IOs ( Invention Origin Enhancements ) change things pretty drastically, although it's a complicated subject. Depending on what you have, you can give yourself defense, add a chance for resistance debuffs to your attacks, add more regen and recovery and recharge, and so on. They can also be very expensive.
As far as Katana goes, the animations for melee sets were tweaked, and flow much more smoothly. Although being so long away you might not realize it.
A variety of custom weapon skins for Katana and other weapon sets can be chosen at the tailor; some require unlocking to get. There's a list and images of them here.
As for the game in general, there's been a huge number of changes.
Paragonwiki is a good place to find out information.
Arc #40529 : The Furies of the Earth
I was here for the roll out of IOs. My Kat/Regen is lvl 50, and is fitted out, for the most part, in ALL basic IO enhancements.
My rule of thumb when I crafted my IOs was anywhere I was using just one or two of the same enhancement, I would use one or two lvl 50 basic IOs. Anywhere I used three of the same enhancement, I would use 3 lvl 40 IOs.
I have no SOs or lower anywhere.
So, for example, Dull Pain & Reconstruction are both 6-slotted with 3 lvl 40 recharge & 3 lvl 40 healers. My attacks are slotted 1 lvl 50 +acc, 1 lvl 50 endo, 1 lvl 50 recharge & 3 lvl 40 +dam. (I only slot 1 +acc because I'm running Focused Accuracy)
My reasoning was that, because of ED, I didn't lose that much going with 3 40s rather than 3 50s. I think 3 40s give you aprox. +101%, while 3 50s give you aprox. +108%. Not sure if that is exact, it's been close to 3 years I've been away.
Yes, I do know that 2 lvl 50s give aprox. +98% and a lot of people go with all lvl 50s, 2 +acc, 2 +dam, 1 recharge & 1 endo.
Also, a few of my Katana attacks are slotted with all lvl 50 "sets." For the life of my I forget what the sets are.
Here's a question: Will I run into problems if I Exemplar down to run some of the lower level Task Forces? IIRC when I left there were some problems with IOs scaling down too much when you Exemplar, particularly the IO sets.
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Here's a question: Will I run into problems if I Exemplar down to run some of the lower level Task Forces? IIRC when I left there were some problems with IOs scaling down too much when you Exemplar, particularly the IO sets.
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Exemplaring does nothing to your slotting whatsoever. All you can lose when exemping down beyond the normal powers lost for dropping the levels is losing some of the set bonuses that you no longer qualify for (re: if you're too low to slot those IOs, you still get the enhancement benefit but not any set bonuses you may have). Procs and other special benefits of IOs will still remain no matter what.
Cool.
If you're curious as to what you should aim for on IO set bonuses, */regen has 2 things that it loves beyond everything else: recharge and recharge.
When IO slotting a */regen, I've got 4 steps that I tell people to go through:
1. Get more recharge.
2. You still need more recharge. Get more recharge.
3. That's still not enough recharge. I told you, more recharge.
4. You've got how much recharge? Noice! Now you can start slotting for positional defense!
Because IOs have made recharge so much more variable between individual builds, you're also going to want to look into your attack string whenever you start building. */Regen is one of the nicer secondaries for this because you get significant defensive benefit to go along with all of the morbid amounts of +recharge that you need for many of the top tier attack strings. Kat/Regens generally tend to aim for enough recharge to have Gambler's Cut recharge within the animation time of any of their other attacks (Divine Avalanche, Golden Dragonfly, and Soaring Dragon are the 3 standard attacks used because they offer the best damage).
You're also going to want to invest in at least 1 Achilles' Heel proc for Gambler's Cut. It's not all that great for chewing through minions and other soft targets, but it will contribute more than any other single enhancement slot when you're fighting hard targets like AVs.
Is all that really nessasary outside of PVP?
IIRC even after The Crisis of Infinate Nerfs I still managed to solo the Praetorian Earth story arc with just SOs.
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Is all that really nessasary outside of PVP?
IIRC even after The Crisis of Infinate Nerfs I still managed to solo the Praetorian Earth story arc with just SOs.
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IOs? No, not at all, but they're a virtual requisite for many of the other challenges that we Scrappers have invented for ourselves. Also, by IOs, I'm talking about set IOs. I view common IOs along the same line as I view SOs: for leveling, not for crazy challenges and hard core character design. There's just not much you can do with 'em.
Keep in mind that, thanks to how click oriented */regen has become that +recharge has become exceedingly important except for a few builds that instead focus on high levels of defense. Either way, the primary method for achieving optimum performance from a */regen is all about shrinking the ratio between the periods of high survivability that are attainable and the equally common periods of inferior survivability. Recharge is the most common method of doing this, but it's also possible to do so by simply increasing the baseline performance to such a degree that the click powers are less necessary (at which point it's not as necessary to have high recharge so that the click powers are always available).
