Bad Perk University: Self-Care Revisited

Hello class, welcome to Bad Perk University! I'll be your professor for today, and we'll be going over the worst perks The Entity has to offer and see how to make the most out of them. Well, I didn’t think I’d have to talk about this perk again. This is Bad Perks Revisited. The format of this post is going to be a bit different this time around. Since I’ve already talked about this perk in great detail in an old post (the very first in the series even), there’s not as much of a need to go over every detail again. For perks like this that get nerfed in the future after I’ve covered them, I’m going to briefly mention how the perk used to work, what it does at the time of writing, why it was changed in the first place, why it’s bad or worse than before, and what can be done about it to make it better. I have another post in the works for the Calm Spirit change as well, because...I have a few things to say about that one. But for now, it’s time to revisit Self-Care.

How Self-Care used to work was that it allowed survivors to heal themselves without the need for a medkit at 50% the normal healing speed. This meant that while a normal heal took 16 seconds, a Self-Care heal took 32 seconds. If you had a medkit however, it also increased medkit efficiency by 20% when healing yourself with it. It wasn’t always like this, but it’s been this way for the longest time and it was always this way when I first started playing the game.

What Self-Care does now is that it no longer has the medkit efficiency bonus, and the self healing speed was reduced to a mere 35%. This means healing yourself with Self-Care will now take roughly 45 seconds. You could literally do half a generator in that time.

So why was this perk changed? Anyone who’s remotely experienced with the game will tell you that Self-Care is a shadow of its former self, and that it hasn’t been very good for a long time. This is because inexperienced players, or players who know better but don’t care, will attempt to use Self-Care at every opportunity they can, often running to a corner of the map to heal while their teammates are dying on the hook. That’s the common negative stereotype when it comes to Self-Care.

So a lot of players were baffled when it was revealed that Self-Care was going to be further nerfed, with the explanation that the perk had a very high pick rate at high MMR, where players knew when and where to best use Self-Care. Now, I’m not arguing against this reasoning. The fact that Self-Care used to give medkit efficiency was by far the most powerful aspect of the perk. The ability to heal yourself is one of the strongest powers survivors have, as it allows for their teammates to not have to spend time on them and instead focus on generators. My problem is that if the developers acknowledge that healing yourself is very powerful, why didn’t they nerf medkits instead? Why is Circle of Healing still giving fast self-heals to the entire survivor team? You mean to say that perk is still fine because you have to bless a totem first, but Self-Care’s slow but consistent healing warranted changes?

The thing is, after playing around with the nerfed Self-Care, using my usual self healing build of Self-Care, Botany Knowledge (which got a healing speed buff but a medkit efficiency nerf), Desperate Measures and Resilience, I found I was able to get self heals in as quickly as 21 seconds. That’s...not bad I guess. But the important thing to know about this is that I was doing it when I had no other choice, when being healthy was the only way to get out of a sticky situation. My concern is that good players can still make good use of Self-Care (not that they would when Circle of Healing exists), but bad players suffer even more from it. In the worst case scenario, at Tier 1 of the perk, healing yourself takes...64 SECONDS! Holy…

That’s longer than a single hook state! That means if a particularly clueless survivor tries to Self-Care with Tier 1 and their teammate is on second hook stage, that survivor will DIE before the Self-Care user can finish.

But alright, what’s my point? Just don’t do that, right? Most people use Tier 3 of a perk when they can help it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think nerfing Self-Care was missing the bigger picture. Removing the medkit efficiency bonus was a good change, but it’s not because Self-Care was too strong with it, it’s because medkits are too strong. More specifically, medkits heal too quickly. The charges they have are fine, mostly. But with extra charge addons, healing speed addons, the existence of Built to Last, medkits can quickly undo pressure in a way killers can’t always effectively counter, especially not if Circle of Healing is also in play.

So how does one use this new Self-Care? Well, not much has changed really. You basically use Self-Care the way I described in the first post. Run a healing build and bring a medkit. This time, you’re not bringing a medkit to get more use out of it. You’re bringing Self-Care so you can finish healing when the medkit runs out too soon. And it will run out, because you’re using Botany Knowledge. The nice thing is that even if the medkit runs out quicker, you’re still getting lightning fast heals out of it for the duration it lasts. Self-Care is necessary here to be able to finish healing yourself, even if you have charge addons. The strategy hasn’t really changed, it’s just weaker now. That’s the point of a nerf, I suppose. But the problem I mentioned earlier is still present. Experienced players are still going to make SOME use of Self-Care. They might not use it as much because other perks are becoming more appealing, like Off the Record, but those that know what they’re doing will carry on like nothing’s changed. The problem is with new players who are going to sabotage their teammates and get them killed, without them necessarily realizing what they’re doing wrong. The reason players often meme and call Self-Care a killer perk is because wasting that much time healing yourself actually helps the killer more than the survivors, and new players just aren’t going to understand that. If there’s anything in particular that I’d like changed about Self-Care, it’s to get rid of things like this happening.

Closing thoughts, what should be done about this perk? If being able to heal yourself no matter what, without needing a medkit, is truly problematic, then maybe Self-Care needs a rework. Now, I’d prefer if medkits were changed first, that way healing perks could be adjusted accordingly, and maybe Self-Care could even get its 50% healing speed back, but if that’s not going to happen, then maybe we can make Self-Care work differently. My goal with a Self-Care rework is to make it accessible and viable at all levels of play, so it’s useful at high levels and for newer players. To do that, I’d make the self heal a reward for fulfilling a condition, rather than a passive ability. Let’s take one of the most well designed healing perks in the game for inspiration: Inner Healing. That perk rewards you with a fast self heal that ignores healing speed debuffs, in exchange for cleansing 1 of the 5 totems in a map, so you don’t get to do it too often. I think Self-Care should work similarly. Here’s my pitch:

Make it so unhooking a survivor safely activates the perk and lights it up. When the perk is lit, you can start healing yourself without a medkit, and as you do this, the perk depletes until you’ve fully healed yourself one health state. You could make this take like, 25 seconds, so that it’s better than the old Self-Care, but not so strong we end up with people healing themselves mid chase like the old Self-Care that had 80% efficiency. The healing speed can be modified with things that increase healing speed, but it has a limited number of charges that can only be refilled by unhooking another survivor. Effectively, it’s a medkit for a perk. By making Self-Care work like this, it rewards survivors for helping their teammates with a pocket medkit they can use later, and it eliminates the issue of “Self Caring in a corner while your teammate dies on hook”. You want to heal in a corner of the map? You have to earn it first. In other words, the perk would look like this:

After performing a Safe Hook Rescue on another Survivor, Self-Care activates:

When injured, you can heal yourself without a medkit at 50/57/64% the normal healing speed for the equivalent of one health state.

Maybe Self-Care doesn’t need a rework, but I would have preferred a rework in this manner instead of driving an already weak perk further into the ground just because it had an unusually high pick rate. But maybe that’s just me. For now, I guess we just have to live with the fact that new players are going to get their teammates killed for not understanding how to use a perk.