Action Speeds Should Be Capped
In my opinion, the fact that theoretically there's no limit on how quickly you can perform a certain action if you stack multiple different boosts is one of the major underlying problems plaguing this game right now. Healing in a tiny handful of seconds, or stacking generator repair boosts so you can bang one out with incredible efficiency, are extremely hard things for killers to deal with and very hard to balance around if you're only looking at lowering individual perk/item/what have you numbers.
If instead of that, there was always a minimum amount of time it'd take to heal someone/yourself no matter how many things you stacked to try and lower it, it'd help keep that mechanic in check from a balance standpoint and would free up the design space for existing and new perks to be more impactful on their own without worry that they'll be stacked with other perks to get ludicrous speeds. The same goes for any other action speed, even ones not mentioned specifically in this post.
This doesn't just go for the survivor side, either- if kicking speeds, pickup speeds, vault speeds, and other such numbers had a cap on the killer side, the perks that impact those things could all be universally buffed to be more useful and engaging without too much worry about things going haywire because of an unanticipated pairing/build. Those things just aren't actively problems right now in the way that healing speeds and to a lesser degree generator speed increases are, so I didn't lead off with them.
Now, I'm no game designer; I won't pretend to know what the right number for that cap would be, or if it should instead be a soft cap where increases beyond a certain point give diminishing returns. I just think looking in this direction is a good idea, for overall game health.
What do you all think?
Comments
To an extent, caps on certain action speeds might be useful. But the game already does have diminishing returns on stacked bonuses due to the way they’re applied together.
For example, desperate measures is (let’s assume all survs are injured) a 56% bonus to healing. This reduces healing time to 10.26, saving almost 6 seconds.
Botany gives you 33%, reducing a heal to around 12 seconds, saving 4.
But since bonuses to action speeds are additive, if you put these together for a total bonus of 89%, healing time is 8.47. The second perk in this case (doesn’t matter how you order them) does give you a diminishing return - it’s not saving as much time as it would by itself.
Now on the other hand, action speed penalties are similar, but they’re multiplicative (because this ensures you never reach 0 no matter what). But this changes something important.
For example, sloppy butcher’s healing slowdown is 20%, this makes healing take 20 seconds, or 4 seconds longer than normal.
If the killer has pentimento (2+ totems), the slowdown is 30%, creating 22.86 second heals, or almost 7 seconds longer than normal.
Putting these together, it’s figured as (1-0.2)(1-0.3) = 0.56, so the total penalty is 44%, not 50%. So the healing time is 28.57. The difference here though is that the time difference is larger than either of the two perks alone, whereas it wasn’t with healing bonuses. So although it does have “diminishing returns” by being multiplicative (instead of being 50%), you actually still get MORE value despite that by stacking them together.
Now, back to what you said - might a cap on action speeds be useful for some things such as healing? Maybe, but I think it’s more an issue with certain individual perks and items (and notably how quickly a syringe can heal you within a boon), and not putting them together, at least for right now. As far as gen speedup goes, I think prove thyself and good toolboxes are still overtuned regardless of whether you combine them with anything else or not. But that’s just my thoughts.