Pharmacy Got Gutted Over The Years...
Of all perks you see get talked about, Pharmacy is probably the perk you never heard about or cared about.
Pharmacy USE to provide a constant increase to chest searching speed, and the first chest opened would give you an Emergency Medkit.
In Patch 6.1.0, Pharmacy was changed to only activate while injured, but you can get multiple Emergency Medkits in a single match. The ability to search chests faster was changed to only apply while injured (and getting only Emergency Medkits while injured), making this perk's niche (searching chests faster) be pointless for chest builds, it only "viable" as a self-healing perk.
Along with this, in the same patch (Patch 6.1.0), Botany Knowledge, a perk that was common to see with Pharmacy since it granted increased healing speed and Medkit efficiency, was changed to have a healing inefficiency on Medkits, making it only useful in self-heal builds that dont rely on a Medkit.
Furthermore, as time went on, the Emergency Medkit has gotten worse. In Patch 6.7.0, Medkits universally had their self-healing nerfed. Even if you managed to search a chest to get the Emergency Medkit, the heal (including the chest search time) would take forever compared to other ways of healing.
In Patch 7.6.0, Strength in Shadows was added, which grants Survivors the ability to self-heal in basement at 70% speed; when paired with Botany Knowledge (which does not synergize with Pharmacy after Patch 6.1.0), this can be increased to 120% speed, faster than a standard Medkit, and effectively marking the end of Pharmacy since it's self-healing was pointless.
On top of all of this, with Patch 8.2.0 we got Dracula, which has perks that actively discourage searching chests. While we already had Franklin's Demise or Sloppy Butcher to make Pharmacy worse, Dracula's perks directly make chest searching take more time and punish the Survivor for engaging with chests.
And generally the landscape of the game and the meta has pushed the game into a direction where Pharmacy is useless. There are better perks now. And the game has pushed itself into a direction where you rarely have time to do side objectives, leading to Pharmacy often just being detrimental to your matches since getting value takes too much time away from Generators.
This perk USE to be usable, it had a niche that made it fun to run. Now it is useless, and nobody cares or talks about it and it actually makes me sad since this use to be one of my favorite perks.
#JusticeForPharmacy
Comments
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I forgot Pharmacy existed till you just mentioned it lol
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Im not surprised. This perk was not popular to begin with, despite not having a bad effect, it was generally always overshadowed by other perks but did have a niche. The issue is through direct changes and indirect changes, it lost what niche it had, and it's effect has gotten worse and worse as power-creep has made other perks better and better.
Nobody is using Pharmacy nowadays, and the only usage rate it has is solely from Adepts. This perk is beyond dead, it was killed and rolled through the mud several times.
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Funnily enough, I bought the ANOES Chapter together with the base game, so I did get to use Pharmacy throughout the years.
It was never as strong as other perks, but at least back then there was a reason to it, but now there just isn't.
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i used to farm green medkits with it. the perk's death was inevitable with the downfall of op green medkits.
i think it should give a green med kit once and have a secondary (strong and consistent) functionality on top, just like scavenger and residual manifest. i don't think making the faster opening a permanent effect would save the perk.
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I imagine a permanent aura reveal of yourself to all injured survivors (like a reverse empathy) could have its uses, especially for certain archive challenges in solo.
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Empathic Connect already exists. Which is funny because it got buffed as well and everyone either forgot about it or complained since the aura reading effect was used by some players to sandbag. 💀
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To be fair, I forget Yoichi exists rather frequently (I don't have an excuse)
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I have been using it for when i ran out of medkits 😁
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I remember using old pharmacy as a new potato survivor years ago. Good times
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I remember a post which suggested that Pharnacy could give you the item equivalent of a syringe. An interesting idea, to say the least.
Edit: Both @ReverseVelocity and @jesterkind made a post with a suggestion to change Pharmacy this way.
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The pharmacy nerf in 6.1.0 was confusing at best. Like you said, this perk has been hit directly and indirectly several times, and already suffers from the fact that chests are largely a waste of time.
Forcing you to waste time while injured makes this borderline a killer perk at this point. Unfortunately I don't think this is on their radar, since even the player base seems to forget this perk exists.
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I really do hope they look at this perk and revert some of the changes directly made to it while buffing it to make it more in line to what it originally was.
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I really liked using it just for the chest speed boost when this nerf happened they should’ve buffed plunderers with a speed boost
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I'd like to see old Pharmacy back. That standard chest speed increase and green medkit find, instead of just when you're injured, was so much better. Sure, it might make those chest searching perks stronger, but whatever.
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I don't see a reason to take this perk over Plot Twist 😣
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Or Strength in Shadows, or Self-care + Botany, or Inner Strength, or even just a medkit.
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I don't know what are they gonna change in pharmacy but I hope these tweaks are more meaningful so it's gonna be at least usable
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I'd rather run self-care than pharmacy because I solo queue and you can't always rely on your teammates to heal you. Especially if they're a SWF group.
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Pharmacy used to be a staple for my Lisa
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Botany + strength in the shadows is 105% speed not 120%
Base healing speed is 100% add botany its 150% then multiply by the 70% penalty (1.50*0.7) to get a final healing speed of 105%
Anyways for pharmacy you could just have the perk create a temporary item that is equivalent to an old emergency medkit (+50% self heal speed and 16 charges with no self heal charge penalty)
then change whatever activation condition for it to be how you want it
1 stack always activates on first open
1 stack always activates when injured
always activates
always activates while injured ect
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Pharmacy is the worst survivor perk in the game right now
No reason to run Pharmacy if you can run Self Care or Strenght in Shadows
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