Hot take: penimento isnt strong. People are just bad at remembering

It's literally insurance for your totems, so I think they should be careful if they chance the perk

Currently this Is the only perk that makes totems viable at all

I think Pentimento gets too strong too quickly and with too little effort in a Hex build, especially in solo queue. I see Plaything/Pentimento builds constantly at my MMR. If you try to cleanse through it, it's a 112 seconds of cleansing time (4 Plaything totems + 4 Pentimento totems), before you even get to the long stretches of heavy gen regression, the value from Oblivious, time waste from running to totems / looking for totems / being chased off totems, etc. Because of the time it can waste for survivors even with perfect information, but especially in solo queue, the best way to handle Plaything if you are sure Pentimento is in play is to never cleanse the totems. Good luck coordinating that in solo queue, though, especially as there's only a chance Pentimento is in play to begin with. Usually in solo queue it takes a while before most of the team even knows Plaything is in play, never mind Pentimento. And usually by the time you know Pentimento is in play in solo queue a couple Plaything totems have already been cleansed and it's already too late to prevent it from providing obscene value.

If Pentimento didn't exist, or if the gen regression penalty required (say) 4 tokens instead, or if you got the notification that you were hexed by Pentimento when first cleansing a totem, the calculus would change; without the threat of Pentimento, especially in solo queue, it would make sense to cleanse the Plaything totems you find, as the Oblivious can easily force misplays that sink the entire match and is therefore likely worth the cleansing time when convenient. Plaything would still gain the killer at least a minute of wasted time from dealing with the totems (and potentially much longer) plus shorter chases and general havoc. That is incredible value from a single perk slot before you even consider its great synergy with Pentimento.

Think about it this way too - Plaything/Pentimento gives the killer four chances to get better average gen speed reduction than old Hex: Ruin, which was meta despite being a hex that could be removed with a single cleanse. SWFs can probably mitigate the impact of long stretches of Oblivious should they (correctly) choose to not cleanse, but solos and new players are going to get shredded with little effort. It's a similar problem to old Ruin in that way.

The mere existence of Pentimento also heavily discourages survivors from cleansing dull totems, which I don't think is a good thing. Survivors should be encouraged to do secondary objectives and not just gens. They shouldn't be encouraged to avoid secondary options to avoid having to interact with the killer's perk.

The killer can interact with the remains of a cleansed totem to collect its bones. While carrying a set of bones, the killer can then perform a short ritual at any potential totem spawn location to construct a Rekindled Totem, visually identical to a Hex totem. Only one set of bones can be carried at once.

For each Rekindled Totem active at the same time, Hex: Pentimento gains an additional effect:

• 1 Totem: reduces all Survivors' Healing speed by 10/15/20 %.

• 2 Totems: reduces all Survivors' Recovery speed from being downed by 10/15/20 %.

• 3 Totems: reduces all Survivors' Repair speed by 10/15/20 %.

• 4 Totems: applies 3/4/5 % Hindered to all survivors.

• 5 Totems: all Totems are permanently blocked by The Entity.

When a Rekindled Totem is cleansed, its remains are consumed by The Entity and it cannot be rekindled.

First of all, this would start the effects more gradually so as to be less overwhelming, while still ramping up to be quite strong if survivors are unable to cleanse. The perk still gives the killer a fun and worthwhile secondary objective to shoot for, and it still has good synergy with other Hex perks.

This version also gives survivors more information about how many totems the killer has lit, especially for solo players, as actions like opening the exit gates are pretty uncommon for a given player to perform in the match. Before the actions go from most to least common as tokens increased, so it was hard to know if a killer had 1 rekindled totem or 3/4 of them, especially in solo queue. Now, the 3 and 4 totem effects are the most obvious, so survivors get better information about the perk as it gets stronger.

Finally, one of the frustrating bits of this perk as a killer is that you're only ever going to get 5 totems against a clueless team, because a good team would likely never cleanse a non-Pentimento totem while Pentimento is up, as a 30% repair speed debuff is (arguably) stronger than every other Hex before you even consider the time it takes to cleanse. That limits the fun you can have with it as killer. Giving the killer agency to choose where the totem is reconstructed and making the totems impossible to identify at a glance makes it a lot more fun, in my opinion, and raises the skill ceiling for both sides. Survivors would need to keep searching for totems as they navigate the map, even in areas they had already checked, and they would be rewarded for spotting totems that hadn't been there before. Killers would have to weigh the benefits of good totem hiding spots with the time necessary to grab the bones and reconstruct the totem in the new location.

This would take some testing, especially if it becomes clear that some of the totem hiding spots are just too nasty, but I think it would be a fun minigame for both sides! And I don't think it would be OP either, given that you really do need to make a Hex build around it.

