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City of Heroes Issue 5 Spines/Regen Respec Build (Assumed At Least Level 39)
Here is my Issue 5 Spines/Regen Respec build for City of Heroes, currently at Level 40.
This build does not represent going from Level 1 through to Level 50, although it would be possible, but not most effective.
Instead it represents my build after the I5 Respec.
In my opinion, City of Heroes is structured such that the build which takes you through from level 1 to about 24 is not the same build that is most effective above level 25 when the types of enemies you face changes. Therefore in my view players who want to maximise their effectiveness should take full advantage of the Respec Trials that are available in the game. Build your character to each level range in which a Respec Trial occurs and then Respec your character to take full advantage of all your power picks and slots at that level so that you are better able to deal with the new threats you will face. The game changes drastically, for example, when you get Single Origin Enhancements. And it changes again when you begin fighting in Peregrine Island and start facing Fake Nemesis and Malta Sappers. The types of damage that you are exposed to changes, and thus your character should change too to meet this new threat. Think of it as your Hero fine tuning his/her training to adapt and meet these new challenges head on ;-)
One clear example of this is from levels 1 to 24 I used Lunge and Impale six slotted as my primary attacks and did not use Spine Burst. When I Respecced the first time I remade Jentia taking the Area of Effect powers over the single target powers I used previously. This opened up an entire new world of gameplay to me which I had not experienced with this character before.
The Purpose of this Spines Regen Build:
1) To deal a high amount of damage to multiple opponents
2) To survive the follow-up attacks from multiple opponents.
3) To remain viable against at least +2 Boss opponents and a range of +X Minons and Lieutenants to maximize XP gain.
4) To be able to Solo missions on Invincible
5) To be relevant in an I5 Team.
Your Health- In City of Heroes your health increases slowly over time. The amount of health you heal is known as your Regeneration Rate. You can figure out that the higher your Regeneration Rate, the faster you will heal to full health.
Your Endurance- Every hero has 100 Endurance with which to play. This is affected by Accolades which can increase your maximum Endurance by about 5 points or so. Endurance also recovers at a fixed rate that we refer to as your Endurance Gain,or Endurance Recovery rate.
Without further ado, the build:
Exported from version 1.5B of CoH Planner
http://joechott.com/coh
Archetype: Scrapper
Primary Powers - Ranged : Spines
Secondary Powers - Support : Regeneration
01 : Fast Healing hel(01)
01 : Lunge dam(01)
02 : Spine Burst dam(02) dam(3) dam(3) dam(5) dam(5) dam(7)
04 : Quick Recovery endrec(04) endrec(7) endrec(9) endrec(9) endrec(11) endrec(11)
06 : Hasten recred(06) recred(13) recred(13) recred(15) recred(15) recred(17)
08 : Combat Jumping defbuf(08)
10 : Dull Pain recred(10) hel(27) recred(33) recred(33)
12 : Hurdle jmp(12)
14 : Super Jump jmp(14)
16 : Integration hel(16) hel(17) hel(19) hel(19) hel(21) hel(21)
18 : Reconstruction recred(18) recred(23) hel(23) recred(25) hel(25) hel(27)
20 : Health hel(20)
22 : Stamina endrec(22) endrec(39) endrec(39) endrec(39) endrec(46) endrec(46)
24 : Kick (Fight) dam(24)
26 : Ripper dam(26) dam(29) dam(29) dam(31) dam(31) dam(31)
28 : Instant Healing recred(28) recred(33) recred(34) recred(34) recred(34) hel(36)
30 : Tough damres(30) damres(40) damres(40) damres(40) damres(43) damres(43)
32 : Throw Spines dam(32) dam(36) dam(36) dam(37) dam(37) dam(37)
35 : Resilience damres(35)
38 : Weave defbuf(38) defbuf(46) defbuf(48) defbuf(48) defbuf(48) defbuf(50)
41 : Focused Accuracy endred(41) endred(42) endred(42) thtbuf(42) thtbuf(43)
44 : Laser Beam Eyes defdbf(44) dam(45) dam(45) dam(45) dam(50) dam(50)
47 : Energy Torrent conrng(47)
49 : Moment of Glory defbuf(49)
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01 : Brawl Empty(01)
01 : Sprint Empty(01)
02 : Rest Empty(02)
For simplicity sake we will assume that your character has a Health of 1000 and an Endurance of 100.
