Leave altruistic healing alone
The issue with healing has always been with self-healing with medkits and boon COH, and it is a great thing that they are trying to address this. However, the increase in healing time from 16 to 24s should not apply to altruistic healing.
To understand why, I think it is helpful to think of health states in terms of forgone generator progress and risk.
As of now:
If the update goes live as is, this is what healing would look like:
From analyzing these numbers, we can make several predictions:
- Medkits will save survivors even more time than before, making them even more necessary than before.
- Camping will be more profitable than before. Killers can injure survivors coming for the save, and since it will take survivors a longer time to reset to go back for the save, there is a higher risk of a survivor hitting stage 2/dying and hook trading becomes more necessary.
- Although these changes will make stealth killers stronger, they will undeniably make top-tier killers A LOT stronger. Killers for which inflicting health states is trivial will become much much more oppressive.
- Perks and addons that inflict Mangled and Hemorrhage will undeniably become meta.
I think the most problematic aspects of healing have always been medkits (especially green ones) and boon COH, which allow survivors to split up and save time. Altruistic healing, on the other hand, should in fact be encouraged and should remain unchanged at 16s because
- It is a fair time investment of 32s (36% of gen progress)
- It takes time for survivors to find each other and travel to heal
- It increases the chance of grouping up and allowing killers to pressure multiple survivors at once
Also, if you devs go ahead with this change, please think about reworking Hemorrhage. Even in this boon COH and medkit meta, I have never lost a game as Wraith using Sloppy Butcher and Nurses' Calling to harass and constantly regress healing. I can't even imagine what it would be like to play against that after this patch drops.
Comments
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If someone actually considers taking the entire length of a gen to heal themselves with Self-Care the game should uninstall itself for that player
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No one is really talking about how the change to healing buffs camping, which is something BHVR has said they’re trying to avoid. Lol. Kudos to you for pointing that out, OP.
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This update won't kill medkits.
This will kill altruism. Med kits will be more necessary then ever. And since survivors can't reset. It's everyone by itself, try to gen rush gens and hope you are lucky.
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I have a feeling, especially with SWFs, survivors are going to play like they're against a Plague or Legion. Most will opt out of healing at all and just gen rush, especially since all of the generator regression perks got absolutely gutted. Lots of games are just going to be even more gen-rushy than before.
Some SWFs will probably also designate one of their teammates as a healer. Like, with We'll Make It, Botany Knowledge, maybe COH. So it really, really hurts Solo queue. Which uh, I thought we were in the process of trying to make the game a bit better for them in the first place.
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Keeping the altruistic time investment the same as not a fair time investment, because all the good gen kicking perks got nerfed into the ground, and killers need the slowdown shifted to healing speeds.
It doesn't matter if one type of healing is more problematic than others, because that's not the point. The point is the gen regression slowdown is being shifted to healing speeds, and that requires all healing speeds to be nerfed.
And I don't know why people keep focusing on medkits, when there are a bunch of healing speed perks they could start using. Maybe the solution is healing speed perks are more valuable than before, which would encourage survivors to use different perks, which would be good because it's supposed to be a meta shift.
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What they’ve done is made medkits even more useful basically. They didn’t address the huge efficiency boost of self healing because they made all healing slower
So why would I not keep using them like before? Either that or I’m gonna stay injured all game with adrenaline
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Agreed. Self-heals were a problem, but altruistic healing was not.
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Fun fact: if the killer face camps with sloppy butcher, it takes 60 seconds for the hook stage.
In those same 60 seconds, 2 survivors can heal each other.
Even better (worse), is if someone goes in to use Reassurance and gets hit in the process, it will take 30 seconds to reset to try for the save. The entirety of the Reassurance timer will be spent healing to try and rescue (which takes 2 people).
Face camping with sloppy, deadlock, NOED, no way out is getting a gigabuff with this patch.
Two other 'fun' interactions to consider:
- Sloppy butcher + hex: face the darkness. It is now impossible to heal fully, base kit, without being interrupted by the scream. You have to find the totem. With the medkit change, being interrupted or missing a skill check deletes one heal from the kit entirely (which might be the only heal).
- Pinhead will be miserable with chain hunt. It takes 90 seconds to start the chain hunt. Survivors who heal against a sloppy butcher cenobite will be in an endless loop of heal two survivors in 60s, go for the box to be injured again, repeat.
