Health mechanics feedback

A rather fundamental system yet so very over-tuned in players favor, health is incredibly easy to come by and prevent the game from ever properly punishing the player for reckless play.

Medkits are abundant on nearly every level, a player has the option to either bring his own, loot one from many random spawn locations on the map or is at the very least guaranteed one at the extraction area. There’s never a sense of urgency to play cautiously as to avoid health damage because there are near no consequences for losing it if medkits are this abundant of a resource.

At every stage, players start at full health, disregarding how skillfully/recklessly they extracted from the previous mission. Armor doesn’t behave this way, why should health?

I believe that the health state should carry on between the missions to better reward avoiding damage. This feels like a fundamental non-questionable design element for roguelike games yet is missing from Rogue Point for no apparent reason leading to a boring inconsequential and near disconnected mission progression.

The newly introduced health on headshot is a masterclass broken and overpowered. Oftencase removing the need for medkits altogether whilst not having the downtime of using a medkit. 5, 10 or even 15 instant health during combat for action as simple as scoring a headshot nearly completely removes consequences of being damaged whilst having no opportunity cost like a similar, way more balanced health on melee kill skill.

I don’t believe that regaining health instantly during combat should be an option at all as it largely removes the stakes from encounters leading to boring shootouts where the outcome is largely predictable.

I’d like to suggest a slight overhaul in how health works to hopefully address my concerns about the game playing way too easy.

Instant health regain skills should instead reward temporary health that would deplete overtime and the amount of health they offer should be adjusted accordingly. Current per headshot values could remain as is if the health was temporary and didn’t affect the actual bar but health per melee kill should subsequently be increased to better reflect risk associated with it. I’m thinking temporary 20-30 would be reasonable.

Medkits should heal less and be the only source of permanent health regain offered to the players. That way they would be more valuable and strategic resource over the current near-free top up they are.

Lastly, the %health/5s skill could be redesigned to instead slow down the temporary health decay so that some synergy between the skills could arise. It’s not fun to wait around for miniscule amounts of health and some back and forth between player choices could be interesting gameplay-wise.