How many people who have healers go into a battle with less than full health? Almost no one. Health Packs are then only used to revive the fallen. Some game developers have recognized this and hence removed the need for between combat healing all together since it’s basically a chore required to play the game, and chores suck. Examples include Dragon Age: Origins, Final Fantasy XII, Assassin’s Creed III, and others. So, why not have Heroes who survive a match be given full health, eliminating the need to go heal them before their next match?
As I understand it, the purpose of Health Packs, and their 36 minute regeneration cycle, is to limit the armchair warrior who plays all day all the time from achieving single handed dominance of an event. But isn’t this also what MMR and Scaling are for? Limited Health Packs (as well as MMR and Scaling, but I digress) encourages players to actively NOT play the game. Your team out of commission? You are out of Health Packs? Oh well, game over. Features that limit gameplay are bad features.
Rarely do I encounter a situation where I don’t have a Health Pack to revive a fallen hero anymore, you’d have to have 6 heroes downed inside of 4 hours to run out, but I have a max level healer and go into matches with full health strong heroes like Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Punisher. The existence of Health Packs at all doesn’t really benefit me, unless I royally screw up. Those without healers are punished for playing the game, as they must trade the health of their heroes for the rewards of a mission, and then rely solely on the regenerating health packs to keep their team thriving. They inevitably hit a wall and can not continue without purchasing Health Packs or waiting out the clock to get the Health Packs they need. This is an unfair advantage to players who have healers. Having all heroes heal to full between matches will correct this imbalance.
If the design intent is to slow the game down by limited access to Hit Point restoration, then the new slowing down will be downed heroes. With no Health Pack to revive them the new downtime is their time to get back up. This can vary between characters but I’ve never seen one be down for more than an hour to two hours. This would also encourage roster rotation, if a hero goes down one must rise to take his place if a player wants to continue in an event. It would also encourage more overall play and less last minute rubberbanding to the top play, because what if your required hero goes down in the last hours? Then you are stuck at a particularly bad score. All these things seem like things we should want to encourage.
If you want to leave Health Packs in, because they are a potential source of Hero Point expenditure, fine, I don’t mind that, but consider fully healing any standing heroes at the end of each match. We do it anyway when we are capable, it would just eliminate the need to prologue heal, and get the 20 ISO for doing so, and remove the disadvantage to new players who don’t have OBW maxed out. Health packs would then be for reviving downed characters only, which is all I currently use them for anyway.
tl:dr? - Heal all characters between fights because OBW does that anyway for those that have her.