Unnatural Healer, do you think its OP?

[DemonchanSama (Lilyia)]

I personally feel like Unnatural Healers are really strong for only 5 days, free healer mech serum every 5 days and the only side effect is a mutation to the body part, which can just be amputated and re-healed later.

Do you feel that preventing the organ failures of the healer is enough justification for this ability? Generally, as long as it isn't the brain, or heart, you can keep them alive with bare minimum even early game if you utilize ancient cyro caskets.

Should the penalties be harder? Have a higher chance of failure? Have a chance for catastrophic death by mutating the pawn into a powerful flesh beast instead? I feel that would be lore appropriate.

Should multiple healing of the same pawn carry with it increased risk such as causing unnatural genetic break downs in their cellular structure?

Maybe increasing their hunger for a period of time? Or sleepyness?

Maybe every time the healer, heals someone, it actually accelerates their own death?

I'm curious how everyone feels about it. Mech Serum is very rare, and these guys trivialize the importance of such things.

I don't know why, but I always feel like I'm cheating by using them.

[MadArtillery]

I'm yet go actually see it. It sounds super busted but without the touching it I don't think I can say much.

[DemonchanSama (Lilyia)]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

I'm yet go actually see it. It sounds super busted but without the touching it I don't think I can say much.

I have three, 2 in my main colony, 1 in my mining camp. Between them I don't even need to invest much into bionics because they always heal the worst injury.

Maybe it would be more balanced if they could only heal certain things like permanent scars or injuries but not regenerate full body parts, in its current iteration I really feel like they are just too powerful for such a short cool down.

There either needs to be more risk, higher chance for failure, or only healing minor injuries.

Since they usually always come with something like the chance for complete brain deterioration ((basically making them dead weight for your colony)) or organ failures, There is some level of justification to their power if you are able to fix them up.

My recommendation is to remove the healers ability to heal complete loss of body parts or destroyed organs, but only allow them to heal things such as illness, heal scarring, and permanent injuries; Healer mech serum needs to have its place in the game and it would continue to do so if these guys are toned down.

[VoiD]

Yeah, all the creepyjoiners are.

Wait until you transmute a giant legendary steel statue into pure gold, it's basically a free ticket to wipe out the stock of an entire town, or an instant max quality room if you're already facing max size raids anyway.

Or the necromancer dude raising like 50+ shamblers for you in every raid, trivializing any potential threats.

Tbh the healer was the least impressive of the bunch for me, and he was great, but you can heal all scars through chronophagy anyway, and replace limbs with better bionics, the main advantage, for me, was being able to restore eyes to keep repeating blinding rituals for psycaster levels. I know you can do it with bionic eyes, but it just feels cheesy to break an eye-like machine and pretend you did the ritual, now, natural regrown eyes is a different story IMO.

[Tam]

yes this healer is op, the reason why i do not use most of these creepjoiners, they trivialize already nerfed gameplay
except joyful and master-of-all maybe

[VoiD]

I really, really like their concept, I think they should be much rarer, but it's a very neat, fun even when you find them.

I just wish the rest of the game could keep up with their advantages, as you said, it reduces the overall fun level of the game if using them trivializes other aspects of the game. As we were discussing in another thread, the powercreep is real, and it might be time to overhaul major threat events to keep up with the new content.

[Jaggid Edje]

To be fair, game has dozens of other OP things as you progress through it...it really does. But the healer, you can get really early in the game, even in a pre-tribal start. At least most of the rest of the OP stuff in Rimworld takes a while to reach.

I love the Unnatural healing, but I definitely agree that it is OP.

[Tam]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

To be fair, game has dozens of other OP things as you progress through it...it really does. But the healer, you can get really early in the game, even in a pre-tribal start. At least most of the rest of the OP stuff in Rimworld takes a while to reach.

I love the Unnatural healing, but I definitely agree that it is OP.

yes. game already has tons of op stuff
walking healing serum with short cooldown makes it even worse

to be honest i dont even know why they did decide to make such powerful pawn that replaces the rarest quest item people were hunting hard

[HunterSilver]

Surprisingly not particularly. It's nice to be able to heal a scar or injury every once in awhile but we already have so many hyper efficient tools that do that. The primary use for it is to heal duplicate sickness and crumbling mind without wasting a healer mech serum.

Like, it sounds so good, and then you realize you have so little use for it that you're mostly just using it to cure blood loss on colonists after fights just to justify its existence.

Great ability, great concept, but not nearly as game breakingly good as you think it will be.

[XelNigma]

yup, its OP. got it on my first colony. only down side was she would send out a agony wave every few months.
But than again everything in anomaly is OP for the player.

