Warkupo

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For the benefit of the OP, Regen is still a great set despite being more high-maintenance compared to Willpower or Super Reflexes. Of all the sets, I think it has the easiest ride through the lower levels. On the end-game, high-end challenges at level 40+, it's still a great and reliable scrapper for pretty much anything out there.

Now, some people have said that regen lags behind other sets because of IOs and certain other challenges. Most of that is hype. Oh yes, Regen doesn't get as much of a return in benefits from IO sets as other secondaries do, but that doesn't mean you are going to suck [censored] either. I was able to take a MA/Regen scrapper (arguably the weakest primary) through the RWZ Challenge and solo a Rikti Pylon, so don't think that Regen will fall too far behind other sets while you are having fun in the game.

However, some of the naysayers of Regen are correct because of the need to specialize a build for very particular goals, such as AV hunting. Some people like to make very specialized builds, which require picking certain powers, sets, and forsaking certain QoL powers (like travel powers) in order to min/max for the task at hand. In this case, other sets might be more attractive than Regen, unless you are ready to pair up Regen with one of the Broadsword or Katana.

But in general, Regen is good as any other set out there. As long as you are having fun with it, then that's the right set for you.

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Just as a final disclaimer, I don't think /regen is bad. I don't think any scrapper anything is bad, and I probably wouldn't make us the target of attention right now either, as there are other powersets *cough*gravity/devices*cough* that could really use some dev attention. Still, so long as we are going to discuss it, we might as well say how we feel about it.

I made an Empathy/Dark on Freedom once. It was the only character I ever deleted out of pure frustration with the community. Seriously, I have more than fs#@ing Healing Aura.

I would just directly raise the damage, honestly. I don't know that endurance has ever been the problem of any of my defenders, but then, I build with that sort of thing in mind.

Give us a recharge bonus and you run the risk of making kin/ even more absurd than it already is.

Raising the damage multiplier of the defender would give everyone the same increase without accidentally favoring one power set over another.

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Extremely late reply to this, but this is where you contradict yourself. You first claimed that SR without IOs "underperforms", but then in this post you seem to admit that the set is "decent" with just SOs. So which is it?

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I had this huge post written up but if I keep arguing this, I'm just going to be recycling all the posts I've already made in this thread. I'm just saying the same thing every time someone replies to my posts. I'm not sure what part of the communication is breaking down, but at some point I'm not getting my point across.

Recap: All I'm complaining about is low-level SR that doesn't have IOs. If you're low level and have IOs, that can ease the pain. Low level SR without IOs is the least durable set there is. All sets have problems at low levels, but SR is the worst. Even Shield has +HP and +RES to fall back on. Other sets have +regen or heals. SR has nothing other than defense, which almost all low-level enemies debuff, and at low levels you have no DDR or scaling resist. SR is a late-bloomer, and that's why it has problems at low levels only, unless you patch it up with IOs.

High level SR + IOs = extreme
High level SR = decent
Low level SR + IOs = decent
Low level SR = terrible

It's just like Dominators were. If you can suffer through the first 35 levels or so, you get rewarded. But for some people, those early levels aren't any fun and not worth the effort.

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Nope, you just don't know how to play your SR. ALL scrappers have weak defense in the low levels.

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I'm going to entirely disagree with this comment with the same amount of factual evidence as you provided.

Only going to adress the ones I have experience with~

I'm going to have to just disagree entirely about Brute's /Shield secondary. The fury they make puts them on pretty equal footing with scrapper damage, and they can achieve tanker level mitigation and have tanker level HP. If anything, they are the *best* of both worlds, for anything you do ever. Brutes don't have any smaller an endurance bar than any other archetype either. A well built /SD brute can demolish nearly anything with extreme zeal.

Also, I've only ever played Dark Blast on a defender, but I felt the main focus on this set was that it was more mitigation oriented. You trade a bit of damage for that. Granted, my Dark Blast was paired with /kin, so what do I know about vanilla damage?

Broadsword, the way it was explained to me, does better damage the first 5-10 seconds of a new enemy. After that time has elapsed, Katana will take the lead in damage. That's the basic difference between 'burst' and 'damage over time.' Whether or not you prefer one type of damage to another is totally your opinion, but broadsword doesn't perform worse, just differently.

