Why the needless Thanatophobia nerf? (Would like dev response)

Levitika
Levitika Member Posts: 237
in General Discussions

I'm genuinely curious as to why BHVR thinks that increasing the Thanatophobia perk's percentages by 1% justifies removing the heal slowdown to prevent a (as they put it) "lose/lose scenario".

Let's do some math here. Base healing speed is 16 seconds. With current Thanatophobia's 16% slowdown, this bumps it up to 18.56 seconds. Two and a half seconds is not crippling by itself. Stack this with the Mangled effect for 40%, you're up to 21.76s. That's a bit more oomph, but now you've used half your perks for this. Run this with Coulrophobia, you're up to 86% slower, or 29.76s. Now that's definitely painful, but not only is it unrealistic (you'd have to keep people injured within your TR the entire time, something only two killers can do without Dark Devotion), but you'd also have to devote 3 perk slots to it, essentially devoting your entire playstyle to relying on preventing them from healing, AND this is assuming none of them have medkits or healing perks.

Now. Say that the new Thanatophobia kept the healing debuff. This would only bump it up to 19.2 seconds by itself, 22.4s paired with Mangled, and 30.4 with both and Coulrophobia. That's an extra 0.64 seconds across the board. Not a significant increase by any means... and this is assuming that again, none of them have medkits or healing perks.

If a Survivor just ran Botany Knowledge, it would negate both forms of Thanatophobia completely, and negate Thana+Sloppy down to just 3%/7% slower healing. If you run Botany Knowledge and Desperate Measures, then it negates Thana+Sloppy+Coulrophobia completely, and makes the new version slow you down only 1%. (Botany+max Desperate Measures clocks in at 89% faster heals, for reference). One could also just use We'll Make It, which trumps all healing slowdown. Or For The People, or any number of options.

So where exactly is the "lose/lose" scenario, outside of a situation where survivors literally cannot heal, such as being Broken? It's unrealistic to expect an average Killer to focus that hard on an anti-heal build, but Survivors having a medkit with speed addons/healing perks is both astoundingly common and offers tons of options for counterplaying this.

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