Are Boons Dead?
I feel like I’ve only encountered a survivor running boons a couple times since the nerf to Circle of Healing. Personally I don’t feel like they’re worth the effort to set them up.
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I’ve seen Dark Theory once or twice since MFT became a thing, but I don’t really see Boons much anymore. I do see more players running Inner Healing, though. At least there isn’t friction between those who like(d) booning & those who like cleansing totems anymore.
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dark theory can be ok because your teammates might be running MFT so it has synergy. it might save them in a chase at the cost of you setting up a boon, so slower gens. the other boons are bad and not worth the time.
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The issue with DT and MFT though is that DT has a finite range. Even if you managed to keep the killer in a 24-meter area for a while they’d still eventually bloodlust you down. Tbh though I didn’t see the killer who faced that person with DT and MFT fall for that. Didn’t look like he (it was a Pyramid Head) struggled at all to catch & down the survivor.
Frankly, I don’t mind if Boons fade away. They only exist because killers wanted survivors to have some other objective that didn’t involve gens. Now that survivors aren’t messing with them, they can focus on completing gens.
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that is general issue with all boons. they have too little radius to be used. the problem is that if you buff their radius to good level such as 40 meters, then killer will complain about fast healing from COH and you will get more complaints of MFT+DT haste stacking then you do currently. so boon are under-tuned so killer do not complain about boons like they did in the previous COH era.
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Fair point. Eh. All of the Boons are outclassed by individualized perks now (Lucky Break, Inner Healing, Exhaustion Perks, Made for This, etc). Boons can be situationally alright in SWF but even then they are usually just a time sink. A waste.
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i think boon:shadowstep is better then lucky break but it is worse then distortion. its perk that is under-tuned because it is missing few effects. the two effect it is missing is ability to remove blood marks(only no mither does this) and it is missing 100% iron will to be a good perk. shadowstep could have game-changing effect, but it is least useful out of the boons blessings.
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Honestly, the boons look great on paper, but in practice they kind of suck. I always liked the one that hides scratch marks. But it's hard to get use out of.
I have no clue how they could improve boons though. Maybe improve them and make killers destroy them when the snuff them out to balance out the strength? I dunno.
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Lucky Break is versatile in a way SS isn’t. And it really does circle back to the boon being in a small, finite range. You can’t guarantee that you’ll be in its radius when you need the effect. But Lucky Break can work anywhere.
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the thing is that boon:shadowstep can allow you to stealth before killer ever finds you. It also works when your healthy unlike lucky break. Lucky break has limited duration and you will run out of the duration if you stay injured. but yes. it comes down to finite range for why boon are not good.
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Love how people thought boons won the boons vs scourge hook battle, yet right now it’s the complete other way around lol.
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Boons seem a lot more viable when you can co-ordinate than when you cannot. SO if you're a SWF they are usable, if not, not as much. COH nerf had a lot more impact on solos.
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Yep, they are dead. All of them except for CoH were bad to begin with (maybe Shadowstep was okish, but not worth a Perk Slot). And even CoH before the most recent Nerf was not that good. At least not as good when you can spend the time on a Gen instead, even before the most recent Nerf Boon-Users lead to the team having a lower chance of escaping IMO.
And IMO they could have nerfed CoH from its last state before the most recent nerf by just letting it work on one floor instead of mulitiple floors. I think this would have been enough and it would be a decent Perk without being too strong or too hard to deal with as Killer.
But they destroyed the Perk and basically put it in line with all the other Boon-Perks. I hope we will never see any Boon-Perks again, because they were a failed concept to begin with.
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Yea but also remember they buffed lucky break and healing another survivor recharges the timer now so you get multiple uses out of it , boons are pretty much useless now there's really no point in wasting the perk slot unless you're just bored and randomize perks
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Boons are way too restrictive for general play.
They can be ok for swf, but in general they are just not worth it and if they don't bring insta value they are just bad for the survivors, as survivors will be wasting time setting the boons.
Thats why COH was the only good one, because it was busted, now all boons suffer because of their restrictions.
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Circle of Healing is still strong but not as versatile as other perks are. Shadow Step is underrated. It can be really powerful in the right hands. Exponential is good but situational.
Overall boons aren't bad. They just aren't as good as they used to be and definitely no no-brainers, which means other perks are more appealing.
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Shadowstep is still solid, and even though CoH is not really worth running to or blessing on its own, with Shadowstep it's like, you know, might as well. I've had a few games where running these two really helped, especially when fighting off a 3gen or against Nurse's Calling.