Broadsword and Battle Axe have the same number of AOE's. Yes, Headsplitter is an AOE as well, and once you start using it as such, becomes very devestating. Battle Axe's AOE's do hit more enemies however. Battle Axe is also regulated to Brutes and Tankers, which have a lower multiplier for damage, meaning Broadsword is doing more damage as of right now until you start factoring in Rage. Even then, burst sets like battle axe are very difficult to take advantage of on a brute, who gains more fury by attacking quickly. I don't know how to math Battle Axe into a scrapper form, but as it is right now, Broadsword does better damage overall.

It also seems odd to mention sets that are performing well unless you take away a power. I mean, I could take RttC out of willpower and say willpower is underpowered like that, but it'd be kind of silly to do so since it isn't how the game is actually working.

DB/WP works well because of the toggle nature of WP, and the KILL NOW nature of DB. You won't have to stop your combo at any point to click on your heal, or your conserve power, or your whatever. You can wholly concentrate on doing damage. /SR works for similiar reasons.

BS/Regen was my first character to 50, and I still play him more often than any other of my characters. That said...

Regen really starts to lag behind once other characters start formatting their builds with IO's. Not to say that Regen doesn't also become more powerful from IO slotting, but that the things Regen focuses in aren't really the things IO's focus on, ie: Regenerating HP. There is a massive disparity between defense and just about anything else, and any character that starts out with even a little bit of defense in their secondary can usually achieve very high defense with IO's. The same cannot be said for regeneration.

You can slot regen up for defense as well, sure. The best I've seen anyone manage in this regard is around 20% or so to all positions. This is decent, you won't evade all attacks by any means, but you'll evade enough to make a substantial difference in your survival. The problem is, once you start getting hit with defense debuffs, and you will, because they're freaking everywhere, you can start kissing that investment goodbye.

In fact, Regen has no Debuff Resistance of any kind, and because Regen is not dodging anything, it gets hit with everything. Any debuff in the game has absolutely no mercy to you, and you will constantly be slowed down with every attack that hits you in some way or another. Compare this to defense focused sets, such as /Super Reflexes who, by the nature of defense, dodge most debuffs and keep on going. In a round-about way you can argue that defense sets not only have defense debuffs resistance, but resistance to everything since if you can't hit them with it, you can't apply it to them.

Worse, regen doesn't even have mitigation for it's two focuses; Regen and Recharge. Once either of those debuffs hit you, Regen becomes greatly crippled, where as defense based sets usually retain a portion of their defense so that they can take out their enemeis before their debuffed into nothing. Regen, on the other hand, is instantly turned off, and you have to hope you have a click ready, the guy is almost dead, or you packed some... *cough* defense inspirations to bolster yourself up to soft-capped levels.

Regen really requires that you know your enemy, what he can do, and what you'll have available to fight him. You really need to be able to predict what can happen at any given time and what you'll need to do in preparation. Going off of what Werner was saying, you'll often die with a feeling of "What did I do wrong" where as other sets you'll be more likely to just shrug it off with "Well that was unlucky." Regen requires you to put a fair bit more thought process into what you're doing to receive equal or worse results as the other secondaries.

Devices: I cautiously put this up. I still adamantly feel most people just play this set incorrectly, but even I can admit it is under-performing in some aspects that, if addressed, could make the secondary much more appealing to the masses.

A big part of devices problems is how long it takes many powers to get set up. 4 seconds on trip mines, 8 seconds (and then another 15) for time bomb, and 6 seconds on gun drone. That's quite a bit of standing around, which, while I'm sure is tactical, is also boring as hell.

Yet, you can't really make trip mines activate much faster. (From Mids) In comparison to Nova's 305 damage, Trip Mines does 230 without the endurance crash, or massive recharge. If you were able to just throw those all over the place you could easily decimate an entire battlefield with one power. At the same time, the activation time makes the thing really difficult to set up if you don't know what you're doing, or are unable to predict the future. This prompts most people to trying to set up the mines before battle, which few teams enjoy waiting on.

