Penti should be nerfed
The current Penti is a bit more manageable than old Penti, which would flat out slow down repair speed by 30% with one totem without having any aura reading to find where it is, but current Penti is still problematic and too strong for its conditions.
The aura reading mitigates it somewhat, but this adversely affects solo queue survivors, as they will have more difficulty finding totems cleansed by other survivors. In addition, it just punishes niche survivor builds made around the idea of cleansing totems, such as Inner Strength and Overzealous.
Penti is something that can be applied to up 3 different totems, 4 if you run Plaything and survivors are dumb enough to keep cleansing. Yet despite that, just one of its totems is more effective than its most comparable Hex, Wretched Fate, as although it is 20% instead of 30%, it applies to all survivors instead of just one and also applies to healing.
And this is supposed to be a perk that sort of compensates you for losing your other Hex perks, but its effect is stronger than most Hex perks in the first place. Even if, let's say you set up 3 Pentis on your way to generators or survivors around the map throughout the game, and the survivors are on comms so they are able to retrace their steps and cleanse the totems pretty quickly, that's half a gen worth of time just recleansing totems they already cleansed, + however much time they took running across half the map to get to them. This doesn't even include that it probably wastes multiple survivor's time which is more beneficial.
Even though this perks design is terrible to begin with, the simplest solution is to make it weak enough that its a valid decision to just work on gens through it. If one totem was something like 12%, depending on the amount of gens left survivors could cleanse it or push through it more easily without a huge lose-lose as it is now. The other possibility is making it scale so that survivors may be able to ignore one totem, but not two or three (such as scaling from 8% and increasing by 8% for each totem so that survivors can cleanse one or two totems but leave one if they don't know where to find it.)
Comments
Solo que should not be an argument to nerf any kind of perk/addon/killer unless they are top tier already. If you apply "Solo que gets stomped by this so it should be nerfed" then pretty much 90% of killer side should be nerfed.
If anything, this should be used as an argument to provide better info for said solo que, which is coming in a form of an emote wheel at least.
And even then, at which point solo que can be excused? Survivors still get notified if someone cleanses a totem, and they should pay attention to their approximate location, especially if shortly after they cleanse the hex, they get chased (Wherever killer now is was the location of a hex). Needless to say, the one who cleansed hex has the info on the totem location and should prioritize it if penti's in play
Even if you want to throw away the argument for solo queue (which I still think is completely valid), that was only one of the issues with it that I mentioned. The perk is too powerful for its purpose, where it is more powerful than most Hex perks while simultaneously guaranteeing way more value, if they're all cleansed it probably ends up being more than a minute of survivor's time, and if they aren't cleansed then you have a permanent 20-26% decreased repair speed for the rest of the match. The survivors are forced into a huge lose-lose scenario when Pentis are up, and they are also actively punished from the beginning for doing the only counterplay for Hex perks. The time sunk into cleansing Penti's could be even more if it's a build with Thrill and the survivors have not found it.
The problem with hexes like Penti or thrill or undying is that they have created a balancing nightmare around hexes. If defense perks like Penti thrill and undying are in the game, hexes that have otherwise good designs like blood favour are just objectively not okay but hexes like ruin that require continuous uptime for good value are.
Blood favour is a hex that is perfectly fine on its own. It has a powerful and immediate danger to survivors that needs to be removed and even if you only get 2 or 3 uses out of it, It's good and if survivors leave it up the whole match, they're gonna get destroyed by it.
Ruin however threatens no immediate danger, and in order to get significant value must repeatedly regress gens throughout the match, if it is cleaned early and there is no perks protecting it, it is terrible unlike blood favor which is good even if it's only used a couple times.
This creates a balancing problem where hexes can't be buffed to be good perks unprotected because they're too good when protected and protection perks can't be nerfed because weaker hexes are almost useless without them.
The devs basically need to decide what they want hexes to look like. If they want hexes to be dangerous protection perks need to be severly nerfed and many hexes buffed or they need to nerf dangerous hexes like blood favour.
Yeah, I don't know why more killers don't run it. It's easily the strongest slowdown in the game if you pair it with even one other perk on a killer with decent mobility.
IMO Thrill of the Hunt should not affect Totems which got rekindled with Pentimento. Perks with Pentimento are usually 3 Hexes (including TOTH) and Pentimento and if Survivors dont cleanse the TOTH (which is random), the Pentimento Totems also need ages to be cleansed. I think it should not be the case that they also take longer to cleanse, Pentimento-Totems always should take 14 seconds to cleanse.
If solo que is the main argument, then yes, it should be thrown away, solo que suffers from a lot of things, because solo que itself is a nightmare, not the perks. Prime example of consequences of using solo que logic: Knock out. It was sheit vs swf, strong vs solo que. Now it's just sheit.
Pentimento's effect is powerful, I can't disagree with that, but there is nuance: it is physically impossible to use this perk until at least one totem is cleansed. You might get your first cleansed totem after first 2 gens are already done, and then it's effect no longer as good.
On the other hand, the build that must accommodate Penti. Option A, Plaything for extra hexes. Those can be ignored by survivors, as usually paying extra attention will prevent Oblivious from being too good. And even then, they should know the location of the Plaything they cleansed. Option B, 3 other Hex totems without Plaything. In this scenario, Penti at most should proc 3 times. And even then, if one of the 3 is a defense totem like Toth, then survivors might get lucky and not cleanse it as last one, so only 2 pentis in that case.
And tbh I once again find Aven_Fallen suggestion to work better as a supposed nerf to Pentimento, that Rekindled totems are their own thing and aren't affected by Toth. (And for fairness, they probably shouldn't be affected by something like Counterforce as well)