Pharmacy Rework

At the cost of requiring you to find, open, and rummage chests, of which there are always a limited number.

If you have time to do all of that without being interrupted, then you'd have had time to use any other self heal too. I could see more than one being OP, so I could see it being downgraded to a one-use perk, but I do strongly believe that the only way to make Pharmacy even slightly worth running these days is for it to give you a heal that both isn't a medkit, and is stronger than a medkit.

Otherwise, why not just bring the item with some actual supporting perks?

I think that'd make sense, right? Each player would get their own instance of the perk to use, otherwise it'd be too up to chance.

As to Inner Healing, there are enough differences to make them sidegrades, in my opinion. Inner Healing has more synergies and doesn't steal your item slot, whereas Pharmacy here would be harder to synergise with since chests aren't generally worth it and would require use of your item slot which makes trying for chest builds even harder. That, on top of three chests versus five totems.

Inner Healing still has the "not everyone can run it and get full value" issue, but that's separate from this discussion, I think.

The actual vaccine animation is about five seconds, iirc, and there's an addon that can bump that up by another five.

This'd need to be tested, but I feel like it'd be kind of hard to stand still for five seconds in a chase to use this that way. The actual syringe only requires about one second or so, right? Enough time for the prompt to show up.

Pretty much, yeah - and there wouldn't even be anything stopping Pharmacy from using a longer variation of it, if I am wrong about how long the vaccine animation is specifically.

It's my opinion that SiS and IH are about where self heal perks should be, balance wise. Both are limited in terms of time, Inner Healing requiring a totem to be found and cleansed before being static in a locker and Strength in Shadows requiring you to run to the basement as well as being slower than default heal speed without Botany, and IH is limited in terms of uses, too.

With the right supporting perks, you can make both genuinely strong and reliable, but they'll always require something more from you than just starting to heal.

That's why I think this version of Pharmacy would work. It's meaningfully limited in terms of how many times you can use it, and has roughly comparable time investments to those other tools too. You wouldn't be able to use it to delete killer pressure on you as many times as you wanted, which was the problem with old healing, but it'd be more desirable than someone else healing you in a lot of scenarios, which is kind of required for a limited-use perk.

I don't think that's true at all.

For starters, I don't think the perk would've given you the only medkit explicitly designed to heal yourself if it was supposed to be for healing your team. That alone says to me that we're supposed to consider Pharmacy an emergency heal for yourself, not a way of healing your team faster.

Second, when they changed it in 6.1.0, the little joking flavour text they put in the changelog was "try stealing my medkit now, Meg" which implies that they wanted to make it LESS likely for Pharmacy's medkit to go to someone else instead of you.

Pharmacy is supposed to compete with self heal perks. It's just not good at it, and never has been.

I went back to that dev update to go reconfirm, and it reads like this:

Considering the two options presented are "hope nobody takes it" and "hide it", I think it's fair to say Pharmacy is considered a self-healing perk first and foremost, with the possibility of altruistic healing just being only that, a possibility. The focus is still on you getting to use your medkit on yourself, after all.

It's still important to note that, at the time this update was written, the perk still gave you a green medkit, the only one with a self-heal bonus.

As an aside, it's not like it matters. As an altruistic healing perk in a SWF, Pharmacy is still excessively mediocre and not worth running over much better options since it still requires a lot of prep-time for a medkit that isn't any better than any other medkit these days. It still needs to be buffed, and making it more focused on self-healing would still be a way of doing that.

Personal judgement based on my own experience with it, my overall understanding of the game outside of my own matches, and a little bit of community feedback.

I do go on to provide my reasoning in the post, talking about its various incarnations and their place in the wider game.

If the goal is to get your teammates healed, there are a lot of better options. Botany Knowledge, We'll Make It, Desperate Measures, even Circle of Healing itself works better as a zone of keeping your teammates healed than you personally spending a whole lot of time unlocking various chests just so your teammates can get a slower heal than if you'd not spent the time at all and healed them directly.

That's if we're assuming you want your teammates healed, too. If we're just looking at what's stronger than 24 second self heals, then 22 second self heals (Strength in Shadows) or a 20 second disjointed self heal (Inner Strength, 12 seconds cleansing and 8 seconds in a locker) would both count. Whether it's considered an altruistic heal or a self heal, Pharmacy just doesn't stack up against the other options.

Medkits are still very good, yes, but they're not that good. The old medkits, absolutely, the old Emergency Medkit was flat out broken, and even an old regular medkit would've made what you're describing only kind of weird instead of a flat waste of time. New medkits, though? Those heals are already slower than if you'd just healed them outright, and that's not counting all the time you spent unlocking those chests.

The only benefit to what you're describing is that teammates don't need to be near you to heal, but that brings us back to the age-old problem with this perk: They can just bring themselves a medkit and it'd be better than relying on Pharmacy. It's a fine niche tactic for hyper coordinated SWFs, but even in that context it's worse than a lot of other options- and a perk only being good in that context would still warrant changes even without that.

Pharmacy is weak and undesirable either way, and since it's pretty clearly meant to be a self heal perk, that's where I'd like to see it improved.

Yes, those perks require two survivors to heal, but the actual time investment would be so much lower that it's much stronger.

What you're describing is spending an insane amount of time running around the map opening chests just so everyone's heal can be slower than you healing them to begin with, after you've spent all that time setting it up. Medkits aren't fast anymore, this time investment doesn't pay off.

