Arcanaville

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My main point Arcana wasn't which side was right or wrong but that people need to stop dismissing veteran misgivings based on "you don't have the numbers to back that up."

If a bunch of veterans say to the devs, "Boy we seem to be missing a lot," the devs need to freaking check into it and stop asking us for demorecords. Assume we know how to play their game after 2+ years for crying out loud.

F

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I'm not making excuses, but for what its worth, most of the reports were about lucks "occasionally not working" or "working intermittently."

Although I cannot say she was the first to put it this way, it was Kali's multiple reports of lucks "not working until enough of them were used" that got me thinking that they might not have been broken, just weaker than advertised. Which caused me to run specific tests looking for the ramp up/ramp down behavior, which I was able to reproduce consistently in at least one instance.

The question I posed to pohsyb was this (paraphrased): are lucks modified by the AT scale modifiers, in such a way to reduce their strength, because they appear to me to be working at lower than their advertised numerical value.

The answer was: no, but it must have prompted pohsyb to think about it further, because after looking at the modifier values (inspirations use the "ones table") he then took the next logical step and looked at the base values, and here we are. It would have been my next question anyway, if the mods were not the issue, but it illustrates the train of thought.

However, even *I* had no idea how to replicate people's impressions that lucks were working intermittently and that didn't match my experience.

I wouldn't say I ever "dismissed" the reports of malfunctioning lucks, so much as I couldn't reconcile them with my experience. Its entirely possible the devs were in the same position. The real lesson, I think, isn't that we should listen to players more, but rather (and I kick myself because I actually teach this) sometimes you have to stop listening to the players, but still hear what they are trying to say.

When players said *sometimes* two lucks worked fine, and sometimes not, it was important to realize players can't tell when they are working fine. I definitely should have rejected some of the players observations, the problem was I rejected the wrong ones.

Hear the problem, not the symptoms. Troubleshooters everywhere know what I'm talking about.

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That kind of self-aggrandizement is more typical of the lamer (male) gender.

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I'm not always sure I'm right, I'm just sure everyone who disagrees with me is always wrong.


Better?

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So Insights SAY +25% _Accuracy_ but what they mean is +25% (or not even that, but whatever) _To_Hit_Buff_.

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An interesting theory is that lucks *are* "+25% defense" relative to base 50% tohit. Perhaps in the distant past, all critter types had base 50% tohit (and they do again). Lucks date to that time when a player popped a luck, he was reducing net tohit by 25% for all attackers; +12.5 percentage points DEF = "+25% defense" colloquially. Given other things I've seen and heard, this is not a bad theory.

Insights, though; good luck coming up with a theory there.

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I hope this little nugget will be a lesson to the Doubting Thomases who arise to shout down anyone without a 5 MB file of 10,000 hits and misses to back him up. The people who were correct in this case were, not the statistical gurus (sorry Arcana, but then I am in this group most of the time too), and not even the devs themselves, but rather, the people who KNOW the game inside out from many hours of playing it, and could tell just by feel, that something odd was going on with inspirations. So maybe from now on people will be a little more open-minded when the more intuitive, but experienced, gamers have something to say about these things.

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Actually, I think the problem in this case was that there were a lot of very experienced people on both sides of this issue who were going by feel, and no one wanted to do controlled testing of something like this, because controlled testing is not easy to do (ten bucks says no one comes close to guessing what sort of testing uncovered this).

I've felt the "odd" behavior of lucks before, but I was willing to dismiss it as being just that: a feeling. And feelings are so often so very wrong when it comes to accuracy. But the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about the specific examples being posted, the less easy it became to dismiss it as a perceptual error - as *most* of these things actually are.

You know, in the realm of accuracy-related issues, the devs have made some doozies. But in terms of the total number of real problems relative to the number of complaints about accuacy, the devs are probably batting 0.999 or better. That's an additional problem with this sort of thing. Denying there is a problem automatically is not a good idea, but its so very very right so very very often.

