Starsman

It is a minimum level of balance for tankers to be able to take alphas without being forced to go into pool powers or use their secondaries.

It does not mean that a set that cant pass that test would be impossible to tank with, considered the proper set combination, pool usage and IOs, but the set would be at a disadvantage compared to any tanker, and risk being considered a gimp set if you take the wrong offensive set or are not high enough to fit Tough/Weave and have them slotted by lvl 20.

Is it possible to build a current stat transfer regen to tank? Sure. But it would be the easiest tank to gimp in the hand of a non-VIP player.

Its just bad game design to consciously allow that.

The biggest issue there (and mind you it would not have helped with the alpha tanking issues) is that RTTC is the power they should had turned Instant healing into, instead of nerfing it into a click.

Now you cant go that path without making it, indeed, look like Willpower.

Difference being: regen was not stacking that smash/lethal on top of anything, making it extremely weak. Invuln at least stacked it on top of something. Arguably still weak but not that bad.

And I know its a "recent" change, but Resist elements also has slow resistance and has been doing 7.5 resist (10 for tanks) for a while. I think those things combined to a better overal power than the old Resilliance.

And yea, I know im now bringing power combinations... dont call me out on that because I still am being realistic. :P

Well there is the deal with taunt auras being mandatory part of tanker design.

Hey I didnt make the rules!!

BUT there is also the fact that tankers may be running Energy Melee, Fiery Melee or Dark Melee. None of those have anything near the level of mitigation Shockwave provides and not familiar enough with Elec Melee, Street Justice or Kinetic Melee to say if any have anything on those lines.

You cant say a set is good for tankers with a conditional requirement to specific primaries. Even a bigger No No is to say a specific Epic pool is required.

I dont think it has much to do with skill (unless you call skill carrying enough inspirations to take on every alpha throughout a mission.)

I would say end game raids are an entirely different ball game. Not only are you forced to have a vip account (meaning access to IOs) but also likely already started building on your incarnate powers.

At the very least, CoF and OG both serve as potential taunt auras. OG would be the endurance free one.

Unfortunately, most of the arguments in this thread have no much weight when we dive into that bucket of game content, since as you stated in your first post, it is free and premium players that will find the set's endurance cost an issue.

I am not sure where to start, but i do know i want to keep it very short.

For one, RWZ Challenge runners tend to be heavily IOd, often with softcapped defenses, between other things. It's not something you can use to measure tanking efficiency from level 1-50.

Second, regen can be a great set for survival, as long as you are not confronted by heavy burst damage. the RWZ challenge is rather constant and is nothing like jumping 16 foes that all have their heaviest attacks ready to fire, and all will fire at once.

Remember: a tanker must be able to tank (this means taking on alphas and surviving them,) without IOs, without Incarnate powers, with only it's own powers and SOs, and perhaps, just perhaps with pool powers (but they cant be factored in the set balance design, or at least have never been in the past.)


I have heard this as a big rule of the challenge: Usage of Shockwave is cheating. :P

The power can often bring more mitigation than our preservation set may bring.

Not saying it does not happen or that i dont believe it, just that I have never seen it.

I would love to be in a team where it happens and see it. I rarely played red side before GR and have not played enough to be in a team with masterminds doing this since then.

You know, I'm aware masterminds were designed to tank, but I have never seen a Mastermind tanking.

Well, when you put it that way....

But its pretty!!!

Maybe I'm too easy to please but I love the new character creation UI. If that dev is still here, I would love to see him tackle the in game UI (starting by the power manager.)

PS: hate this forums code tag that does not use fixed widths fonts.

You see, as sucky as flury may be, I was able to take advantage of it in a few low level characters to fill in level gaps (mostly tankers that got slow access to attacks.) Sure, there are other better pool attacks, but before fitness was inherent, and you were limited to 4 pools, I found myself sometimes stuck with the speed pool. Dont take me wrong, not defending the power. It does suck, big time, but I still feel old Resilliance was even less useful.

Body armor, when mods are accounted for, still was better given it was the equivalent of 9.375 resist for scrappers. Would not take it over it's toggle peers, but it was still not as bad as Resilliance.

