How To Balance Medkits (In My Opinion)
I mentioned this idea in another thread that I made, but I wanted to isolate this idea specifically just to give it a little more focus.
So, it's my opinion that medkits are posing a very specific kind of problem in this game, and it's self-heal speed. Not the speed of healing others, mind, but just for healing yourself- if two survivors are dragged off a generator to heal, I'm okay with them having tools to make that departure more in their favour, time-wise. This is aimed squarely at being able to heal yourself at supersonic speeds and undo a killer's pressure in like, eight seconds.
Medkits are a big part of that, especially now that CoH has been toned back to merely 'too strong' instead of 'absurdly broken', but they're also basically a requirement if you're not playing with a group; you can't always rely on random teammates to heal you, and while you normally do still get healed by randoms, there are key moments where you can't coordinate that and a good method of healing yourself is essential. Medkits are and have always been the best tool for that, and I don't want to take that away from solo-queue players- but something clearly needs to be done.
So, what's to be done? How do you balance the necessity of self-heal sources against the problem that having those sources be too fast causes? It's simple: Slow them down, and buff their charges to compensate.
With that in mind, here's my suggestion: Medkits have way increased charges, but dramatically reduced healing speed increases. When healing yourself, I think somewhere in the realm of two to three heals for a mid-tier medkit sans addons, but a negligible heal speed boost- if there's even one at all. Healing others can grant more speed so they're still useful for doing that whenever one chooses to, but for healing yourself, the tradeoff is high charges for basically no extra speed- no penalty, but not much in the way of extra speed either.
That way they're still balanced compared to other heal sources- it stacks up favourably against Self-Care in terms of speed but you will still run out of charges, and it stacks up neutrally against the totem-based healing perks because it's slower but there's no requirement before you can use it. It's also not too unbalanced from the killer's perspective, because repeated heals is not a problem so long as they aren't super-fast heals.
What do you all think? Did I miss something that'd make this less of a good idea?
Comments
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Definitely the right direction I feel. Obviously the numbers matter but tweaking in this direction is favored.
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I don't think it s a bad change per se but i don't know if you need to compensate med kits at all for nerfing them.
imo the steps that should be done 1 by 1 until medkits are balanced are these:
- remove the self-healing speed bonus on green medkits
- make healing speed increasing addons not work on self heals
- the botany knowledge nerf but only for self-heals
if it is still bad then yea i'd add speed penalties to self healing but increase charges of medkits/increase altruistic healing speeds with medkits.
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"Compensate" may have been the wrong word to use- the point isn't to just "make up for" having nerfed away the healing speed, it's to rebalance medkits as a reliable self-heal that lacks in speed and can run out. In order to do that, you'd have to make sure you can heal more than once off the average medkit- therefore, increase charges.
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ohhh i see.
imo that is a dangerous route to take just because that might just completely delete self-care (as if the devs did not already delete it)
so your idea and mine are these right?:
- make them reliable self-healing options by increasing charges but decreasing self-healing speeds
- strongly decrease self-healing speeds but also strongly increase altruistic healing speeds
I like both ideas, tbh I'd take any idea over current medkits.
If people waste time self healing for a hit I dealt thats good. If people that get unhooked get healed within 4 seconds by a med-kit thats fine by me too. As long as the effiency gets taken away from solo instant healing
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I wouldn't say strongly increase altruistic heals, but having there be a good boost there is a good direction to go. Also, it's only decreasing the boost you'd get from an Emergency Medkit; so, all medkits just flat heal you at base rates, no more.
Self-Care is currently in timeout for crimes of being ran too often over six years, so we'll have to revisit that one when it's learned its lesson.
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lmao in timeout
also this looks like a good first change to see how it'll go. i am in favor of minor nerfs first as long as nerfs keep getting handed out until it is balanced
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