A perk that I’m very sad wasn’t touched in the meta shift (and what I would do to buff it)
The 6.1.0 patch was good for a meta shakeup. Even though the nature of the meta stayed the same (survivors stacking second chances and killers stacking stall), the nerfing of high-tier perks and the buffing of weaker ones, if nothing else, increased perk variety, something the game has desperately needed pretty much since its inception. However, for as good as the patch was, I think all of us have at least one perk that wasn’t touched in the patch that we wished was.
For me personally, there’s one perk in particular that I find baffling that it didn’t receive a buff, for three reasons.
- I just adore the perk and want it to get some love
- It’s a terrible perk and needs to be buffed
- Perks that did its job better before the patch received large buffs that they didn’t really need while this was one completely forgotten about
I’ll give you three guesses as to what the perk is. Hint: It’s a healing perk.
… No takers? Okay, I’ll tell you.
It’s Solidarity. I have an unhealthy love for this perk that I can’t really explain. Something about it just tickles me in a way that no other healing perk really does. I truly do love Solidarity’s design. But I think most people can agree with me when I say that it has always been a really, really bad perk.
For those unaware of what Solidarity does, it’s very simple: While injured, healing another survivor without using a medkit also heals you at half the speed. So if you fully heal a survivor and then half heal another one, you’ll have (100% + 50% / 2) = 75% healing progress on yourself, for example. If you fully heal two survivors, you will also fully heal yourself. It’s an incredibly fun perk that just isn’t nearly as good as it ought to be. Even when it first came out in early 2019, so many other perks outclassed it because of how situational and lackluster its effects were. But the perk took a MASSIVE hit with the Hemorrhage rework, because once you stop healing someone, the progress you gained for yourself immediately begins plummeting. Even if the other person starts healing you right away, the benefits of Solidarity are substantially reduced by Hemorrhage on account of just how quickly it drains healing progress. Plus, it makes the already rare instances of styling on someone by magically becoming healthy while you heal them all but impossible.
This perk needs a buff. And the fact that it went completely ignored in patch 6.1.0 while healing perks that were already much better than it such as Botany Knowledge received a HUGE buff to its already-large healing speed absolutely befuddles me.
So, with all that in mind, I’d like to propose several buffs to the perk in order to not only make it viable, but even, Entity willing, strong. And I’ve spent, admittedly, way too much time thinking about how to buff a perk that no one probably even knows exists.
In my opinion, the first thing we need to do is address one of Solidarity’s core issues: It is a healing perk, but it is a very situational one—and in that situation, it still doesn’t do insanely much. Now, the obvious fix would be to increase the ratio at which you heal yourself from 50% to, say, 60% or 75%. This makes perfect sense, but I propose a different solution: Notice how in order to activate the perk, you have to heal someone WITHOUT using a medkit. I honestly think this is a good way to balance the perk seeing as how medkits are, frankly, disgustingly strong at the moment, but with such an undeniable drawback, I think it’s fair to compensate with the following buff:
-While injured, you heal other survivors 25% faster.
I picked this change over increasing the self-heal ratio for two reasons.
- Even at just a 50% ratio, fully healing someone with Solidarity equipped reduces the base time it takes for them to heal you from 16 to 8 seconds, and the time taken for the two of you to fully heal each other from 32 to 24 seconds. Numerically, that is the same as them healing you with a +100% healing speed boost. That’s nothing to scoff at, and that’s not including perks that either you or the other survivor has to increase their healing speed (and keep in mind, they can still use medkits). Situational as Solidarity is, I worry that buffing the self-healing ratio could easily cause the perk to get out of hand.
- Providing an altruistic healing speed boost while injured means the perk will both increase the speed at which teammates heal you AND the speed at which you heal them, increasing the team-wide utility of the perk. With a 25% speed boost, you could be able to get a clutch heal if the killer tries to intercept you, perhaps allowing your teammate to take a protection hit or, at the very least, prevent the killer from getting an easy 2-man slug.
In addition to this, there is another, much bigger buff I would like to propose. A buff that would solve both of Solidarity’s biggest issues: The situational nature of the perk, and the perk’s single biggest counter.
-Solidarity grants the user total immunity to the Hemorrhage status effect.
This buff would not only allow Solidarity to maintain full usefulness if the killer has inflicted Hemorrhage on you, but it also completely nullifies the status effect as a whole—a powerful effect that will allow you to not only salvage partial healing accomplished by the perk if you are interrupted, but also any partial healing administered to you whatsoever. A substantial buff that makes the perk both much better in the situation in which it’s meant to shine and also have a useful effect unique to it outside of that specific situation.
Those are the two primary buffs I’d like the perk to have, but I’d also love to see a third QoL change:
-Solidarity’s self-healing is not reduced while cooperatively healing.
Right now, healing someone with a third survivor helping you will reduce the self-healing gained from Solidarity by about half. I would like this to simply not be a thing—grant me the full 50% conversion regardless of if anyone is helping me or not.
TL;DR: I love Solidarity a lot and think it should be buffed in the following ways:
-25% faster altruistic healing speed while injured, to simultaneously make the perk stronger in its intended use case and also increase team utility
-Complete immunity to the Hemorrhage status effect, to prevent Solidarity from being rendered even worse by a single status effect while also giving it a much wider range of situations in which it is useful
-Grant the user the full 50% self healing while cooperatively healing, as a QoL buff
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I’m going to go lay down now and contemplate the fact that I just wrote an entire essay on how to buff Solidarity.
Comments
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I'd like some kind of buff to Solidarity as well ! I remember picking it up in the Shrine a couple of months ago thinking it might be nice since I'm usually going for unhooks with We'll Make It and healing quickly after, but I haven't actually taken the time to play around with it.
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I mean would it really be OP if they just buffed it to a full 100% of the heal? Still don't think it'd be used -that- much.
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Really add a delay on the hemorrhage loss, (like 3 seconds) would make it all right.
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I can pretty confidently say it would be. You would quite literally be healing two people in the time it takes to heal one. Numerically it's the same effect as two people healing each other in the radius of old Circle of Healing—and by "old" I mean the one where it doubled your healing speed. Difference here is that you wouldn't even need to set up a boon that can be destroyed; it would just be completely passive. And that is once again not taking into account the use of anything else to speed up healing even further, because good lord are there a lot of healing speed boosters in this game.
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I wonder what happens when two solos who both have Solidarity and are injured have to heal. Sounds like it would be a funny back and forth !
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That's an entirely separate problem of solo queue suffering from a sore lack of information imo. I could go on a whole rant about how no one in the game knowing absolutely nothing about what builds anyone else is running until they’ve seen them use it is a major flaw in the game's design almost as egregious as maps, but that's neither here nor there.
Post edited by LiveBritishReaction on2
