Make Self-Care and Hex: Ruin Built in Perks!

@Wolf74

Hits are worthless when they don't buy you time and any progress gained from them can be reverted an infinite number of times without any drawbacks.

Isn't this exactly how it should be?
Imagine being hit, being able to escape and still losing to it based on that fact. Why bother escaping form the killer at all?

Of course you'd still try, but now you're punished for playing well.
A hit should be a killers gate-way to downing a survivor. If a killer fails to do so, then that survivor shouldn't be punished for that disproportionally and (together with an earlier mentioned suggestion) even further cripple late-game mechanics.

If we'd remove self-care for a moment, then you'd see the consequences:

Healing at 2 or 1 might already be impossible, meaning that at this point of the game, there's no more point in playing. You already have everything against you, either that or you're steamrolling the killer to the point the killer feels bullied.

This creates both sides of the extreme.

As you see, all of this results from the community being unable to see the underlying effects of all the changes they propose:

They don't advocate for balance, they advocate to make low-survivor teams weaker while barely touching 4 survivor teams, meaning that the ENTIRE GAME becomes dependent on securing the first kill.
As linked in the 3 video's shown, or basically any game you can find about DBD, you will see the same happening.

That way the killer can only put pressure on one survivor at a time and no one is "wasting time" searching for teammates to get healed and everyone just runs to some area that is either void of gens or full of looping spots and the killer basically has to drop the chase to keep the "map pressure". That way gives a "free heal".

Are you really sure this is an issue with healing? I'd invite you to think again. The problem that we see here is caused by the Death-Efficiency curve, which in short means that early game-stall mechanics are futile, where as late-game mechanics are drowningly strong.
The problem of Gen-rushing is caused by this same Death-Efficiency problem.

Healing is only related in as so far it's something that allows survivors to do something slightly faster, but being able to do things faster is still not the problem.
That would otherwise make everything part of the problem: Toolboxes, generator-efficiency increasing perks, exhaustion perks, yadda yadda.

As obvious as Toolboxes appear to be part of the Gen-Rushing problem, they really aren't. Neither is healing or any of such nature.

The only thing that Self-care does is lessen the Genrushing problem, not insofar that it would nerf survivors in their current state, but because it strengthens the power of lower-survivor count teams versus high surivivor count teams, which allows us for better tools for balance.

If low-survivor count teams cannot survive, than that means that all balance changes must revolve around the initial push, meaning that we MUST assume 4 players alive for the match to realistically progress.
It's this design philosophy that causes Gen-Rushing and as contradictory as that might sound, making self-care part of the base kit is1 step in the direction of solving the genrushing problem, which is another child of the death-efficiency problem.

@HuN7r3sS said:
It's nice to dream, but I don't think any perk should be base except maybe Kindred

We already have quite some perks that are part of the base kit right?

Perk 1: Your ability to heal teammates
Perk 2: Gain a notification when a generator is finished and locate the exit gates.
Perk 3: Gain a notification when a survivor is hit, hooked or died.
Perk 4: Your ability to vault windows
Perk 5: Your ability to throw pallets
Perk 6: Your ability to recover independently to 95% when in the Dying State
Perk 7: The ability to get off a hook with 3*4% chance

Without free perks the game would be pretty #########.
The only difference is that they gave these perks to us for free from the start.

@HuN7r3sS

Are you saying that game mechanics are perks? Like is hitting a perk, and carrying? These are just the mechanics that the game functions on, not perks

And if Self-Care was introduced in the base kit of the survivors you would say the same about self-care.

Or taking this, this is what our conversation would've looked like:

Me: You should be able to heal your teammates without a perk.
You: Survivors shouldn't have those perks for free! THAT'S What med kits are for!

Us currently:
Me: You should be able to heal yourself without a perk.
You: Survivors shouldn't have those perks for free! THAT'S what healing your teammate is for!

@BACKSTABBER said:
self-care should be removed, the only way to heal yourself should be with a medkit or by allies

the ruin maybe is ok as it is or maybe needs a buff like 2 totems to be destroyed

Why not remove being healed by allies as well?

After all, doesn't that negate much of the damage a hit of a killer would do, making their hits less meaningful or completely negligible? Didn't that create the infinite healing problem that we(not me) tried to solve?

