Why Self-Care is Broken Beyond Belief, and How I Would Fix it

@SovererignKing said:
Barring the other points, as Powerbats said, I’ll tell you now that NOED is not balanced. Ruin could use a tweek to make it less susceptible to be made irrelevant that is true. 

NOED is a crappy cheese, and the only perk I consider a crutch for Killers. It a cheesy “Comeback” perk that rewards failure. Sure, the game isn’t balanced and Survivors are too strong, thanks to Gen Rushing being too easy to pull off, thanks to Looping making it a nightmare to catch anyone. However that’s not justification for a perk like NOED. 

Good Killers can be cucked by bad map balance, bad mechanics, unbalanced Survivor perks, this is true. However the opposite is also true. Killers who are legitimately bad at the game can easily get carried hard by NOED. Killers that absolutely do not deserve to get much can get a ton.

Take this Huntress for example:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMKJtVdFeY

Couldn’t land a hatchet throw to save his life. Missed even regular swings. Spent the whole match just trying to tunnel one dude out. Got one other person... Then NOED. Snowballed the whole damn team. You may use the defense of “break the totems!” I did, but only a SWF can coordinate knowing if they broke all 5 totems. It’s really unrealistic to expect 4 randoms to make sure they got all 5 totems. 

I for one would rather the balance the game and get rid of crutches like NOED. It’s just not fair legitimately bad Killers can get carried by one perk. Same as DS, it carries bad Survivors. 

Side Note : Honestly when it comes to SC, they just need to give it limited uses. The whole reset to zero thing is kind of stupid imo. It’s the Killers fault in the first place the Survivor got away and was able to self care. YOU as the Killer failed to track your prey properly. The problem with self care really is how little it means to be injured while body blocking. The developers just need to limit it to 3 uses l, so Survivors have to be more judicial. 

Lastly, Spint Burst needs a change that you have to be running for 3 seconds before it activates imo. That way it doesn’t just cuck Ambush Killers so hard. 

I'd have to disagree with your assertion that Hex: NoED is a crutch perk.

In regards to the video you linked:
Ironically, the video you linked not only shows how badly yourself and the group of survivors you were with played, but that the killer that you say was 'carried by Hex: NoED', was actually not that bad at killer in the first place. Firstly, they were running a decent loadout, which means they likely know what they're doing. Secondly, they were using a controller, which is obvious to see based on the fact that they turned at one constant rate, which means that they had their joystick pushed as far as it could go to turn. With something as limiting as a controller to be aiming with against survivors that can be highly mobile and agile even with a controller, missing swings and throws is expected and sometimes unavoidable. It's not like they're using a mouse that they can adjust the DPI of to perfectly suit themselves, then are able to turn the exact right amount they need to at every opportunity, to land hits. Thirdly, it took yourself and fellow survivors 10 minutes to power the exit gates, and you IGNORED several unlit totems that were on your screen. Complaining about Hex: NoED after you had 10 minutes to break 5 totems (at 14 seconds each and not being difficult to locate, taking a grand total of 70 seconds to break and maybe 30-40 seconds of total travel time, you could've broken them all solo in under 2 minutes, but you chose not to), is pathetic. Especially on the pallet lodge, where you have visibility to spot totems almost across the entire map. Additionally, the killer had 1 survivor dead before the exit gates were powered, and would have killed you even without Hex: NoED, for a total of two kills. And the only reason that Hex: NoED was able to be used in that match, was because your fellow survivors played like altruistic lemmings after the exit gates were powered, EVEN AFTER THEY KNEW Hex: NoED was in play. That's not the killer being carried by a crutch - that's survivors dying to their own stupidity. After your shameful display of the survivor main mentality 'I'm bad at the game, nerf the other side', I'm finding it incredibly difficult to take you seriously, and to treat someone who is so entitled as yourself, with respect while maintaining my own equanimity. I just want to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of what I'm responding to, but that wouldn't be respectful, now would it? Anyways, here goes.

First of all, Hex: NoED has several soft counters.
Hope, Dead Hard, Small Game, stealth perks (such as Urban Evasion), flashlight saving the person downed by NoED during the pickup animation, insta-healing them off the ground with an anti-hemmorhagic syringe or styptic agent, etc.

