Potential Medkit Tiers Rework Suggestion
I think fairly frequently about what to do with medkits, as there's no denying that they're suffering from there not being a substantial difference between the tiers anymore. This is a hard issue to fix, because in terms of balance medkits are doing pretty great and tweaking anything too hard risks unbalancing them again. I think I have something in mind, though.
So, for the sake of this suggestion, I'm not pitching changes to the brown or yellow medkits. I think you could maybe make the yellow medkit's altruistic healing speed a bit higher, but ultimately I don't mind the difference between those two medkits just being their healing speeds.
For the green and purple, though, I do have ideas. Starting with the green, here's what I suggest:
Emergency Medkit:
- Unlocks the self-healing action with a speed penalty of 33% and a charge use penalty of 33% (Unchanged)
- Charge capacity of 48 (was 24)
- Altruistic healing speed boost removed (was 45%)
Ranger Medkit:
- No longer unlocks the self-healing action at all
- Charge capacity of 96 (was 24)
- Altruistic healing speed increased by 50% (unchanged)
The idea is relatively simple, overall. Give the Emergency Medkit its old niche of being the self-heal medkit back, and then give the Ranger Medkit a more defined niche of being a genuinely worthwhile source of altruistic healing speed that doesn't use up a perk slot at the cost of not being able to heal yourself at all. The complaint is that the medkits aren't different enough between tiers, so this would give them a toolbox-style differentiation in what they excel at by taking away the other numbers + boosting the numbers on the things they're supposed to do.
I want to speak briefly about the balance of the Emergency Medkit, though. While its former niche of the self-healing medkit made it completely overpowered, I don't think we're at risk of that happening again because it still has the speed and charge penalty keeping it in check, and no longer synergises with either Self-Care or Botany Knowledge. The end result here would be two heals without addons, that are still held back by speed and lack of potent synergies.
It would, probably, bring back the Emergency Medkit just being the most desirable overall, but I'm okay with that. People likely wouldn't use the purple Ranger Medkit for healing others that often, but they could do so with far more of a noticeable effect than they could right now if these changes were made, and… well, the green medkit probably should be more desirable than the browns and yellows, so I don't see an issue from that angle.
What do we think? Too much, not enough?
Comments
I agree with the idea that there needs to be more difference between the different medkit rarities.
However this seems like a bit too much. While it's true that Self Care wouldn't boost the efficiency of the green medkits anymore, and Botany wouldn't either, you can still make Botany work well with this rework as long as you plan ahead a bit.
To use this reworked green medkit with Botany (which essentially reduces the self heal time back to 16 seconds), all you would need is any addon or combination of addons that gets you at least 12 extra charges (the goal here is to get from 48 to at least 60) as that's enough for 2 self heals even with the efficiency debuffs (a medkit self heal with Botany requires 30 medkit charges). Streetwise alone would also get the job done without any addons (this offsets Botany's efficiency debuff), then you could just use heal speed addons instead or whatever else you wanted. Granted, this still isn't as strong as the 10.7 second self heals green medkits used to give, but it's not that much worse either.
Alternatively, you can drop Botany and use charge addons to get 3 self heals instead of just 2, which is a lot.
With the current medkits you can get 2 self heals if you run Gel Dressings + any of the other charge addons, but it's not possible to make that work with Botany unless you ALSO run Streetwise on top of that (or another perk to recharge items) - at that point you're justified having such a strong medkit with using 2 perks and 2 addons. You CAN use Desperate Measures instead, but in most cases that heal speed is going to be lower, so it isn't as good overall.
As a side note - I agree with increasing the altruistic heal speed on the yellow medkits, I'd go 50% for that. I would also probably give a tiny nerf to brown medkits to set them a bit further apart and then buff green and purple medkits.
An idea I had for the green medkit a while back was to keep it the same for self healing, but go in line with the "Emergency Medkit" name and give it 100% altruistic healing speed at the cost of using all 24 charges (ie. the same efficiency debuff as self healing). You essentially get a We'll Make It speed heal any time during the game as an emergency when you need it, but only once.
Ultimately, my opinion here is that the investment still justifies the outcome even if you get an extra heal this way around. You still have to invest a lot just to bring yourself back to the old standard of an addonless, perkless, not Emergency Medkit speed medkit, and therefore have no real way to improve it beyond that point.
It might end up being too much with testing, I don't know, but my gut says that the level of investment we're talking about here - both addons and at least one perk - just to get two speedy self heals when you could also just invest perks to get comparable speeds is probably fine.