I should point out, that in the main, I've never been treated like that by the devs: they've patiently listened to almost every testing-related problem I bring to them. Its either because I'm always armed with a lot of helpful information useful to them, or because I'm armed with so much information its easier to check into the problem than read my testing information. Too accurate to ignore, or too annoying to ignore. Not sure which I am. Not sure which one its more useful to be, either.

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I've added this to my buglist. I'll update the text and make a balance pass on Inspirations in the not so distant future.

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Thanks Castle. This saves me my next PM.

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Could the acc strangeness be due to the change in how to-hit is calculated vs. the old days? In the old days accuracy and to-hit buffs were basically the same (if I recall) but now, to-hit buffs are ADDERS and acc buffs are MULTIPLIERS.

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I think the difference between the old days and today is that people *thought* it was one way back then, and *think* (correctly) its this way now. I don't think the mechanics have actually been changed since release, or even significantly prior to that.

However, even red names have occasionally misspoke on the subject of accuracy, which can further confuse the issue. pohsyb, one of my sources for technical details, admitted to me that one of his accuracy examples that was being used as the "definitive" proof that accuracy was additive was in error, and explained to me that in actual fact its multiplicative. It wasn't changed, his example was just off in that one detail. It happens when you are trying to illustrate one thing, and overlook a detail somewhere else: it happens to me occasionally, which is why I specifically proofread for that type of error in everything I post.

Its also why the devs are sometimes gunshy about posting numerical examples: sometimes a typo can loom large as people extrapolate an entire game engine around it.

This doesn't excuse the Mr. Magoo mistake on the inspirations' text descriptions, though. Which is, for me, the meta problem with all things accuracy related. If they had screwed up the sturdies, it would take all of five seconds to figure that out and bug it, and a lot of people could generate unambiguous proof of the error.

How many people can actually test accuracy problems and know how to draw proper attention to them, in all of CoH? A couple dozen? A couple?

Geko is basically right: accuracy is not broken, and basically never has been. But practically everything related to accuracy has been broken at least once in some way, sometimes for extended periods of time, and often the hurdle to prove it is extremely high. I'm not sure what the best way to fix that is, but *somehow* I think the game needs to tell people, in at least general terms, what's going on with accuracy, when they do things like pop lucks, or use radiation infection, or have six guys in the invincibility field. Not necessarily with a flood of numbers, but something.

My instinct is to say there should be a "/debug accuracy 1" command that when enabled shows the net tohit percentage on every hit and miss in your combat chat. Heck, even if it was locked out for players, I would think this is the sort of thing the devs should have access to, so I could PM a red name and say "check this please" and they could check the true net in-game behavior in like ten seconds.


By the way, does anyone think I'm being selfish in thinking all this accuracy testing deserves a badge?

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Get this moved to Guides so it doesn't get deleted!!!

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I thought it made more sense as a discussion topic here and would draw more attention. I'll make sure this thread or a reposted version eventually makes its way to the Guides section for permanence.

Another update: lucks and insights don't match their text descriptions. According to pohsyb, these are their true values:

DEF
S - 12.5%
M - 25%
L - 33%

ACC
S - 7.5%
M - 18.75%
L - 37.5%

See this thread for more info.

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MoG: when you fall, you can activate this power to revive yourself. When you return, you return with 70% resistances to all but toxic/psi, 25% maximum health, 60% defense, and +800% (Instant) healing. The power lasts 60 seconds, and has 650 second base recharge. When it expires, your maximum health returns to normal, and you are left with your current health and endurance (i.e. no crash).


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Strange no toxic resists since that's one of Regen's strengths. Not a deal breaker since we could just hit recon. I'd be very happy with this version of MoG. Like DO said the defense would either have to be positional or base defense.

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Its actually intended to preserve the psionic and toxic weaknesses the devs seem to insist they want to impose on MoG, but soften them significantly by allowing Instant Healing which would mitigate that damage (but I made a typo I'll correct in a moment). A compromise between what the players want, and what the devs might need to see it as not overpowered.

