Boon totems should not be reignited on the same totem
The title says it all. Boon totems should not be reignited by the same survivor on the same totem. The “idea” when the boon mechanic was introduced was that Boons would have to be considered as a strategic decision by the survivor. To Boon or to cleanse. However what is happening is that survivors are cleansing 3-4 of the totems and running to the same totem to reignite (at least that’s what I see a lot). No-Ed and other hex’s aside, this infinite boon mechanics makes keeping survivors injured and “snowballing” incredibly difficult.
As a player on both sides I can understand to problem. The devs should too.
suggestion: Boon totems should not be reignited by the same survivor on the same totem more than once. (Another survivor may boon that specific totem but not the same survivor).
suggested buff: Time to boon a totem reduced by 4 seconds on dull totems
suggested de-buff: time to boon a hex totem increases from 24 seconds to 30 seconds.
I would personally go further to suggest that only one type of boon can be active in the map at a time. Considering another quote from the devs is that Boon’s are a survivors “small corner of haven”. (The idea doesn’t apply if 2-3 survivors have an active boon).
But for now I think the inability to infinite reignite temporarily solves that problem. Essential it gives one survivor to boon a max of 5 times, which is plenty seeing as the killer has to find them too now.
Comments
The problem with this suggestion is twofold; one, it's a nuclear option that hard nerfs boon totems in a way that dramatically changes their impact on the game (which is a problem when it's your first impulse), and two, it's a giant change to the base mechanic of boon totems when the only boon perk you've mentioned is Circle of Healing.
CoH is not the only boon perk now, and they're clearly going to keep adding more, so hard nerfing the core mechanic to accommodate for one of the three current perks that associate with it being OP feels a little silly to me. Wouldn't it be a better idea to first nerf CoH, and then see how it bears out?
CoH is one example yes but I think the boons having a limit to 5 totems within a match is still a reasonable suggestion. Seeing as how Hex’s are single use, Boons should be “single use” one one totem. I doubt they’ll nerf healing speed on CoH but removing infinite boons solves future problems with other kinds of boons, whatever they may be.
Hexes are single use because of the way they're designed, whereas boon totems are designed differently. Part of the intended point of boon totems is that there's a back and forth, where the killer spends a second to snuff a boon and survivors spend much more time setting it back up again- that intention isn't really how it works in reality, but we can get it to work that way.
Step one is to nerf CoH, it's too strong for any variation of the boon totem mechanic. Step two is to make boons have much much less vertical range, so you can't be affected by one on the top floor of Midwich while you're on the bottom floor, for example. Step three is to fix totem spawns so that there aren't any weird out of the way ones that killers can't reasonably go snuff without putting themselves at a huge time loss.
It also might not be the worst idea to make blessing take longer the more times an individual totem is snuffed, OR make it so snuffing a totem puts the perk on a brief cooldown, too. Those ideas could help make the mechanic work properly.
I mean, it's kinda middle ground between current and destroying...
There is kinda problem that CoH is just OP, so yeah instead of changes to boon mechanic, we can just nerf the ######### out of CoH...
I think it should be personal perk only, at least that self-healing effect.
There is no value in snuffing out a Boon totem.
Survivors will reignite it ~20 seconds later and you've just wasted 30 seconds finding the totem, snuffing and re-finding survivors.
You can have a back and forth with one survivor repeatedly snuffing and re-blessing, while the other three survivors win the game.
They are for all intents and purposes, permanent Hexes.
Don't bother snuffing the totem out, just remember where it is so you can ambush survivors that go there to heal.