Best method I can think of to address that is split up the activation time. You know how on a Mastermind you summon the pet, and then the pet begins an animation to signify themselves being summoned? You know how you can move around while this is happening? /Devices needs to be like that. The Blaster should only spend a second or so to drop the power on the ground, and then it sets itself up. This would allow the blaster to concentrate on blasting, yet not allow the power to be set up so quickly that you just blow up the entire friggin' area. It would require some work on BaB's part, but I'm fairly certain he enjoys suffering on my behalf~

The other problem with /devices is that many of it's powers aren't really needed. Not that they're useless, just usually superfluous. With IO's, this only becomes more apparent.

Web Grenade: Bad start, I'll admit. All blasters start with an immobilization attack which I've only found useful before level 10 or so. Still, that's even more noticeable on /devices which already offers few worthy power selections, so I'm including it in my little list here.

Targeting Drone: With the plethora of IO's available, I don't really know many situations where this is that useful anymore. You can augment every power with everything now, and usually have more accuracy than you need without needing *more* on top of that. There used to be a fine argument that you could trade slots normally spent on accuracy for endurance reduction or recharge, but this isn't really the case anymore. If not for the Build-Up IO, Targeting Drone likely would have been dropped from my build by now.

To fix it, I would add a 20% damage boost to Targeting Drone. Thematically you could state that the little robot is pointing out the weakest area of the enemy, where you concentrate on, thus doing more damage as well as being more accurate. From a gameplay perspective, this helps /dev compete with the other secondaries that include build-up.

Smoke Grenade and Cloaking Device: You usually skip one of these thanks to the stealth IO you can easily place into Sprint.If you take Super Speed as well, you can safely avoid both of them. A fine enough argument can be made that not everyone wants to pay for the stealth IO, or can afford one at the same level these are available. Still, it feels somewhat cheapened when every other Archetype can do something that was once unique to /Devices with the stealth IO+Superspeed. Additionally, if you're going to build optimally, there's really no reason to take either of these powers when you can do the same thing with a power you get for free, and a power you'd have wanted to take anyway.

Smoke Grenade should really shed all enmity/arggo/threat on you, akin to the power 'Smoke Flash' from Stalker's /nin secondary. Thematically it would make sense, and would open up a lot more tactical options, as well as being a nice 'oh [censored]' power.

Cloaking Device should allow a damage boost when you shoot before the enemy is aware of you. I think a straight up critical might be a bit much, however.

Time Bomb is absolutely horrid. You aren't waiting 8 seconds as advertised, but 23. You can't really do anything until it blows up the spawn you placed it in or they all move out of the time bomb's radius to come attack you. I guess you could just set up more trip mines while you're waiting for this stupid thing to go off, sure, but the thing still takes 360 seconds to use another one anyway, and it barely does more damage than trip mines anyway. You'd be better off with almost *anything* else than this power. Especially considering you already *have* trip mines, which is superior in just about every conceivable way.

I don't even know how to fix it without completely altering the way it works. I did like that idea of making it into a toggle which, when de-activated, causes the thing to explode. I *might* take it then, but as is, it's the only power in the set which you absolutely should never take for any situation at all ever.

Gun Drone: Just takes too long to set up. Probably needs to stay out longer. If it was self-animating, as I described previously, it would greatly improve the use. It really just needs a few numerical nudges everywhere and then I'd be happy with it.

Just in case you needed further convincing, my own AR/Dev blaster only uses Caltrops, Taser, Targeting Drone, and Trip mines, with contemplation on just dropping Targeting Drone altogether. That's 4 powers out of the entire secondary, which isn't exactly good.


I have other powersets I'd like to complain about, but I need a break for the moment.

I wouldn't discount the sweep combo. It's very useful in the right situation. Attack Vitals and Sweep are all I'd focus on though. Empower doesn't even give a single inspiration's worth of an enhancement...

mmm, is there anything in particular you're trying to build for? Price limit? Things like that?

It all seems very chaotic. Many powers have quite a bit of slots where they didn't really need them, but I assume this is because you stopped really caring about your power selection after you got Moment of Glory. I think you could move many of your slots to your attack powers to get some procs and eek out a bit more damage, especially from your auto-powers like health, fast healing, quick recovery, etc.

I really don't know about Kinetic Combat. Knocking all your enemies away from you isn't really giving you a ton more mitigation over the amount of damage you'd be losing from knocking everyone out of range from the rest of your AOE attacks. I think it'll hurt far more than it helps, and you'd probably be better off with conventional damage IO's.

