Altruistic vs Self Heals - Really, a rambling about medkits
How long is a heal?
On the surface, you might say a heal is 16 seconds. Indeed, a heal does, in fact, require 16 charges and is done at a rate of 1c/s.
However, healing typically requires the help of another survivor. So 16 seconds for both would be 32 seconds.
So in actuality, a heal is more accurately defined as being 32 seconds, the same as pre-nerf Self-Care, which was the reason it was 32 seconds.
For reasons I'll explain later, let's bring in Mangled. Mangled turns 16 into 20, or 32 into 40. You'll see why I mentioned this later.
Altruistic Heals
We've already gone over that a base heal is 16 seconds for two or 32 seconds.
However, let's look at two altruistic healing perks. No One Left Behind and We'll Make It.
No One Left Behind
No One Left Behind gives a 50% buff to altruistic heal speeds, but only in the endgame. Doing some rounding, we can calculate that it turns a 16-second heal into a 10.7-second heal. Since it takes into account two people, 21.4 seconds or about 67% of the original total.
We'll Make It
We'll Make It gives a larger buff of 100%. Cuts that heal from 16 to 8, so the total time spent is 16 seconds or 50% of the original total. It just requires you to unhook someone and lasts for 90 seconds. This is a very powerful perk, cutting healing time in half.
Yet, no one complains about them? Who complains about We'll Make It? Honest?
Self-Heals
Something to keep in mind with self heals is that there's just one survivor. A heal is 32 seconds since it requires two people. Take away one of them and that's 16 seconds, half the original value which is equal to We'll Make It. Keep this in mind for later.
Self-Care
Now, Self-Care is unique in that it's been busted and now is left in the gutter. Let's go over 3 different versions of self-care.
Release
Release-Day self-care healed at 80% of the normal rate. Heals were shorter at 12 seconds vs 16, but let's ignore that for a moment so we can still say that a heal is 32 seconds. That's a 20% penalty, so 16 seconds becomes 20, the same as a mangled heal. However, it's a mangled heal for one survivor, so 20 is about 62.5% of the original rate.
This was deemed to be too powerful. While it wasn't the strongest in terms of raw efficiency, it was a reliable source of healing with little risk, could be used with other perks such as Botany or We'll Make It (it worked on all heals at the time), and made medkits redundant.
Nerfed
Self-care was nerfed to 50%, 32 seconds. 32 for one person is 16 for two, so no issues. Used Botany and you could get it to 24 seconds or 75% of the original value. Shadow of its former self and required two perks.
Why the bad reputation? The long timer meant people healing during time-sensitive events such as when a teammate is on a hook could easily get your teammate killed, that time you can be interrupted, and it enabled the habit of constantly wanting to heal which is not a good idea.
Current
How do I put it? Self-Care is pathetic now. It went from 80% to 50% to 35%, or rather, it now took 45.7 seconds to heal. Yeah, pretty bad.
45.7 for a single person. Let's cut that in half for a moment: it becomes 22.85 seconds. Self-Care was nerfed so that it became slower and less efficient than healing while Mangled.
Why was it nerfed, to begin with? Having a reliable source of healing was too strong. You should be encouraged to have teammates heal you, I guess.
Inner Strength
I thought this perk was worth a mention. You do 14 seconds of cleansing + 8 seconds of waiting in a locker. That adds up to 22 or about 69% (nice). Now, this had the downside of being limited to 5 uses per match for an entire team, period.
Circle of Healing
Rather than bring up all 3 versions, I'll compare Release-Day CoH to Current CoH
Current
I'm not gonna rant about boons. Its value is 50%, so altruistically, it's identical to No One Left Behind.
What's unique about CoH is that it has the former 50% self-care penalty, which is unspecified. So in actuality, you're healing at the same rate you would be if you healed another survivor.
Self-Heal is 21.4 seconds or 67%, so nothing game-breaking on its own, right? Yeah, sure. No, really. I hate the perk, but sure. I could hear the argument. Let's keep going though.
Release
Same as before but with a value of 100%. Heal was 16 seconds for one person, so 16/32 or 50% of the original value. The same as We'll Make it.
This was a perk everyone agreed was busted. Lamenting about it would be a waste of time because this iteration of the perk is gone now.
So far so good
No issues in the self-heal department yet. Circle and Inner Strength are comparable but nothing that rivals the strength of We'll Make It, except release CoH which is gone now. So what's going on? Is We'll Make It just a hidden gem? Are people blind to an obviously broken perk?
Medkits
This is where things get insane. Medkits don't have Self-Care's 50% penalty. As stated above, it's equal to we'll make it Baseline. This is what causes things to break.
Emergency medkit/CoH+Medkit
Because you start at the 16-second heal baseline, you're not limited by the soft caps We'll Make It has. You heal at the same speed as No One Left Behind, so 10.7... except it's just you. It's just 10.7. So 10.7/32 or about 33% of the original value.
This is... insane. But let's keep going.
Emergency + CoH
An 8-second heal for one person. That's 25% of the original value. Yeah... it's really fast.
Finite so fine?
An easy argument to make is that medkits are finite, unlike perks (sans Inner Strength), so their being extremely powerful is perfectly fine.
Ideally, the killer would like to commit to a chase. So let's say you're hooked 3 times. Obviously, the third will kill you, so that's two instances you would be healing. There's more nuance but let's work with this example.
How many heals can you fit into a medkit? A heal is 16 charges and all medkits have 16 at least. How much can you add? Well, you have a 16-charge add-on, a 12-charge add-on, and 2 add-ons with 8 charges. So apparently, quite a few.
With an Emergency Medkit, you can almost get 3 heals. 44 charges for 2.75 heals.
A Ranger medkit starts with 32 charges and can get up to 60. That's almost 4 heals!
Yellow? Starts at 24 and can get up to 52 which is more than 3.
Brown is the same as Emergency, just without the speed buff.
So, you have an item that can match or surpass the healing speed of a dedicated altruistic healing perk, which can be augmented by other perks and can have a duration that can let them heal more than the ideal 2 "necessary" heals.
CoH is often complained about for making healing too easy, something even I'm guilty of. However, if we say that heals are too fast and easy, I think the biggest issue is medkits. CoH just exacerbates the issue.
So...?
The point that I am attempting to make is that Medkits should not be as strong as they are for as long as they last.
They outshine dedicated altruistic healing perks. At their worst, they're equal to the strongest healing perk in the game in terms of raw numbers. To me, the fact that it's possible for healing yourself to be even faster than being healed by a teammate with the best healing perk points to a large problem.
A single survivor with an Emergency medkit and charge add-ons might not be an issue. But the fact you can have 4? The fact this can be augmented with CoH? The fact you don't even need an Emergency medkit specifically, just a yellow medkit with charge add-ons and 1 guy with CoH to get the same effect?
Why now?
Medkits have been like this for ages, why is this an issue now? Why didn't people complain before?
I think the biggest factor is availability. The grind was horrible for a long time. Now, not only is every cheaper but you get a lot more BP than before.
We're having the opposite problem right now, and we're flooded with BP and not enough to spend it on. People are stacking up on their items and add-ons, and what was previously rare is becoming a common occurrence. So while the issue existed before, it was rare enough that it didn't create much fuss.
TL;DR
Medkits allow heals that are effectively better than We'll Make It, and now they're as common as loose change on a sidewalk. Please send help...
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