Katana/Regen Build

The only times I have ever seen him take advice from someone were when the initial pvp changes when they gave taunt and confront a 75% range debuff, giving grant cover defense debuff resistance, and something for invulnerability lol.

Castle listens to a lot more players than just me. And regen *is* numerically stronger than most of its peer sets**. Not specifically because of animation time, but because the mechanics of regeneration dictate that as a necessity when balancing against a range of performance.

On the other hand, I do know that Castle doesn't tend to respond to most PMs that tends to start with "I think X should get a buff because." When I first started PMing him about game mechanics, he didn't tend to respond to any of those from me either. Historically speaking, these do not go well or end well for the devs.




** The arguable exception is Willpower, and Castle knows I think Willpower was set too strong in Issue 11. If Castle listened to everything I said, Willpower would have launched a lot weaker than it actually did. But apparently Castle has a lot more spine or I have a lot less influence than most people give credit for.

Actually, I've never sent him a PM starting that way. I generally start with asking why whatever I'm sending him a tell concerning is present and then show my evidence. The suggestion is only present at the very end and is almost always a list of potential solutions (with the various pros/cons of each that I could identify). I do realize that he probably knows more than me about the balance of the specific sets, but there are just some things that I wish he would clarify since there seems absolutely no reason why they shouldn't otherwise.

Even so, I don't think Castle even thought about the animation time use differences between */Regen and other sets. */Regen is pretty unique in that regard, and you'd only really notice it if you were specifically looking at the comprehensive differences between */regen and the other sets. Trying to point out a specific disparity between a set that already operates on a near completely different scale of effectiveness than everything else is something I'd hope he'd actually look into, especially when you consider that he's been trying to address the whole issue of animation time balance in attacks for a good, long while.

The original game didn't balance cast times at all. Attack cast times were only examined because the wide variations in cast times on attacks had a provably unintentional effect: many powers were much less effective than intended overall.

That same argument doesn't translate to Regen directly, because the specific argument relates not just to full attack chains, but the average damage output of attack sets when slotted with SOs. Attack cast times have *both* an initial effect (or rather a mid-game effect) and place a constraint on the amount of benefit an attack set can get with recharge bonuses.

Comparing two defensive sets with comparable numbers of clicks, one with higher cast times, would be at least an analogous situation. But when comparing two mitigation sets, one of which has more clicks and one of which has less, two counterbalancing effects of clicks come into play. Clicks cost more than toggles and passives in terms of activity time. But clicks benefit from recharge more (because in general recharge can't benefit toggles and passives). That makes this a far more complex argument to make, and the burden is on the advocate in this case (well, in all cases really).

Its not a new assertion: Castle wasn't a red name when it first came up on the forums back in I4 (I don't think), but I'm assuming he probably saw discussion of it. A lot of regens suggested when the focus shifted from toggle IH to reconstruction that reconstruction's activation cost was in effect applying an offensive penalty on regens. However, there was no way to demonstrate numerically that this offensive penalty wasn't actually part and parcel of the qualitative mechanical difference between clicks and toggles, specifically that clicks could benefit from recharge. In other words, no one has suggested yet why the difference isn't (or couldn't be) an intended difference.

On the subject of uniqueness: Regen is unique - among scrapper secondaries - in terms of its rooted cost, but its not, for lack of a better way of putting it, unique in a unique way. Dark Armor is unique in its endurance penalty. SR is unique in its inability to increase damage mitigation strength with recharge bonuses (ignoring the tier 9 emergency power). Invuln is unique in its movement penalty. Uniqueness alone cannot justify taking action against an intentional qualitative difference. If it did, Regen would lose Quick Recovery: its the qualitative distinguisher among scrapper secondaries with the absolute highest game-balance impact. To be valid, a uniqueness argument must be able to state that, all other things being equal, the thing in question must be specifically equalized. But there is no rule I'm aware of that says, all things being equal, all mitigation sets must have the same number of clicks and incur the same amount of rooted penalty. If a set had to incur the rooted penalty for a large number of clicks but somehow couldn't benefit from recharge or other click mechanical advantages, then that would be a case where a balance argument could be made. That makes the uniqueness observation intrinsically weak as a balance argument. If you had an argument that could justify *why* the imbalance you've calculated shouldn't exist, relative to all of the other qualitative differences that exist, you'd probably have a much more persuasive argument.


(By the way, on the subject of Clicks, its been suggested that there is a rule that says Clicks > Toggles > Passives. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such rule. There is a rule that says in general Toggles are stronger than Passives, but no rule that says Clicks must be stronger than Toggles. If there is such a rule, the original devs didn't follow it, and the current devs consistently ignore it. Clicks tend to be stronger per activation than Toggles, but that's mainly because Toggles activate more often. In *that* sense there is such a rule, but no rule that says the *overall* net effect of a Click must be superior to comparable Toggles). So while there is a qualitative mechanical difference between Clicks and Toggles, there seems to be no requirement that Clicks explicitly end up significantly stronger than Toggles either ignoring those qualitative differences or when completely factoring them in).

