Detective's Hunch buff
A small buff, but one that I believe would cause a good impact in the game is by giving detective's hunch a proc for 5 seconds when the match starts. This would passively buff the value of maps, and as the perk became more prevalent for survivors it would also reduce generator pressure at the beginning of the game where the killer needs it most. Simultaneously this would make killer hexes more vulnerable but I have undying changes that I would recommend in conjunction with this change to help keep them safer.
@BenihimeWrath said:
How undying currently interacts with totems that use tokens, specifically hook tokens, seems counter intuitive to undying's descriptive purpose of "maintaining the vile powers that flow throughout the trial".
So why do only 2 totems lose all of their power when they are moved if undying is supposed to maintain it? In addition to this it seems like an unnecessarily arbitrary restriction considering hex perks in general do not perform well the higher rank you are. With respect to 3 very specific hex perks, the meta combination of ruin/undying, and NOED which does not show itself for the entire trial, and is still often destroyed quickly. Most other hex perks are relegated to very specific, rather "meme-y" builds for lack of a better term, if they are strong enough to be chosen at all over other perks that you can't lose, but do that totems job better.
With this in mind I would propose that hex totems that use hook tokens only lose 3/2/1 tokens. This would still give survivors break points to aim for to reduce the power of strong hex perks. (e.g. Dropping devour hope from 5 to 4, or 3 to 2.) Without completely obliterating all of the work the killer has put into the match up until that point. This buff to devour hope is also meant to make it more viable, thus indirectly reducing the amount of tunneling survivors experience so that killers can maintain tokens. Moving devour hope more into focusing the survivors that are healthiest at any given moment.
Furthermore with this change I would hope that Huntress' Lullaby would become a more viable and respectable gen defense perk to rival ruin, thereby indirectly nerfing ruin. The fact that lullaby loses all of its power and ruin doesn't when cleansed sort of baffles me when the gulf between their power is so enormous to begin with.
With that said, I would suggest swapping the tracking between undying and thrill of the hunt. I feel it makes more sense that undying would of course alert a killer when a totem is being worked on, but constantly feeding information to a killer? That's not undying's job, its job is to protect the totems.
I believe this change would cement thrill of the hunt as a more viable totem defense perk with the earlier alert from seeing a survivor aura, plus the increased time it takes to work on it. Rewarding killers for being vigilant, and being aware of their positioning in relation to their objectives while simultaneously reinforcing the theme of thrill of the hunt for killers that want to interact with survivors and chase often by providing them more information unrelated to generators or hooks.
Comments
I think the point of Hunch is the tradeoff of not having the perk until a gen is done, with the payoff of getting exact locations of Totems/chest/gens.
As opposed to Small Game where you have it all match but have to search the surrounding area even after proccing the perk. Having it work at match start would be pretty insane in regards to totems.
If you actually use detective's hunch you'll find that the location is more suggested due to the scaling of an object's aura over a distance. Now this really isn't a huge deal with larger objectives such as generators or chests, but it can be frustrating determining the exact location of a hex perk that you need to find. While it is understandable balancing out how powerful the perk can be with generators being finished, I feel its too ineffective in its primary job (expected META usage) in finding totems. Anecdotally, I've had vastly more luck finding totems by accident than I ever really have intentionally through using this perk. In addition, with its activation requirement, it technically makes the perk less effective against one of the most common hex perks, Ruin.
In addition I suggested this change to help reduce generator pressure at the beginning of the match, and indirectly nerfing Ruin twice. 1.) by allowing the activation at the beginning of the match, making it more vulnerable, and 2.) reducing the impact of needing to finish generators has on the perk. While the buff is not insubstantial at 10%, 5 seconds in practice is really only enough time to note the general location of nearby objects before you start working on a generator without running headlong towards the killer to get the most use out of the suggested buff.
(Obviously I'm making this suggestion either based on how current Undying works, or how Undying would work in my suggestion, not the PTB version.)