Even if what you're describing were as strong as you're describing it, wouldn't that still be a good reason to rework it? To make it so that it's not something SWF can abuse, and also making it so solo queue can benefit from it just as much?

Two people could run Pharmacy to open chests twice as fast… or one person could run current Circle of Healing to get vastly more efficient heals for less prep time.

Two people could run Pharmacy to open chests twice as fast… or everyone could just bring a medkit with two heals and get the same effect for zero prep time.

Two people could run Pharmacy to open chests twice as fast… or two people could run We'll Make It and get much better healing efficiency overall.

The fact remains that prep time like that only pays off if the resulting heal is SHORTER than default, but the heal you get from a medkit is LONGER than default. Medkits are good specifically because of the flexibility and lack of investment that comes with them. You just have the medkit, from the start of the trial, and can use it whenever you need. They're also good because their only "decent" baseline can be improved, via addons and perks, which doesn't come into play with Pharmacy here.

Even when medkits were busted, Pharmacy wasn't appealing because having to go find and search a chest for an item you could just bring in yourself was an unnecessary extra step. Now that medkits aren't busted, it's honestly detrimental, whether the heal goes to you or to your teammate.

It's not like the ACTUAL situation old Circle of Healing enabled, where everyone's healing was significantly faster than someone else healing them due to stacking CoH with their (old) medkits or something like Botany. If everyone was forced to actually use CoH's 22 seconds ish as their heal every time, the perk never would've been as huge a problem as it was, because that's only "decent". A version of that, but with a slightly longer heal, way less flexibility, and way more prep time, is flat out bad.

Plus, I'll direct you again to the question I asked in the last post: Isn't that still worth fixing, even if everything I'm describing were somehow wrong? Isn't it bad for a perk to only be useful in hyper coordinated SWF groups?

In order:

1: No, I don't think that's accurate, most survivor perks are perfectly usable in solo queue.

However, if that WERE accurate… does it become okay all of a sudden? Isn't it still a problem for solo queue players to not be able to make use out of perks like this? Isn't it a problem for a perk to be innocuous in solo queue but broken in SWF?

2: I feel like I already addressed this, but self healing WAS the problem with old CoH. It just wasn't CoH ALONE that caused the problem. The issue with that perk was that a very small extra investment (a medkit, and maybe Botany if you're feeling fancy) made CoH a station for ultra-fast self heals that were significantly faster than someone else healing you.

Self healing is problematic when it's FAST. It's not problematic when, like with medkits, Strength in Shadows, and Inner Strength, it's SLOWER than someone else healing you.

As an aside, we're not talking about solo queue in this discussion, we're talking about SWF. You're contending that Pharmacy is a top tier source of healing for SWFs, right? That's why I bring up that perks like We'll Make It and Circle of Healing are significantly better for SWFs. They're also not actually that bad for solo queue because the problem is lack of coordination rather than time inefficiency, but we're not talking about that here.

3: To address your last part about Pharmacy being comparable to old CoH: Only if you view CoH used ON ITS OWN, which it wasn't before and wouldn't have been particularly problematic if it were. Old CoH, meaningfully and consistently, provided FASTER self heals than someone else healing you. Medkits provide SLOWER heals.

The prep time of CoH was considered acceptable and even strong because it paid for itself by making subsequent heals faster. It still does, if you're in a SWF, it's a very very good perk if you have the coordination to use it. What you're describing is putting in more prep time than old or current CoH to make everyone heal slower.

If you put LESS prep time into using a perk like WMI or CoH, while in a coordinated SWF, time spent healing overall goes down, considerably. If you put prep time into opening every chest on the map with Pharmacy, in a coordinated SWF who then use those medkits to self heal, time spent healing overall goes UP.

I mean, it sounds like you're agreeing with me now, so you'll have to forgive me for asking for more clarification.

That makes it sound like it's a good idea to start changing some things. If a perk is only even potentially useful for those in a super coordinated four-stack, AND people in that very specific configuration have no real reason to want to run it even then because it's heavily outclassed by a wealth of other options, it kinda sounds like the perk is operating in a pretty lacklustre state and could use an overhaul.

For instance, a rework that allows it to better fulfil its intended role as an emergency self-heal by uncoupling it from medkits and bringing more unique, evocative flavour to its use.

I strongly feel that no players, SWF or solo queue, would use Pharmacy this way if all that changes is that they can see the aura. It's still a waste of their time compared to almost any other healing option, altruistic or solo.

For the record, this isn't an instant heal, it's a slightly faster syringe that requires both opening a chest and rummaging it before you can even do the animation to start the timer. It's not instant like Adrenaline, and it's also not instant to start like a syringe.

Pharmacy has prep time: You need to find and open chests, and I'm pitching adding rummaging to that too.

In order for the perk to be viable after the prep time, it MUST provide a heal that's faster than options which don't require prep time, IE, medkits. The only exception to this was old Circle of Healing, which had its own unique approach + was broken because it provided WAY faster heals anyway.

The only two ways to make Pharmacy's current design halfway appealing is to either have it buff medkits directly (a terrible idea for a wealth of reasons) or to make it provide a heal that isn't tied to a medkit + is faster than a medkit to counteract the extra time investment. I lean towards the latter, obviously.

As an aside, I don't want it to be only useful or viable for SWFs, I want it to be useful for solo queue as well.