And as to using recon: I presumed that this would retain the "immune to healing and regeneration" that the current MoG has, *except* for its own inherent Instant Healing. The presumption is that Elude + IH is good enough for anyone, especially because this doesn't have a crash (as I think no self rez ought to). Its mainly to give regens an extended "immunity" after rez that allows the regen to bounce back, fight, retoggle or whatever, and then transition smoothly back into the fight - all things that seem reasonable if you've already died once. And if you've died once, the presumption is that a lot of +regen might not have been doing it for you, so this power gives you 60 seconds of something else - high defense - to buy your way out of trouble.

In effect, against most damage types, this is superior to Elude by a wide margin: can't complain there, even if you can't use recon.

For toxic, you're meant in effect to just have IH (no toxic defense): which means I erred in saying +RES(all -toxic/psi). It should have been +RES(all -psi) only - it should have toxic resistance.

For psi, you're meant to have IH, but a psi vulnerability, much like the current MoG, but softened by IH. You could still pop a bunch of lucks to cover the psi hole after using this rez, if it was necessary (everyone else gets to buy their way out of certain problems with insps, so I don't see that as making this power overpowered). Of course, you'll need to pop more than you think.

So uber against most stuff, just regen against toxic, and vulnerable (but less so) to psi. And you have to die first.

It isn't perfect, but its a serious suggestion and not a fanciful one, so I was looking for something the devs might actually have a chance to think was reasonably balanced.

Why 60% defense? Anything more than 45% doesn't do much in PvE anyway, so in that sense, there's no difference between 45% and 60%. But in PvP, its there to resist tohit buffage.

A lot of people have reported oddities with inspirations, especially lucks, and occasionally insights. I finally had a chance to test those out. Wasn't easy, let me tell you, and the tests were nowhere near the level of precision I would like to have, but I was able to see pretty conclusively variations in the behavior of the insps over what we all assumed was their behavior, based on their textual descriptions. So I had something of positive proof to take to the devs for enlightenment.


The textual descriptions are wrong: very very wrong.


Here is what the insps actually do, according to pohsyb:


DEF
S - 12.5%
M - 25%
L - 33%

ACC
S - 7.5%
M - 18.75%
L - 37.5%

RES
S - 10%
M - 15%
L - 20%

DMG
S -25%
M - 33%
L - 50%

Well, at least they got the damage and resistance ones right. But lucks are half the strength you think they are, and insights were created with a random number generator.

(Please don't reply that the insights aren't actually random, I know that.)

The good news is that SR isn't a little more than one small luck, its a little less than three. At least I think that's good news: all of you that were wondering why you sometimes needed to chomp four or five of these little guys now know why: it takes five of these guys to floor an even level boss in I6 (four in I7).

The bad news is that lucks and insights aren't actually balanced. In lower level zones where drops are often the smaller variety, lucks are a little stronger than insights. Not too much, but some. In RV, where drops are more often of the larger variety, insights are stronger than lucks.

So as tohit buffs become more common, from the BB to SC to WB to RV, insights also become more powerful than lucks. That's probably not a good thing either.


You would think by now we wouldn't trust the text descriptions for anything, and here's yet more proof that you shouldn't believe everything you read. Unless it comes from me, of course.


And this is worth noting: because lucks are defense, and therefore probabilistic in nature, not everyone will tend to see "average" performance. Some people will see behavior close to what they really do, and extrapolate their performance correctly, and some people will see bursty behavior that is out of line with their true behavior, and extrapolate their behavior incorrectly.

But in this case, it was the people who complained about seeing oddities that were right, and the people who thought they were working correctly that were wrong. Including me: sorry guys and gals, it took me a while to eventually come around and devote testing time to this.


The question, of course, is whether anyone else but me will know this, after this thread gets pushed down into page 42 with all the Issue 7 threads.

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hey, what if we combined Revive and MoG?

so you die. BLARGH! then click Moment of revival and you stand up and do the cool animation. Then you get full end and a the full heal/25% hp drop with capped res and def. duration, 45s. recharge, 300s

then, in place of revive, we get that click power that I mentioned earlier that gives 1.5 base end recovery for 90s, recharge 500s.

eh? EH?