OK, Sonic Repulsion is a... blach sheep. But mostly due to it's endurance drain (it has one of those per foes end drain right?) Else it would be a very good team support power.

But I digress, I guess some would find in their personal views powers that were "worse off", but for me, who mostly plays melee classes, I found Resilliance to be just horrendous and only took it to have a place to put resist IO sets.

We can agree it was the worst passive in the game, right?

Edit: wont go into Invoke Panic because it was victim of one of the most stupid nerfs from the Statesman era.

wow.. that was one big buff! Well deserved too... Resilience was the worse passive... if not the worse power, in the entire game.

Follow the Amazon category rule: place it in both categories.

If you consider no immob or KB protection are issues, then the thread should address solutions to those points directly.

Endurance cost reduction in Dark Regen will not compensate for those issues. Reduce the end cost of Dark Regen and in a few weeks you will see other users asking for a different buff in the name of lack of KB and Immob protection.

I actually would find a case for native KB protection a much more valid one than a case for buffing Dark Regen. I would even advocate it myself, since its insane to tank without KB protection in this game. The only issue there is that IO's negate most arguments on the topic and it may be hard [not impossible] to push such a change just for the sake of free players.

Immob protection is required but not something you need to always have running. Since Immob does not disable you like a stun or hold would, you can just toggle it on once you are immobilized and need to move.

It's not too different in that sense from Fire Armor, who's Immob is only available after landing a burn patch.

Unlike attacks, self defense powers are not balanced in issolation, but as part of a whole set. Just because Fire Armor gets to have Healing Flames, does not mean Regen can have the same (and you will see both heals are different.) Same goes for Dark Armor, you cant justify a change to it's heal just because another set has the heal you want.

Dark Regen has a high endurance cost not to pay for the heal, but precisely to avoid you using it often. The goal is for you to be able to heal to full in a croud, to be weaker against single foes, and to not do it too often. That is the design for the set. If you remove that penalty, you force the devs to use a standard technique to prevent you from using it often: recharge.

Many things depend here, offensive set (super strenght or claws with followup would technically need less accuracy) but you always have 2 extra slots to add more accuracy as needed. Recharge and Heal are not needed so you can half your end cost and double your accuracy with just SOs. There are also HOs in the high end game, I understand those are available to free players.

You can lower CoF's end cost, but given it's constant and rather heavy end drain, as a tank, you may rather just pick what aura to run instead of just attempting to run them all.

That is part of the intended design of Dark Armor, even after the many balance visits. It's not a set for you to turn on every toggle and forget about them, its intended for you to pick the aura that best suits the current situation and use it. CoF can be extremely redundant, and should you be facing end issues it should be the first toggle to go out the window. Same with Death Shroud for tanks since you can fall ack on Oppressive Gloom as your main taunt aura as early as lvl 26.

3 Slot for endurance cost. 1 slot for accuracy. That should lower end cost to a more manageable 17.34. Still no pocket change but still extremely powerful.

As it stands, Dark Regen can be insanely powerful and its endurance cost technically keeps it in check. A decrese on it's endurance cost would force a heavy recharge nerf, one that may not necesarely be proportionate to the endurance reduction (it may be much more than 2x the current recharge.)

As for Oppressive Gloom, and Tanks: you dont need to run it all the time. That being said, an endurance starving dark armor tank that is restricted to SOs may want to consider using Oppressive Gloom as his taunt aura, and not run Death Shroud nor Cloak of Fear.

Since the power does damage based off your melee damage modifier. This means tankers already suffer way less damage from the power than scrappers. 71% the damage to be exact.

Not only is the damage lower for tankers, but their extremely higher HP means that tankers take a 50% less proportional damage than scrappers do. The damage it removes by stunning just one or two minions should be enough to make up for the self inflicted damage.

This. Due to the akward choice of rebalancing PvP attacks around steady DPS mechanics, slow animating attacks with low recharge rates are insanely powerful there.

Cant think of anything that would make that power useful in pve, though, other than a touch from a developer's hand.