Hex addition that could make them viable
Since hexes still feel rather weak (if not only from their effect, but by their poor spawn rng) I think the best way to buff them is this "The 1st time a survivor begins Cleaning Or Blessing a Hex Totem, Gain a Notification"
It gives Them a better chance of not being destroyed right away without their effects having a chance to activate, and it allows for a very gentle QOL change that makes them a bit more viable
Comments
So tap a totem and then stealth, gotchu
I feel like the most you really should do is maybe make the totems look like normal dull totems for the first 30 seconds or so. This will help alleviate all the times survivors spawn on them. Beyond that, there's no reason to hinder the intended counterplay to totems.
i as a very heavy totem user, i would be happy with that change. i just want to have a chance to have my perks be used in the match lol
I mean there are perks to slow totems down right? Either utilise more of them or maybe could hope for a better totem protection perk in the future i suppose.
I dont usually do a FULL totem build, but I often run ruin and I know how disheartening it can be when the totem is found before the survivors can even move their character. The camera is doing its spinning intro thing and its already spotted.
You cannot say hexes feel underpowered while hex:toth is still in it's current state. That one hex makes full hex builds extremely strong. Especially against killers that excel at guarding hexes, like jason
Its getting nerfed next patch.
It's getting a token nerf. It's still going to be extremely strong.
Doesnt change that it will still be very popular and full Hex Builds are really obnoxious, especially on Jason. TOTH changes will only be relevant when they actually change the Perk and not only do a small number change.
Im not sure you really CAN change TOTH without completely changing its purpose as a hex defense perk. It was the same issue before when it acts as an alarm to show a hex was being cleansed. Setups could be made to make hexes basically unbreakable like the old Sniper doctor.
They already said they rework TOTH.
Maybe if you nerf the effects of the strongest hexes this could work.
I know they said they'd nerf the numbers. Can you link or SS where they said they were reworking it? Imma be real with ya, im pretty sure most of my use for it is from chaos shuffle or something, so if they make it do something interesting, im down.
They made it sound like the TOTH change is temp and the future changes might be to "the killer" rather than TOTH. Im guessing they mean Jason from that.
The concept behind hex perks is pretty straightforward; high powered at the risk of permanently losing them during play. There are a couple issues with this concept. Because of the random placements, it may take a survivor wasting several minutes to find and disable that hex which creates an inefficiency in early game that can offset losing the perk late game. On the other hand, I've been in games where less than two minutes into the game, 3 of 4 perks were disabled which means I had perks for one chase and then was basically perkless from pure bad luck. The second issue is that not all of the hexes are strong enough to even consider that risk or have hefty activation requirements and then run the risk of activating directly under a survivor's nose thereby preventing any value from the perk.
The randomness is both an issue of the program logic for selecting totems and the maps themselves. Some maps, totems are very tricky to find without a perk while others can be spotted from almost the other side of the map. The cleanse ability is needed to balance the effect of an overpowered perk. Trying to adjust every map to have completely balanced totems is just impractical. The questions becomes, is it possible to adjust the spawn logic to be more fair? If you make all the totems spawn as far from survivor spawns, they will end up clustered and the survivors can use that logic to find them fairly easily.
I like the suggestion from LordGlint where hexes don't become active until 30 seconds into the match but adding logic that they then spawn as far as possible from survivor's (probably using the same system as cenobite's cube). This will have a more random distribution based on how the survivors have spread in the early match and prevent them appearing on a survivor to be insta-cleansed while maintaining the current concept of hunting them down and cleansing.
Another idea could be to rework hex totems so they have a persistent weaker effect and while ignited, a much stronger version or secondary effect. That leaves them still meeting the concept of powerful perks that carry the risk of being countered by cleansing but leaves the killer with some minor effect to continue playing with. Perhaps something like ruin is 150% regress on a gen when not being worked, but after cleansing, it reduces to just increasing regression rate 25%. Now you still get some benefit benefit when kicking gens or using another regression perk but it's far less potent. This could take some sting out of immediately losing hexes due only to bad luck. It is important to note that some hexes have unique mechanics where they would need to be left unchanged such as those that trigger on cleanse or have conditional effects such as Hex: Face the Darkness. There are also a few hexes that need reworks to even justify the vulnerability such as Hex: Two Can Play.
I feel like this would be more reasonable as an addition to Dominance rather than a basekit change.
Honestly yeah. I hate the idea of buffing hex related perks when the Unemployed Build is so prevalent right now, but Dominance could use this change to actually be a good perk choice
I just want the right to choose which totems contain my hex perks, but every time the idea is suggested, survivor mains have a conniption and a seizure and spam downvotes while foaming at the mouth. Guess it's different when they do it.