The State of Healing (We're back in the early days again)

When I first hopped into my first playtest, one of the things I noticed early on in interacting with the various systems is that health was more than abundant. It was plentiful, you would never need to worry about getting mulched around the corner because around that corner would also be a medical station for you to patch yourself up with.

And then most of those stations were removed. Presumably because we were swimming in said overabundance.

But we’re now we are somehow back to the same state of healing that led those healing stations to be removed. We have way too much, and healing kits aren’t even the most problematic aspect of that anymore.

Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that there are frankly very few defensive tools to support players if they either choose to play solo, or play away from the rest of their team. The somewhat fairly recent Tear Gas Grenades and Proximity Mines are a good step in the right direction, but they are still consumables that get overshadowed by either their cheaper siblings like smoke grenades or the various frag grenades, or the centerpiece of this discussion, Health on Kill/Armor on Kill.

Every other means of “healing” in this game requires you to interact with something in the game that takes your focus away from actually engaging with the enemy, which allows them to be more engaging. It also forces you to play from safe positions, be cognizant of your surroundings, covering your teammates so that they don’t take any unnecessary incoming damage. Health and Armor on Kill just requires you to… kill enemies. (With headshots for the former.) When you’re negating damage, you’re negating incoming consequences, and you’re forgoing all risk for only reward, which leads to some pretty predictable and boring gameplay after some hours.

“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.” -elire01

This is a philosophy I largely believe in, as many other shooters, especially those that present themselves as tactical, do not feature any healing in active combat mechanics; shooters that do have drastically different systems that allow in-combat healing to be more nuanced; i.e. vertical progression RPGs/games with gear ratings, crit stats, etc.

Although I believe elire01’s suggestions are solid, I would go as far as to say that Health on Kill and any form of “kill for hp regain” should be axed completely, making medkits are the only way to “permanently heal”, and that there should be more interactable healing items in the game that award “temporary health” instead, a la Left 4 Dead/2.

Interactables such as pills that restore a potent amount of temporary health, adrenaline shots that increase the movement speed of the player with a minor temporary health boost, and medkits that remove temporary health while restoring most of the player’s missing health. These are all descriptions of L4D’s items, and they could fit here very well.

Revived players could also start with a small amount of health, while most of their missing health is filled with temporary health, prompting them to find a medic or a medkit immediately.

Being that explosives can be exceptionally (and at times unnecessarily) punishing to the player, we could look at the damage received via explosions to also replace health with temporary health without just removing a massive chunk of it.

Damage that penetrates armor (i.e. AP rounds, fall damage) but does not break the armor plate could also be converted to temporary health.

If we wanted to be a bit more creative, we could also look at other implementations of healing, like a ranged heal similar to a stim pistol, or deployable heal like a fixed healing aura.

As an addendum, Armor on Kill should only repair the “plate” that you’re currently on. If your third plate is lightly damaged, you’d be able to fully repair it in theory. If you’re on your last plate, that should be the only plate you’re allowed to repair. So you cannot regain your second and third plates if they are completely broken.

Armor plate scavenging could also be a fun and interactable mechanic. Loot dead, heavily armored enemies for a single plate that may be damaged, so long as you did not break it.