How I would approach the healing changes

White_Owl

It seems to me that the healing changes announced in the Dev Update feel unfinished, as if they wanted to address the main mechanic but without looking at the whole picture. Now I'm not pretending to be the guy who can see the big picture better than the devs but still I have some ideas I'd like to share.

First, I'm ok with increasing self healing time to 24 seconds, but altruism and teamwork should be encouraged imo so I would make healing someone else faster at base, at least 20 seconds.

Most survivor perks would be fine but a couple would be problematic:

• Self Care: we all know the absurd numbers that would result from the base change. What I suggest is that the perk allows to heal at 75% speed (=32s) for one full heal, after that it deactivates but can be recharged by healing others (like Lucky Break). This would allow to make it usable but still encourage teamwork.
• Botany Knowledge: Since it seems Medkits will not be able to hold that many charges anymore I would make so it gains charges by standing still inside bushes revert it to a previous version, with a healing speed bonus at 33% but not penalty.
• Reactive Healing and Solidarity: these perks have always been screwed hard by Haemorrage, so I would propose a change to the status effect itself (see later).

A killer perk I would change is Coulrophobia. I'm a big fan of the perk, but I think the funniest part about it is the skillcheck, and if the speed penalty (especially if comboed with Sloppy Butcher) is too high no one with a functioning brain would heal while under the effect. What I'd love is to make the speed penalty start low (e.g. 20%) and ramp up the closer the killer is, so that survivors could at least be tempted to try and finish the heal.

Haemorrage: aside from making completely worthless the perks mentioned before, since all healing is slower it can be very oppressive in anti-healing / hit-and-run builds... What I suggest is to make the regression stop once it reaches 50% progress but buff the regression speed to 10% to compensate.

As for Medkits, I'm not sure I like how they reduced the overall usage (not more than one heal per match) and still reduced the altruistic bonus. I'm pretty sure no one would every waste a good medkit to heal someone else slightly faster, once. If we want to encourge altruism, I'd make it so altruistic healing consumes half the charges.

For now that's what comes to my mind. In general I'd like more altruistic healing and to not make healing feel hopeless (since that generally encourages more gen rushing), and I think those changes would help with that.