tukkek
commented
1 year ago Apparently it's possible to link effects with a "shield bonus", so that the effect will be cancelled if the bonus is ended. The reference for that would be the Engineer Force-field skill. This would allow a different approach where you can't keep the uptime because Flasks can't be used to tank while taking damage (which would cancel the regeneration).
This would be a much bigger change to vanilla balance and also sounds much more complicated to implement and balance.
Flasks more-or-less allow you to constantly "piano" with 100% uptime which is extremely powerful and possibly break the game even by using lower-tier flasks on higher-level areas. Having a staggered approach with 50% instant heal and 50% over-time regeneration might help offset that with a pause between large heals and twice weaker period of over-time regeneration.
While I think Flasks are fine as-is and the price and rarity do make up for the power, that's probably only because I don't go out of my way to exploit them to have 100% uptime. Trying something like this might be an objective improvement, if hardly needed.