UberGuy

My only Brute is a Firey Aura secondary, and I can't play it like I would a Tanker, even with heavy IO investment. Some powersets that are shared as Tanker Primary and Brute/Scrapper secondaries can produce a Brute that can be played like a Tanker, but not all of them can, without outside help. And personally I think that's fine, even on a Brute. Brutes are not meant to fully take the Tanker role. Even so, some Brute secondaries are better fit to assume the Tanker role than others, just like Tankers or even Controllers are not meant primarily to deal damage, but some have powersets that make them very good at it. It's one of the beauties of CoH, but we should recognize that, sometimes there are give and take aspects of fitting in to some roles better than other.

What, then, is Regen giving up? Regen and WP are kings of low downtime. Their green and blue bars rarely stay less than topped out for long. Because Regen is more click-dependent than some other sets, including WP, sometimes that means a Regen needs to back off when it needs to heal and none of its clicks are back. What's important about those scenarios is that it then comes back, seconds later, probably fully healed. That's part of the playstyle of the set. It means it takes more tactical control of your surroundings than other sets, to be successful, a characteristic which I enjoy greatly about it.

I agree completely that Regen on a Tanker is probably going to have performance issues without significant design review, and I suspect that's one reason it has taken so long for it to be proliferated even to Brutes, with Tankers not yet on the horizon. Tankers often want to stand still and take it on the chin, and current Regen by design can only do that so much in a given time span before it falls over.

One thing I will say is that I would not assume that any design changes for Regen to make it into a reasonable Tanker primary will be back-ported to Scrappers, and IMO they might not even be ported to Brutes. They might be, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. The days where each AT gets a "verbatim" clone of another AT's powerset are long past.

I made a DB/Regen Scrapper in the I11 era, long after all the changes to IH and whatnot, and long before the recent buffs, and I didn't have this problem at all. That character is now 50+3 and IO'd out, but the serious application of IOs never starts for me until the mid-to-late 40s, so I wasn't "tricked out" when leveling.

Of course by the time I created that character I already had two level 50 Regens (one Scrapper and one Stalker), so I'm extremely familiar with how to optimize it in play.

SR has the top DDR and it has scaling resists. It's also got modest +recharge.

SR doesn't have a ton going for it, but it has more than just +def.

Well, then it's an awfully good thing that isn't even in the ballpark of what I was doing, isn't it?

That's correct. He does not begin regenerating (healing, actually) until he stops over the stations. The time stop serves primarily serves only to keep us from attacking him while he goes from wherever he started at to the current station. (Note that, originally, someone who died from Disintegration during time stop healed Antimatter. That was changed - while they may still die, that death no longer heals AM.)

This inability to act while he is moving might serve a legitimate tactical purpose on the third station, as it's possible he could be defeated before he even got to it if a league had high enough effective DPS. I suspect, though, that it's mostly there for flavor, to impress on us just how powerful he is supposed to be. And if that in itself annoys you, you wouldn't be alone.

I actually don't have much problem with "gimmick" powers in the hands of AVs and such. Despite that, I do dislike the degree to which they are used in the final fight in Keyes. I don't find Keyes hard, and didn't find it even before they changed it (though I did find it tedious), I just don't like how the final fight is dominated by Antimatter's gimmicks. We have lots of examples in other trials where the gimmicks add flavor and even challenge to the fights without completely dominating them. In Keyes, it almost rises to the point that Antimatter himself represents almost no challenge at all - it's almost all about the gimmicks.

There's a simple reason for that. The game engine doesn't support it, and it's not trivial to add.

It doesn't bother me.

It can miss, but it is unlikely to unless you have very high defense. Even at the incarnate softcap and no debuffs present from Seers (not a trivial combination of factors to operate under in the trial for the vast majority of characters), he's going to have over a 10% chance to hit.

