I must begin by saying I am initially extremely excited but I also have some concerns given this games lineage in the descent series.
I do enjoy the descent games greatly but I feel they have always done a pretty bad job making combat feel tense or even faintly important.
In the first descent, monsters were exceptionally easy to defeat and were spawned (literally) around every corner, but it was limited by the overlords hand and threat. Character death was costly but then you just sort of awkwardly teleported back in on the next round.
The second descent handled this significantly worse I find. Monsters automatically respawn at a static rate (that makes large/ tough monster substantially more preferable to smaller ones). Killing individual monsters is only useful if they are literally in your way as in most quests simply rushing to the objective was the best course of action. Despite my criticisms of the monster side of things the handling of player injury is worse, any character can spend their turn to just get themselves up, wherever they are and if another player can get to them and spend an action then they are good to go as if they had never been downed.
There is no permanency or weight to any of the combat. Damage suffered can be measured in lost actions which leads to strange things where it is better to stunlock or immobilize heroes then actually kill them if one must choose between the two.
I am optimistic about imperial assault reintroducing threat to limit the imperial players reinforcements. But I sincerely hope this game doesn't use either of the death revive mechanics of the previous games.
Ideas for alternatives:
1. Out of action: I wouldn't advise perma-death for a campaign game but if missions are short enough and heroes are tough enough I could see a simple system where heroes who run out of health are eliminated for the remainder of the mission. Unfortunately this doesn't mesh well with the games (likely) greater focus on ranged combat as it would allow the imperial player to simply focus down players one at a time. If there was an effective way of heroes controlling/dividing imperial aggro then maybe.
2. More harsh revive system: Use the system from 2nd edition but either limit it by a resource (medical kits), make it take more time, make it more punishing for the revived character in question (no getting up with 2 actions to spend), no getting up all by yourself.
3. Injuries: As the system in 2nd edition but perhaps each time you are downed you slow down for the remainder of the mission somehow, get to many and your permanently eliminated. Enemies cant attack downed heroes so this might cut out reviving allies in the stupid situations where they will just get knocked over again.
Anyways those are my thoughts on combat and death/revive mechanics. Do you guys also share my problems with d2/d1? What system would you like for imperial assault?