Lunge: Lunge is the first power pick that you should take. It will serve you well throughout the life of your character. If my build was aimed at heavy single target damage, then Lunge would be an attack I would six slot. As it is, it is an attack I may 6 slot for the early levels, but not after I respec.
Fast Healing: This is an inherent healing power which increases your Health Regeneration rate by 75%. Early on you might think about slotting this to increase your survivability until Reconstruction and Integration, however it is not recommended that you slot this over and above anything else in this build at the later levels. The increase to regeneration is simply not high enough to warrant slotting when contrasted with using Instant Healing , Reconstruction and Dull Pain in normal practical use. I have tested this practically through play on the Test server. There are those that seem to believe that slotting fast healing is more effective than slotting tough. But it is not. Practical tests run on the servers and all numbers simulations show that slotting Tough has a far more profound effect on your survivability than slotting Fast Healing ever will. So for the purposes of this guide and the goals outlined above for this build I do not recommend slotting Fast Healing *in place of* Tough.Whether it makes 'common' sense or not, in game it is not more effective than 6 slotting Tough. I actually can't think of where the extra slots are going to come from to put in Fast Healing. Early in your character's life putting some slots in Fast Healing until you get Integration, Reconstruction or Dull Pain may sound like a good idea, but really you should be focussing on 6 slotting your initial attacks as soon as possible at this stage and popping Green Inspirations otherwise ;-).
Spine Burst: The big daddy of your Area of Effect Attacks. If you are surrounded by 10 opponents, and you fire off Spine Burst you have a chance to hit them all with Damage, Slow, Poison, and a Critical Hit. That's a heck of a lot, and a powerful Spine Burst attack will just about finish most minions that you face at your own level in the game. This is one of the powers that defines the Spines set as the AoE king for Scrappers. However, it's endurance cost is very high. If you fire this off each time it is available you may find yourself sucking wind and reaching for a blue inspiration very quickly. Manage this carefully, or else forego some of the damage and slot an Endurance Reducer. Up to your playstyle, try it out on Test if you have to.The Slow component of your Spines power should never be discounted. It makes you very useful to a team, since once you start hitting opponents with your spines attacks, your enemies' own attacks take that much longer to recharge. Your teammates will thank you.
Quick Recovery: Spines is by nature very Endurance heavy. All it's attacks suck a huge amount of Endurance, and this is why Regeneration is an almost perfect match for Spines. Quick Recovery is a power that must be taken for an effective Spines/Regen build. It allows you to recover your Endurance at a vastly increased rate. With Quick Recovery six slotted you will be gaining double your normal endurance each second. Slot this with Endurance Reducers, of course.
Hasten: For this build, 6 slotted Hasten is a necessity. It allows you to recharge your powers 70% faster than you normally would. This means that your attacks cycle 70% faster, allowing you to keep attacking your opponents continuously which is important for Spines. It also helps with your defense, as your Defensive click powers such as Reconstruction also recharge 70% faster with Hasten running. The 6 slots are necessary so that as soon as Hasten runs out, you can click it again to restart it. This ensures that all your powers will ALWAYS recharge 70% faster than normal.A trick is to hold down the Ctrl key and click the Hasten power. It should become surrounded with a green circle to indicate that it is on 'autofire'. It will continue activating in an endless cycle and you will always be running Hasten.
Combat Jumping: This is a power taken on the way to Super Jump. It provides some protection from Immobilisation effects, and also provides about 3% Defense. In the early levels it can also substitute as a Travel Power until you get Super Jump.
Dull Pain: Dull Pain heals a bit of damage when you use it(494 points in my case currently), and boosts your Maximum Hit Points by 40%. Since your Regeneration powers are based off a % of your Maximum Hit Points, this effectively increases the amount of hit points you regenerate per second. It can also make a difference when wading into a powerful foe to allow you to survive the first strike, known as the Alpha Strike. It is an extremely important power for Regeneration and it is actually critical to an effective build.
Hurdle: Hurdle is a bump on the way to getting the much needed Stamina power. It allows you to jump higher. Coupled with Super Jump this allows you to get around the city a bit quicker as you spend more time in the air leaping over buildings which would block your progress and getting the benefit of Super Jump's boost to your forward motion.
Super Jump: Your Main travel power in the game. Super Jump is useful because it has an excellent Vertical component which allows you to clear most terrain obstacles in the game, as well as having a fantastic forward speed that propels your character toward their destination. The drawback is, what goes up must come down. And you must touch the ground at some point before you jump again. If you touch down in range of enemies, you will get hit. However, after using Fly and Superspeed, I choose Super Jump as the best travel power in the game.
