Should There Be More Totems?

Hey, you're gonna have to race me for them, I love cleansing bones.

You'd also hypothetically have more chances for your hexes to spawn away from survivors, though. Good hex spots do exist, and increasing how many spawn points are filled increases the chances any one of them will be a good hex spot.

Plus, like I said, if survivors are breaking dull totems more, they're spending time off generators more. Maybe this'll change with future perks, but the only "break a dull totem" perk that would actually offset that time investment is Overzealous, and that perk is already infinite if you pair it with a boon.

With a little bit of tweaking, the killer could still have totem-defence perks that help them in these scenarios. Undying would show them interacting with those dull totems, Thrill would need some number tweaks but could easily still slow them down, Retribution would still render them Oblivious, Dominance is presumably going to keep its basic effect once it hits live, and even Pentimento could still exist in some form. It would benefit killers too, not just survivors. Both sides would have more meaningful options.

I mean, I don't see how anything you said even connects to what I just said, let alone disproves it.

CoH was too strong, undoubtedly. That doesn't mean boons and hexes aren't completely different mechanics…?

That's not a bias, that's a difference in understanding.

To me, the fact that boons are designed to be localised buffs in a small (ish) area inherently makes them completely different to hexes. Because, y'know, they are. Hexes are global effects that push survivors into a one-time timesink to find and get rid of them. Boons are localised effects that survivors want to continually spend time keeping up. They have different intents with different associated gameplay, they're just not that similar. The only similarity they even have is that they revolve around totems, but even the way they use totems is different.

One-time boons would be a dramatically different kind of perk. They'd all need to be completely overhauled from the ground up to accommodate such a fundamental difference in intent behind the mechanic. I just don't see the value in something like that, I don't think it'd be better for everyone for boons to be dramatically stronger and more annoying but also much less reliable on the survivor side.

Then you shouldn't want one-time-use boons, that's my point. They'd need to be significantly stronger to justify only being usable a handful of times in the best of circumstances.

I'm not ignoring anything, I know hexes can spawn in bad spots. I do play killer, I know how annoying hexes can be. I also know hexes don't always spawn right out in the open and that there are a fair number of pretty good hex spots on most maps. Like I said to you earlier - that you are actually ignoring, for the record - more totems means more chances of good hex spots as well, not just the bad ones.

Hexes, in general, would need more help than just this. This wouldn't even really help hexes as a class, they'd be at a net neutral here, it'd just help combinations of hexes. It wouldn't hurt hexes, though.

Alright, let me give you some hard examples. For the sake of this discussion, we're going to assume that the current five totems that spawn is being increased to seven, for an increase of two.

So. Right now, let's look at a couple hex perks. Let's say you want to burn three perk slots; Plaything, Haunted Grounds, Devour Hope. Well, assuming you hook each survivor once, that's seven hex totems trying to spawn. Four from Plaything, two from Haunted Grounds, one from Devour Hope. This combination doesn't work with the current number of totems… but it would work with seven dull totems in the trial.

Let's take another example. Plaything, Devour Hope, and No One Escapes Death. That's a potential six hexes trying to spawn. Not a good synergy now, but with seven totems, you've even got one left over in case some enterprising survivor decides to cleanse a dull raw.

Pretty much any synergy that follows these lines is going to become actually possible with more totems, and it also opens up the design space for future hexes that spawn multiple totems, either at base like Haunted or over time like Plaything.

But let's say you aren't interested in synergies, you want a specific single perk to get stronger on its own with this change. Alright, let's look at two examples there.

Undying. On its own, Undying shows you the aura of survivors near dull totems. While that range is still going to be a little mediocre, with six totems to pull from instead of four you've got a more even coverage of the map.

Face the Darkness. This perk spawns on a random totem for as long as you leave one specific survivor injured. With seven totems, it becomes that little bit harder to find when it spawns, especially when it's blinking on and off so someone might miss it when it's active.

These are the direct examples. As I laid out before, counterpick perks that weaken survivors interacting with totems like Thrill or Retribution also get stronger. Dominance, assuming it doesn't get overhauled between PTB and Live, also adds more to the game overall with more totems in contention. And, finally, it mustn't be overlooked, more survivors cleansing totems is more time to generate pressure just on its own.

You keep mentioning that you have two more chances for them to spawn right in front of survivors, and have never acknowledged that there's also more chances for them to spawn away from survivors. It's starting to make you look extremely biased.

Also, I am absolutely talking about totem spots and I was very clear about why: Some combinations of perks spawn more hexes than there are dull totems, and you don't even need to use all your perk slots to do it. It is totem spawns, not perk slots.

I'm not going to go through every single one of those perks and explain why they're not as bad as you're making them out to be, but I do want to highlight two that you're extremely wrong about: Plaything and NOED.

How is more totems making them easier to spot when you can already see them through walls? The "whole thing" with Plaything is pushing survivors into cleansing totems or being easier to sneak up on, that's the benefit. They're not hidden like other hexes are.

The only other perk I want to mention you being wrong about here is Retribution. I bring that up in the context of it being a counter perk. If you're not familiar, Retribution inflicts Oblivious on someone interacting with any totem for any reason, so if combined with something like Undying or just general info, you can sneak up on someone doing a totem easier. That's also why I mentioned Thrill, it's relevant because it's a counter perk, not because it gets directly stronger.

The rest of them are absolutely you nitpicking to just dismiss everything out of hand, to be clear, but there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into the ones I didn't mention. More totems is obviously an improvement to build flexibility here, even if you personally don't like running the perks involved, and it's also more opportunity to run currently niche perks IF survivors interact with totems a lot more because of the change.

If you don't want to respond that's totally fair, sincerely, but just for the sake of clarification: Hexes can spawn on your side of the map, as well as spawning towards the middle. It's absolutely possible for hexes to not spawn in front of survivors.

Alright, man, if we're done we're done. Just wanted to make that one part clear in case there was legit confusion.