Well, the only faction that will have a genuine medic are the SM, so the others would be left with nothing. Or better said nothing that passes off as a medic is confirmed for other races.
Im ok, if not a bit cautious, about the "everyone can get people up" idea. Considering the TTK is waaay lower than GW2 for example a downed ally would be a magnet for more kills for the man who downed the first dude.
As long as they avoid nonsense like rallying (auto revive) when something you engaged dies and leave the ability to fight back to a minimum to none in the downed state i think it can work.

I'd like to see various "downed" states, like you see in an actual fire fight. This system would also work on the premise of "self aid... buddy aid... corpsman/medic aid".

1. "Downed, but not out"... can think coherently, can apply "self aid" to stay in the fight longer, can request medic, can crawl to cover, can return fire(with some loss in accuracy), or can only use sidearm. First aid from a medic can be delayed for some time before the downed man goes unconscious.

2. "Down hard"... incoherent or totally unconscious. In need of "Immediate" medical attention or they become "expectant". "Buddy aid" from any shooter on the field can act as a stop gap until definitive care from a field medic becomes available.

3. "KIA or expectant" Killed outright or mortally wounded. No amount of medical attention on the battlefield will save this player.

Translating these examples into a gameworld shouldnt be too difficult, and would offer more of a variety of wounded and downed players, as well as different challenges for the medic classes.

Translate to 40K game world:

1. Downed, but not out: player cannot walk, run. Can crawl to cover, can only use side arm, can apply first aid pack to self(slowing the bleed out status). Can also be dragged to cover by buddy(dragging is faster than crawling). Once player has reached cover, they can prop themselves up to a sitting position and use primary weapon(bolter, plasma rifle, ect) unless their primary is a heavy weapon(Lascannon, Plasma cannon, heavy bolter). Player must receive medic aid in order to fully return to the fight. Player will bleed out and drop to "Downed Hard" if they dont receive medic aid within 1 minute.

2. Down Hard: player cannot move, limited visibility. Downed player must receive medic aid within 60 seconds. Any other player can apply 1 first aid kit, to keep the downed player alive a bit longer(+60 seconds) until a medic arrives.

3. KIA/Expectant: Self Explanatory, player is beyond saving.

One possible way to manage this would be that the #1 state kicks in when you're at a certain non-zero health threshold, and points for a kill are not awarded until you reach #2 or #3.

For example, assuming this game goes in the direction where you have "armor HP" and "health HP" (which complaints about that system aside seems to be where they're going) state #1 would kick in when you reach 50% "health HP" (ie ~25% total HP, give or take depending on how your faction's health:armor ratio is weighted).

Your armor can still regenerate at this point (again, complaints about regeneration aside that seems to be where they're leaning) but it won't stop you from bleeding out, it just might stop an enemy bullet from accelerating the process.

You can do self-aid, but self-aid only restores a small amount of HP, say ~20-30% of health. If it's enough to get above the threshold (ie you had more than 20% left when you applied the 30% heal or vice versa for the 20% heal), great! You are no longer bleeding. If not, well you've delayed the inevitable, hopefully long enough to find a medic.

#2 of course would be when you actually run out of health, and then #3 would be when you get overkilled/executed.

An easy way to handle the "crawling" thing would be to have a prone position and force them into it when they enter the "bleeding out" state. A less harsh way to handle it would be that they can still stand/crouch, but sprinting and jumping are disabled.

I'm I the only 40K fan that has a problem with Armor.... regenerating? In my opinion, Armor should act like it does in the Lore... it degrades over time the more damage you take. Armor can receive minor "in field" repairs via armor cement. Some rounds glance off the armor, some rounds ricochet, other rounds detonate on impact(severely weakening the armor), while other rounds can penetrate the weak points on the first hit.

The entire premise of armor regenerating put EC into the same category as most of the other shooters on the market resulting in extremely short TTK, ie you get hit, you're either dead in the next second, or you find cover, you "regenerate" then you're back in the fight. Surely there's a better method or approach Behavior can take that's more fitting to the 40K universe.

By implementing a more robust damage model via heartier armor(and scrapping regenerating armor), which will increase TTK to some extent, I feel that would be a better representation of how armor functions in the 40K universe. It would be severely disappointing to see EC's combat damage model as a BF4 or COD in a 40K setting.

Honestly I would rather see armor as damage reduction instead of a second health bar.

This does three things:

1: It means healing has a higher relative efficiency on more armored characters because each health point is "worth more".

2: It means that an "armor piercing" attribute that allows weapons to ignore a certain amount of damage reduction makes certain weapons more effective against high-armor targets (low damage, high armor piercing), certain weapons more effective against low-armor targets (high damage, little or no armor piercing), and others effective against both (both high damage and armor piercing, these would generally be supremely powerful weapons that are probably intended for use against vehicles). For example, a Punisher Gatling Cannon would have hilarious DPS due to high damage and ridiculous rate of fire, but it has zero armor piercing so its effectiveness drops sharply against heavily armored targets such as Terminators (though even Termies shouldn't underestimate the sheer weight of fire that thing can put out).

3: It frees up the role of "regenerating shield" for... actual shields. Such as rosarii, conversion fields, refractor fields, Tau shield tech, etc. These shields would likely NOT benefit from armor DR, because they go over/around your armor.