Integration: The main regeneration power of the Regen set. Integration allows you to recover 150% of your regeneration rate.Each SO Heal adds 33.3% onto that regeneration rate boost. This means that at 1000Hit Points you will recover 375 Hit Points per minute, or 6.25 hit points per second with this power. You cannot survive as a Regen Spines without this power, it should be slotted as soon as possible after you get it, as this is what keeps you alive as Regen. Instant Healing is now a Click power and cannot be depended on as an Always On power that you can take at higher levels and then redistribute slots out of Integration with a Respec. Integration now forms the backbone of your Regeneration and as such needs to be six slotted asap. With 6 slots Integration increases your Regeneration rate by 350%.
This means you will heal 874 Hit Points in one minute, or 14.58 Hit points per second if your overall Health is 1000.
Integration also provides protection from Status effects such as Sleep, Holds, Knockback and disorient. This means that as a Regen scrapper running Integration you are immune from most of the specialized attacks that enemies throw and you just have to concentrate on healing raw damage.
Reconstruction: If I were taking this build from 1 to 50 I would definitely take Reconstruction a lot earlier. It allows you to heal 25% of your hit points with each click.
6 Slotted with 3 Heals and 3 Recharge, or 4 heals and 2 Recharge depending on your play style. Reconstruction is a life saver now that Instant Healing is no longer a toggle, and can change the situation in an instant when it is used correctly. It is a must have for Regen. Each SO you put in this power adds 8.3% to the healing amount. I use this bind for reconstruction. Type this into your chat window /bind g "powexec_name Reconstruction". Now everytime you press the G key you will fire off Reconstruction.
Health: One of those annoying Power on the way to type of power. It does help with regeneration though, giving you 40% boost to your regen rate. You dont have the slots to waste on this, however. So dont add any slots to it.
Stamina: And heres the granddaddy of Endurance Recovery, Stamina! With this 6 slotted you boost your Endurance recovery by an extra 1.25 Endurance every second. That helps incredibly with keeping your attacks firing off one after the other whilst you still have Endurance to click Reconstruction to heal yourself. Remember Spines is Endurance heavy, so you need every last drop of it.
Kick: Doesnt even form a part of the series of attacks I fire. It does low damage un-slotted, but has the bonus chance to knock an opponent back
though it doesnt do this very often. Its necessary for our Defensive powers, however, so we gotta take it. You could take Boxing, which falls into the same boat except it has a very small chance to disorient an opponent for a brief time. Both relatively useless powers compared to everything else in your arsenal. It's another "Filler Power on the way to" type.
Ripper: Now you get your next major attack! Ripper is a sweet attack that deals an incredible amount of damage and more often than not Knocks down your opponent! It fires in a very narrow cone, so if you can line up your opponents one behind the other you can hit more than one with this attack! An opponent that is on the ground, is not attacking you, giving your Regeneration powers more time to work and boost your health. You can follow Ripper up quickly with a second attack. Hitting em while they are down is quite allowed!
Instant Healing: This used to be the mainstay of Regenerations survival. But since it was completely changed in Issue 5 the use of Instant Healing must be rethought.
The power grants you a 800% boost to your Regeneration rate for 90Seconds each time you click it. Yes I said 800% J I want to be able to fire Instant Healing as often as possible, there is a lag of about 1 minute and a half before you can click it again,so make the 90 seconds that it is On count fully! Each Health SO you add to this increases your Regeneration rate by 66%.
Tough: Tough allows you to resist Smashing and Lethal damage that your character receives. 6 slotted Tough resists 24.75% of the S/L damage your character gets. This means that if something normally hits you for 400 S/L damage, with Tough running you will only get hit for 301 damage. A big difference since you can only regenerate that much health every second, so anything that lowers the damage you are taking allows you to live that much longer!
Throw Spines: Throw Spines fires spines in an arc in-front of you. This is different from Spine Burst which affects everything around you, but it still does some sweet damage. Knocking something down with Ripper and then firing off Throw Spines is a favorite tactic of mine. This rounds out Spines Area of Effect powers, and these are what makes Spines the Area of Effect Scrapper king! Your damage on single targets may not be that high, but what youre after is groups of opponents that you take down quickly.
If you want to, you could slot up Lunge and Impale which are very powerful Single Target attacks instead of some of the AoE. So you have some flexibility with Spines to go single target, or multi-target. This build assumes you are going for hitting multiple opponents, however.