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It occurs to me we can give regens exactly what they want using this idea. We absolutely, *cannot* allow healing within MoG so long as MoG is discetionary. But Soul Transfer is allowed to be *really powerful* because its also a self rez: its not a purely discretionary power.

So, how about this for MoG:

MoG: when you fall, you can activate this power to revive yourself. When you return, you return with 70% resistances to all but toxic/psi, 25% maximum health, 60% defense, and +800% (Instant) healing. The power lasts 60 seconds, and has 650 second base recharge. When it expires, your maximum health returns to normal, and you are left with your current health and endurance (i.e. no crash).

Perhaps the devs would consider that balanced *because* its a self rez, and therefore self-limiting.


In effect, just like MoG is *supposed to be*, this MoG is useful when regen fails. In this case, though, regen really *has to* fail for it to be useful. But if regen fails, this power would be *really* useful.

Its definitely not a cheap elude anymore, but it isn't exactly more powerful than elude overall either. It now has the same downside as Soul Transfer, but in exchange it works like a regen power, and doesn't overpower the set by doing so.

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That still means that only people with Knockback powers would move the ball, and it wouldn't have the physics aspects that you'd want, since it has to follow knockback rules rather than particle movement rules.

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The ball would try to get up after we hit it?

That would be creepy.

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i love this whole discussion but this has to be the most fanciful conversation that's taken place in either of the Lounges, moreso than even the "create-a-nerf" stuff. I really don't ever see them going back on their stance concerning risk. All this stuff would make soloing much easier and I just don't think they'd ever do that. Situational power has been their design goal for the last 4 rounds of nerfs.

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This makes regen, and all scrappers, situationally powerful. Except, instead of the scrappers dictating when it happens, the actual *situation* dictates when it happens.

Yeah, that just makes too much sense to think it will happen.

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So that would make Regen something like this:

Fast healing - 200% Regen buff passive
Recon - same
QR - same
DP - same
Integration - super mez resists to hold, sleep, disorient, immobilize (reduced held time to 1/3) passive
Resilience - mez PROTECTION to disorient (only protection, very thematic for regen) 10% Sm, Le, Toxic resists
Instant Healing - same
Revive - same
MoG - Fixed somehow

--------------------

And Invul something like:

RPD - 12.75% Sm, Le passive
TI - 20.25% Sm, Le toggle
DP - same
Resist Elements - 13.125% Sm, Le, Toxic
Unyielding - Mega resists to status
Resist Energies 13.125%
Invincibility - 2% for first mob, then 1% thereafter cap 10
Tough Hide - 7.5% defense to all but Psi
Unstoppable - Something

Hmm... I like.

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If, and only if, containment was taken away, some of the damage mitigation in the passives would be shifted to INT and UNY, so that instead of doing double or triple damage when held, instead the controller would detoggle that extra damage mitigation away temporarily.

In PvE, this would require more villains to run toggles instead of having inherent protection, so there was something for controllers to detoggle. Running toggles also simultaneously solves another non-regen non-scrapper related problem: what use is end drain? For blasters and defenders, even if the drain to zero is only momentary, its a detoggle, and the villain has to either fight with less, or take the time to retoggle, and either one of those is good for blasters and defenders.

The more I think about it, the more problems it solves. Give everyone something like 50%-75% of their protection in passives, and 25% in toggles, and use detoggling to give end drain and mez their proper damage-amplifying advantages. It allows mez to actually work in the game without being overpowered, and provides a way to distinguish scrappers and tankers so tankers don't feel scrappers intrude on them on pure damage mitigation: they get to keep theirs under heavy mez whereas we don't - but that also means the "cap" on scrapper mitigation doesn't have to be so strict to prevent scrapper/tanker overlap.

You know, it might also allow the return of toggle IH, since IH can now be more readily detoggled via end drain or mez, at least momentarily. It would force the regen to stop to retoggle it, or fight without it, but it wouldn't be permanently up in high end fights no matter how it was slotted, so perhaps it would no longer be overpowered.