In keeping with 40k's tabletop roots of course, any and all stats that any piece of equipment has should be fully visible to the player and the way that the stats interact with each other should be completely transparent.

Edit: of course this would mean you only have one health bar by default, and thus under that system the bleeding threshold should be something like 25%, where self-aid heals 12%-ish, since a higher bleeding threshold would probably be considered "too hardcore".

Bleeding still wouldn't stop an actual energy shield from regenerating if you have one, but by the same token the energy shield would not stop you from bleeding. It would just block bullets that may have otherwise expedited your demise.

Wildstar online has an interesting "shielding" system which might work well for armor in EC. It does act as a sort of second lifebar, but it's always less than your health pool. While your shield (armor) remains intact, it takes a percentage (I think it's 60% in Wildstar) of the damage you take, until it runs out. then all damage is applied in full to your health. If you manage to stay out of harms way for a few seconds, the shield begins to regenerate. In Wildstar I think it's 6 sec, but EC may want it to be a longer time. This gives an impression of armor having indefinite longevity (it'll always come back), but not able to hold up to sustained focus fire (so if you're made the primary target, you'll still want to get out of harm's way before that armor fails you). It also opens up some fun ways to play with the mechanic such as restoring armor as a form of healing, buffs that allow 100% of damage to be applied to armor until it's gone, or attacks which bypass enemy armor even if they have it active.

We are getting a bit off topic here... apologies in advance. Perhaps we should start an armor discussion thread, or find an old one and chime in there.

Though I havent played Wildstar, it sounds similar to how WoW used to deal with degradation of armor and equipment. The longer you're taking damage, and dishing it out, the more your equipment degrades. As it degrades you're armor still offers some protection, but with each incoming hit you're losing more health. You can be downed, revived and keep on fighting, but your armor is protecting you less and less until it's repaired. This sounds much more like the 40K universe than regenerating armor.

THQ's Space Marine was enjoyable and had some descent mechanics, however it shouldnt be the "bar" per say by which any future 40K games are built around.

I'd much rather see armor in EC being implemented the way it is represented in the Lore. Much heartier Armor than it was in the Space Marine game, but with weak points that can be exploited. The armor degrades as you take damage, dependent on where that damage occurs. If you take a heavy damage to your left shoulder, the armor value of your left shoulder pad drops by a certain % and you may sustain some secondary health loss as a result. Physically that left shoulder pad shows obvious degradation to any enemy players near you and can be exploited. The left shoulder pad can be repaired by use of armor cement, but the number of armor cement tubes players can carry would be limited.

Dammit, there's no reason to complain about this at all, or put in health debuffs or anything. Just put in revives like how they function in War of the Roses. It takes five seconds to lift a bro off the ground, and during that time you're archer bait and can often turn into a porcupine if you aren't careful about rezzing teammates. Also, "knockdowns" count as kills, actually executing the enemy is just extra points, albeit a fuckton of extra points for you to put in the bank.

This is further solved by restricting it to Warlocks, Sorcerers, Apothecaries, and Mad Doks.

Also, for HTK, Terminators should take around sixty rounds to kill with a bolter/shuriken rifle, similar to the Max Suits in planetside 2 given the ridiculous amount of armor Indomitus Tactical Dreadnought Armor provides, plasma, melta, and lascannons should be the only weapons capable of actually proving lethal to terminators. Or maybe even immune to bolters, shootas, shurikens. Terminators don't really die to bolters, you need special weapons or heavy weapons.

I'm not a big fan of "shoot X amount of times" to kill type damage models. I'd prefer degrading armor, by section or piece of equipped armor(Arms, Shoulders, Helmet, chest, back, upper leg, lower leg). Each piece of armor should have it's own independent armor value. As a specific armor piece degrades, you start taking more and more health damage accordingly. At 100% the armor either deflects the round(resulting in 0 damage) or the armor takes damage. Once the Armor reaches 50% you start losing some health incrementally(due to blunt force trauma). Once the armor piece is actually broken or pierced you take full value damage of whatever type of round is hitting you.

I seriously dont hope we see a generic "flat damage" model as you described. We've been doing that since the 1980s in video games. In 2014 I would hope for something a little more fitting for the 40K Universe.

Some weapons systems will obviously score catastrophic hits resulting in kills on the first hit, such as an artillery round, or a round from a tank. Crushing damage or being run over by a Rhino should also result in catastrophic damage resulting in instant death.

Running a Space marine over with a rhino won't even faze them. They just dust themselves off and jump right back to the fight, IIRC happened in the Horus Heresy. There has to either be a monomolecular array of spikes on the front or a dozer blade. A Land Raider however is an entirely different matter.

Terminators however should be capable of simply grabbing the tank if it comes at them with their power fist or just holding it back. You can't run over a terminator. Hell a Titan stepped on a terminator once and only mission killed the dude. But Terminators should eat artillery and tank cannons with little problem until we get into the lascannon or plasma department. Same for Wraithguard.

Also, I highly doubt we'll be getting degrading armor, especially as we've seen health bars in all the alpha shots. At best we may see it for tanks, but I'd doubt it'd be on infantry or heavy infantry given the shear nightmare that would be to code for an MMO.