We had dryads which where as weak as any tamed alien and many would argue not worth the pruneing time.
Then we got mechs that put dryads to shame.
And now we have ghouls that put mechs to shame.

Its definite power creep. I feel like the mechs where at a good spot, balance wise with difficulty to get then power scale once you had them.
Dryads needed a buff sense day 1. and ghouls need to be nerfed hard. maybe reduce their healing power down to that of a normal pawn but let them keep the regeneration of lost body parts.

[Tam]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

Surprisingly not particularly. It's nice to be able to heal a scar or injury every once in awhile but we already have so many hyper efficient tools that do that. The primary use for it is to heal duplicate sickness and crumbling mind without wasting a healer mech serum.

Like, it sounds so good, and then you realize you have so little use for it that you're mostly just using it to cure blood loss on colonists after fights just to justify its existence.

Great ability, great concept, but not nearly as game breakingly good as you think it will be.

so little use (completely replaces rarest healing item)
Thats quite funny how player says this item is not op yet describes how this stuff allows him to save healer serum.

[HunterSilver]

Originally posted by Tamm:

so little use (completely replaces rarest healing item)
Thats quite funny how player says this item is not op yet describes how this stuff allows him to save healer serum.

Yeah, and it's very much not nearly as game breakingly good as you think at first glance. There aren't a ton of situations where you use healer mech serums.

For scars you just use chronophagy rituals, for missing body parts you're better off grabbing a cheap bionic, and for blood loss and diseases you just wait them out.

In a pinch it's nice, but it very quickly becomes a hammer looking for a nail type of situation.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

For scars you just use chronophagy rituals, for missing body parts you're better off grabbing a cheap bionic, and for blood loss and diseases you just wait them out.

In a pinch it's nice, but it very quickly becomes a hammer looking for a nail type of situation.

Pre-bionics is when it's OP. (which is what I personally said above). If you play with slower research speed, it can be a while before you get to bionics. Especially if you start tribal or even pre-tribal to boot.

Edit: Also wondering about your chronophagy comment. If I had used that for all scars, my whole colony would be like 13 years old, even if I went out of my way to make the ritual not-so-effective. Given that there are penalties for being under 18, I did not use that ritual to deal with most scars. I used Unnatural healing quite a bit for it though.

[Das Trojanische Pferd]

Originally posted by DemonchanSama (Lilyia):

I personally feel like Unnatural Healers are really strong for only 5 days, free healer mech serum every 5 days and the only side effect is a mutation to the body part, which can just be amputated and re-healed later.

Do you feel that preventing the organ failures of the healer is enough justification for this ability? Generally, as long as it isn't the brain, or heart, you can keep them alive with bare minimum even early game if you utilize ancient cyro caskets.

Should the penalties be harder? Have a higher chance of failure? Have a chance for catastrophic death by mutating the pawn into a powerful flesh beast instead? I feel that would be lore appropriate.

Should multiple healing of the same pawn carry with it increased risk such as causing unnatural genetic break downs in their cellular structure?

Maybe increasing their hunger for a period of time? Or sleepyness?

Maybe every time the healer, heals someone, it actually accelerates their own death?

I'm curious how everyone feels about it. Mech Serum is very rare, and these guys trivialize the importance of such things.

I don't know why, but I always feel like I'm cheating by using them.

there is a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that can happen in anomaly so they are fair i would say just to save pawns that might get metal horrors hatched and are on a 2 hour bleedout timer you can only rly save them with a healer because you still need to kill the horror....

[HunterSilver]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Edit: Also wondering about your chronophagy comment. If I had used that for all scars, my whole colony would be like 13 years old, even if I went out of my way to make the ritual not-so-effective. Given that there are penalties for being under 18, I did not use that ritual to deal with most scars. I used Unnatural healing quite a bit for it though.

The ritual can't push a pawn under the age of 16 and you can control how much age is swapped by reducing or increasing the quality of the ritual if you're clearing a lot of scars. The penalty for being 16 is pretty minor luckily, primarily a single hp loss on some body parts and a slight drop in carrying capacity for hauling.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by HunterSilver:

The ritual can't push a pawn under the age of 16 and you can control how much age is swapped by reducing or increasing the quality of the ritual if you're clearing a lot of scars. The penalty for being 16 is pretty minor luckily, primarily a single hp loss on some body parts and a slight drop in carrying capacity for hauling.

That's not correct, it can take you down to as far as 13. Not sure why you think it's 16.

There's also a limit to how low you can get the quality of the ritual. I have a ritual area specifically for the lowest quality possible, it still shaves a good bit of age of any pawn that isn't psychically dull.

You also forgot the global work speed penalty for being below 18 as one of the penalties.