Secondly, Hex: NoED has the hard counter of breaking all the unlit totems. You say that it's near impossible to do outside of a SWF, but I disagree.

Let's talk hypothetically.

If all 4 survivors spawn more or less evenly spread across the map, they'll all spawn near a totem and can break 4/5 of the unlit totems that could be Hex: NoED, about 14 seconds into the match. It doesn't take a SWF to do that, and survivors are more likely to take care of totems before generators and the like because they're very rewarding in terms of point gain per time spent, 600 points for 14 seconds of time.

At 14 seconds each (to destroy) and not being difficult to locate, taking a grand total of 70 seconds to break and maybe 30-40 seconds of total travel time, you could've broken them all solo in under 2 minutes. If you memorise totem spawn locations within map tiles and totem placement distributions, it doesn't matter how randomly they spawn, because they spawn randomly WITHIN A VERY LIMITED NUMBER OF SPAWN LOCATIONS, each of which you can quickly check, and usually from a distance.

And that's not even mentioning that every totem perk the killer runs, reduces the number of unlit totems on the map that you'd have to find to counter Hex: NoED before it spawns by 1. Since Hex: Ruin is meta at high ranks, that means that survivors generally only have to break 4 unlit totems, not 5, to counter Hex: NoED without ever having to worry about being endangered by it.

Since I've already debunked the survivor main myth that 'bad killers get carried by Hex: NoED', let me fix your words for you.
How it works in actuality, is that 'Hex: NoED sometimes provides killers with the tools necessary to punish bad survivors, but most of the time it is 100% useless against even half-decent survivors'.

Now, onto the part of your post relevant to the thread itself, which apparently was just a side note, an afterthought. You said:

"Side Note : Honestly when it comes to SC, they just need to give it limited uses. The whole reset to zero thing is kind of stupid imo. It’s the Killers fault in the first place the Survivor got away and was able to self care. YOU as the Killer failed to track your prey properly. The problem with self care really is how little it means to be injured while body blocking. The developers just need to limit it to 3 uses l, so Survivors have to be more judicial."

While giving SC limited uses would solve some of the problems that Self-Care causes, it would create more problems than it would solve. First of all, if Self-Care were ever nerfed in that way, survivors mains would complain incessantly on the forums and review bomb until the devs caved and gave them what they wanted, which would be a buff to another aspect of Self-Care (likely, it would be reverted to healing at around full speed), and/or another nerf nuke to killers (such as by removing the lunge of the killer's attack from the game, which I've seen many survivors demand on the Steam forums, time and time again).

Agreed, on the reset to zero thing being stupid.

I disagree about it being the killer's fault that the survivor has the opportunity to Self-Care. If the killer wants to have any chance of getting more than one kill against half-decent survivors, they'll inevitably have to provide at least one survivor with an opportunity to heal (since the only way to stop survivors from completing their objectives, is to take more than one of them away from their objectives at the same time). Essentially, what you're saying is that the killer's only counter to Self-Care is tunnelling, and if they don't do so, they're a bad killer. And the problem with that statement, in that you're saying that the only counter to Self-Care is to tunnel a single Self-Care user to death, is that the time spent doing so would provide every other survivor with more than enough time to escape. Which essentially translates to saying 'only bad killers don't throw the match or get more than one kill'. Which is just, plainly and simply, stupid.

There are two main problems with limiting the uses of Self-Care, balance-wise (rather than realistically, as I mentioned the realistic concerns with this route of nerfing Self-Care earlier in this post). The first, is that not many heals are necessary anyways. If you consider a survivor Self-Care'ing after each hooking and having one spare Self-Care, that's more than enough healing, more than they'd have needed if they played the match carefully. The second problem with that, is that most effective bodyblocks are done when multiple survivors are doing the bodyblocking. And in this case, those survivors who bodyblocked together would also be in a position to heal each other and not need to dip into their Self-Care charges.

And, on the note of your proposed Sprint Burst rework. And it is a rework, since it's partially a nerf, and it's partially a buff. This would allow Sprint Burst users to make better time around the map without wasting Sprint Burst by running for only 2 seconds, walking, then repeating the process. But, at the same time, it would make survivors more vulnerable to ambush killers. It's definitely an interesting idea, and could be worth implementing into a PTB.