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boon range are too small 24m isnt enogh, thats why most of them are useless, CoH was the only one but its now a swf Perk
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I've seen them quite a bit lately but the only mildly annoying one is shadowstep.
CoH would actually be a good info perk to let people know where people are running the killer but it's reliant on a totem being in the middle of the map so it's difficult to get value.
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The only Boon that changed was CoH. The others are untouched. And none of them are good enough to be ran tbh.
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I never said any of them were changed. They are simply overshadowed by other, safer options.
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Boons are failed in concept. If they’re actually good enough to run they’re too good because of how they’re simply designed. So in order for us to actually make boons in general good they would need changes to their fundamental design and how they work. Infinite placing and costing the killer more time to snuff than it takes the survivor is just flawed design as it negates the entire point that is “suppose” to be the negative attached to them.
That all said, for how much people complain about CoH supposedly being bad now it’s just frankly not. It’s extremely good. Not as much in solo queue but it’s still present in every single swf you run into at higher mmr for good reason.
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the counter to infinity placing is shattered hope. although, why would anyone shattered hope when nobody uses boon anyway.
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It's more like the balance of the game as a whole...
Spending time to set up a boon= less time on Gens
With healing and Gen times increased it makes players go and do the Objective instead of "wasting time" doing anything else
And with the nerfs to COH, and the "uselessness" of the others... kinda seems like an issue (at least IMO)
Also with no perk (that I can think of) that speeds up Blessing there's really no real reason to bring a Boon perk
Like we have perks and items that speed up Healing and Gens so I wouldn't be surprised to see a perk that speeds up Blessing... also surprised to not see that perk come out with Mikayla (sorry if I misspelled her name)
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Even if, and as we said that's a big if, people are running boons almost guarenteed, Shattered Hope is still complete and utter trash. It is not a solution to the boon design problem.
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So solo yeah, swf nope
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didn't killer suggest this solution to boon design problem and they implement it as a perk? I used during COH era and looked pretty good for countering boons with wraith but issue was that people also ran these hyper-fast healing med-kits. there was nothing to counter those med-kits so it still wasn't rewarding to hit & run.
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My main issue with boons is inner healing.
A lot of times survs with that perk make boons not worth.
I would like to see teammate perks in lobby.
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They suggested it as base kit, not as a perk, which is a huge difference.
With a CoH in play you can remove it from the game, but now you've wasted a ton of time and pressure snuffing all the totems around the map to make them lose 1/16 of their perks in exchange for losing 1/4 of yours. Just terrible. A perk slot cost is massive.
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that would make boons useless. you would never get that base-kit. it is like asking survivor to see all hex auras for the entire trial.
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That's why it was only suggested based on the old OP COH, not the current one.
Anytime it's suggested now it would be in tandem with boon buffs.
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Yes but to be fair majority of survivor perks are weak/niche or even useless, boons are terrible but they're not worse than average survivor perk
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it doesn't matter what buffs you suggest because it is free gen defence eruption incapacitates for killer for survivor equipping perks.
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Boons, in terms of balancing optics, always suffered really badly under how myopic the community can be. People would point to a survivor or two healing up under a CoH totem and call it OP because it was such an effective time saver, but then be absolutely mum about the amount of time wasted on setting it up. That part is out of sight, out of mind.
So its output got nerfed to be more in line with other perks, while its input stayed as overbearing as it was.
Net result is that boons are just not worth the investment.
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Could you rephrase, not sure what you’re saying.
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blessing boons is secondary objective for survivor. you spend time away from generator to activate the survivor perk. if you spend 30 second to find boon and 14 second to bless it, you lose 44 second of generator time. in other words, you self-incapacitated yourself to activate the perk. for boon to be worth it, you save more time then 44 second spend blessing the totem. that is why COH was so good because your teammate/you would save time on healing and healing can increase killer overall chase-time. your were almost always positive in time. The other boon do that as well. DT grants haste effect which allow survivors to chain-pallet loops, so it prevents a survivor from going down and allows them to chain a pallet loop they could not chain, then chase get extended and you get massive gen-time as survivor. This is also why MFT is strong. Boon:exponential saves you time by the fact that you do not need to walk to another survivor to pick them up. Shadowstep grants you extra time by using it to stealth around killer making killer waste time and indirectly allows you to work on generators. the boon perks are like gamble. you invest early time to get more time later.
shattered hope denies value the time value of using boon perks. it becomes detriment to the survivor. your encouraged to rush gens and ignore blessing totems that will get destroyed and provide no value to the team.
