UberGuy

Once upon a time, this was true. Now, I don't believe it is, even if you can AoE your foes well. With XP smoothing came a steep change in how over- and under-level foes rewarded players. As far as I know, this was never documented. I posted about it in the Market forums quite a bit at the time because I noticed how it strongly affected rewards/time my level 50s earned fighting over-level foes. (Inf rewards changed as well.) Fighting under-level foes is worth quite a bit less than it was before XP smoothing, and I believe I did math at one point showing you had to defeat -1 foes faster than the increase in DPS you gain against them to make up the difference.

Woah. Where's that news from? I missed that one.

I don't think you're missing anything. I'm a bit off of the recharge needed for perma-Hasten, but other than that, I have all the toys you describe, and use them broadly as you describe using them. And as you say, I don't spend all my time needing one of them running constantly, so I don't suffer that much for the gaps my lower recharge forces on me, since I tend to use the +def powers only when I need a "burst" of high defense mitigation. Against anything but AVs or extremly durable foes, my need for mitigation decreases as the fight goes on and I defeat foes.

Eh. I don't think I agree, and it's one reason I was not hoping for regen debuff resistance for the set as a buff. Foes that debuff regen 1000% or more are extremely common in the late game. That just plain shuts regen off today. After we get this buff, it might take two opponents to doing this to completely shut off regen, and one foe outputting -1000% is still going to hammer your regen rate.

It's at the point now where, under most situations containing these foes, I have just learned to operate under the assumption that my regen will be turned off. Clearly that's not a good state to be in, but it's survivable due to Recon and the heal in DP, plus MoG. On the flip side, if my recharge gets screwed, my Regen isn't likely to save me, where my heals and MoG could have if they were to come back. That's why I would very much have preferred recharge debuff resistance. Willpower needs -regen resistance, because regen is what it does to get back lost HP. Regen has more clicks going on to achieve the same, plus a mini-godmode that suffers (and benefits) from recharge effects.

Well, you're being a little self contradictory here. You don't get hit when you're using MoG, barring bad luck with the RNG. Regen doesn't take "all of it". They take all of it (well, the full average for no defense) when MoG is not up.

Also, I think you're making the case sound a bit strong when you say Regen gets overwhelmed more often because it has lower def. That makes it sound as though Willpower has lots of defense that let it avoid getting overwhelmed most of the time. Assuming nothing but ED-slotted defenses, its got around 4% defense to L/S, 12% Psi defense, and 15-16% defense to everything else.

That's certainly decent defense, and of course its a huge base to build towards the softcap with. It's not going to rule the roost on its own, though. By itself its not going to save a WP from lots of flying debuffs, (especially -defense debuffs, despite its resistance to them).

So a WP is going to suffer less secondary effects on average than a Regen, but unless we're talking about near softcapped builds, they're still going to suffer plenty of them.

Perhaps, but if so it's a well put opinion about what the concept of a "Regeneration" powerset should be, mapping available game mechanics to a name. As such, all you're really saying is that you share his opinion. I don't. Ultimately, I'm not sure why these opinions are being brought up in a discussion about buffs to and the effectiveness of the powerset. It could be called the "Bob" powerset, but how well it works or not wouldn't be affected by its name.

And how much of the survival contribution for a high-end Willpower build comes from the nonlinear returns of stacking +defense IO bonuses? Sure, the high end of those benefits is possible because of a nice base of +def provided by powers in the Willpower powerset. But if Willpower's in-powerset +defense was nil, like Regen's, would people be saying how Willpower outshines Regen? I rather think not.

So what it comes down to IMO is that Regen's surivability is called "gimp" compared to Willpower almost solely because its powerset contains no +defense to build on with pool powers and IOs.

I saw this suggested some months back, and I thought it was a good idea then, and it's grown on me since. IH lives in a weird place. You need to know you're going to need it before you use it, because the combination of its activation time and the fact that it probably won't save you if your health gets too low before it kicks in means using it reactively is dangerous. If it had a decent heal on it, this could address a big chunk of that in a lot of (but not all) situations. I would be much more likely to use it as a reactive power, because it would be more likely to succeed when used that way. I think that would lead me to use it more often overall, rather than it suffering from a slightly less impressive version of "too awesome to use".

Heh. Learn to play. My Regens are my go-to characters for the trials.

Edit: I did a Keyes Tuesday this week. During the 2nd reactor, the group ran up, and one of the three other people I was on Skype with asked me how I was soloing one of the spawns that guards the terminals. (I had been doing this to spawns during the whole phase, they just happened to bring the group to one I was soloing then.)

Do I claim Regen is "on par" with Willpower of Shields for top-end performance? Not across the board. In the gutter? Learn to play.

For me, it's recipe, market, then enhancement, with salvage and vault coming in distantly.

Like Roderick, I stop whatever I am doing when my recipes fill up. Unlike Roderick, I do store stuff on the market, particularly salvage pre-crafting binges, and I'm a moderate volume seller. 5 slots is 50 items if you can 10-stack them, meaning one market slot has more value to me than 10 salvage, just because it's either potentially 10 items or an extra listing/bid. Enhancement trays I don't care about in normal play, but they could "pay for themselves" in a virtual sense the next time I need to rip a bunch of stuff off of a character. (In fact, I have a huge store of valuable Hami-Os locked in alternate builds on at least two characters, and the enhancer slots would make tearing those off much easier.)

Sadly, this is the thing I will miss about losing Galaxy City.

Which is precisely why I would never use "Lovecraftian" to describe it. The CoT are, at their core, just an ancient race of human wizards who, based on in-game stories, traffic in your garden-variety fantasy magic, including some rather significant bargains with demons. Lovecraft is a much more specific trope, characterized by Eldrich Abominations or things that are otherwise cosmically wrong. While Lovecraft stories often contain cultists, that is certainly not what characterizes them.

About the closest thing I can get to a Lovecraftian feel from the CoT is that they are very old. Indescribable ancientness was a common theme of actual HPL fiction (less so in the Mythos works of his peers). The game lore doesn't stress this ancientness much - it's just part and parcel of the CoT's story and isn't presented as anything inherently horrible the way I think HPL would have tried had he created them. (And probably with good reason - I always thought HPL was weird for seeming to think that the ancient was intrinsically horrible.)

Um, the Circle of Thorns has never evoked Lovecraft for me. Ever.

I have no problem with you disliking the new look, but I don't get that as a reason for it at all.

Nope. In fact, I do that far more with characters who have Super Speed.

I am quite unclear on what there is to be thankful about that. Even if it was a bug, why is that bug something to thankful to have removed? That strikes me like being happy that they changed a variable name somewhere in the source code.