@Kind_Lemon said:
In response to the original post:

While I completely agree on the power of self-care as a time saver to the extreme for survivors, I do not think that self-care's healing speed should be nerfed, although that would be the easy solution. Instead, I would rather the devs implement a new status effect, much like they did with blood lust, where self-caring without a med-kit gives the bloody hands status, which slows down all actions and decreases all skill check zones until either 60 seconds of consecutive actions have been acomplished, or that survivor has either used or been heald by a medkit.

A side note on Small Game: This perk should be changed to show the auras of traps and totems within 8 meters while in a chase. Small Game should be more useful against Hag and Trapper (I've run into more traps due to small game because I thought the ding was for the totem right next to me and not the trap in front of me).

That's an interesting idea.

Though, I have a few questions about it:

By what percentage would action speed be slowed per tier of the perk? By what amount would skill check sizes be reduced? Would the bloody hands status disappear faster under the effects of Vigil? Would there be a quick action where you could use a rag from a medkit to wipe those bloody hands off, or would it only be cleared by fully medkit healing?

Depending on the answers to those questions, it could seem like a solid rework plan for Self-Care.

I may go through the replies to this thread, and take some of the ideas and incorporate them into the OP. Though I'll probably wait for some more replies with more ideas to flow in, to get them all in at once rather than have to do it over and over again and potentially have the thread locked for a while, like it was when it was first posted.

On the note of Small Game, your rework suggestion is actually a reversion to how Small Game used to be (though 6 meters was the range back then), back when the Trapper was the only trapping killer. But the devs nerfed Small Game, because it was essentially a hard counter to a specific killer that made that killer's kit entirely useless. Back in the day, when Saboteur was meta, SaboJakes with Saboteur and Small Game would go around destroying all the Trapper's traps and teabag all the way to the nearest infinite.

Personally, I don't want Small Game reverted back to its former glory. I don't think a perk should guarantee a survivor's safety, and that survivors should have to survey their surroundings carefully at all times, rather than have a perk that takes the thought, awareness, perception, and general skill out of it. This is because traps are easy to spot and easy to predict the location of, so having a perk to do something for you that you could easily do without it, just says you don't want to have to think during a match (against a Trapper or Hag).

@ShrimpTwiggs said:
My idea to change it is a little out there. I would have the survivor running self-care start off with a certain amount of times they can use it, depending on the level of the perk, and they can "recharge" it by performing altruistic actions like unhooks or healing others. There are probably better ways to nerf it, but I thought I'd throw in my thoughts.

Well, there are a few things to hash out with that idea.
-Which scoring events (the full list) would give Self-Care charges?
-How many Self-Care charges would each scoring event give, and how many 'charges' would be comparable to a full heal?
-Would the Self-Care user start the match with Self-Care charges, or only be able to use Self-Care after acquiring more Self-Care charges in the match?

@M2Fream said:
I dont care about the speed. Hell, they could put it up to 75% speed but as long as it is infinate, it is broken. I want dishing out hits to multiple survivors at a time to mean something. 

SC should opperate on a charge system, so here is my change

Self care starts with 4/5/6 charges with a maximum of 8/10/12. where 8 is enough to heal yourself. You can use charges to heal yourself at 60% normal healing speed. If you do not completely heal yourself, the stitching will come undone at 2% per second  or 5% per second while running. You gain 1 charge back every 35/30/25 seconds you spend in the killer's terror radius

Would this idea be like Stakeout, where charges are only acquired while NOT in a chase in the killer's terror radius, or would your suggestion have survivors generating charges in a chase as well?

@Wolf74 said:

@Radiant said:
Nobody uses those, sorry.

We can do this back and forth. No, you are wrong.
I use some of them when I play survivor and I see them used a fair share of the time.
Of course usually it is the "4th slot", because the other 3 are SC, SB, DS.

The proof of the matter is the devs' statistics that they've given out on devstreams about perk usage. If I recall, Empathy and/or Bond are usually on that top 10 list.