UberGuy

I have a very long-time DM/Regen character that existed long before IOs, so I'll try to share some experience. Warning, small book incoming.

Both Willpower and Regen are excellent at low downtime, being good at filing back your blue and green bars rapidly. DM is a nice combination with either. In a world without fancy IO benefits, DM has been at times considered to be as strong as some entire Scrapper secondaries in terms of the survival benefits it offers you, so it's never a bad choice.

The biggest thing to remember with DM is that it is pretty single-target focused. Soul Drain and Dark Consumption are AoEs, but they have pretty large recharge times, so they are not "bread and butter" attacks. (They are very good buffs, though!) Shadow Maul is very nice in terms of the damage it does, but its area of effect is kind of small - it can take skill to get more than a couple of foes in its area. It's also vaguely dangerous to a Regen because it locks you into a long animation during which you can't heal. (I still take it on my builds, because, hey, it's better than no AoEs.)

The single-target thing is important to remember because it puts a limit on one of DM's big benefits in a non-IO world - the toHit debuff it applies to foes. You can't lay that on a lot of foes at a time, because you just can't attack that many at once.

The good news though is really Siphon Life. This power is almost silly good. Its one of your best damaging attacks and it also heals you. In a world with SOs, I recommend you focus on slotting it as an attack, as the base heal it gives you is decent even with no Heal enhancement. It may seem strange that something like this would be desirable with powesets that also heal you, but Regen does have times where all its clicks are recharging, and being able to get in another heal (while hurting your enemies) doesn't suck at all.

Basically, WP gets you HP back over time. Regen also gets you some HP back over time, but gets you big chunks of HP back in periodic bursts. Dark Melee can buy you time, which both secondaries will be able to use to refil your green bar.

In this vein, Touch of Fear is a pretty potent power in an SO build. IO'd DMs or those with less time-sensitive secondaries often skip it, but a couple of hits with it can disable a dangerous foe. In something like a fight with two bosses, this can make a huge difference in the incoming damage you need to heal back. If you can fit it in, I think it's worth considering.

Since I mentioned WP too, I want to cover the high-level differences in how WP and Regen play. If you already have this info, feel free to stop reading.

WP is pretty obviously full of toggle and passive powers. The only click powers it has are Strength of Will and its self-rez. Pretty much, you fire up its toggles and go, and the only click you have to worry about being able to get to in a hurry is maybe SoW. WP can't get big chunks of HP back in a hurry, as it lacks a self-heal, but it tends to take a bit less damage than, say, Regen, as it has some damage resistance and some defense to help fend off attacks.

The more foes you have around a WP, the better it regens HP. This is a little at odds with DM's single-target focus, as the regen improvement in getting more foes around isn't likely to counteract the increase in damage you start taking. WP doesn't have a self heal, so adding Siphon Life is a pretty big deal to a WP.

Regen is very much about click powers. Getting those clicks back is the key to survival. Hasten is a Regen's friend, IMO. Reconstruction, Dull Pain and Moment of Glory are your go-to survival powers, with Instant Healing letting you enjoy occasional spurts of WP's regen at its best with your other click heals. Compared to WP, a Regen's HP suffer a much greater roller coaster ride. You need to have good reaction times to activate your clicks when you're in a tough fight.

In my opinion both WP and Regen are excellent sets that play very differently and therefore cater to different preferences. I like Regen, because careful attention to timing my power activations puts my survival in my own hands more so than passives with fixed stats do, which is something I enjoy. I think DM/Regen works nicely, though its probably not the most min/max thing you can build with Regen. (That's probably Katana/Regen.)

I hope this helps you, and you enjoy what you do build.

They're pretty awful.

While it's hardly universal, there's a lot of distaste for snipes even for the AT/powerset combos where they are primary powers. The damage they deal for their total activation time, and the likelihood that they will be interrupted in combat relegates their typical use to an opening attack. Not everyone likes devoting a power pick and 3-5 slots to a power with such a limited role.

