I tested this behavior and it indeed doesn’t give you any toughness on bleed kills. I was clearing a horde with the combat blade and I noticed that my toughness doesn’t go up at all. I entered the Psykhanium, spawn a bunch of horde enemies, let them lover my toughness to 0 and then reproduced this behavior. I strike the mob 2 times to body to cause heavy bleeding and let it bleed out. My toughness was still 0 after the kill. Meaning the bleed out kills are not counted as killing blows and it’s kind of annoying for bleeding builds to remain on high toughness during the horde clear since majority of enemies will die due to bleeding effect and only ~20% enemies are killed by weakspot oneshots or so. Is it intended to work like this or do you plan to change that?
Of course it does not restore toughness on melee kill, because bleed does not count as melee damage (although this might not be that obvious without testing it).
All dot effects count as ranged damage, so kills with dot count as ranged kills.
Ogryn restores toughness on heavy attack hits, so bleeds do not interfere with toughness regen all that much.
If you are playing zealot with bleed knife, you can skill for toughness dmg reduction and ult cooldown reduction on crit (with knife, you should go for crit anyway). So while you build up less toughness from melee combat directly, you also take less toughness damage and can use your ult more frequently. All three zealot ults restore toughness.
As psyker, you can restore toughness by building up and quelling peril, as well as warp attack kills, which also counts ranged attacks like staffs and soulblaze.
Veteran does not really have much in that regard right now (out for blood feat should work though).
It is possible that the feat below will be updated to also apply to the user. In that case, it would allow you to restore toughness via bleeds, while in melee combat.
Well, I play veteran with combat blade and I find it super annoying that my favorite weapon has direct debuff like that. It’s kind of stupid that bleed damage in melee weapon causes that disadvantage and force me to pick workaround talents to balance it out. It just need some adjustments in my opinion. You cause bleeding with your melee weapon? Let the bleeding count as a melee damage then. It does sound more intuitive.
I’m kind of disappointed because now the only way to keep the toughness relatively up with my stealth vet is just invest into confirmed kill which is somehow awkward when I want also Deadshot for those revolver guaranteed crits.
Anyway, thank you for your reply. It clarified some things, but these shady workarounds to balance that factor just prove my point that it’s just counter-intuitive. I hope the FS will do something about it. Bleeding (or burning) damage should be categorized depending on the weapon that caused it, melee or ranged. I realize that it might be tricky to make it work since you might cause bleeding with both weapons at the same time and it should stack, and that might cause issues with calculation if the damage types are different. Anyway, I’m curious if FS will resolve this or just leave it since not many weapons have bleed damage.