Well, the bigger problem, as I see it, is that while click powers benefit from recharge, it also increases their costs in the form of animation time. As you decrease the recharge time of the power, there is an exponential (though a slow exponential) growth in the amount of animation time consumed. This translates directly into a reduction in offensive and defensive capability as you have more and more powers competing in ever increasing quantities for a single resource that is never capable of being increased. Sure, you can become more survivable on a */regen, but, by doing so, you're reducing your own damage capabilities as the same time.

Well, first things, Invuln has no movement penalty. You may be thinking of Stone, which does have the movement penalty, but isn't available to Scrappers. On the question of uniqueness, you've first got to confront the magnitude of the difference in which the set is made unique. */Regen operates off of a completely different scale than the other sets and uses a completely different mechanism for its contribution. Whereas every set you've mentioned uses toggles and passive powers for the vast majority of its survivability, */Regen uses click powers. Whereas every set you've mentioned uses defense and/or resistance (and mez effects, in the case of Dark), */Regen uses straight up damage recovery (Resilience doesn't count by any stretch of the imagination). Whereas every other set has a decent enough suite of debuff resistance and other debuff countermeasures, */Regen has none. The magnitude of difference between */Regen and every other set out there is huge.

The only set that could potentially rival */Regen in the level of difference is Dark and that's only because it uses a different cap on performance. */SR isn't anywhere near as different from the "standard" than */Regen, since, as you pointed out, the only way in which it is unique is in that it doesn't have a method to increase survivability through +rech (which isn't even true because neither do WP or SD), which is, if you look at every other set, a rather minor contribution. Invinc's contributive benefit from +rech is pretty much summed up in more time with DP active. The comparative benefits of that are decent, but not so incredible as to make +rech more important for survivability than offense. Basic SO slotting already provides 66.66% uptime which is great. More +rech isn't going to make the difference completely. +Rech, for every set except for */Regen, primarily an offensive tool. The defensive benefits of it are secondary.

I hope it hasn't been me that made the suggestion that Clicks>Toggles>Passives because I don't believe that. Toggles definitely trump Passives, but that's because they are almost functionally identical except that Toggles have endurance costs and passives don't. As to clicks, you have a lot more to analyze because you have to address animation time use and activation cycles along with everything else. Since Toggles use up virtually no animation time (unless you get mez'd, they're up all the time), it would stand to reason that, if you account for animation time, the click should be stronger because that's a cost that the Toggle gets to ignore.

Essentially, Clicks, Toggles, and Passives should all be balanced but each category of power has additional costs associated with it that the "lower" categories don't have to deal with in. Passives don't have to deal with endurance costs or mez shutdown. Toggles don't have to deal with animation times (or, at the very least, deal with them in an almost nonexistent manner) or being rooted. Click powers have to deal with absolutely everything. If you ignore the mitigation qualities of the powers, you would naturally conclude that Click>Toggle>Passive makes sense, but that's ignoring the factors that actually cause the powers to be balanced anyway (especially considering that sets are balanced as a whole rather than as a set of independent powers).

Actually, animation costs increase linearly. If you presume that clicks "pay" for their benefit in terms of endurance and cast time, then the ratio of cost to benefit remains constant right up to the recharge limit.

You're probably thinking that as mitigation root costs increase linearly, offensive opportunity as a percentage of the total decreases inversely. That's a completely different thing.


No, actually I forgot the movement penalty was removed. Slip of the keyboard on that one, my mistake.


You're stating that Regeneration (the set) has differences in mitigation strength as justification for looking at the cast time penalty without first demonstrating those differences are a net minus. In fact, the way Regeneration was implemented, those things are a net plus. Because the devs have no good model for comparing Regen to sets like Invuln and SR, Regen gets set much higher than it really ought to be (the same thing happened with Willpower, although the error there was slightly different).

It doesn't help your case to mention all the ways Regen gets to break the rules in ways that *benefit* the set. Trust me: if the devs had a proper model for Regeneration, Regeneration would be lower. Instead, it was originally set high, then reduced in strength until the datamining couldn't tell it was too high.


Oh, one more thing:

1. The contribution of recharge to sets like Invuln, Dark Armor, Regen, and Fiery Aura is not a minor contribution.

2. When SR was designed, Willpower and Shield Defense didn't exist. Its design rules predate those sets, in terms of the unique aspects of the set. I was assuming you were considering the original four scrapper sets, because:

3. Accepting the current state of mitigation sets available to scrappers, its not true that Regen has especially high rooted time costs. Regen has reconstruction, which has a base 0.73 cast time with 60s recharge, and Dull Pain which has 0.73 cast time with 360s recharge. Assume we slot both to 1.95 recharge, and we get a net rooted efficiency cost of 0.73/(60/1.95) + 0.73/(360/1.95) = 0.024 + 0.004 = 0.028, or 2.8%. Fiery Aura has Healing Flames, a 1.5s cast time 40s recharge power. Equally slotted, its rooted cost is 1.5/(40/1.95) = 0.073 or 7.3%. Fiery Aura has nearly three times the cast time cost of Regen. Adding in IH (0.004) and MoG (0.011) doesn't help matters. Regen increases to about 4.3%, which is still only about half the cost of Fiery Aura.

