With RG2, status effects will receive an overhaul and a simplification from their present setup which is current still based on vanilla's status effects.
A large number of complaints stem from the huge number of medications in the game, the number of status effects and being afflicted with so many effects that you just don't know how to treat all of them.

• Parasite status effects have been removed.
  Parasites are more common in vanilla than Reforged; in either case, real life parasites are usually irritants and nothing serious. Assuming a parasite is large enough to cause any serious harm to a person, it would be large enough to simply pull out with your hand without any medications.
  
• Open Wound is self-healing.
  Open wound lasts only for a minute and does not turn into an infected wound. In all respects, it's nothing more than a bleeding injury. It deals quite a significant amount of damage if just left to bleed out, but is easily treated with bandages.
  
• Open Fracture, Closed Fracture and Broken Leg are merged into a single generic "Broken Bone" status effect.
  As all 3 status effects have almost identical effects and the same treatments, they serve no purpose in existing as separate effects.
  
• Radiation Sickness and Radiation Overload have been removed
  Radiation Sickness is just another name for Radiation Poisoning; and Radiation Overload (vanilla status effect) isn't a real affliction.
  Radiation Poisoning now triggers at higher Rads and once it times out, adds Organ Failure to the mix.
  
• Well Fed is an active effect instead of a passive one
  Well fed has been merged with the food bonuses of RG1. It's given only by high quality foods and gives a temporary boost of +100 max hp, stamina and food capacity.
  
• Indigestion, Poison Food, Poison Bite 1, Poison Bite 2 and Intoxication have been removed.
  
• Indigestion (which isn't a harmful effect) and Poison Food have been merged into Food Poisoning. An irritating, but non-fatal affliction that will heal on it's own over time if not treated with medication.
  
• Poison Bites and Intoxication have been merged into a generic "Poison", which is a constant but slow drain of HP until evolving into Organ Failure.
  
• Many medical items have been removed so that the minimum number of items are needed to be managed. There are no overlaps with the new medical items, so it's one item per condition (excluding medkits).
  No anti-parasite pills or anti-toxic ointments.

Blocks will have considerably more HP with the new material system, which now deviates completely from the vanilla setup. This includes a functional removal of the hardness system currently implemented in Empyrion.
Functionally, that will make no difference to the players. Blocks will take the same number of hits to destroy, except that now when a turret says "100 damage per hit" it will actually DO 100 damage to the block it hits. Not 6.66 damage like such a weapon presently does to a steel block (both in RG and Vanilla).

Note: For how much work that is to do; it involved me going through every block in the game (2000+) and manually calculating their hitpoints.

I've spent the last few months and will continue to spend more months building hundreds of new high-quality POIs for players to engage.
New shielding mechanics will be employed for AI Bases that have externally-mounted shield generators that must be destroyed before a POI can be entered. These shield generators produce a visible bubble barrier over the structure that makes it easier to identify a POI as shielded.

With new material changes and damage calculations with the new system, it opens up the possibility for more CV weapons to be enabled on planets as comparatively underpowered ground bases intended for HV/SV combat will instead hit harder and be more durable under fire against CVs while remaining more yielding to HV and SV.
Note: This situation only applies to ground-based POIs and not space.

Weapons in RG2 will be modularly upgradable by taking them to a gunsmith with the requisite upgrade kit; allowing you to replace specific parts for different effects on your weapons.
Replace the barrel, the receiver, feed system, stock or scope on your chosen weapon for adjustments in accuracy, recoil, reload speed and damage.
Upgrades are automatically transferred to any identical weapon used by the player, to ensure they're not lost.
Note: Subject to change

The Pulse Rifles have been merged with the Assault Rifles. The new assault rifle series have the rate of fire of Pulse Rifles with the magazine size of Assault Rifles. No one ever used the assault rifles after they had a pulse rifle, and rightly so.
The IDs used by the Pulse Rifles will go to the SMGs.

Miniguns now use the same ammunition as Assault Rifles.
Ammunitions have been rescaled to match their real-world counterparts instead of being massively oversized... and/or being fictional (looking at you, 15mm rounds. You don't exist).