On top of that, the versions given in Patron Pools have much longer total interrupt/activation times than the snipes given to ATs like Blasters or Defenders. They're extend almost to the point of ridiculousness. On Stalkers they once had some favor in PvP since they would crit when Hidden (they might still, I don't track PvP much), but that was about it that I noticed. The Scrapper version doesn't even have that (consistent) benefit.

In short, unless you have a good set bonus you really want, I wouldn't take them.

The above assumes performance is more important than concept. Clearly, if concept gets the override then take what you will.

Combining two accounts, I am a (C). My primary account would be a (C) by itself, and my second account would be (D). I tend to concentrate my wealth on my 50s, and my primary account has more of them.

It's like someone from an alternate universe came here and posted about a CoH that had the same ATs, but that all functioned differently than ours do, and whose players acted differently than ours actually do.

As mentioned, BAF is a special case. In most other contests, the ability to neutralize large spawns of critters is a godsend.

Even in the BAF, control is useful on the minion escapees. You won't be able to do anything to LTs, but no one can. Focus on controlling the minions - people with high DPS or at least high burst damage need to deal with the LTs.

If you have no level shifts, well, anyone with no level shifts contributes a lot less on any iTrial, even the two "basic" trials (BAF and Lambda). Getting to +1 helps noticably. Getting to +2 helps a lot. Getting to +3 makes things seem easy.

The thing this discussion does for me is make me really dislike auto-hit defense debuffs. The example we come back to a lot (partially my fault, I might have introduced it in the thread) is Arachnos Tarantula Mistresses. Their debuff isn't just auto-hit, it's very large - 30% at even level. Only a defense set with extremely high DDR is going to be able to soak that. If it was the only -def that Arachnos applied, it would be less bad, but Crab Spider critters - common as minions, LTs and bosses - have both ranged and melee defense debuffs which become much more likely to land and cascade the debuffs. The Tarantula debuff is able to be perma (or very close to it) and Tarantula Mistresses can appear multiply in a spawn, with each applying their own debuff.

IDF have something similar applied by Scryer minions. It's lower -def (around 10% IIRC) though it comes bundled with -DR. I do believe that, among Praetorean critters, only the Scryer IDF and Victoria MkIV War Works apply -def, making cascade failure less likely. For these reasons, I don't find the IDF version quite as devastating as the Arachnos one. If nothing else, minions are easier to defeat quickly, making re-application of the debuff less likely.

You just repeated yourself, and completely ignored what I said.

You aren't "continuing" anything. The "reductio" you're offering here fundamentally the same as what you said the first time, and what I responded to.

I like the way CoH tells its stories - centered on you, and also assuming that your progress through levels is a proxy for the passage of time. When you meet someone at level X+10, they refer to things you might have done with them at level X in the past tense.

It's not perfect for reasons you mention, but I think much more highly than most of the alternatives I have seen or considered.

I know someone who doesn't even post and very rarely reads the forums who has over 100B in Inf, obviously not counting items either stored or slotted. His net worth is a lot higher than that if you include theoretical sale value of stuff, because he's got hundreds of valuable items stored.

There's a lot of money out there.

Folks, anytime we look too hard at mapping systems meant to set boundaries in a game system and looking at how they would map into "real life" such as we might create in fiction, be it canon or fan-fic, we always find that they don't work. Sure, some creations map better than others, but I have never found a game system that divided people, powers, origins, or anything into neat categories that actually didn't break down if you really thought about it too hard.

What that doesn't mean is that no such system should be created for games or related media. It just means we're expected to have either really resilient suspension of disbelief, or just expected not to think this hard about this kind of stuff (which is sort of the same thing).

Long before the Origin of Power story that so many people here rail about, the Origin system never made sense even for existing characters. Is my Blaster who was dunked in coolant infused with Portal Corp energies that gave him Ice Blast powers, but who is a brilliant engineer who builds his own Devices weapons a Science or Technology character? What if his ice powers were a genetic mutation he was born with, and his secondary came from studying magic? What if you have a railgun engraved with accuracy-increasing runes?

The point is that even something as 0-day as the original Origin system made no sense if you thought about it too hard. Nothing in stuff like this does.

It's just my opinion, but if your roleplay sense of this stuff starts getting in the way of your ability to enjoy the game for what it is, I think you're doing it wrong.