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Please read Animal Farm and then change Boons/Hexes

DBDVulture DBDVulture
in Feedback and Suggestions

Observation:

The reality is that boons can be renewed indefinitely and hexes cannot. You need a perk to remove boons forever but not for hexes. Devour Hope or NOED are clear example of why survivors should not need a perk to be able to remove hexes. That alone should make the developers realize therefore that boons should not need a perk to remove them from the map. At what point did survivors become more equal than killers? This simple thought inequality should be shameful to the developers.


Suggestion:

Boons are more fun when they can be relit indefinitely. Hexes would be too. Make all hexes be able to be relit as long as there are bones. Killers should be able to re light hexes indefinitely and instantly if there are bones left - make hexes overwrite boons with a single tap. Dull totem locations should be immediately visible to a killer when their totem is destroyed and can be placed again. Boons holding the place of dull totems would effectively block the killer's indicator but he could remove the Boon to place his totem.

Notes:

  1. There should probably be a limitation for Devour Hope in that you lose your stacks when it is renewed. This means you will probably never get it to reach full potential twice in a game but you can have the totem active for strategic totem purposes
  2. Perks like Undying/Haunted ground should probably not be able to be re-lit but instead have their appeal with each other as they are already a strong combination. Also Undying could still protect DH so it should not be "eternal".
  3. Hex ruin would become inert when one person dies but you could have it be an active totem that does nothing and has to be removed before you put up a boon in that slot. [Code wise just change Ruin to : If four survivors are alive then generators are slowed by : blah blah blah. If four survivors are not alive then generators are not slowed.]
  4. NOED requiring the gates to be powered would only activate once per game and cannot be activated again.
  5. Hex Plaything already has a limit of once per first hook per game. Since this single perk spawns potentially four totems they should not be able to be re-ignited.

Discussion:

People love to say that Hexes are more powerful than Boons. Playing as both sides I have to vehemently disagree as boons can effectively never be destroyed because nobody plays with Shattered Hope. Perks like Devour Hope do nothing in something like 85-90% of games and then basically ruin the game for survivors when they do trigger. Devour Hope being a massive exception is one of the hex perks that I hopes gets revisited soon for a rework but is not the main topic of discussion for this thread.


With a single perk slot from four survivors you can give the entire team the ability to heal indefinitely. Medkits have charges for the sole reason that you can't depend on them to heal you repeatedly. Even after being heavily nerfed Circle of Healing is still disruptive because it rapidly nullifies the status of being injured. Most of the games I lose as killer involve a SWF using boons to make healing faster/infinite/not require a second survivor. How often do you say as survivor : I lost because the killer had Bamboozle?



Let's look at a website that tracks perk usage for the last 14 days ( https://nightlight.gg/perks ).

Near the bottom of the list you can find :

  1. Hex: Third seal : 0%
  2. Hex Crowd Control: 0.21%
  3. Hex Thrill of the hunt : 0.24%
  4. Shattered Hope: 0.64%
  5. Hex Retribution: 1.71%
  6. Haunted Ground: 1.71%
  7. Huntress Lullaby: 1.91%
  8. Hex Blood Favour : 2.14%
  9. Hex Pentimento : 3.43%
  10. Hex Ruin : 6%


Overall this list shows hex perks in a very sorry state where almost no one wants to use them. Translation: why bother to buy those DLCs if the perks are worthless? Furthermore I would be embarrassed If I had designed the Shattered Hope Perk to see it get used less than 1% of the time because it effectively does nothing (and should be part of the killer base kit in the current balance).


As a point of reference Boon Circle of Healing has been chosen by 17.21% of survivors. Why are Boons chosen so much more often than most Hexes? It shows pretty clear by usage that Boons are better than Hexes.



Speculation:

One of the goals in DBD game design for a long time was : how do we give survivors secondary objectives? One possible answer is to make totems a thing survivors have to continually fight to remove from the game. Imagine for example that we wave a magic wand and these changes go into place with no problems immediately. What would happen?


Overnight the meta might instantly shifts so every killer has one hex totem (but it won't be ruin). Survivors are forced to cleanse all the totems to prevent the killer from turning their hex on again after it is destroyed - since they can overwrite boons with their hex totems. The appearance of more hexes would make the value of boons questionable since survivors would need to break all the totems. Survivors would be at odds with each other over the idea of needing to delete totems or save them so someone can use their boon perk.


This will have the effect that survivors will not be slamming generators all the time. It will make the perk : Thrill of the Hunt relative again because people will be breaking totems to stop the killer from having some super nasty effect.

The very best loopers will not be able to loop as long because killers will run perks like Crowd Control/Blood Favour knowing that the perk will get several minutes of use before all the totems are gone. This will be good for the game to equalize chase times (which has been a problem for years for game balance). Middle tier and low tier survivors were not going to have 5 generator chases anyway and their chase times are not very likely to be affected by "chase" hex perks.

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