I'd probably drop the stealth or fly pool in favor of the fighting pool and see if you can't fit Tough and Weave into your build. You already have quite a few powers that you aren't doing anything with anyway, so why not turn them into powers you'll actually be using instead?

There's a cleaner one available on monday, apparently. I'll keep you updated~

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Most likely, you'll only be able to change the color of powers, not remove the effects. However, if the color tinting blends in the same way as the Auras do, setting the color to Black will make it nearly invisible.

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Blargh, I wanted to say this! How DARE you!

Because scrappers like fighting, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dUjDaSyzY III

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf0VzRellrw IV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpStJIdDUiw V


Expect to have massive nerdgasms~!

/FA

I usually stick to 2 acc, 2 dam, 2 defense. Unless of course I'm using something that has native defense, in which case I'll pull out defense accordingly.

Maybe make enemies take a little longer to get up from knockback, or have it apply a tiny damage boost so that there's not such blinding hatred over it when it happens. I don't personally think it's a big deal, as I usually /follow whatever enemy I'm attacking, so I run after them the same second they get tossed aside. Not everyone does this, though. Hell, I'm not sure *anyone* else does this. Either way, I've never found it a good enough reason not to take an attack.

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The only enhancement that resists debuffs is Winter's Gift.

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Thus the massive disparity

/regen stalker pretty much plays the same as it does on a scrapper. You have less HP, but also a bit more defense, so you can more easily get good defenses on your stalker, which makes up for the smaller HP. Excellent Mez Protections, and many clickable abilities you can use to tilt the battle in your favor.

The biggest strike against it is the Stalker HP cap, which greatly diminishes the effect of dull pain to the point where it's barely more than a really big heal. It doesn't double your life like it does on a scrapper. That said, my stalker melees with the best of them just fine.

For best results, you'll want to pick up Hasten. Regen has a lot of clicks, and Hasten helps make them come back faster. It'll greatly increase your survivability beyond anything else I could think to mention.

I don't know, I rather liked the concept that my 'temp' jet-pack required fuel to fly. It seemed to fit in the theme with a 'natural' character, who would need to refuel his jet-pack once it ran out, where as a character who flies with his own powers would need to use energy he gathered. Whether you wanna call that endurance, chakra, magic, or whatever, doesn't matter to me.

I would also love a sheath for my weapons, or the option to always have them displayed. I would enjoy more back decoration as a whole, since that's what I'm typically looking at. It seems odd to me that my character can bulk up his front with armor, but leaves his back totally exposed.

I'd add giving more IO's that better focus on non-defense mitigation to that list as well. The disparity between regeneration/resistance/statusresist and defense is quite large.

I think the problem with the APP's and the scrapper is that the scrapper is pretty powerful with what it has. It doesn't really need to hold the enemy, slow it down, or immobilize it, it has a whole secondary devoted to mitigating damage already. It's already used to fighting up-close, and usually has a complete attack chain long before level 40, so additional blast attacks are kind've pointless as well.

If I had to pick, I'd say Conserve Energy, Caltrops, or Petrifying Gaze are about all I'd even consider. Conserve Energy is obvious, if you need endurance, there you go. Caltrops mitigates pretty good levels of damage with your enemies crawling around like idiots. Petrifying Gaze can lock down sappers pretty easily. That said, they can all be replaced by IO's. IO your attacks so they all cost less endurance, and you don't need Conserve Energy. IO out your defense to dodge the sapper, and you don't need to control him anymore.

Our APP's are useless because scrappers are too awesome to give anything potentially useful.

I've contemplated turning my BS/Regen into a Kat/Regen, but if I did, I'd probably keep the original character and just remake him on another server. Only level 50 I deleted was my fire tanker in a premature hissy fit, which I regret. Still, he remains dead, not re-invented.

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Not really sure this is needed. With strictly SOs, Regen wipes the floor with most of its sibling armor sets. It's only these days when defense sets have been given an almost absurd bounty that we think of Regen as lagging behind.