Edit: autocorrect, added other annoying interactions
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I don't how long you've been playing, so maybe you already know, but this is not the first time BHVR tried to use healing as an alternative slowdown: In 2018 they changed healing from 12s to 16s with the intent to make games longer. It didn't work, good survivors just dropped selfcare and focused on gens. Sure, back then survivors had old ds, iw and dh, but resilience, Adrenalin and sb are still same, so my guess is that good survivors will just do what they did in 2018.
For more mediocre survs who are not good in chase the healing changes will probably hurt, because they need the extra health state, but it's not the mediocre survs that Killers tend to worry about.
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Bhvr had good intentions, but their changes were so rushed and one sided that they miss the mark of the issue and don't see the consequences.
I am so tired of this, feels like the third update in a row where bhvr just does something that with 15 min of reflection you would see the big problems this would create while solving absolutely nothing.
It's so frustrating.
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A lot has changed since 2018, and we deserve to let the full meta shift happen. Game slowdown needs to be shifted to all healing, to encourage killers to chase survivors. The problem we are trying to solve is killers not wanting to chase survivors. The problem isn't whether or not some types of healing are more of an issue than others.
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Absolutely. Funnily enough I've seen more than a couple Fog Whisperers echoing your exact sentiments.
Honestly, less spreadsheets and more time actually playing the game and watching and listening to some of the more unbiased Fog Whisperers would go such a long ways, I feel like.
Especially since I've seen a startling uptake in streams referencing that exact final word you used in your last sentence.
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I understand completely where you are coming from. What I am concerned about this next patch is that the healing regression meta will be significantly more oppressive than the gen regression meta.
Consider the following scenario. You get hit by a killer with Sloppy Butcher. You find a teammate. 20+ seconds through the heal, the killer comes back to harass you and your teammate (not even committing to a chase, just to interrupt the heal), and your 20+ seconds heal (40 seconds of foregone gen progress) regresses to 0 almost immediately. There has been no gen regression (maybe except the 25s incapacitated eruption) that would erase 40+ seconds of gen time in a span of seconds.
Even with the strongest existing healing perks, I'm really not sure if survivors will be able to get heals off fast enough than the killers can dish out health states (or regress heals).
Furthermore, consider scenarios in which killers get cheap and easy hits, like when survivors go for the unhook. I'm not sure if the slowdown that the killers gain (60 seconds of gen time) is in line with the skill and effort it took to get that hit.
Although I see your point as to how the shift to healing slowdown can encourage chases, they can easily be abused. And believe me, they will definitely be abused.
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This is exactly why it won't make it to live. People will showcase how ridiculous it is on the PTB and they'll be forced to reverse course.
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I'm glad you mentioned the impact on camping and hook trading. Even finding someone to heal up with is hard in solo. Extending heal times, and adding in any anti-healing perks the killer chooses to run, and there's little incentive for a killer to leave a hook when everyone is injured. Alot more people are going to die on hook.
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If the new meta shift is overtuned, then it should be live for a while, and adjusted as needed. We shouldn't be trying to revert the altruistic healing speeds, before they've even reach live.
All the slowdown that killers are losing via the gen regression perk nerfs need to go somewhere. We shouldn't try to push the entire healing burden on self heals, so that SWFs can just easy mode bypass the nerfs with their voice comms. The whole point of the survivor HUD was to close the gap between solo q and SWF, so that survivors as a whole can be balanced together. Having healing speed nerfs affect all healing IS balancing all survivors as a whole.
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I expect they'll either leave it as is, since most of the videos from fog whisperers I've seen have praised the healing changes. Or, at best, they'll change it to 20 seconds 'based on feedback'. And sloppy will probably get the 'Thana' treatment two weeks later.
But these are readily apparent consequences of a change like this. Players already do this.
I have to assume they've already considered these situations and decided it was ok on paper. I just very strongly disagree that this is ok, even on paper.
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"Camping will be more profitable than before. Killers can injure survivors coming for the save, and since it will take survivors a longer time to reset to go back for the save, there is a higher risk of a survivor hitting stage 2/dying and hook trading becomes more necessary."
I feel like if you're getting hit, and you go back to reset every time without another survivor there to actually get the save or without trading hooks, I feel like that's just a bad save and the survivor shouldn't have gone for it in the first place.