Although, haha, in this scenario, regens might want to *keep* the click IH.

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Get rid of toggle dropping and getting mezzed would be annoying but fine.

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The reason why I prefer to shift defense into the passives rather than totally remove toggle dropping is that I think controllers detoggling half your protection (but not most of it) makes a whole lot more sense to me than controllers doing containment. If this unnecessary "toggles must be stronger than passives" idea went out the door, and was replaced with "give the baseline protection to the passives, and give the "extra" protection we want them to have to the toggles," detoggling would make more sense. It would serve much like the downtime of dull pain or the limited uptime of IH does: that level of protection would be extra protection to allow scrappers to be more hardy situationally, but you couldn't count on it.

Mez would then be knocking scrappers down from "great" to "good" and not "good" to "kitten." Which would be another difference between tankers and scrappers: tankers, with the stronger mez magnitude protection, would be much less likely to be detoggled, which means they get to keep their "extra" protection under much more hostile conditions. Which is exactly what we want.

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SR defenses are typed melee, ranged, and AoE. This means they each protect only against attacks typed as such. The assumption was that (except for Hamidon), all attacks have at least one of those three types, and therefore SR defenses work against all possible attacks.

Apparently not.

Note: appears to be a PvP issue only, because it only seems to have occured for player versions of the powers in question.

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Update: I posted in the linked thread that Castle confirms the psi "hole" extends to PvE critters as well, at least some of them (but probably not all of them). But this isn't a pure PvP issue.

Defense_Options:
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I have a strange Idea. Take Int and make it an auto power. But remove the defense to status protection and give it resistance instead. However inexchange for that it gets resistance to all effects, fear, slow, everything. But it does loose KB protection. Really does it make sense that because you heal fast you don't get knocked back?

Anyway just a crazy idea.

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Stupid_Fanboy:
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i'll take you one further. do that for all scrappers and tankers. tanks get kb protection though.

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A long time ago I suggested that one way to distinguish scrappers and tankers was to give scrappers ultra-high mez resistance, but no protection, and to give tankers ultra-high protection, but lower resistance. So mez tends to connect with scrappers, but they shake it off fast. Mez tends to bounce off tankers, but if you get them, you get them good.

To make this work, you would need to shift more of scrapper and tanker protection into the passives rather than the toggles, to prevent sudden mez death.

Then each one would be immune, or relatively immune (high protection, high resistance) to certain specialty mez. SR might be slows, regen might be sleeps, invuln might be disorient, say.

Removing knockback protection, though, would require a major boost to scrapper defenses. It made sense in I3 to take KB protection away from a perma-elude scrapper. It doesn't make sense to take it away from an I6 scrapper, because so much of their damage mitigation is tied into killing attackers quickly. But I think a lot of people would trade KB protection to get back I3 regen or something close: really powerful damage mitigation, but can be tossed around a lot. Sounds more scrapperish to me, anyway.

I can see how that can be confusing. I'm still updating the guide for I7, I will adjust the language accordingly. The next verison of the guide has slightly better calculation examples also.

SR defenses are typed melee, ranged, and AoE. This means they each protect only against attacks typed as such. The assumption was that (except for Hamidon), all attacks have at least one of those three types, and therefore SR defenses work against all possible attacks.

Apparently not.

Note: appears to be a PvP issue only, because it only seems to have occured for player versions of the powers in question.

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SR would be fine if it had a decent heal.

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There's a reason why that proposal doesn't have one: its the thing that SR is least likely to get. I'm basing that on information I can't share, but suffice to say I believe I lack the ability to overcome the hurdle I know is there.

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You're looking at it as Regen is so much more powerful than SR. NURF THEM. Sure you're saying it nicer and more reasonably, but in the end that's what you're saying. It's because both you and the devs can't figure out how to make SR be reasonably on par with Regen in a way that maintains the essential character of SR.

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Its trivially easy for me to do that. I've come up with about six different ways to do it. On each one, been implied or directly told it would make SR too powerful. I am one hundred percent sure that those suggestions would only put SR on par with regen, not exceed it. Draw the logical conclusion.