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That is a very, very extreme exaggeration of the time spent setting up the boon. You are absolutely not spending 30 seconds looking for a totem rofl. The vast majority of the time I would make that zero time looking. You usually run into them passively in your time going to gens. You’re essentially only losing the time through setup of the boon, of which when you multiply the time given to the other 3 survivors when you spend time as killer to snuff it, is wayyy more time lost on gens as killer than what that one survivor spent setting it up. You “want” the killer to waste time snuffing all your boons as it’s a net positive for your team in “most” cases. This is proven by the fact that most of the time killers will not ever waste time snuffing a boon, even when the old OP CoH existed, they would just eat it.
This is a case of treating the game as a 1v1 rather than a 4v1.
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Boons are still good, but you have to be in some form of SWF to get use out of them.
Exponential + DT is one of my favourite combos in the game when im playing with friends. DT on its own is fun as well.
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by the time you bless a boon, the game will be over so there no point in equipping the boon perk. you should selected a different perk. strong swf/strong efficient solos can finish gens in like 6 minutes if everyone plays well. perks with no value are empty perk slots. they're not worth equipping. its same reason why killer do not equip shattered hope. the fear of an empty perk slot.
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No, the game is not over by the time you boon rofl. Boons as a concept are not remotely similar to shattered hope whatsoever. The fact that most swf bring a CoH contradicts saying that groups don’t bring boons as we literally have the evidence. If it was not worth equipping we wouldn’t see them running it.
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i don't really see that. SWF only bring COH if they are excessively taking hits for bodyblock strategies which is free win vs m1 killers. That is just abusing bad killer balance. they could easily do that with botany knowledge or autodidact which almost heals you instantly if your at 5 stacks and you will be at 5 stacks if your excessively healing 6+ times per game. the only difference is you do not need to setup boon and killer cannot turn off the perk. in general, I do not see boons both in soloq or when playing killer. typical swf run MFT+Hope or 4 adrenaline for healing.
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It should have been a basekit solution. Imagine if BHVR did a honor their promise to tackle 3-gen by doing it via a perk, survivors would riot.
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that is exactly what they did, right? they invent potencial energy. Vittorio potencial energy helped team eternal break 3 gen skull merchant game. I imagine they charged the potencial energy perk and then used it to break 3 gen. I know saw someone in end screen with that perk.
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Actually no, on top of adding anti 3 gen perks they also moved gens on some maps and they nerfed severely (perks are dead now)the best 3 gen perks that for the most part allowed it to even be a thing.
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I'm glad they're gone. I can't count how many times I had teammates just rebooting the same totem and wasting everyone's time.
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Killer mains still want survivors to do that now. That’s why they’re trying to convince survivors in this forum that Boons are still worth running. They know it’s basically a time-waster with little to no effect on their (killer) gameplay. Lol
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Let's see...
Dark Theory is overshadowed by MFT. Even on its own, it's still terrible since it's 2% in a restricted area that's determined by rng. Waste of a perk slot.
Shadowstep is actually pretty decent but not really a good standalone perk. Needs others to support it.
Exponential is legitimately an extremely powerful perk. It's just so hard to use because slugging by its nature is situational, and now you're adding several conditions such as setting up a boon, being in its radius, etc.
That leaves us with Circle, the perk that single handedly carried the boon mechanic and caused a massive balance issue. In its nerfed form, it's still genuinely a good perk; 100% faster heals are nothing to scoff at. It's just that people prefer to rely on themselves, not their teammates, so the 100% faster altruistic healing rarely sees use, especially with solos that can't communicate with each other.
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Honestly, Dark Theory and Made For This should have their speed boost switched.
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They've been doing nothing but band-aid perk solutions for years, my guy. Camping, tunnelling and slugging all have perk-based solutions. And all of those are basekit things for killers.
It would've been critically unfair for some trash tier survivor perks to be hardcountered by a new basekit buff to killers. And killers would've been throwing one hell of a tantrum if the entire boon gallery got colossal buffs in compensation.
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I believe in their current iteration, survivors need to be able to boon more than 1 totem at a time to get larger coverage. Especially putting them in areas the killer doesn’t have a lot of interest in revisiting, making places with completed gens much stronger and less likely to get snuffed. That’s a lot of time waste though, but at least then the “only 24 meters” could be counteracted a bit by having a few of the aura bubbles
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Shadowstep definitely worth a perk slot. The others dont. I saw so many people miscalculating about Coh. Spend 10sec running into Coh zone to save 8sec, not yet counting the time you have to run back to Gen because Coh is far away from Gens.
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