4. The specific ways SR would still be unique, even among all the currently available scrapper mitigation sets is:

a. It has no way to improve on the intrinsic endurance limit for offense, which you can do in one of three ways: improve DPE, increase endurance recovery, or provide an endurance-efficient damage aura. Regen and Willpower have quick recovery. Shield Defense has a +DMG power. Invuln has a tohit buff. Dark Armor has a damage aura. Fiery Aura has an endurance recovery power *and* a damage aura *and* a damage buff. Quickness does *not* do any of those three things, and does not, as a consequence, actually increase the damage per unit time you're capable of generating while obeying the endurance recovery limit. The endurance recovery limit is actually one of the foundational balance pillars of the entire game, which makes this not a trivial difference. In fact, its the difference that comes closest to being game-breaking, because it tampers with a balance-significant parameter (as the devs define balance).

b. It has a large class of attacks which exist at essentially all levels and all ranks for which it has no damage mitigation of any kind, proactive or reactive. There are no such attacks for anything with health recovery, which includes Regen, Willpower, and Fiery Aura. It also includes Invuln on a technicality because DP has a heal, but more importantly and not a technicality Invuln has +health, which acts as resistance against all forms of attack. Even against psionics, Invuln has the equivalent of about 37% resistance with fully slotted DP. Dark Armor has resistance to all damage types. Shield Defense has +health. That leaves SR as the only scrapper mtigation set that has literally *zero* protection against a large class of attacks: non-positional psionics. This is significant because SR's original design didn't intend that: SR was designed to offer protection to all attacks. Non-positional psionics was essentially an override of SR's original design intent.

c. Its the only scrapper mitigation set for which essentially all the damage mitigation powers in the set synergize sufficiently strongly with at least one other power that the set loses more than proportional strength when any one power is eliminated. In other words, SR-1 is significantly weaker than any other set minus one damage mitigation power. That was due to a laudable but faulty design decision. To make sure the SR passives were not seen as "worthless" they added scaling passive resistances to each of them. This meant every passive synergized with each other strongly (in fact, having two provides only about half the resistive mitigation of having three, not 2/3rds - the math is complex to prove it though), and synergized with its corresponding toggle. Removing, say, slotted dodge cuts the passive scaling protection in half, and also increases net incoming melee damage (assuming SO slotting) by 45%. In normalized terms, assuming each positional vector blocks roughly 1/3rd of all damage, removing dodge reduces net strength of the set by over 22%. Without this strong double-synergy, removing any one power should reduce the set by something closer to 1/6th, at least on average: instead the ratio is closer to 1/4.5.

What's specifically unique about SR is that *every* damage mitigation power is like that: all three toggles and all three passives have an incremental reduction factor higher than 1/6 (the passives are about 1/4.5, the toggles about 1/4.2). This interlocking is the basis for the colloquial comment that with SR, you need to take everything. And that runs counter to the design intent for the damage mitigation sets. It should be optional to take any one power, for most powers, with the only cost being a loss of effectiveness proportional to the strength of the power. Some powers will of course be more valuable than others, but overall the average should hold.


Those are the top three on my list. There are a few more that are weaker distinctions, so I'm not including them here. Each of the above is balance-significant working from first principles of the devs' own statements about game balance, or things I happen to know about the design of the game. Collectively, its enough for me to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that *something* is wrong with SR.

The only reason why none of those problems has been addressed is because Castle holds a trump card: SR isn't underperforming as a result of those problems. That makes it a low priority item to even bother looking at them. My guess is that the same holds true for Regen. Things like MoG were a thorn in Castle's side, but something like reconstruction taking too much time (when its one of the fastest clicks around) is probably too far down the priority list to devote significant time to at the moment. And for *both* SR and Regen, I would tend to agree.


By the way, a significant fraction of Regen's damage mitigation comes from the +health of Dull Pain, which is not a health recovery effect.

Actually, I tend to use IH as the Regen "tier9" rather than MoG, and I consider it very valuable, if not essential. In fact, I find IH and Elude have more in common than Elude does with Unstoppable. With Unstoppable (especially given Dull Pain and Invuln's resistances to start) you can wait until you get into trouble (to a point) and then activate Unstop. Its no big deal to get down to half health or a little less and then go unstoppable. But with Elude, you're much better off using it somewhat proactively to protect your full health bar. If you wait until you get low, Elude won't protect you from one unlucky hit, and won't reduce the level of damage per attack. It will greatly reduce the likelihood of two unlucky hits close together, and reduce the chance of three in a row even more, which is why it works best when you still have full health. IH works in a not terribly dissimilar manner. You don't want to wait until your health gets too low, or its recovery won't be fast enough to bail you out of one last big hit (or burst of hits). But if you use it while you still have lots of health, it will basically erase a high level of incoming damage and keep you at or near full health. I found the transition from using Elude to using IH to be smoother in terms of gameplay than the transition from Elude to Unstoppable for that reason.

So for me, IH is optional in the same sense that Elude would be optional to SR, if Elude didn't crash and you were not invention-buffed to the soft cap to begin with.

It's a pretty bad *** build, and yes you deserve the credit for making it.