Why Boons Are Fundamentally A Broken Concept
Based on the word of a former dev, we have a pretty good idea of what role the developers think boons are supposed to be playing in this game. They're supposed to be the 'secondary' objective for survivors, slowing down the game. However, the entire idea falls flat fundamentally on account of how they tried to implement this secondary objective: as is their usual method, they slapped it on as a new perk, or in this case set of perks. In the end this is completely counter-productive: boons end up being a secondary objective for the killer more than survivors.
The format of a survivor perk makes no sense for a 'survivor secondary objective' as I aim to show. Firstly, the fact is that survivors obviously have full control of whether the supposed 'secondary objective' exists at all, by whether they choose to take the perk or not; they furthermore have far more control over their perk than killers have over their own hexes, which makes no sense from a 'horror' thematic perspective and which furthers the sense of impotence killers feel when outmatched by stronger survivors, which is increasingly common with the busted MMR system. Survivors choose when to deploy boons, where to do so, and of course, when to relight them, which they can infinitely.
Consider the most common suggestion for a 'secondary objective': finding 'parts', which a survivor would need before they could begin repairing a generator. Ignore the specific merits of this, and focus on what sort of objective this is: something that survivors have to do, which takes up their time unavoidably and which each survivor has to do, and which gives them no special benefits. It should be obvious that the kind of secondary objective people actually wanted was nothing like boons, which renders quite comedic the developer's flaccid attempts to say 'it's actually what you wanted all along!'. People wanted a mechanical update to the years-old format, not another bandaid perk solution.
Now we can get to the root of the problem: boons as a 'secondary' objective, because they have been forced into the role of a survivor perk, can never work, and will always be overly powerful or weak to the point of irrelevance. We already see this: CoH is ludicrously OP, and barely anyone uses the other two already. It isn't a coincidence. The fact is, that because boons are survivor perks and hence their existence in the game is completely up to the survivor who chooses to take them, they will only ever get taken if they are 'worth it'; that is, if they are perceived to offer benefits great enough to counteract the time needed off gens. Everyone already knows that Shadowstep and Exponential are never taken, except if they have a map offering and a specific spot in mind that abuses the vertical range.
In terms of time investment, it's a point made endlessly that a Killer's time is four times as valuable as a survivor's. With regard to boons there is another point to consider: survivors are a team, whereas the killer is alone. This means that one can't just take into account the time taken to boon vs to break. We also have to consider that while one person boons, the other three can be on gens. in other words, the survivor team continues to get pressure on gens when boons are put up, just at a lesser rate. On the other hand, when a killer goes to break a boon, they sacrifice all their pressure: they have to drop chase if they've noticed the boon in one, and if they noticed them outside of chase, this time is time lost that they could have spent patrolling gens. It's even worse for the worst kind of boon spot from a killer perspective: those upstairs and in hard to get to spots such as the library on RPD.
If a boon is good enough that the killer is compelled to break the boon, the time differential always favors survivors; and if the boon is bad enough that the killer doesn't feel the need to bother, it probably wouldn't be taken into the game at all. This is the fundamental issue with boons as a 'secondary objective' perk: if they're good enough to actually take into the game, that means they're good enough that the benefits outweigh the time lost on gens (for just one survivor) to the degree that the killer probably has to break them, and each time the killer does so, that's effectively time the survivors have gotten back from the time taken to boon.
A secondary objective survivors can't be a half-assed perk; it has to be a new mechanic that actually applies to all survivors, not just the ones who choose to opt in. I'm not necessarily saying that a secondary objective would be an improvement; but if they aim to put one in, they should at least do it properly.
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