Thrill of the Hunt deserves a proper rework - Remove the "hex."
Hex: Thrill of the Hunt was nerfed when boons were released.
It went from:
- Gain a notification when someone starts workin on a hex totem.
- 6% slower cleansing per totem still standing.
- 10% more hunter bloodpoints per totem standing.
To:
- 10% slower cleansing per totem still standing.
- 10% more hunter bloodpoints per totem standing.
This was fairly clearly an effort to prevent boon totems having realistic counterplay so that Mikaela would sell well.
While Thrill of the Hunt now effectively doubles the time to cleanse or bless a totem, it has effectively lost the main reason any killer had to run it; it gave them a chance to interrupt a survivor who is attempting to cleanse their hex. Thrill of the Hunt has always been a relatively balanced perk, as it offered survivors effective counterplay by cleansing dull totems to lessen its effect without revealing their location, eventually making the hexes much more easy to cleanse.
Now, Thrill of the Hunt is largely worthless. Killers are already very limited on their options for perks, and most killers outside of the top few are heavily dependant on useful, tangible effects to impact a match. While Thrill can provide a background slow, this only affects a completely optional objective of cleansing and booning. In the ABSOLUTE best case scenario, Thrill slows down a survivor who really wants to boon a hex totem. In a more likely scenario, Thrill buys no net time on a hex because as soon as a survivor sees the Thrill notification, they just cleanse the hex instead, which takes around the same time as blessing it would without Thrill.
This bring me to the major point of the argument.
Thrill of the Hunt is not deserving of the Hex status any more.
It is frankly ridiculous that a perk which provides no real information any more, and only serves to be a moderate hindrance on an optional task, is also subject to being removed from the game permanently in less than 30 seconds. Hexes are on totems in the first place because they're supposed to have such a significant impact that they are balanced by being able to remove them from the match permamently. Thrill is simply nowhere close to strong enough to justify that any more.
As stated above, Thrill already progressively gets 20% weaker for every totem that is cleansed. As a stalling perk, that's already a fair diminishing effect. It does not additionally need a lit totem that purges its effect entirely in one action. Its new version removed the existing counterplay of the perk, cleansing dulls, which gave the killer some value in incentivising working on dull totems, and instead turns the optimal counterplay to cleansing hexes as soon as possible, because there's no longer a threat in doing so, and worst case scenario you remove the hex Thrill was meant to be protecting anyway.
In short, removing the hex status means that, while still arguably a bad perk, and one which is very difficult to capitalise on, the killer still has the assurance that across the whole match, any attempt to cleanse or bless will be hindered, and they will get a more reliable benefit from their perk. The perk would still lose effect for every totem cleansed, so would still incentivise spending time removing some dull totems in order to make blessing a more efficient process later in the match, but it would not have the risk of only slowing a single action across an entire match.
Comments
Or leave it a hex perk, but remove the dependence of the slowdown on the number of tokens and make an increase in bloodpoints in the Brutality category.
Let's be honest, noone cares about BP part. You can't go above 8k anyway.
Just removing dependence will help a little, but not really worth using anyway. It would still be easily cleansed and you would get very little time for it.
Keeping tokens, so you can negate effect in long run and making it classic perk might be interesting.
And yet, do not forget about the bloodpoints. And the Brutality category is the most suffering in terms of gaining bloodpoints.
I literally forgot this was a perk.
I think the last time I ran this was back in 2017 when I was learning Nurse when DBD first released on console.
Ahh... memories :)