“Totems Are the Survivor’s Second Objective”
Okay, so then let’s actually treat totems as if they are a true secondary objective.
Add a totem counter into base kit.
Incentivize survivors to cleanse totems (but don’t require it). Something like bonus bloodpoints or slightly faster coop healing— any small effect— would encourage survivors to spend a bit more time on bones.
Normalize spawn locations so that they aren’t “literally on top of a barren hill” too obvious or also “darkest corner of the map hidden in grass behind a bush inside a box “ too hidden.
Totems should be balanced so that survivors can feasibly cleanse all five and do the gens even in solo que.
If totems were actually consistently treated as a secondary objective instead of a conditional that survivors can only attempt to predict, I’m sure the amount of totem-related complaints would go down.
Comments
If there was counter play for them using Hex's like skill checks like the orbs in the rift we collect
I've actually given some thought to how to incentivize the Survivors to break totems more often. What I've come up with is this system added to the base game.
For each Generator complete, gain a token. For each Survivor dead, lose 3 tokens. For each Totem remaining in the trial, gain 1% faster pick up and hook per token. So... when the first gen gets done, the Killer gets +5% speed to those two things assuming none of the totems have gotten broken. If the Survivors then simultaneously finish 1 more gen and break 2 totems, the Killer will have +6% for the boost. If the Survivors finish 1 more gen, but the Killer kills someone, he'll have 0% boost. If 2 more gens pop and a totem breaks, Killer will be at 4%. This will max out at +25% which will be noticeable but not an insurmountable buff for the Survivors to face.
If that's not enough to get Survivors to break bones, we could add vault and maybe kick speeds to the buff as well.
No-no-no. If you guys could plant totems again after they've already been broken that'd nearly defeat the purpose of finding them and breaking them. Because if they got to choose where the totem goes and it not go in specific totem spawning locations ontop of that? It'd be a freaking nightmare.
You guys would just be like " Oh remember how you broke every totem early on to prevent NOED? Well it has been 3 minutes. Enjoy. "
I'm down for anything that adds additional gameplay mechanics to the game and makes it less monotonous overall.
Every match feels the same and especially after grindy events, it's hard not to feel totally fatigued with the gameplay. We need more things to do and more ways to advance to really make the game feel good and not just something we do because we're used to it.
Since you are giving me the power of a developer, then here is what I would do with the nurse. However, first there are some caveats.
1. I am going to ignore the fact that the first thing I would do with Nurse is rework her teleport power, because it’s design is flawed and allows it to completely bypass all tactics the survivor has available to them.
2. We are going off data that was presented by the developers in 2020 in October. So this data would most likely have included the relatively recent Nurse nerf that removed the 4 and 5 blinks addons and added a charge to get blinks back.
3. We also have hatch escapes that are artificially lowering Killer kill rates by letting survivors escape when those survivors should have been a kill. I would guestimate that 1 survivor uses the hatch every other maybe every 3rd game, which is technically a unrealized kill for the Killer. Since this happens only on 3 kills, the killer would technically get 3.5 kill every time they get 3 kills. Again an guestimate, so that would add about 2.5% extra kills per killer. (3.5 kills is about 87.5% and 3 kills is about 75.0% kill rate, averaged with the percentages of other kills, its about 2.5%). Again, I don’t have the actual data, so as a Developer I would account for this. I’m not including key escapes because they are cancelled out by Moris.
During 2020, the data showed a 40.29% kill rate for Nurse at all ranks, but showed a 57.00% kill rate for Nurse in Red Ranks. We’ll add a 2.5% to account for Hatch escapes which brings the kill rate up to 42.79% in all ranks and 59.50% in Red Ranks.
My first choice as developer would be to collect additional data, 6 months out from the Nurse nerf, because players are still learning how to play the Nurse after the nerfs, so the data wouldn’t be accurate.
However, if you don’t want to do that. Then just using straight data, I would do a slight nerf to Nurse in Red Ranks and possible Purple ranks, maybe increase the recharge time of her blink by 0.5 seconds. In brown and yellow ranks where she’s probably lower than 40%, I would add a blink indicator, so newer players can learn to play her, so she would have Spencer’s Last Breath as default. Once a player hits green rank, they would no longer have the blink indicator and once they hit Red Rank, they would have an increased recharge time.
So, since I told you my plan, what would your plan be?
I agree give survivors more BP and I like the idea of maybe 2% healing bonus to teammates if they do totems. But totems should be hard to find or very well hidden and a totem counter would be too strong as it gives too much information to one side.
Absolute flex