Regeneration Balance Suggestions

[Former user]

Regeneration is basically just a quality of life mutation, preventing dismemberment and decapitation and automatically curing infections. While this is nice, and stops it from being useless, dismemberment and infections can generally be avoided through cautious play or cured via other means, and decapitation protection is only gained after a significant amount of investment, unlike other forms of decapitation protection, which generally cost less and can be effective earlier in the game (multiple heads, slog).

The additional regen rate/no regen delay is negligible at low levels because the mutation is too low rank to be effective, and negligible at high levels because it takes exponentially longer to regenerate any meaningful amount of HP. This is basically just a function of how Qud is balanced at high levels; if it takes 200+ turns of waiting to naturally regenerate your health pool, then it wont really matter at all if your health keeps regenerating during combat, because the outcome of combat is likely to be decided long before regeneration was able to do anything significant.

Possible Changes:

Convert regeneration to be an activated ability (regenerate) that essentially acts like an ubernostrum injector, healing and regenerating limbs with the added benefit of curing diseases. This would give it useful healing properties while retaining most of its quality of life benefits.

Rework regeneration to have a % activation chance at the end of every turn that is scaled based on the amount of damage taken over the last few turns (in relation to the players max HP) and modified by diseases/dismemberments. When regeneration activates, it heals the player for a percentage of their max HP at the end of every turn (and has a chance to regenerate limbs/cure diseases) and has % chance to deactivate every turn (scaled negatively based on the amount of damage taken over the last few turns and reduced by diseases/ dismemberments). This basically turns regeneration into a high risk/high reward mutation that can give the player a lot of staying power provided they are committing drawn out engagements, while at the same time not replacing healing items/natural healing (Low activation chance if the player isn't consistently taking damage)