Characters with bigger hitboxes should have damage mitigation, NOT more health

I see a lot of people suggesting that characters with larger hitboxes should have more HP.   Unfortunately this is a poor solution that does not fix the problem of large characters being disadvantaged relative to small characters.   It may level the playing field for one fight, but the larger character is still taking more damage.   That means that he has to consume more healing items to top himself up after a fight.   It means that they need to waste considerably more time consuming those extra healing items to stay topped up.   So the big characters are still weaker than the small ones, but the problem has shifted to one of being drained over time in as attrition takes its toll.   It's also an ugly solution since players will need to remember many different health totals in order to estimate how close that they are to killing a target when counting damage numbers.

A better solution to the hitbox problems is to give the bigger characters damage mitigation values to compensate for the extra bullets that they are hit by relative to the smaller characters.   This has a number of advantages:

1:   Similar to the raw HP approach, this levels the playing field from the perspective of a head to head engagement.

2:   Unlike the raw HP approach, the larger characters will not be disadvantaged from an attrition perspective since it will take the same amount of healing to top themselves back up to full.

3:   It's a "clean" solution since you do not need to remember many disparate HP values when counting damage numbers towards a kill.

4:   It makes aesthetic sense since the larger characters are equipped with bulky body armor that logically should be providing some damage resistance.

5:   As a damage mitigation value, it can be confined to only affecting certain hitboxes.   This is important for keeping the reward for landing a hit fair relative to the difficulty of landing the hit.   For example, it's much easier to land a bodyshot against Gibraltar than it is to land a bodyshot against Lifeline and in turn the reward for landing a single bullet against Gibraltar's body should be less than the reward of landing a shot against Lifeline's body.   However their heads are still pretty much the same size.   Since the difficulty of landing a headshot against Gibraltar is roughly the same as landing a headshot against Lifeline, then the reward of landing that shot should be the same.

So, in conclusion, bodyshots landed against a large character like Gibraltar would inflict less damage to him than bodyshots landed against a different character since his body hitbox is so much larger than the rest of the characters.   However he'd enjoy no extra measure of survivability against people who land a headshot against him since his head is still approximately the same size as everyone else's.

The inverse could even be applied against characters at the other end of the spectrum.   If someone like Wraith is simply too small and squirrely compared to everyone else, then she can be penalized by taking slightly more damage per body shot than other characters.