I think most of us hate the bleedthrough system, but I understand its purpose. It rewards skilled gameplay, since if you can avoid getting hurt by the time you get toughness back to 100%, you essentially take no damage from getting hit. But. There’s still times where things are just outside of your control and it feels like these moments add up pretty severely if you end up with a PUG thats just not on point.
I feel like an easy solution would be to leave the toughness system as it is, with the only change being that toughness regained above your max restores health instead. It doesn’t have to be 1:1, there should still be a challenge, but enough of a restoration that playing melee doesn’t feel like a hindrance despite how fun it is to hack and slash away with a chainsword.
The point of this game is to have a finite amount of health, to do this would make the whole game have to be rebalanced and/or changed.
if we started healing off of hordes while at 100% toughness it would be pretty easy to get back to full health when not being hit, Vermintide 2 did have the option for slow health regen at the cost of not being able to benefit from healing kits on the dwarf which was both good and bad depending (vermintide 2 had a different system somewhat in that you would restore lost HP as temporary HP instead of this toughness we have now) but at the end of the day it is called toughness not shields.
This would be a disasterous change if applied flatly to all classes as a core toughness mechanic.
It removes the core concept of ‘finite health between medicae stations’ (or ‘finite potential for mistakes’).
It adds enormous balance problems where certain classes would/could be unkillable vampires (SS with powersword for example) because they excel at horde clear or have toughness-related traits, asymmetrically benefitting from hp replenishment.
You would have people trying to replenish health with melee, and getting ****ed off with others using flamethrowers or other ranged weapons / grenades trying (quite rightly) to horde clear. Or just generally, everyone competing with everyone else for health.
You can’t just “kill stuff”, you’d have to think about who needs the health from the kills. It sets up a bad dynamic.
It doesn’t have to be 1:1
Even if you tried to temper it by making it not 1:1, you would end up where to balance it you’d have to make it so weak you could barely notice it.
Put another way, this mechanic would avoid breaking the game exactly to the extent that you nerfed its effects into the ground.
That said, I wouldn’t mind this as an explicit trait on the Zealot or something, one you could choose in lieu of one of the other strong traits, that let you regen health slowly in this way via skillful melee or something - but you’d probably have to have a trade-off, like not benefiting from medpacks.
Honestly the devs should just revert toughness to how the game was designed around and how the tutorial currently explains it. There was nothing wrong with it and if they are determined to change it back at a point down the line they can maybe spend a month or two testing it and how it interacts with everything FIRST.