Could camping actually go down BECAUSE of how survivors can get hit and not reset in a hot sec? There is potential for more targets that are unhealthy now.
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There isn't a 'go back to reset every time'. With sloppy, you get one mistake. If you have to reset even one time, you lose the hook stage entirely because the reset takes 30 seconds. If you can't coordinate that rescue effectively, like say in solo q, someone is almost certain to make one mistake at some point.
Camping is getting the biggest buff since gen speeds increased. Face camping in particular now means you either get a free kill, or get at least 72 seconds of healing slow down as two other people have to commit to being injured.
If you think this will reduce camping, you're completely delusional.
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Why not make medkits the "old toolboxes" for teammate healing? Give them a moderate heal speed increase and lots of charges but disallow or severely limit self healing. Feels really bad having every survivor item category systematically reduced to uselessness.
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Yeah, my only problems with this patch are the base altruistic healing speed changes and the Billy add-on nerf. Billy's add-ons should stay the way they are, and altruistic healing should remain 16 seconds while self healing should be changed to 24 seconds.
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Maybe I'm missunderstanding your answer but it feels like you totally ignored my point, I didn't even mention different types of healing.
I get that you are trying to say we need a different type of game slowdown, but from experience I don't think that healing is the way to go.
I think Killers dislike to chase was mainly a results of the buffs to gen kick perks (Coh and medkits made target switching unappealing but not chase in generell imo) so with them nerfed now that shouldn't be an issue, it would be great though if the Devs would buff perks that reward chase like ruin and Pop again (and the pain res nerf is way to much, but that is besides the point).
With the proposed changes I expect weaker survs to struggle (and not necessarily because the games takes longer but because they die quicker) but strong survivors will just focus on gens, so I don't think this change will improve the game speed on higher levels.
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Where do you want the slowdown time to move to? It's moving away from gen kicking regression, and it has to go somewhere. And trying to shift the burden to only self heals, which SWFs can easily avoid, isn't going to help.
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I actually think this reduces camping as now gen regression perks will slow the gens down significantly less making punishing a camping killer much easier. If a random survivor is just running in alone and getting hit to go back and heal that’s a bad save from the survivor. He should be going in simultaneously with others. To be honest though if he’s camping you should be just pumping gens anyway though and not saving. This change will incentivize less camping as well.
Yes those healing numbers do look rough but the gen regression nerfs offset that a lot. The gen slow down has to come from somewhere. If you don’t want it in healing it’s going to go back to gen regression. At least when it’s in healing it makes gen perks less required on killers which is a good thing as it opens up the meta more.
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Sorry but you're wrong. There are too many ways to heal in DBD currently. Medkits could heal 2-3 times per game and offered very quick heals. Boons added a 5th phantom player to heal anyone in its radius and that broke the game too.
When you look at the DH meta it didn't matter when you got hurt because you had to get hit twice more. It was overall far harder to inflict an injury than it was to heal it.
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I'm not sure that the gen regression perks that synergize well with camping, i.e. Deadlock and DMS, have been affected significantly, save for Pain Res. So I don't think it necessarily means camping is easier to punish. Meanwhile, gen-kicking perks have been nerfed to the ground, so there is not much incentive to go away from the hook and towards the gens to apply them.
A lot of killers I've gone up against who play optimally proxy camp, giving you the illusion that you can go for the save. What ends up happening is I go for the unhook, and I see that the killer is not too close to the survivor, and I try to go for the save. The killer then hits me, and as I try to lead them away from the hook, they do a 180-degree turn and head back to the hook. Meanwhile, the whole time, the other 2 survivor sees that I am not on the gen (signaling that I'm going for the unhook). After I get hit, someone else will have to go in for the save (because healing me would take too long) and find the killer is camping. By then, it'll already be too late and someone will have to go and trade or the hooked survivor will hit second stage.
Also, unless it's a Bubba, it's always going to be optimal to trade instead of letting someone hit second stage or die on second hook. Not going for an unhook to do an additional gen doesn't mean much when someone is going to be quickly out of the game.
In conclusion, I think the changes to altruistic healing speeds will enable camping to be more profitable and easier.
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Well that’s just the thing, these healing changes DO incentivize the killers to leave the hook and pressure other survivors as now their injures matter and they are more likely to have shorter chases since more people will be injured and DH is basically gone.
