About the Healing Mechanics and Rewarding Team Cohesion

Essentially my point is that it is prohibitively hard to regain any real amount of contested health with weapons other than the meltas, which do large amounts of aoe damage with a single click.  Regaining much of anything much less all of it EVEN with a bulwark on your team buffing you with the perk that reduces the speed that contested health degenerates. 

I'm unsure if the perk for the chainsword for example that says "heavy hits regain 100% more contested health" is somehow bugged, but when i tried it, it didn't seem to make a lick of difference. So in melee... you are just kind of going to have to accept that you are going to lose that health. An execution opportunity presenting itself pretty much immediately not withstanding. Sources of healing are scarce enough, and if you can't keep up with regaining contested health you will be having a hard time.

Now I'm moving on to how to solve this issue with 2 ideas that to me sound reasonable and rewards players working together:

Since there has also been discussions of somehow rewarding team cohesion, as the astartes rely on teamwork to take on overwhelming odds. And currently there is no reward for sticking together, and and people running off on their own to either try speedrunning by skipping fights, or just do emperor knows what... My opinion is that being alone like that should punish the player running ahead of the others, but not in a way directed at the teammates he left behind.

Hence my suggestion as a solution to both these problems would be to reward team cohesion with some type of buff to healing.

Option one: Decrease in the speed that contested health degenerates by default if the team are within a reasonable distance from each other.

Since a class like the sniper or heavy might want to keep their distance, 2 teammates within this radius should invoke the buff. Unless the radius was made huge, but then it would not longer really be a teamwork buff.

Since the perk of the Bulwark is not enough to give ample time to regain contested health but, but with this added bonus, a cohesive team could have a much more forgiving window to attempt to get their contested health back, and even without a bulwark on the team the situation would be easier. But the bulwarks buff would then be a very welcome addition to a team. The baseline would be slightly easier to deal with. That way with the bulwark on the team, and playing him myself a lot, you would have more time to be patient in melee and not simply wildly swing while hoping for the best, which never ends well. Not on ruthless or even substantial. Instead you would have a bit of time to stop your relentless attack which invariably ends up with you simply taking even more damage because you did not stop to parry.

With this sort of mechanic in place you would have the time to play with the games mechanics in mind which work well in melee most of the time. IE aiming for perfect parries where ever possible. This way you could start your attack swinging wildly into the enemy to regain some health, but you would also have time to stop for a parry, and best case achieve putting an enemy in the execute state, which saves you from losing ALL of your contested health. Though you most likely did leave the encounter wounded, because it is not that simple to reliably get that execution, and not fast enough to negate all damage. As it should be! Allowing to regain an amount that was probably intended to be possible, however with the current punishing time limit, amount of enemies on substantial and ruthless difficulties and not to mention ranged teammates swiping every execution from right under your nose. (Though this is a player/teammate issue) You often end up from going from full health to less than one bar in even a small encounter where you make a tiny mistake and get hit for massive damage. And are completely unable to get that health back no matter how you try.

Option two: When your team is in cohesion (as in close enough to each other). You slowly regain health.

However i believe the above idea to be a better one since it is more synergistic with the mechanics already in the game, and rewards  aggressive play, which likely was the whole point of contested health, unless i am mistaken. If this second option were to be implemented, there should be a cap to how much you can heal, so that it would not be abused by simply standing around in a safe spot to heal the whole team fully. The cap could be that you would heal at maximum to fill up the bar that your health currently is at. suppose you were at 1hp, you could only heal up to one bar with your teammates close, and also this heal should be VERY slow. And out of combat. Much like shield regeneration. Alternatively if you allowed for more healing, the AI game master should punish this behavior with an additional wave of enemies.

I believe both of these ideas would help with the problem people are facing with healing. AND reward teamplay and once something tangible like this was added to reward teamplay, the game should tell you in the tutorial tips you get whenever you first do things. Of these ideas i really prefer the first one. Though the second could also be explained by, and would be, lore accurate, since the space marines power armor pumps them full of medicae automatically, when wounded.

Conclusion and contextual information

This is a long post, but I wanted to present my Ideas and arguments behind it in detail. I really hope something is done to help with the healing, As it would especially help with less experienced players who already apparently struggle with anything past average difficulty. Judging by my steam achievements ONLY 5.9% of players have cleared a mission on ruthless difficulty, which is wild to me, They are very much doable, but people really do have problems it seems. However, I've often seen people rely on meltas to do these runs. But a Bulwark, Sniper with las fusil and most importantly Heavy with the currently (pre patch) indomitable multimelta makes these runs almost easy even. But that is about to change once the heavy is no longer able to endlessly facetank everything... The bulwark in this squad set up is the weakest,but that might change since now the possibility of getting heals from his banner could become essential to surive. As things as are for maximum efficiency you would replace the bulwark with tactical who is also running the melta rifle, and this is simply because of his powerful auspex scan and general utility I really find the melta meta incredibly boring, and I'm glad the bug is getting fixed, but our marines will need better opportunities to heal now that heavies will be competing for the already very scarce stimpacks as well...

​

Thoughts? Am I way off base here? How do others feel about rewarding teamplay or should that be done in some different form? :) How about the problems with contested health and melee? Other ranged weapons besides melta? I have a feeling most agree at least on the parts that more opportunities for healing are needed, and some form of reward for teamplay would be great, IMO this would solve both. I do not think something like focusing the same target should do extra damage etc are good ideas for rewarding teamplay, but there might be other ways to incentivize it. So please add your own thoughts, and upvote for the devs to see if you think I'm making sense. :)

(I do love the game though and I do not wish for too many changes or sweeping nerfs etc. OR most importantly I do not want the difficulty to be turned down, though someone might argue more healing is doing that, but I don't agree. It would be a way to help players survive the harder difficulties, without making the actual difficulty tiers easier! Slight bullet sponginess aside ruthless is fine as is!)