What if Circle of healing was changed into an aura boon?

Well that certainly wouldn’t be as unbalanced and broken as what we have now. I don’t think that would actually be very good though.

While this is an infinitely more balanced concept I don't like the idea of running a Boon perk where you yourself get no tangible benefit. It's directly down to your team and how they play/choose to come to you in the Boon that determines whether or not you get ANY value at all from this version of CoH. All of the other boons in the game offer the Booner (lol) a benefit as soon as they boon the totem.

I would prefer some sort of cap on how much healing the boon can do before it becomes snuffed automatically. The problem with CoH is that it provides INFINITE healing that the killer will usually be unable to stop without throwing the game to some degree. It outclasses the other boons in terms of value by a mile. If there was some way to cap that value or make it so the perk wasn't just mindlessly strong, it would be much less controversial as a perk.

I was thinking something along the lines of making it a passive heal, you slowly gain healing progress passively at half or a quarter of the normal rate. It would allow you to do gens without having to waste time healing and would punish killers that stay too long at a single loop, but I can see it being quite overbearing on indoor maps.

Finding the boon in general isn't a problem, the problem is that if you have to go 15 seconds out of your way to get to the boon to snuff it out then you're realistically losing about a third of a gen every time it gets placed. If it's in a deadzone then yeah keep it up and get easy downs there but if it's out of the way AND in a strong structure (Upstairs in ironworks, Bottom floor of badham preschool, in an area with no gens, etc.) then you basically have to accept that you can't hit and run and instead have to commit to every chase because you don't have the time to keep snuffing it.

Ok and? Making it basically Boon: Kindred still allows for solo queue survivors to get healed by figuring out where to find teammates, it just stops CoH from killing every hit and run killer in the game

Still blows my mind how that happened tbh. Coh was far stronger even before they nerfed SC.

Fair enough. I mean I think boons as a whole should be reworked. Coh is OP and the rest are mostly too situational.

Maybe you could add an effect where items become less effective when healing with the boon? Give it a cooldown until you can boon again? Idk.

I still can't really understand why people want this boon to be nerfed again honestly it's pretty fine as is... There's Sloppy/That one Scourge, Shattered, and add-ons that counter CoH as well as healing builds in general. No to mention Legion and Plague who's powers say "Screw you healing!" already.

Honestly, I don't have any issue with boons that require the killer being nearby for their effect to happen. Since the routing and snuff time are quite low compared to the blessing time, they kind of function as a one time "trap" that can disorient killers with the effects like hiding scratch marks and other minor effects that can have a major impact depending on how either side plays around them.

But CoH is the outlier, and continues to be to this day. People will continue to complain about it for as long as it breaks all of the other design concepts that boons adhere to, and until they throw on a stipulation like "must be within the killer's TR to self care" or something of that sort it will continue to be problematic compared to boons themselves.

Of course, not having that safety is the point. It introduces a risk that is equal value to being able to heal without needing self-care, a medkit, or another survivor. It also only really runs that risk vs a killer running nurses and/or with a small TR, doesn't exactly hurt stuff like the doctor or wesker anti-heal builds or maps like badham/the game./midwitch where you can be nearby the killer but impose a pretty length path they need to route to reach you. Most importantly it stays consistent with the other boons in terms of their risk/reward nature, and doesn't have a disproportionate impact on stealth killers and/or hit and run playstyles.

I would benefit more if that muppet who keeps setting up their Boon would actually do a Gen. Especially against those "I play 4 Slowdown-Perks so that the game takes ages so that even I can win"-Killers who are very common these days. You need every second on a Gen against those and if I see that the guy who set up a Boon at the beginning of the match is setting up their boon again while nobody is injured or anything, something is dying inside me.

Exactly, which is why I think they should be reworked and the perks rebalanced as necessary.

Unless you run Iron Will though, or Bite the Bullet in hopes to not get found and downed it's a pretty bad way to balance it out though. Shadow Step and Dark Theory have that risk/reward to bring the killer towards the boon to help you loop inside its radius. Unbreaka-boon is somewhere in-between; where you hope you get slugged and can make it to the boon to get up in time.

I feel if you were to make CoH more "in-line" with what we have as boon totems already (even though they're already pretty consistent with the same radius, set-up time, and reliant on a totem), then you'd have to rework the whole thing entirely IMO. And the only thing I can think of that would fit a rework for it is gradually healing over time, as you can't heal yourself and be chased at the same time (that or increase the healing speed to compensate for the risk). It'd have to work like a syringe/Renewal which would be objectively worse than having a survivor take their time to heal themselves vs doing gens.

then you'd have to rework the whole thing entirely IMO

exactly. My suggestion was simply one to bring it more in line with the concept it is an outlier to. Nobody said those other metrics like time to set up are different, just that its entire dynamic with a concept as core as map pressure is pretty out there, especially when it has arguably the most useful effect. It is nowhere near restricted enough for what it provides.

New dead hard is honestly better than the old one, both in terms of balance and in terms of impact. Its skill floor is a lot higher, and reads are more helpful than reactions, but you can actually extend chases even further than you could with old dead hard.

Also, funny you mentioned CoB/Overcharge, since overcharge specifically got nerfed to pretty much require pairing it with CoB. That was the devs' idea of trying to break that synergy up.

Their point about CoH was that it has ruined the viability of multiple more healthy strategies, which has been a significant variable in why those affected would have adapted back to LCD strats. Its a perfectly valid assumption, and not mutually exclusive with the belief there will be people who camp and tunnel regardless of options.

It just doesn't sound like the right way to go about aligning it with Shadow Step and Dark theory. Unbreaka-boon is more inline with CoH where you don't want the killer to really be there as you're getting up. There's like no real good way to balance this perk without nerfing it into the same oblivion as Self-care, or reworking boons/totems as a whole. Requiring the killer to be nearby to heal yourself within a radius is way too restricting, and just would make Self-care the better perk for the work CoH requires to activate.

And I'd honestly prefer totems in general having a QoL update of sorts.