Okay, so now that we know what health is going to look like and its goals (Allowing you to both kill quickly and stay alive longer), and because I've spent the last few days thinking over how to best improve Health+Armor for Planetside 2 (Seeing we both came up with Halo-shields as an effective system was a cool coincidence)
However, I shortly thought out some of the pitfalls of shields, and came up with a unique concept I don't think I've seen implemented into any other game to combine lethality and staying power: Half-regenerating health, with armor supplying Damage Reduction.
Half-health regeneration works similar to a mail-in rebate: Every time you take a hit, a static percentage of the damage gets "Refunded" a short while later, marked by a faint bar on your HUD under the main HP bar. In an extended firefight, your health bar can last quite a while if you can avoid taking damage (Giving high staying-power in a fight).
At the same time, you go down in about a second if you take a continuous stream of fire, keeping high lethality as well (You can't get an HP refund if you're dead). The advantage this system has over Shields+Health seen in Halo and now Space Marine is that every hit still counts, instead of some arbitrary threshold that needs to be broken before you go down.
Shields have a potential problem of causing Medics to be ineffective because they can't and don't need to heal shields. On the flip side, static HP overtaxes medics by taking soldiers "out of commission" and in need of healing after even brief exposures to firefights. With Half-regenerating health, the player can use the Regen bar to gauge how much staying power he actually has for the extended firefights.
As far as armor's concerned, all armor types can return as suits that offer Percentile-based damage reduction, with Stealth armor surviving half as much damage as Agile armor, and REXO suits surviving half-again as much.
I... haven't thought of a system for MAX suits. I think they should function in a similar manner to Vehicles (Albeit light-weight vehicles) when it comes to handling damage.
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