like stakeout.
- Once booned, totem will have 1 token, if a boon is affected by TR will gain token each # seconds.
- Max tokens 2
- Any healing action done within boon area will spent one token.
- Upon depleting tokens, boon is cleanised.
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Against good survivors, knowing where the injured ones are going means nothing because you cannot chase the injured ones, or the remaining ones will finish the gens. Survivors win the battle of attrition in this case. CoH has no counter in any situation where you need to guard gens on a specific chunk of the map where CoH isn't, unless you are already down to a 1v3.
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I mean, if you’re going for a 4k then yeah - the likelihood of success is low there but a whole series of events have to play out before you get to that scenario. In that situation you have a choice - focus on slowing gen progression gambling that the extra time will give the survivors more of an opportunity to slip up or focus on getting as many hooks as you can. If the game were more algorithmic where everything has predictable branches on a flowchart of actions and counter actions then what would being ‘good’ at the game even mean?
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