Hot Take: Pentimento deserves to be changed

Pentimento is what I call a “nuisance perk”, along with others like Knock Out, Weave Attunement, Rancor etc.

These perks barely have an effect in a SWF but become a considerable nuisance to deal with in solo queue due to not being able to coordinate counterplay.

On paper, the effects aren’t that strong, but my solo queue matches just seem fall apart when these perks come into play.

Hot take… If you see plaything expect pentimento to be there too. I recommend not doing totems in this case. You can't control your teammates but most players with hours already know not to cleanse until end game if even then. We just play oblivious and pay little bit more attention.

New players will learn by playing and screwing up ( i hope ). Pentimento is the only "good" hex perk left and even then it needs to be partnered with plaything or other hexes to work.

If you believe these people should be taken into account in game balancing, then literally half of the game should be deleted as well.

Where on earth did I say that? Ah yeah, classic DbD forum members responding to imaginary comments.

Pentimento is not a problematic perk at all. It has very clear counterplay and you already know exactly where the totems are. The debuff needs to be big enough that it's worth the survivor's time to go get rid of it especially considering it often isn't active until later in the game.

In my opinion, Pentimento is a rather unhealthy Perk not because it is strong or powerful but because it has a bad effect on other Perks and sidequests: Plaything is a good Hex Perk because either survivors go on a sidequest to cleanse it or they don't hear the terrorradius. However, due to pentimento, survivors stay oblivious because Pentimento is worst than beeing oblivious. As a result, Plaything becomes weaker due to this Perk because survivors ignore the sidequest and still sit on generators. Survivors also get punished for having rather unique perks like Inner Healing, Hardended, or Overzealous - and of cause for doing archives (and yes I count this because everytime we have a "cleanse totem" archive, I see much more Hex/Pentimento killers than usual - myself included). The downside is that survivors don't use these Perks and will play the more metaperks. However, the good part about Pentimento is that it makes hex builds much better (I would say: viable) and gives them more value - so at the same time it is also healthy. If Pentimento would not exist, hex builds would be dead. The perk on it's own also is strong but has counterplay - just pay attention which totem you cleansed and check it when you know Pentimento is active. There is also the general issue with hexes that totem spawns are really bad and they miss something to prevent a start cleanse. This makes them much weaker. Of cause, we could also talk about how unfair this Perk is for SoloQ but okay for SWF (maybe also about how strong it is against new survivors), but this should not be count because then we would look at the weakest moment of a Perk and if we do this, every Perk would be too powerful.

Overall, it is a really difficult Perk to balance because on the one hand it has some unhealthy aspects but on the other hand, it is also healthy. But the moment, I would say that Pentimento can stay as it is because comparing to other stuff in dbd (map offering, syringes, Kock Out, Nurse, SWFs) it is not that problematic. In addition, before the developers either rework or nerf Pentimento, they should fix hex perks in general as well as totem spawns on every map. If they make them better (which is not so difficult and they are rather lazy tbh) then we can talk about it again.