Med-Kits would be the solution. So why stop at self-care?

Hits are not irrelevant because Survivors can heal. Hits are irrelevant because healing effectively removes every penalty you incurred from getting hit, and you can do so an unlimited number of times. There is no penalty for losing chases over and over again on the Survivor side like there is on the Killer side.

So your solution is to bully low-survivor count teams, requiring 4 man teams to be buffed worsening the gen-rushing problem?

EDIT: Hit's are your tool to down a survivor. It's just that you believe it should be used for different things. There is no need for hits to be more than just that: hits.

No, my solution is to actually punish Survivors who can't win chases. I want Survivors to want to avoid getting hit because hits are a threat instead of a short-term inconvenience.

Survivors who can't win chases aren't really bothered by your approach. Either by the time your effect starts to become burdensome they already rushed out of the gates with all, or if your effect becomes burden-some then some people already have died and the survivors that now deal with your effect already are in the worst possible spot.

Because there is now a tool that makes a survivor's life harder when they get hit, the game balances around that:

1. You buffed solo-loopers that loop for the longest amount of time (with a gen-rush)
2. You nerf more interactive gameplay and punish the noobies.

Guess where those type of design decisions take us.

Making the game better would be to make healing easier for lower-count survivors and harder for higher count survivors. No the opposite way around.

We've done the opposite for years and nobody is happy with the course of that.

So you're saying this change won't affect Survivors who can't win chases (i.e.: newbies), but you also say that's a bad thing. Make up your mind, dude.

What I say is that this would punish low survivor count teams predominantly, just like every terrible balance proposal ever posted of this forum.

And that if you even believe that healing is the underlying issue here, you should at least try something that screws every survivor count category over equally, let alone curved reversely.

It's very easy to detect a terrible balance idea in the game DBD is, because they always follow one rule:
They celebrate the initial push and punish the late-game disproportionally.

Your idea jumps right into that.

To make some progression here:
Let me ask you, why do you think self-care-healing is a problem?

There is no penalty for losing chases over and over again on the Survivor side like there is on the Killer side.

Well, you haven't lost yet have you?

Survivors have gained up to 96 seconds (3*32 being the ideal scenario where each of them is working on a generator).
Hits are worthless when they don't buy you time and any progress gained from them can be reverted an infinite number of times without any drawbacks.

So the survivors can still progress the game after being hit and managing to escape. Why is this a problem?

The biggest (and only) drawbacks are the noise you make, the blood trail, and the fact that an additional hit will put you in the dying state. This can all be reversed as long as you're healed, and you can always be healed an unlimited number of times.

So there is a penalty. You are now ready to be downed.
But you could get out of it an infinite amount of times. Well, why is this a problem?

Hits are not irrelevant because Survivors can heal. Hits are irrelevant because healing effectively removes every penalty you incurred from getting hit, and you can do so an unlimited number of times. There is no penalty for losing chases over and over again on the Survivor side like there is on the Killer side.

So healing-speed is too short? But there's still the infinite heal with teammate healing and they can be just as effective, even worse so with SWF.
There is no penalty? We already know the penalty. Losing the chase? The survivor hasn't lost yet.

So what really is the problem?

That the killer can't down people?

That the killer doesn't have the time to down people?

That the killer should be able to win the match through just smacking them and letting them escape?

That the survivors can keep up the game after repeatedly winning against the killer?

Are we talking about something win-rate related or is it just your ideological stance on what you think hitting should be?

What really is the problem?

@powerbats

Yes since Franklins doesn't exist to remove said med kits and 4 solo players would be required to run bond and or Pharmacy. Your solo teammates are potatoes well sucks to be you in need of heals, someone wants to troll you for w/e reason well you're screwed.

Exactly. It would be an unhealthy form of dependancy that disproportionally rewards SWF's against Solo's.

It won't change the core issue of Ruin which is it's either cleansed really quick or it never gets touched and the good survivors just power through it.

The age old question of inconsistency and rank-differences.

I tried to tackle both with the in-built version of Ruin, with the inconsistency factor being targeted predominantly.
And the rank-differences partly as good players will have the 10 skill-checks last through their game.

What do you think of it balance wise?