​Hello Space Marines!

Today, we’d like to hear your thoughts on the balance of contested health recovery.

Since the game’s release, a misconfiguration in contested health recovery values has meant that ranged weapons restore far too much contested health, while melee weapons restore far too little. Nearly a year has passed since launch, and by now everyone is used to playing with this incorrect setup, where ranged weapons recover much more health than melee weapons. To be honest, it’s been bothering me since day one (I’m looking at you, Plasma Pistol).

Now that we’ve addressed some of the bigger and easier PvE balance issues, we’d like to tackle this lingering one. We could have adjusted the values at any point over the past year without asking, but I worry that you have become so accustomed to the current state that even a small, positive change could cause a strong negative reaction. After all, the game is perfectly playable and fun as it is, but we believe there’s still room for improvement.

Any adjustment to contested health recovery will significantly affect the game’s balance. Ranged combat will become more challenging, while melee combat will become easier, more forgiving, and more “brawl-heavy”. This will shake up the entire meta across weapons, perks, and classes.

Contested health is a core mechanic that helps mitigate player mistakes and, more importantly, reduces the number of finishers needed to stay alive, making players invulnerable during finisher animations, unlike in the original Space Marine. I love SM1 (it’s one of my favourite games of all time) but being killed mid-finisher was frustrating, and the number of finishers required for survival could feel repetitive. With invulnerability during finishers, dying would be nearly impossible given how frequently they’re performed, so it makes sense that finishers are absent from SM1’s Exterminatus mode.

Being able to recover quickly by executing an enemy and regaining most of your lost HP keeps you in the fight instead of retreating to wait for armour to regenerate, which can break the game’s power fantasy.

The difficulty with contested health recovery is that it’s a complex system influenced by many factors: damage dealt, the current melee attack, chosen difficulty, AoE, number of targets hit, and more. Even a small tweak risks breaking something unintentionally and may require hotfixes. Hopefully PTS will be able to alleviate this, but I must warn anyone that it might introduce some new issues.

We also can’t simply buff melee contested health recovery, as that would make the game too easy, and Absolute difficulty is already not particularly punishing. So, any melee buff would have to be paired with a reasonable nerf to ranged contested health recovery.

So here’s the question:

Do you want us to adjust contested health recovery globally: reducing it for ranged weapons but increasing it for melee weapons?

Please note: changes to this mechanic will require extensive internal testing and will take some time. Even with positive results, these adjustments will not appear in Patch 10.

Thanks for your support as always.

• Dmitry Grigorenko, Game Director