Health Payback - Perk to make melee more viable

[abborre]

Melee in Fallout 4 is pretty clunky and it will generally subject you to a lot more frequent damage, which makes it especially unviable in Survival mode. So I have been thinking of a relatively simple way of hopefully making melee less hazardous, whilst also keeping it somewhat fair. Preferably this would be added in the form of a new perk, using the LevelUpMenuEx by Neanka mod to allow for the insertion of brand new perks. The perk I envision would look something like this:

 

"Payback (requirement - Str: 4, End: 4, Lck: 4) - When unarmed/wielding a melee weapon, 50% of the health damage you take from ranged attacks gets add to your "Payback Health"(new variable). Payback Health is capped at a number equal to 30% of your max health, and decreases at a rate of -5 points per second. 50% of all damage you inflict on enemies using melee/unarmed attacks redeems health from your Payback Health pool as real health points."

 

The idea is that rather than melee making you passively tougher or allowing you to regain health for all melee kills, this system would insentivice quick retaliation for any damage you take, because the sooner you're able to strike back after receiving damage, the more of the damage you took you'll be able to shrugg off. You die just as easily whilst charging the enemy, but as long as you can start dealing damage quickly, you'll be able to compensate for some of the damage you took earlier, and keep dampening the damage your receive, but only if you can keep dealing as much damage as you take. Thus, I think it'd make melee more viable whilst still demanding performance from the player. Of course, it may have to be balanced a bit.

 

Thanks for reading.