Autodidact--It's not very good
INTORDUCTION:
Autodidact is a very cool premise for a perk and I love it. I feel that more perks should have a push and pull effect to it. What I mean is, you start by being penalized and slowly start to buff your self up as the match goes on. With autodidact, you start with a -25% on healing progression and it removes the ability to hit great skillchecks. The up side for this perk is that you gain an extra 15% for everytime you hit a healing skillcheck. These are measured in tokens as you can have 3/4/5 tokens depending on what tier of the perk you have. So if you have all 5 tokens, every healing skillcheck is +50% automatically to the healing bar which is amazing. However, the issue is that is usually never happens.
EXPERIMENT AND RESULTS
I ran some experiments within trials to see on average you get this many tokens. As a control group, I used 20 matches, each time I had tier 3 Autodidact, here are the results in order; 2t, 3t, 3t, 2t, 1t, 0t, 2t, 3t, 4t, 3t, 2t, 2t, 2t, 1t, 1t, 0t, 2t, 3t, 2t, 1t. On average, I had about 2 tokens (1.95 to be exact) per match. This is dissapointing as that means I was NEGATIVELY impacted on average everytime I brought this perk. Once you hit 3 tokens, you begin to see some of the upsides, but that requires you to be healing other survivors and getting more skillchecks. The other downside to this is RNG, this whole perk RELEIS on RNG. Wether or not you get a skillcheck is completely RNG, in some matches I fully healed 2 survivors with the mangled status and never triggered a skillcheck, meaning, no benefit. But when I did get a skillcheck, it only negatively impacted the survivor I was healing and never got a benefit. On average, every match you bring autodidact, you are hurting your team. I should also mention im rank 1, so matches go by quickly, meaning, this slow burn perk is almost completely useless. Not to mention, using We'll Make It can heal faster than a t3 Autodidact perk with 5 tokens can.
HOW I WOULD CHANGE IT
As it is, autodidact is almost completely useless. With the recent nerf it receieved from the PTB, it's hard to say why anyone would use the perk. While it's concept is interesting (as stated earlier) the flaws are hard to ignore. In response to this issue, I would suggest these main changes. 1. Allow skillchecks to appear while healing other survivors with a med kit. Trust me, this wont break the game and make this perk "op", it's simply to allow med kits with needle addons to increase the chances of presenting a skillcheck while also increasing the rate you heal survivors by slightly. 2. Increase the rate at which skillchecks appear. The RNG is too much to handle with this perk, it can make or break your experience with this perk. To combat this, simply up the rates at which you are given skillchecks to help push survivors out of the penalization area of their tokens As long as survivors get 4-5 tokens, the perk becomes worth it. 3. Give it a point bonus towards Altruism. If you want survivors to use a perk that will hinder them before rewarding them, give them a little insentive. Blood Point bonuses dont affect the trial itself, but help motivate survivors to bring this perk. And finally, 4. Allow survivors to gain tokens from self care, give them the healing progression penalty, and dont give them benefits. If you allow tokens to be obtained off of yourself, you are able to gain more tokens while using this perk while not providing benefits to yourself. Since the whole premise of this perk is to learn overtime, using yourself as practice isn't a bad idea. You can provide yourself with tokens so that you may use your new found skill on other survivors.
CONCLUSION
As much as I like autodidact, it kind of sucks. With these chanegs I suggested, it could become one of the greatest altruism perks without being considered as unfair to fight against. I'd like to hear any complaints or discussions anyone can provide, im always open to discussing the perk!
Comments
What I don't like about Autodidact is that I have to also run Empathy/Bond with it, and hope I get to an injured survivor (without being spotted/caught) before that survivor heals themself with Self Care.
What if equipping Autodidact revealed your aura to injured survivors? Injured survivors could then choose between the slower Self Care or the faster (eventually) Autodidact.