Let me know next time you get to fire Vorpal Judgement multiple times in several seconds, from out of visible range, for 1500-2000 points of damage per blow. He does not have Vorpal Judgement. Vorpal Judgement was inspired by what he can do, which is significantly better. I have no problem with AVs and the like being given very strong powers, because they're designed to be faced by teams or leagues. How he is specifically using these powers is rather more individual, and it's not being done in a normal fight. He's picking off people who are moving from door to door.

I can't tell if you're being ridiculously obtuse or asking an honest question. I told you what part of what you said was incorrect. Why are you talking about something else? It's not relevant to what I said.

NPCs don't have a sense of fairness. If and game dev (in any game) fails to see that, and thinks it's fair game to have the players treated the way we treat the NPCs, that is a major game design fail.

Players never enjoy having something done to them which they don't feel they can avoid or control. If it happens often, and if the consequence is defeat, they enjoy it less and less.

That's partially incorrect. He does not regen during time stop. Keyes Antimatter has zero inherent regen. He only heals from Disintegration and from the terminals, and when he goes to a terminal station, the time stop ends. It's true Obliteration still happens, and people have asked for that not to be the case pretty much since the start. Honestly, I'm not sure if they actually are able to prevent it with the current game engine.

I would rather they just fix the damn AI. We don't need taunt. We need things not to run 500 yards away for absolutely idiotic reasons.

You might find this post of mine helpful in setting the background for a question I want to ask.

Given the theory that all the real challenge in this game is "scripted" challenge, and that the challenge tends to disappear or at least diminish greatly once we figure out the script, what sort of challenge would there be if they explained everything (the script) up front?

Trust me, I think there are things they could do better, but if there's zero player discovery involved, there's really nothing left.

Because not everyone actually cares enough to do it.

I have ridden out every major storm in this game's market. Sometimes I have profited big. Sometimes I have lost lots of value. Sometimes it didn't really affect my net worth. But always I could have worked harder to earn more or lose less. But I didn't, and it hasn't affected me in ways I particularly care a lot about.

Look at your question another way. Why doesn't everyone play SS/Fire or SS/Brutes all the time? Why doesn't everyone PL their characters in the AE, even though it's arguably still the fastest way to 50?

The simple answer is that not everyone has an urge to do the most efficient thing all the time, even when they acknowledge its efficiency (and not all always do). You care more about this than, I'd wager, most of us here, and most of us here care about it more than a lot of other people who don't frequent these forum halls.

Yep, by about 4% regen.

Regen is definitely not a resist set. It's no more a resist set for having a couple of powers with resists in them than Super Reflexes. Regen is a HP recovery set that happens to have some small +resistance powers.

You are correct. The devs did eventually explain the tactic they had envisioned. I don't remember the details, as I got them second-hand, but it involved something like splitting into one team that drew all the fire (and the blooms) to one side and a ranged team that attacked Hami from the opposite side. I may be misremembering the specifics, but I recall that it sounded slow and fragile.

Edit: I will note that the folks I regularly play with and I did actually figure out the most important mechanics required to succeed at the MoM trial based on hints taken from the mission window indicators. "Hm, the number of voids present is important. I wonder why?" We failed our first trial at Penelope, then succeeded the trial completely on our second attempt. As it turns out, we still didn't understand everything (it was literally weeks later that I figured out that popping a void created a "safe zone"), but we pulled it off regardless.

The Incarnate content is supposed to be different in exactly this kind of way. It's supposed to be more challenging with higher requirements on preparation and understanding than most of what has preceded it. That was made clear at its inception. While some players may not like that, it is not inherently bad, it is simply different, and it is different by conscious decision. There was a segment of the player base requesting content in this vein.

Note that I do not think all of the implementation specifics are successful. I have written a guide on how to overcome the War Walkers in the Underground Trial, and using those tactics can make success against them easy. However, I think it was unreasonable to expect anyone to figure out the key mechanics I discovered before writing that trial by actually playing the trial. *I* learned them from perusing external resources on power mechanics that happened to document critter powers. I think that's a bit too far down the road of "let players figure it out" - without such resources, I question whether anyone ever actually would have.

That's very odd. I just confirmed that neither the Stalker nor Scrapper versions are like that. I hope someone has submitted that as a bug.