For my money, I would prefer to have IO set bonuses that were stronger. Defense sets get these overpowered buffs from IOs, why can't sets that depend on healing/regen? If heal sets had much stronger boosts to +regen, +health, and +resistance, I don't think Regen would lag behind after the IO race is over.

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I meant to reply to this sooner, but forgot too. IO's typically give a paltry amount of regen or HP as the first set bonus, and a comparatively large bonus to defense as the last one. I would like to see the reverse be true as well, as it would likely wind up helping to balance powersets that don't have any native defense to stack with the current IO scheme.

Granted, there's always the fear that if you do it that way, regen will get *too much* regen, and become unkillable again. Then again, defense based sets are already soloing AV's, so maybe that shouldn't be the point?

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The only problem with most of what you said, is that I can easily turn it around with the same exact examples you used and say that it was an unintended consequence of trying to bring regen into balance with the other sets. That in their attempt to 'whip' regen into balance, they accidently added *too* much against it, and as a consequence, other sets continue to become much better while regen sits on the side-lines, stunted by the past perceptions of it's performance, and fear of making it as overpowered as it used to be.

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That would be a fine counter to what I said if that was the position I was presenting an argument against. It wasn't.

Arcanaville explained that the devs felt that defense debuff cascading had unintended behavior with SR. Defense debuffs were not added explicitly to counter SR, but were a (largely thematic) attribute given to various powers, especially attacks represented as bullets. How these attacks then interact acted in practice with SR didn't work out the way the devs intended. Cascade defense failure apparently hadn't occurred to them.

That was used as an analog in a claim that -regen as a weakness for the Regen powerset was probably also some sort of accident of fate. Given the progress of the game's history and Regen's place in it, I find that incredibly unlikely.

That has nothing to do with whether or not it is relevant, appropriate, or balanced now. It's a counter only to the claim that it was not an intentional "hole".

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Ah. My apologies for misunderstanding you then. I would agree completely that the devs added things in the past with the intention of lowering the performance of regen. Honestly, of the sets they gutted heavily, I feel regen came out the most balanced. But, the game has changed since then, and regen hasn't. As the bar of 'normal' keeps getting raised, regen remains the same, and I think that's a bit of an imbalance issue.

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I don't think regen's weakness was ever intended to be debuffs. If SR was never intended to be weak against defence debuffs and INV was never intended to be weak against resistance debuffs, then i don't kow how you can't say the same for regen. It's not a designed hole, it's coicidental.

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I wouldn't be so sure.

In early days, Regen was incredibly survivable, and it got a reputation as something of a whipping boy as the devs tried to bring it in line with their vision of what should be going on.

As mentioned upthread, there used not to be many meaningful -regen debuffs in the game. That changed in I4, which, as it turned out, introduced Arena PvP. At that point, many player powers which did not previously have -regen debuffs had them added. (Back then, there was no significant split in how powers behaved in PvP and PvE; the main different at the time was that you could detoggle people - another attempt to deal with how indestructible certain ATs and/or powersets were otherwise.)

Remember that, at the time, it was common for people to skip Reconstruction, because Regen simply didn't need it. Regen built that way was actually very much all about +regen buffs, so high-magnitude -regen buffs were actually pretty dangerous to it. This means that, back then, -recharge was far less significant to Regen characters, primarily affecting their ability to keep Dull Pain up. Without -regen, Regen actually had only one weakness - burst damage.

At the same time player powers got -regen added in, so did NPC powers. Death Mages never debuffed regen with Twilight Grasp before I4.

So in the context of the times, it actually seems quite likely that -regen was designed to be a hole for Regen, possibly primarily in PvP, but also in PvE in general. That progression felt very different from the one SR had. The devs were trying to bring Regen down while they were throwing things at SR to improve it, because there were people pointing out that SR was arguably your worst choice of secondary in the period beween perma-Elude being canned and I7's critter accuracy changes (and I9's IOs).

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The only problem with most of what you said, is that I can easily turn it around with the same exact examples you used and say that it was an unintended consequence of trying to bring regen into balance with the other sets. That in their attempt to 'whip' regen into balance, they accidently added *too* much against it, and as a consequence, other sets continue to become much better while regen sits on the side-lines, stunted by the past perceptions of it's performance, and fear of making it as overpowered as it used to be.

I play another secondary with a similar history called /devices.