How much M1 holding is too much?
So I was watching this video today on some of the updates in the PTB and it got me thinking..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMK2TSNaz8EFor the purpose of this post I'll mostly be picking on The Legion.
Legion has been despised by a good portion of the community for a while now. The healing mechanics weren't designed around a killer who could hit you so often and so rapidly. So survivors feel a little bored as they start to see the game as an "M1 simulator" as they call it.
Now a lot of Legions like to run mangled add ons to slow down the survivors even more. That's a 20% penalty to healing speed.
Your options are mostly self-care which is 40 seconds of m1 holding, or running around finding another survivor to heal you and then having them hold M1 for 20 seconds. (we will get to inner strength later).This isn't even including the mending time to which a lot of Legions use the blade add-ons to extend it.
At the moment Ruin is currently a very common perk on all killers but especiallyLegion. So now you have a killer who can injure and apply deep wounds very rapidly and a perk which regresses your progress at half speed when you're not touching the generator.
So you have to mend that is unavoidable however now you have the option of either trying to heal and watching your generator progress evaporate, or working on a generator injured but having up to a 20% slowdown in effect from Thana. This creates one of those "lose/lose" situations that aren't meant to be in the game. In addition the longer the generator takes to complete the more chance the killer has of chasing you off the gen allowing Ruin to regress your progress.
As of this writing Ruin/Undying is THE meta. So now we throw Undying into the mix and when you take a totem out it has a chance of respawning Ruin up to 4 times potentially. With the new Thana it now affects totems too so you hold the totem for the usual 14 seconds but then the additional 20% extension from Thana, all while the killer sees your aura as you attempt to cleanse it.
However you can now throw Thrill of the Hunt in there as well. According to the video above 4 stacks of thana and 5 tokens of TotH means your first totem cleansed will take around 26 seconds of uninterrupted time. That's 26 seconds of holding M1 - any interrupts makes you lose all progress - and you have to do while while the killer gets an aura of you from Undying and a sound notification from Thrill. At the end of this theres a good chance the totem you take out respawns anyway and requires another 20+ seconds of uninterrupted time in order to cleanse it.
So to sum it up you either hold M1 mending/healing many, many times throughout the game and watch your gen progress reset, or you work with an extra 20% penalty to gen speeds and have totems that require over 20 seconds to cleanse and may just respawn anyway. All this is just hold m1, hold m1, hold m1.
I'm using Legion because he's the worst example of all this. Other killers can kind of pull it off but Legion is the best due to his speed, lack of counterplay in Frenzy, and notifications of survivor locations. Plus it's mostly legions that take Thana. A lot of other killers usually just go hit-hit-hook anyway they don't injure and break away repeatedly like Legion does.
I get it's good for killers to have more slowdown but at some point it all stacks into a bit too much. This isn't about power or balance it's about the fact that what I described above does not sound fun to play against at all and I wouldn't subject survivors to that if I was playing killer.
While it's up to the developers to take this on board I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Legion at least is becoming problematic.
So what are you thoughts? at what point does "hold m1" become too much of holding m1?
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