This said, if the healing changes do stick I would be in favor of nerfing other gen slow down perks like Deadlock, Jolt ect since the “slow down” would have been transferred to healing.
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Did you even read my post? I've said the nerf to boon COH is good and justified, and I think it's good that medkit self-heals are increased to 24s and capped at 2 heals. Nerfing self-healing of all kinds is good for the game. I only want altruistic healing speeds to remain at 16s.
Also, if you want to complain about DH, there are hundreds of other threads for that - not this one.
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I agree that the incentives ARE there to take chase. At the same time, because injuries DO matter, there would be an even greater incentive to just proxy camp and get free hits/hooks. So yes, while there are more choices a killer could make, nothing really stops them from taking the path of least resistance. Also, with the DH nerfed this way, there are disincentives for killers to allow survivors to go for the unhook.
I personally feel that any amount of nerfs to the remaining few gen slowdown perks will not be able to compensate for the 50% increase in basekit healing. I'd be happy to nerf medkits and boon COH and keep pain res, cob, and overcharge the way it is rather than facing a healing regression meta.
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I'd rather have a meta where injuries matter, regardless if I'm facing solo q or SWF, so I can be encouraged to chase people. The current healing speeds (altruistic healing included) are way too fast, and it often feels like a much better decision to stay in one place, than it is to chase after survivors that want to run too far away from the unfinished generators.
If altruistic healing stays the same, then injuries don't matter. I usually don't know if I'm against a SWF, and I need to assume every match will have lots of altruistic healing. There are so many times where I have Nurse's Calling equipped, and altruistic healing is so fast that I can't even get to the survivors before the healing is done. Altruistic healing speeds are a problem, and they need nerfing.
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I don't think there's a "go back and reset everytime". That's a claim the original poster mentioned. I think if there is a scenario where a survivor coming for an unhook gets hit and just leaves to heal, they aren't performing a good save at all.
Why do the two other survivors have to commit to being injured?
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-"Did you even read my post?"
You want team members healing each other to be faster than self healing. Self Care already got a slower heal speed nerf but for six years it had the same mechanical advantage as two people healing. It used the same "time" resources for the team if travel time were zero but if there was travel time then SC was actually more efficient.
-"the increase in healing time from 16 to 24s should not apply to altruistic healing."
Yes it should. Why? Self Care already has a built in penalty. Survivors can bring We'll Make it to heal everyone faster. In fact if this patch made a "Well Make it" meta then you could always get fast heals after an unhook.
There is a perk that already makes healing other people better - maybe you should use it :
The devs are basically making healing be the "second objective" everyone has asked for since the beginning.
- You can play the game hurt and risk getting caught but do the gens faster but you might die faster too.
- You can slow the game down and heal but gens will take longer.
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I think that the current meta where it feels like injuries don't matter is enabled by boon COH and medkits, which deserve to be nerfed. But it's not so much altruistic healing speeds in my opinion. There are already significant downsides to altruistic healing, including the foregone gen progress of 32 seconds, not to mention finding and traveling to a teammate to heal you, which is not only time-consuming but also exposes you to the risk of running into the killer. Furthermore, it encourages survivors to group up, which makes them more vulnerable to killers pressuring 2 survivors at once. The only thing that differentiates SWF with respect to altruistic heal is the coordination of where to meet for the heal. Maybe the issue with the lack of Nurse's Calling value is a wrong prediction of where the survivors might be grouping up to heal.
At any rate, I feel like the nerfs to COH and medkit self-heal speeds are sufficient, and you will witness a huge difference even if basekit altruistic healing speeds remain at 16s.
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The change in 2018 was a generell nerf and it did nothing, so I don't believe that targeting any aspect of healing is going to help (even though I agree that coh and medkits definitely deserved nerfs), that's why I said that I want slowdown perks that reward killers for their actions (chasing, hooking..) buffed again.
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"You want team members healing each other to be faster than self-healing".
Yes. You are not considering the fact that as of now, 2 team members healing for 16s is equivalent to 32s of gen progress. After the change, 2 team members healing for 24s is equivalent to 48s of gen progress. On the other hand, if the teammate heals themself with the new medkit, they will be spending 24s for an equivalent of 24s of gen progress. Even if you kept altruistic healing times to 16s, self-healing with the new nerfed medkit is still more efficient.