Sure it does. Unstoppable and Elude come to mind. Even Willpower with Strength of Will.

Modern Regen is an outlier in several ways, but one of the most striking is that its closest thing to what other powersets get in their "Tier 9" actually shows up at level 28. Modern Instant Healing is Regen's closest thing to a "godmode", not Moment of Glory. (And believe me, I love Moment of Glory and do not miss the old version that was more similar to {but critically different from} powers like Unstoppable and Elude.)

If there was one buff I would like to see Regen get besides some recharge debuff resistance, it would be an up-front heal in Instant Healing. If you use it reactively, once you're already in trouble, you're more likely to end up dead than with a lot of the other "godmode" powers. A decent self heal at the front when you activate it would change that.

FYI for folks not watching VIP beta, both Regen and WP's self rez is getting a 15-second untouchable interval after use.

Edit: By the way, some folks are making me think they may not know that Regen did get -regen resistance in Fast Healing a while back. Slotted up you get about 50% resistance to -regen.

Can you explain to me what the "reward" of Willpower is? The "reward" of Super Reflexes? Of Invulnerability?

I see one reward. Survival. If you are doing "lots of work" and not surviving on a Regen, you're Doing It Wrong™.

I have to agree that nothing I can find agrees with that. RedTomax's updated info also suggests that it is -1 endurance, not -1 max endurance. Contrasting it in all available sources with Speed/Burnout (which we know for sure reduces max endurance) and Energy Drain (which we know subtracts endurance from targets), Disrupt's end penalty looks like Energy Drain's, not Burnout's.

Edit: Scooped.

That really is not true. With only SOs, it actually compares very favorably, and has some of the highest peak performance.

What I am convinced that people notice and are talking about comes about because Regen lacks scaling mitigation. HP regen and healing both recover a fixed average amount of lost HP per time. Defense and resist avoid or remove a percentage of incoming damage per time. Increasing defense or resist increases the percentage of avoided damage, but increasing HP regen or recharge rates of heals only increases performance linearly.

WP would have the same linear scaling problem if all it had were +HP recovery tools, but it has significant in-powerset +defense which allows it to stack much closer to the non-incarnate softcap for at least key damage types. While potentially expensive, it is cheaper than what a Regen has to do, which is to also fork out for as much +defense as they can manage and buff their recharge as much as possible to maximize their access to Reconstruction, Dull Pain, and/or MoG.

So I don't think Regen has a problem at all in the base game. I think its "problem", such as you can call this a problem, is how well it scales to the high-end build game. The softcap represents a level of damage avoidance that only recent builds using things like T4 Rebirth + Spiritual can approach with HP recovery.

Agreed. Regen is a very good set that plays very differently from WP. It doesn't need to work like Willpower. I never really felt it needed resistance to regen debuffs. In my builds -regen is not what gets me killed, and I almost never had to retreat when my regen was debuffed, even when it was debuffed to zero. What was a serious threat to me, and would cause me to retreat if it happened severely enough was when my recharge was debuffed. I wanted recharge debuff resistance much more than regen debuff resistance.

I like Regen. When they first changed it, I was really upset. But then, because I stuck with it, I figured out that I actually enjoyed the clicky nature of its new format. Why? Because whether or not I survive is a lot more about my personal planning and reaction times. With powersets like WP, how well I survive is mostly down to how I position myself, but not much else. With powersets like SR, how well I survive is down to almost nothing I can control personally in combat. I like Regen being more about me and less about the RNG.

I'm sorry, I'm going to be blunt. This is stupid. No, you are not stupid. I'm not trying to insult you. I just get tired of hearing this.

"Regeneration" does not have to mean "+regen". It means you regenerate from wounds. Healing is perfectly reasonable as a representation of that. The powerset's function does not have to be primarily achieved with regen (the attribute) in order to deserve the name "Regeneration".

New players aren't even going to know the particulars of how +regen works. Saying they're going to be confused by the name of the powerset strikes me as ridiculous.