Bad Perk University: Solidarity

Timeman63

Hello class, welcome to Bad Perk University! I'll be your professor for today, and we'll be going over the worst perks The Entity has to offer and see how to make the most out of them. Today’s perk is one that I personally think isn’t even that bad, but it suffers from having an underwhelming effect for the effort needed to make use of it. (Gee that sounds like a lot of perks, come to think of it.) The perk I’m talking about is Solidarity. This is a very straightforward perk when you break it down. When you’re injured, healing another injured survivor without a medkit converts 50% of the healing done to your own healing progress. In other words, if you’re injured and you fully heal another survivor, your healing progress will already be at 50% by the time you’re done, so when the other survivor goes to heal you, it’ll only take half the time than if you hadn’t used Solidarity. So assuming neither of you have the Mangled status effect, and considering that healing a single health state takes 16 seconds, it now takes 24 seconds to have both you and your teammate healed up. Shaving off 8 seconds of healing time? That’s sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

So why is this perk bad? Like I said before, I actually don’t think the perk is even all that bad. The problem is in its application. The first obvious downside is in the description: you have to heal the survivor without a Medkit. This is to balance the perk so that two survivors can’t just heal each other in like 4 seconds or something crazy like that. Healing speeds can already be a little ridiculous with the right builds and coordination. The other downsides are ones that you may not even realize at first. Having to heal another survivor while you’re also injured seems to not come up very often, at least if others’ experiences with the perk are to be believed. But actually the problem comes from finding other injured survivors. Unless you run an information perk like Empathy or Aftercare, you may have a hard time finding an injured survivor to use Solidarity on. And even if you get into the right situation, you’ve got an injured teammate in front of you and you’re injured as well, there’s one more problem…

“No, please, let me heal you first! I said, let me heal YOU! Ugh, fine…”

Yeah, if you’ve ever tried to make Solidarity work, you’ve all run into the same problem as I have. Fighting over your teammates for healing. This already happens rather frequently when two injured teammates are trying to heal each other, but it’s even more frustrating when you have Solidarity and it would be ideal for YOU to do the healing. But of course, the other survivor has no idea you have Solidarity. It’s not like Leader or Streetwise where the game informs them that they’re under the effects. Strangely enough, this is the biggest problem with this perk. All the problems I talked about prior are really just minor annoyances. Yes, there will be times where you can’t find anyone to heal, there will be times when you’re not injured and you just have to heal them like normal, but if a teammate insists on healing you first, Solidarity completely falls apart. And hey, maybe there’s the off-chance that they have Solidarity, YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY KNOW THAT! All that frustration for shaving off a few more seconds of healing when you might have been better off just using Botany Knowledge or We’ll Make It.

So how do we make the most out of this perk? Unfortunately, even though Solidarity synergizes with the majority of healing perks in the game, none of them really help with the problem of fighting over healing. I’ll still list them though, because the best way to make Solidarity shine is to pair them with perks that make healing more efficient. I already mentioned Botany Knowledge and We’ll Make It. Botany Knowledge is the most straightforward, no brainer synergy. You heal a teammate faster, you heal yourself faster. We’ll Make It is the same idea, and I highly recommend it if you’re trying to make Solidarity happen for two reasons. First, the 100% faster healing speed. I don’t need to explain this one. Second, it actually gives your teammate a notification that you have We’ll Make It, which will make them more likely to let you heal them, which is the goal of Solidarity in the first place. That being said, if you choose to run We’ll Make It, don’t run any other healing perks, since We’ll Make It caps your increased healing at 100%. Desperate Measures is also a good idea, since it becomes more effective as more survivors get injured, and if you’re injured, that’s just part of the plan. Empathy and Aftercare are both good perks to run in a build like this so you know where to find teammates that need healing. If you really want to take it to the next level, if you want to be an ascended survivor far above the lowly survivors who are slaves to the meta perks, there’s even Autodidact. Look, Autodidact is incredibly inconsistent, much like Solidarity you might go the whole match without activating the full effect of the perk, but when it works, it absolutely works! The healing time you save for both your teammate and yourself goes through the roof when you have 4 or 5 stacks of Autodidact. I’ll talk more about Autodidact when I get to it, but yeah give it an honest try with Solidarity. There’s one more perk that almost synergizes perfectly with Solidarity, and it’s one of the new perks: Resurgence. I already really like this perk, but the fact that you get 50% healing progress after being unhooked makes it a match made in heaven with Solidarity. You won’t always be healing a survivor after being unhooked, but when you do, you take 16 seconds to heal two survivors, and it’s wonderful to see.

Closing thoughts, how do we make this perk better? It’s very simple actually. Just make it so other survivors can see when you have this perk, like Leader. Other survivors knowing you have Solidarity is integral to making the perk work, so this is the best way to make the perk viable without having to be in a SWF. Because the truth is, Solidarity isn’t that bad of a perk. Not by a longshot, not when there are perks like Predator, Up the Ante, and Monstrous Shrine. It actually has a nice effect that is good when it works. And let me make one last thing clear, you shouldn’t go out of your way to make Solidarity heal you. It’s there for those situations where you and a teammate both happen to be injured. It’s there for you even when you may not need it. Unlike some other bad perks in the roster, it’s actually...a perk. And sometimes that’s alright. Thank you for coming to my lesson, see you next class (It’ll be sometime in the near future, I promise).

Viciusaurus

I feel like I learned a lot about a perk I never used except to get Adept Jane. I'd love to read more :0

PalletsAndHooks

Please give this human a hat.

GuyFawx

Ya the perk should have a icon pop up it pairs really well with resurgence if the other player has it that is not so much on yourself

CriticalWeasel

My take on this.

Any survivor perk that needs cooperation will be shown to nearby survivors at any time like We'll Make It.

Seriously this can solve so much problems with solo queue.

GuyFawx

I almost feel like survivors should be able to see the perks your teammates have equipped in the lobby so they at least know what to expect. Tho the killer should still have no idea