One other change that would be important to make at the same time, and that I really think they should make regardless, is to allow any survivor to cleanse another survivor's Plaything totem at any time in exchange for removing the aura reading for the affected survivor. The way it works now just sucks for solo players, as you'll often find totems you can't cleanse and you'll have a really hard time finding your own totem. I also don't think it would play well with my Pentimento concept, as it would make it very obvious that certain totems aren't Rekindled Totems, and would allow survivors to dodge Pentimento by just not cleansing those hex totems.

Thoughts?

Edit: Another option would be to just rework Plaything entirely, as it lights up a ton of Hexes for one perk slot. I think you should have to commit to a Hex build in order to get good value from Pentimento. Maybe you could reduce the strength of the Pentimento effect further, but let the killer also perform a ritual on dull totem if they so choose to light it? That could make it more useful outside of a pure Hex build.

While I'm totally on board with the good idea to make it so that you "charge" Penti instead and can rebuild the totem at any possible totem spawn location and have it be visually identical to a regular Hex, I think the reduction from 30 to 20% repair penalty (taking it from 38.5 to 22.5 seconds for an entire gen) is already an appropriate compensatory nerf for that, I don't think we need to move effect orders around. Getting multiple Pentis up (and keeping them up) is actually incredibly rare, even with Plaything, and none of the other effects are nearly reliably valuable or at all impactful enough to justify bringing Penti that most of the time will only have the first effect active. I think it simply has to be the repair speed debuff first for Penti to be relevant. The Hindered effect is definitely better than the gate opening speed one however, it's a much more impactful reward for getting 4 Penti totems up and it also informs survivors of this, as you mention, at latest then calling them into action lest all totems become blocked. The recovery one has also always been pointedly lackluster, that could be a Haste effect for the killer instead, or maybe a reduction in hook times.

But yeah, either way, all of the other effects rarely come and let alone stay in play for long, it's really the first effect Penti lives and dies by, and a 20% repair speed reduction is something you could actually even ignore and push through instead, especially if the killer spent additional time to rebuild their totem elsewhere in order to hide it.

I obviously agree on the issue of Plaything + Penti posing particular problems for solo groups, in multiple respects. Concessions such as showing Penti's curse to everyone the instant it is put up could be made. Further general improvements for solos are also imaginable of course, such as status icons showing afflictions survivors suffer from to all other survivors (so you'd see they are Oblivious, and could deduce that it's Plaything).

20% repair speed reduction is still massive; 22.5 seconds for a gen is a lot by itself, but when you consider that it also gives the killer more time to Pain Res / Pop / [insert regression perk here] / kick it and let it regress passively while they chase, the impact is far greater than that, as you effectively need well over 100% of the charges to complete a gen. Working through it isn't really an option unless there isn't much gen progress left; if that actually works and the effect was applied early, that game would have been won regardless, as the slowdown wastes a massive amount of time for such a quick interaction. And doubly so when you consider that killers can defend their totems to make it risky and time consuming to remove even one Rekindled Totem, never mind several, and other perks (e.g. Devour, Ruin) make it borderline mandatory to cleanse a Hex in the first place. Choosing not to cleanse in a match without Pentimento would be a massive self-imposed handicap, so its mere existence buffs all Hex perks. Perhaps this was the devs' intention, but the inevitability of a strong negative effect, especially in solo queue, is just too strong and not the point of Hex perks, in my opinion. The reason that Hex perks are hexes in the first place is mostly because their effects would be too strong if they were permanently active; the trade-off for their high ceiling if you're able to defend your totem is a low floor if you aren't. All but ensuring that they will be active for significant stretches of the game feels too strong and out of alignment with the intention of Hex perks; the ceiling stays high, but the floor is way higher than in a world without Pentimento.

So, while I don't think it's reasonable to apply this much slowdown on a first totem, I do really like your suggestions to show the curse as soon as it's applied, and to show survivor status effects to other survivors in the HUD. That would make this much less problematic for solos.

This would make it pretty bad

Appreciate the comment!

I wouldn't say it requires much effort as killer to use effectively. It's an incredibly quick interaction, and you usually don't need to go too far out of your way to find a cleansed hex totem in a Pentiment + Plaything build. Pentimento + Plaything very, very frequently turns into multiple minutes of slowdown cleansing and multiple minutes of 30% repair speed debuff in exchange for limited time investment and limited skill on the killer's part. Survivors are almost certainly going to need to waste a lot more time (even weighted 4:1) to deal with Pentimento than the killer will trying to keep it up. If that isn't the case, the killer is likely misplaying, as they're clearly defending the totem with the expectation that it will provide more value than spreading pressure. You could push this "time investment" logic to argue they should never run any hex perk ever on account of the time they might waste defending the totem, but I don't think that's an argument either of us would make, and in this case they have up to four mulligans if it gets cleansed!

