So apparently there’s a minimum 10% toughness bleed through, so even if you have max toughness you take some health damage if hit with melee.
This really ruins the feel of the game for me, especially as Zealot, as it makes toughness feel like almost an irrelevant mechanic. Managing toughness, toughness regen should be what enables a zealot to play at low health. Saltspyre’s Zealot class in VT2 could run around with 1 health because its talents enabled higher temp health generation, so as long as you kept attacking and charging you’d not die to small chip damage.
Here though, as a Zealot, if you get down to 1 hp (which is quite common with the passive proccing that saves you from death at 1 hp, plus you’re encouraged to play at low health for stacks) then you will die in 1 melee hit. 100%. It doesnt matter how much toughness regen you have, one melee hit will kill you. The whole point of classes that get damage boosts at low health is that if you keep fighting you can survive by your attacks building up a “shield”. Now though its so easy to take just a single tiny bit of chip damage (which toughness should prevent really) that you’re forced to keep your health close to max where possible, which means avoiding melee combat where you can. As a melee class.
The entire point of Toughness I thought was to serve as the buffer whereby it was what made you feel Tanky. Yes, stamina/dodging/blocking are all incredibly important, but most classes feel the same here and your tankiness is more based on your weapon choice than your class. Zealot was a tanky melee because it had better options for regenerating toughness and thus could survive the occasional chip damage in melee.
Health is your reservoir for mistakes. Every hit on your health damage is permanent and can only be restored by medikit or medicae station. Putting yourself intentionally in melee is now a far higher risk, and if you don’t have a build or playstyle which enables incredibly safe dodging/blocking at the expense of anything else then you’re putting yourself at risk.
This mechanic just makes Zealot and Ogryn feel far too risky, as you are now far far more vulnerable to just dying from random chip damage that your toughness should prevent. It makes all those toughness regen talents feel worthless. If you can take 20 hits in a row at max toughness before you die anyway from the damage which penetrates it, then it almost doesnt matter how much toughness regen you have.
The only way I can feel this mechanic would work is if there are some kind of mechanic for characters to slowly regen lost health over a long period of time without using medic items, like the natural bond neck from VT2 (which was pretty awful) but it feels like the limited number of medikits and med stations is intentional so that the difficulty is balanced in only ever being allowed to make a finite number of mistakes.
Whilst there is no way to avoid the bleed through getting into melee is always going to feel like the wrong decision when you could instead have a build that kills things at range.
Bleed through imo should only be a thing at 50% toughness or lower, or even higher values, just not at 100%. When you’re on max toughness you should just feel that you can always take that first hit in any situation, otherwise there is nothing to distinguish the tankiness between classes. The Zealots Charge restores 50% tougness - if toughness bleed through only happened under 50% then it would mean if your damage shield procced and you were left on 1 health, you enter a fight for survival by charging and then using tanky regen talents to keep your toughness over 50%, so you could always survive one single tiny melee hit.
It feels absolute trash to be a 1 health Zealot on fire with rage and doing lots of damage, knowing that a fly coughing in your general vicinity will kill you even if your toughness bar is maxed.