I want the devs to point to a spot, and say "somewhere generally around there is where the scrapper secondaries should be" and then make sure at least SR and Invuln get there. Frankly, I don't care if the spot they pick puts regen at ground zero or fifty miles away. What I do care about is that in the case of regen, because +regeneration is so tricky to balance, they let regen have a lot (whether its too much, not enough, or just right is immaterial: that its a lot is unassailable). But they believe defense is also tricky to balance (because of stacking), so SR's get to have too little. That is annoyingly inconsistent.

You say its not fear. They were in fact so afraid of stacking problems with defense that they invented a whole different damage mitigation mechanism just to give to SR so they wouldn't have to give it more defense. When the dev team says adding toxic defense or altering the perception rules would take too much work, inventing the first new form of damage mitigation since release just for one set is not altruism or someone getting creative, that's fear.

Its not wholely unfounded fear, but the problems are not intractible.


The real problem is that because regen's damage mitigation is much more difficult to analyze than say SR or Invuln, its easy to dismiss mathematical comparisons unless you've heavily played all the sets and can compare apples to apples.

Because you tihnk somehow I just lack the creativity it takes to "add a heal" to SR, this is SR balanced against the current performance of regen:

FF: 15.75% melee
FS: 15.75% ranged/AoE
dodge: 7.5% melee
agile: 7.5% ranged/AoE
PB: status, +15% health/+15% heal, enhanceable
quickness: +0.3 speed, +0.25 recovery, unenhanceable
lucky: replace with revive
evasion: toggle, intangible
elude: +45% defense, +run/jump/recovery
(this gets rid of the passive scaling resistances, by the way)

Its really easy to look at that and go "no freaking way." But that basically brings SR even with regen, on five critical metrics: average performance, build efficiency, slot efficiency, burst/average damage mitigation curve and power pool synergy.

That's the performance you're saying regen has to have, or you'll quit. And yet I'm pretty sure that if I fight for another two years, I'm extremely unlikely to get it for SR or Invuln.


You should keep in mind that I've never actually stated that I think regen needs or deserves a nerf. I consider the spot that the devs choose to balance the sets arbitrary, and I don't care where regen is relative to that spot: higher, lower, or dead even. Swapping QR between regen and SR was purely an academic exercise to look at the balance issues between them. QR offers three separate benefits to regen: build efficiency, offensive boost, and lower downtime. All three are specific weaknesses in the SR set, which has the lowest build efficiency, the lowest offensive boost of the four sets, and the worst downtime mitigation (no heal, no end recovery). Swapping them on paper helps demonstrate the gap between them, and it can be done in a way that doesn't seriously alter the character of the set (or it would be an invalid comparison). Consider that in the SR example above, I replace lucky with revive. That isn't necessarily because I think SR needs revive: its a placeholder for "a power with no defensive mitigation benefit that would not be universally considered a necessary build choice and could be skipped by anyone with a tight build."

If I actually thought regen should have QR taken away, I would have no qualms at all with starting a thread with exactly that title.


By the way, you know how we used to say that one advantage of SR was that its defenses worked against everything? Its actually regen whose defenses work against everything. Apparently, a theoretical hole in SR's defenses is not so theoretical after all.

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I see regen as the most constant. It keeps going and going, that's what it does. But with Invincibility Inv has a better tohit then regen thus more damage for as long as it can put it out, and SR has quickness for more damage as long as it can go. Sure regen out lasts them assuming someone runs out of end but in the short run its doing less then the those two.

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By my calculations, the increased end recovery of QR is worth about one SO's worth of end reducers in each attack, while quickness is worth about one DO's worth of recharge in each attack (and the actual net benefit is a little lower than the speed value because of the activation time penalty). Theoretically speaking, a regen scrapper can always parlay higher regen into faster speed, especially post ED (and actually, pre-ED also, although few did).


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(I just don't know DA enough, does it not have a damage aura and stealth built in and thus also an offensive advantage to start with in fights?)