That's fair. I'm just super cautious about anything having to do with self healing because last time self healing was super strong it was kinda a huge problem, though admittedly the old Circle of Healing was part of that too and not just the medkits. And effects like Mangled were actually stronger back then too.
I think medkits are in a good spot, they can still be strong and quite useful if you know how and when to use them. They don't need buffed at all, just don't touch them.
I'd rather see things like keys or maps given more, or even making flashlights take more skill to use. It feels unrewarding when Flashlight blinds are so easy for me to get, and keys are useless unless you want to go for hatch or run a wallhacks key. Maps are nice but only the Rainbow Map has any real use to it, and skilled players often do not need them.
Toolboxes overall are fine, but I think we need three major tweaks:
As I said, medkits are balanced, but the tiers are functionally all the same.
The goal isn't to buff medkits for the sake of making them stronger, it's to make the tiers more different to one another so they're not just bloodweb clutter with varying prices.
To make the tiers more different from one another.
Just buffing them in that way ends up with the same outcome, the only difference between tiers is a slight increase in one number. If we want them to be more interesting, they need to be more specialised than that.
Also, I'd argue neither of these are nerfs overall. More charges is flat out just more appealing than the increased altruistic heal for the green, and the purple is absolutely buffed overall in its new niche.
I personally want them to revert the healing nerfs they did, but since this will probably not happen anytime soon, I’m on board with your suggestion.
Ranger medkit should still allow self healing and generally speaking 30-50% healing speed increase to altruistic healing is extremely bad, it would need to be 100% or more to be worthwhile, because otherwise it barely makes any difference.
Healing nerfs? What are you referring to there?
As for the healing speed increase, 50% is the same as Botany Knowledge, which is a really really solid altruistic healing perk. I'm not against the Ranger Medkit getting a higher number, but I also don't think it's worthless with the number it currently has.
I’m mainly referring to the medkit changes, that happened around the time, where circle of healing lost its self healing ability. They should just undo what they did to medkits.
50% is not really good for altruistic healing, but it makes a huge difference in self healing, which isn’t viable at the moment. 50% saves up 5,4 seconds, which is barely anything and doesn’t make a big difference. At that point I can just use it for myself.
only if you remove self-healing action from both med-kits. bvhr is far from making any of c-d killers better so med-kit can stay where they are until bvhr base-kit lethality of weaker killers. the item is nearly free these days and it's among most popular item in the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAu7WyJO62Utru3's video is perfect example of why we cannot buff med-kits until we address shift-w problem for weaker killers. skip to last 2 minute of the video for his explanation.
Took a look at the video, even watched the whole thing so I wasn't missing context. I'm not seeing what this has to do with these proposed medkit buffs, I gotta say.
Could you elaborate?
med-kits cannot be buffed weaker killers are too time inefficient at the chase vs healthy survivors. in fact tru3, even had opinion that survivor healing should be nerfed further by making them unable to heal after x amount of times.
while i do not agree with his view point, i do agree that balance of low tier being bad vs shift-w play and gap-closing is point of contention. it's one of main reasons why perks like self-care, circle of healing and just about all form of self-healing have been nerfed, nerfed, nerfed over and over. arguably med-kit are still over-performing but i think the way dev are attacking the problem is not correct. instead of nerfing self-healing to the ground and healing as hard as possible, there should be solutions to buff lower tier killers to be more time efficient in the chase. healing shouldn't be like an instant win button but it is vs good half of the cast. med-kits buffing would not help in any form.
I don't see the connection here, personally.
I'd sorta see the justification if I were suggesting buffing self heal speed in these medkit changes, but for self healing it's just an extra heal on the medkit. Survivors already have access to this, and they have access to better than this.
I also don't really buy that Shift-W is this gigantic of a problem overall. In the video, the killer's playing on the worst map for not holding a 3-gen that there is, it's a map where you do actually have to stick around that area if you don't want to seriously harm your chances of winning. Survivors being able to make noticeable distance on any other map hardly means weaker killers are languishing, it ultimately doesn't matter that much unless they're running to super strong areas.
I don't think survivors making distance is going to get worse if green medkits give an extra heal at base, basically.
I see, that makes way more sense. I'd be open for making some Medkits do something else, like maybe one can also fix Broken once or something.
@Devil_hit11 I agree, I just wish they wouldn't have nerfed Mangled and Hemorrhage so hard. It only hurt Killers like my main and did nothing to Killers like Dracula or Nurse at all. I genuinely don't think either status needed a hard nerf.
nurse got affected. her mangle add-on was best mangled add-on in the game. dev are now pretty restrictive on mangled. they were already ULTRA restrictive on instant down.