("infinite" is spelled as such, as is "necessary" >.<
Welcome back! Katana/Regen is awesomesauce. That is all. 
OK, OK, that's not all. Let's see. Katana was buffed, along with a lot of other sets. They removed the backed-in pause for redraw. So you can chain attacks faster, and the shorter the attack, the more it was buffed. So Gambler's Cut is kind of the golden child now.
I recommend chaining Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Golden Dragonfly -> Gambler's Cut -> Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's Cut. It technically drops the double stack on Divine Avalanche for a fraction of a second. So when defense is important, skip a Gambler's Cut somewhere. When moving or switching targets a lot, skip a couple Gambler's Cuts. I'll reiterate what was already said put an Achilles' Heel proc in Gambler's Cut. It will provide a serious damage boost against hard targets.
To pull off that chain seamlessly, you'll need +90% recharge in Gambler's Cut. Since you should have Hasten, in a sense, that gets you most of the way there. But I'd want to keep the same chain while Hasten is down. The cheapest approach, if you're looking for cheap, is probably to frankenslot. Frankenslotting means mixing and matching cheap set IOs purely for the enhancement bonus. So in this case, you'd pick up six IOs from different sets that all enhanced recharge, but also enhanced other aspects of the power.
Moment of Glory is now a must-have power. It only lasts for 15 seconds, but it's 15 seconds of invincibility, with no health crash and during which you can heal. Slot for recharge. This is how you absorb huge alpha strikes. It's also a reset button in the middle of a fight.
Don't hit Dull Pain before a fight. It's no longer your alpha absorber, if it ever was. Hit it when seriously hurt to get both benefits of the power the heal and the buff.
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Is all that really nessasary outside of PVP?
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Nope. But do you want to have a good scrapper, or a GREAT scrapper?
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
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Moment of Glory is now a must-have power. It only lasts for 15 seconds, but it's 15 seconds of invincibility, with no health crash and during which you can heal.
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Whoa, wait, what? MOG is must have? I haven't hear that since I first started playing, back in the heady days of Perma-MOG and, dear lord, Perma-Unstoppable.
After The Crisis of Infinite Nerfs MoG was considered a skippable power. So was Instant Healing for that matter.
So MoG doesn't drop you to 25% health? And you can still heal during it's duration? Does it still offer huge +Def & +Res?
Emminem is a rapper, but he's white? Out top pro golfer is black? MoG is must have?
I don't understand the world anymore. 
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So MoG doesn't drop you to 25% health? And you can still heal during it's duration? Does it still offer huge +Def & +Res?
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Yes as Werner said it is 15 seconds of invincibility you have 75 % resis and 75% def IIRC, if not that it is close to those numbers.
"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps
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So MoG doesn't drop you to 25% health? And you can still heal during it's duration? Does it still offer huge +Def & +Res?
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Yes as Werner said it is 15 seconds of invincibility you have 75 % resis and 75% def IIRC, if not that it is close to those numbers.
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Yep. It doesn't drop you to 25% health, you can still heal during its duration, and it does still offer huge defense and resistance. It's 71.3% defense and resistance. Typical builds have enough resistance to hit the resistance cap with it (75%), and 71.3% defense is way over the defensive soft-cap (45%, which floors the to-hit of most PvE enemies), so it is usually only enhanced for recharge.
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
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Nope. But do you want to have a good scrapper, or a GREAT scrapper?
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As you might have surmised, we're a little...focused on performance in here. However, if IOs are not your thing (yet ), no worries. You can do well without them. You can just do ... a lot better with them. Of course that takes a lot of in-game influence/infamy or time spent aquiring IOs. For some of us that's a mini-game in and of itself, for others its a barrier to the end result. YMMV.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Hey guys! I'm back to the game after a long absence. I'm wondering what might have changed for my Kat/Regen.
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I lived through the I5 & ED roll out, otherwise know as The Crisis of Infinate Nerfs. Have the Devs rolled out any other major retcons like that one?
When I left, the key to Regen was 6-slotted Dull Pain, with 3 recharge & 3 healers. Instant Healing was no longer a toggle, and MOG was skippable.
3-slotted Fast Healing & 3-slotted Intigration were enough for 90% of fights. For tough fight you hit Dull Pain before the fight to up your HP and, by extention, up your total regen. If Dull Pain wore off you could hit Instant Healing.
3-slotted with healers Instant Healing actually provided more of a regen buff than Dull Pain. The downside was that the buff was short, and without Dull Pain HP buff you couldn't shrug off the Boss/AV alpha strikes. The only good thing about it was that by the time Instant Healing wore off Dull Pain was back up.
I soloed several AVs using Regen's Dull Pain-Instant Healing-Dull Pain cycle. I even managed to drag down a few of them
Anyway, that's what I remember. Has it all changed much?