The reason why I questioned whether you read my post is that you completely missed the fact that I support the nerfs to boon COH and medkits, the 2 primary ways that survivors heal themselves. Yet, you disagreed with gusto even though I am literally saying the same thing as you.
"Self Care"
First of all, I don't care for Self-Care and I never have. Self-Care is irrelevant. Second of all, I am advocating for altruistic heals to remain at 16s. This literally does not apply to Self-Care. Self-healing via medkits and Self-Care should be changed to 24s basekit speed (meaning I'm okay if Self-Care gets nerfed from 45.7s to 68.6s. Lastly, this really proves to me that you are misunderstanding this whole conversation.
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"the increase in healing time from 16 to 24s should not apply to altruistic healing."
Yes it should. Why? Self Care already has a built in penalty. Survivors can bring We'll Make it to heal everyone faster. In fact if this patch made a "Well Make it" meta then you could always get fast heals after an unhook.
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Sorry, I don't really understand how the presence of We'll Make It and Autodidact in the game justify nerfing altruistic heals. The logic there is equivalent to saying that gens should be 60s because killers have slowdown perks like Deadlock. Like what?
"Secondary Objective"
Yes, I agree with you on this point. What I'm saying is that without boon COH and with nerfed medkits, this secondary objective would already take significantly longer to achieve. There is no need to nerf altruistic healing because there is already significant foregone gen progress, a time investment in finding and travelling to your teammate, and a risk due to grouping up.
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What's the post title:
Leave altruistic healing alone
-"Medkits will save survivors even more time than before, making them even more necessary than before."
While medkits will likely be more necessary than before they will not be healing for 8 seconds anymore. So the claim of them saving more time is just not true.
Compare 10.7 seconds to 45.7 seconds (medkit vs self care).
Compare 10.7 seconds to 16*2 seconds (medkit vs team healing)
And After
Compare 24 seconds to 24*2 seconds (Medkit vs team healing)
10.7-45.7= 35 seconds. (medkit vs self care before)
48-24 = 24 seconds (medkit vs team healing after)
68.6-24= 44.6 seconds (medkit vs self care after)
The take away message here is that self care is getting nerfed to oblivion. This is fine because infinitely healing invalidates pressure from the killer.
-"Camping will be more profitable than before"
Gens will fly like they always have - maybe even faster. In the current meta you can blast the hell out of a generator with Overcharge +CoB and then use a scourge hook. None of those perks will be worth it after the patch.
What you will see more of is : slugging and easy unhook denial. You are going to get severely punished for playing hurt. So you can blast the gens but you'll pay for it when you need to make the unhook.
The survivor team will always have to keep one player unhurt to be able to unhook or then the killer can camp out a hook state.
Because healing is the new secondary objective - this will take up lots of time.
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Mate, why are you still on about Self Care? It is currently ass and it will continue to be ass. If you still see Self Care in your lobbies and are triggered by it, ngl your mmr might just be low.
I’ve already crunched the numbers in my original post, there’s no need to regurgitate this stuff to me.
The basis for which all healing should be compared to is altruistic heals, and not Self-Care.
Even after this upcoming nerf, medkits will save 24s, up from 16s before.
I don’t know what we are debating about anymore. I don’t even know what your point is, it just seems like you’re talking completely past me.
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I've played many games where zero people had COH and zero people had medkits. And injuries didn't feel like they mattered in those games. Altruistic healing, without a medkit, is the primary method of healing, so it needs the full nerf.
I don't know why people keep focusing on comparing self and altruistic medkit speeds. I've been healed many times by people holding medkits, and it's so very rare that they actually use the medkit on me. Medkits are a limited resource, and will be even more limited after the meta shakeup #2, which means altruistic healing without a medkit, will still be the primary healing source.
And it doesn't matter if altruistic healing has downsides. Killers are getting HUGE nerfs in their gen kick regression perks, and that slowdown time needs to be moved to EVERY GAME. And every game doesn't have COH or medkits in them.
And again, I won't notice huge differences in every game, if basekit altruistic healing speeds remain at 16s, because some games are 100% altruistic healing.
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Just wanna say nice work on the tables. Now I don't have to do the math myself :)
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I like how again no one mentions Inner Healing. Good, that's 5 potential quick heals for me.
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