Resilience: Resilience is an overlooked power in the Regen lineup. Since in Issue 5 we can no longer have IH running constantly, I looked at every way I could mitigate incoming damage. Resilience allowed me to boost my Smashing/Lethal resistance by 5.625% when taken together with TOUGH this means my smashing/lethal resistance is 31.5%. This really adds up to a lot in practical fighting in CoH if you like to push the envelope. And frankly you wouldnt need a build like this if you didnt like pushing the limits of what you can do
Another thing to note about Resilience is that it allows you to resist 20% of Toxic damage for 1 minute each time you fire it. So with this build you can fire it every 30 seconds and the effects stack. So for 30 seconds you will have 40% resistance to toxic damage. I'm sure for some this may be an important secondary effect of the power in special situations, but I must say I have never utilised the power to take advantage of this yet. But, it's there if you need it ;-)
Weave: Ah..weave. Ill deal with the questions about the worth of this power later. Truly, I have not been able to 6 slot this on Live to test it practically. However all the figures and simulations indicate that your survivability is improved with Weave running when facing +x level opponents and bosses. Weave improves your Defence, and coupled with Combat Jumping you have 10% Defense to Melee And Ranged attacks.
With 6 slotted weave on with Combat Jumping slotted with one Defense SO:
+0 Minion = 40% (50%) Chance to hit
+0 Lieutenant = 47.5% (57.5%) chance to hit
+0 Boss = 55% (65%) Chance to hit
When you are facing multiple opponents these reductions from the norm (in brackets) is nothing to scoff at. Every hit that does NOT hit you means you have more time to Regenerate your health and stay in the fight longer.
I am Currently Level 40, so past this I am not sure how the build will play out, but this is my proposals for my power picks and slotting:
Focused Accuracy: Damage is what Spines is all about, and dealing Damage is the point of attacking. Since our build allows us to tackle up to +2 opponents with relative ease, your focus is going to be on Hitting those targets in order to do that damage. Thus up until Focussed Accuracy is properly slotted I have Two ACC enhancements in ALL my fully slotted attacks.
This means that I have 66% more damage that I could be doing if I were able to Fully slot my attacks with damage.
Focussed Accuracy allows for 6 SO Damage slotting in all our attacks, giving us a phenomenal damage output per attack, and since we are AoE we hit several opponents with this damage.
That's good stuff.
The problem with Focussed Accuracy is its enormous endurance drain, its frightening really and can bring your scrapper to a standstill very quickly in battle.
So Endurance Reducers are very necessary. It would be difficult to get by without 3 End Reducers in this thing which drops the Endurance usage to about 0.62End/Second (down from a whopping 1.25End/s unslotted!!).
Its not really worth using this power regularly unless it is slotted with End Reducers. The cost is just too high and will keep you from engaging in protracted high level battles,unless you start popping Blue inspirations.
Focussed Accuracy boosts your ToHit chance (not your Accuracy) by 33%. This works out to the following:
FA 1 Slotted with a ToHit Buff SO = 108%
FA 2 Slotted with a ToHit Buff SO = 130%
Further Explanation here
http://tinyurl.com/dax87
If you need more than 130% chance to hit something plus whatever accuracy enhancers you have then you are really overreaching your abilities
But more power to ya!
Some people say that you really need 4 End Reducers in FA, and one in each attack to balance things off, but well see since I have Stamina 6 slotted as well how big a hit FA makes.
Technically if Im skewering opponents with more damage than ever, I may not need to stay in the fight as long.
Laser Beam Eyes: This fits very nicely conceptually with my build. The figures I got for LBE is that it does basically as much damage as Lunge, except it does Energy damage which is something not many enemies resist as readily as Smashing/Lethal damage. Plus it lowers the targets Defense, and additionally it allows you to attack at Range. You can see my idea for how to slot this, it looks good on paper.
Energy Torrent: Coupled with Ripper this helps you to control the fight by knocking down your opponents at Range. This allows you to regenerate some much needed health and to launch about two attacks uncontested against your fallen foes!
Moment of Glory: At this point I dont know what else to pick. So I decided to go with the ole Moment of Glory. This power has gotten me killed more often than any other through its use. It just is not dependable. Some say that Six slotting this bad boy with Defense SOs, and Recharges make you an unstoppable force for the few minutes it is up. I havent tested this; I still think using this is a great risk.
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