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Death shroud is an aura, so its best bang for buck comes in teamed situations with larger spawns, so DS can hit more targets for the END it burns, and the spawns are closer together so there is less time spent burning END and getting no benefit. I'd say DS in teams is at least as good of a benefit as QR is to regen provided the DA scrapper has KB protection and/or isn't being knocked out of the center of spawns, and has enough END to power all of its toggles and attacks through heavy END reduce slotting. Probably it comes up to par with the overall benefit with QR in the late game moreso in the early game, where QR has a big edge over the other sets' non-defensive benefits in the early game (when END is a bigger constraint prior to SOs and stamina).

In any case, DA is the one set I think has a legitimate ability to challenge regen for the strongest scrapper set. Under the right conditions, its the only set that can unambiguously outperform regen. Those situations are not necessarily representative of the average situation, but they aren't rare either. I would not say DA > Regen, but I wouldn't argue with DA ~= Regen, at least in overall performance (its a lot more expensive and takes more effort to get that level of performance out of DA that Regen gets much more effortlessly, but a strong DA driver can match and occasionally exceed Regen across a wide range of situations).

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I considered the option of taking quick recovery away from regen, strengthening it, and giving it to SR

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See, everyone's missing exactly what needs to be done to balance out SR, and I'll post it here because the topic of discussion seems to have drifted to /SR and Quick Recovery. Gather around, children, and I shall share the wisdom. Arcanaville, you'll want to listen to this.

Since MoG basically turns a /regen into a /SR, lets turn the tables. Give the /SR folks a tier 9 called 'Moment of Envy,' that for exactly 1 minute drops all their defense and makes them into a full-fledged regenner with Integration, IH, Dull Pain, and QR running, and one self-heal available. Bam! Problem Solved! No more /SR players within 10 minutes of the patch! 15, tops.

You can all bow down, now. Cryptic, I'm available for hire or consultation.

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That's pretty funny. Almost as funny as swapping instant healing for lucky would be.

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Anything that would require me to actually look at the blue bar is BS.

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As nice as QR is, it isn't infinite END even now. Without stamina, even regens have to manage END. In fact, even with QR and DC on my DM/Regen, I still run out of END in teams when I go all out. I'm afraid I can't take seriously the "unless regen has zero END problems at all, its broken" objection.

A serious balance concern to me is that the devs use END as a limiting factor on offensive output. QR effectively means that not only does regen have the best damage mitigation, it a priori has - and cannot possibly not have - the best long term damage output. Nowhere in the description of regen do I see that conceptually it must beat everyone on damage mitigation and simultaneously must beat everyone on damage output.

The issue is that QR was originally meant to power IH, and now IH doesn't need powering. Which means QR is really giving an offensive benefit, not a defensive one, and a massive one that was probably not originally intended. On the defensive side of the equation, regen now burns more end than it used to because of reconstruction, which is in effect replacing a lot of the original benefit of IH, at lower end cost.

If regen's actual regeneration was less dependent on burning END - if in essence regen didn't cost end to run - QR's reason for existence would be greatly lessened.

I wouldn't worry though. The devs have repeatedly stated both publicly and privately that they have no intention of altering QR. I think its because they are afraid of pissing regen scrappers off at this point. Which is good for regen scrappers, and I play regen scrappers, but when that carries more weight than actual material balance concerns, I'm not so sure that's really a good thing.

If nothing else, consider that if that's the mindset, if they ever change their mind, logic is not going to be a useful weapon to get them to change it back. Personally, I'd rather have what I have because the devs honestly think its the right thing for me to have, and not because of fear. SR has the (low) defense it has because of fear: just fear of a completely different sort.

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Thought #4: Funny you should mention this, because in my (as yet unposted) scrapper secondary balance analysis, I considered the option of taking quick recovery away from regen, strengthening it, and giving it to SR. Net damage mitigation change: zero. And yet, it creates all sorts of interesting balance opportunities.

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Why oh why will people never learn?

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I'm funny that way. You should have been here when I suggested power pool defenses not stack with SR defenses.

I'm incorrigible.