NOED (9th highest pick rate), Ruin (13), Devour Hope (26), and Undying (32) all get a lot of play, and I'd wager most of that is outside Pentimento (34) builds, given they're used more than it, and that Plaything (21) is the usual complement for Pentimento. The aforementioned perks have long been popular, so I don't think Pentimento is needed to push people to use hexes at all. If it were necessary, that would be a signal to buff other hexes, not a signal that Pentimento is fine.

I play a lot of solo queue, and solos regularly get wrecked by Pentimento as they're unable to coordinate countering it, especially because they don't even know it's active until it's too late to effectively do so. Even in a SWF, you need to know what you're doing to counter it. A lot of people play this game casually and won't even know what the debuff icon means, never mind what to do about it, so newer and lower skill players are also likely getting destroyed by this perk. Given how little effort is required to get disturbing value when people just cleanse hex totems (something that is the right play against almost every other hex build), it seems to me that Pentimento is absolutely a problem and something that needs to be reworked.

Penti + Plaything is a particular complication of the issue (certainly for solos), as I've admitted. There is still something to be said about Plaything being a particularly slow enabler of Penti, needing to first get hooks, for people to then cleanse the totem that is also blocked for others for some time, and then rekindling that. But I did mention concessions I would consider precisely for this reason, like sharing info on status effects so that survivors can readily deduce things such as Plaything being in play. I would also agree with the change for Plaything to make it so that it can be cleansed by anyone at any time. But yeah, generally I don't think Penti is a huge issue, not big enough to warrant what I understand as its deletion from relevance in moving the repair debuff to second or third totem.

The global stats on Hex usage might be less insightful for this than high MMR stats, where I do these days see Hex perks alongside Penti much more commonly than in the past, which I suspect is both due to nerfs to other slowdown perks and a trickling effect from tournament DbD where Penti has been growing in popularity as well. Either way, I'm not saying Hexes aren't at all worthwhile or only used alongside Penti (or that they shouldn't indeed be buffed themselves instead if that were to be the case (which it is for some of them that I personally do want buffed)), just that Penti makes them more attractive or less "daunting" to use, which I for one welcome because as the stats also more than anything else showcase, Hexes altogether are far from common, even now after their surge in popularity.

But we do have rather different perspectives on the game, and mine definitely is skewed and removed fairly far from the average experience by not only playing in full SWFs most of the time, but doing so alongside good players where some of the issues that can appear insurmountable in solo then not seldom become trivial. One of the reasons for instance why Plaything + Penti barely registers for us is that the first hook tends to happen so late that the build rarely even really gets going early enough to become very impactful, and that's on top of course of our ability to collectively make the decision not to cleanse Plaything, call out killer location and terror radius for each other, and so on. Doesn't mean we never struggle, and against the top-tier killers anyone can, Plaything + Penti on a good Billy or Nurse is crazy scary. But yeah, while that is more so a "top-tier killers" issue, I know for a fact I would hold different or at least more emphatic sentiments regarding Pentimento (and a fair few other things) were I to regularly play solo still. …That said, I still cannot be on board with moving the repair debuff away from the first totem, that for my understanding really just kills the perk, and it's not like I don't have experience in solo against it myself, as well as experience watching others deal with it in non-SWF scenarios and also simply having played killer a lot with the perk myself, and not finding that it makes things too easy too often (with the caveat that I usually play pretty "nice" and don't camp or tunnel much at all).

I could be on board with a rework that simply changes its effects altogether, replacing the repair debuff on first totem with something else entirely instead, that is still impactful but perhaps not as debilitating as that debuff can be. The Hindered effect would actually be interesting for that, while also inherently coming with the awareness of everyone that Penti is in play the moment it activates. Or if that's too boring because Hindered and Haste seem to be all BHVR can come up with these days, something more out-there such as rekindled totems actually copying the effect from the cleansed Hex but only cursing the survivor that cleansed it could be something.

The perk is clearly geared towards getting all five totems up every once in a while, as they have this whole mini game designed around that possibility. If that is essentially impossible and all that really matters is the first totem, that's a strong indication that it needs a rework, no?

Hexes are always "high risk, high reward" type of perks. Pentimento is on the top of the list of that. You either need huge amount of luck and RNG, or full hex build to make it work

Who hates on Pentimento? It’s definitely not weak, otherwise it wouldn’t be in a lot of builds. I have a couple of anti-hex builds, so whenever I run into Pentimento- getting rid of totems is very satisfying. If I don’t have those builds, then looking for totems is challenging but in a fun way.

Any survivor mains who didn’t mind original undying and ruin? Finding those and escaping was very gratifying.