A Revamp for Rest.

Let's just get the first thing out of the way of.

I hate the Fitness Pool.

More to the point, I loathe Stamina.

Think of it this way, we get 24 power picks over the course of leveling, and if you want/need Stamina, 3 out of those 24 power picks will be... for want of a better word, boring. Swift or Hurdle, Swift, Hurdle or Health, and Stamina.
These aren't really fun powers, they aren't really interesting powers, they're just there, and for some builds, a stepping stone to not fighting like a wheezing, overloading engine struggling to keep up with the pace of things. In fact, I'd quite happily pay £10, even £20, to get the Fitness Pool inherent and out of my life forever so I can concentrate on more fun powers.
Of course, Ninja Run was bad enough for the 'They're paying for an ingame advantage' crowd, so Paid for Fitness would never go down. On the plus side, it means I have £10/£20 more pounds in my wallet to spend on torturing my bookcase.
On the negative side? 1/8th of my power picks on my Stone/Stone/Earth Tanker are going to be boring. Well, except for Swift, because daaaaaaaayum, Granite and/Or Rooted are slow as all heck.

So, no Fitness changes here. We're going to leave that simpering pain of a pool to smugly sit in the power selection of many like a smug git.
Instead, today I am going to look at Rest, the adorable little fellow. Hey, Rest! Tell us about yourself!

"Hi! I'm Rest! Activate me to heal Hit Points and recover Endurance! Though be careful, because when you do, you can't attack! And uh oh, not only that, but you're super vulnerable to damage and lose a lot of defense! Plus it takes me a few seconds to get active! I recharge in 180 seconds, give you -100000% Defense, -10000% Damage Resistance, 1900% Regeneration and 425% Recovery!"

Thanks Rest, you adorable little scamp.

Anyway, 180 seconds. That's 3 minutes, which in the fast paced combat of City of Heroes is a lot of fights.

So, there's one possible solution. Reduce the time Rest takes to recharge. 60 seconds? 30?

Pros:

• Ability to recover quickly out of combat.
• Not viable to use in combat due to lack of attacking/penalty to defence/resistance.
• Up sooner, so less waiting around for your natural recovery to boost you up.
• Encourages Green/Blue Inspirations to be used in combat.

Cons:

• Start up time could prove annoying.

So there's one option. Rest at 60 or 30 seconds Recharge.

What about a toggle though, similar to a travel power? Say, it lets you run about still at baseline speeds, but you'd still have the attack issue, and the defence/resist penalties. The pros are similar, the con having been removed, and it'll teach you to be careful where you move to if for instance you run into a patrol. Call it being startled while resting up.

But what about if you don't like pressing things, or toggling things? Well, you're probably a little odd to be playing this game, but hey!
Let's take a look around for some inspiration. Oh! Hey there, you two Day Job Badge powers, tell me about yourselves!

"Hi, I'm Clubber! When you're out of combat, you get a +Recovery Bonus from me!"
"And Hi! I'm Caregiver, when you're out of combat, you get a +Regeneration Bonus from me."
Interesting, interesting, but what happens in combat?
"We hide. Combat's scary."
"Yuh-uh! But once it's over we come out and give you the bonus again."

Really now? That's nothing to be ashamed of, I'd hide from combat too, but say... you two recognize that a character is in or out of combat, right? What say if you teach my friend Rest this trick?
Now of course, there'd be nothing like the 1900%/425% Regeneration/Recovery bonus from current Rest, as that'd be silly. Likewise, there couldn't be the defence/resist penalty either.
So, that leaves us with a couple of options. The first is a flat rate out of combat. Something meaty, but not too crazy. The second option would be for it to scale with level like how Ninja Run does. The more experienced you are, the quicker you recover. The third... well, he's an interesting one.
We know that some powers increase in Endurance cost when they've been on a while, or at least they did. I really should check up on that. But taking inspiration from Guild Wars, where Health and Energy regen slowly once combat ends, but ramps up to very quickly after a while, what if something similar was done with Auto Rest?
You're in a fight, reduced to baseline levels of health and regen (1.67 Endurance per second, 5.03 hp per second at Level 50). The fight finishes, so your Recovery and Endurance start to increase. At first it's maybe 2/7.56 a second. Goes up some more, then some more, then some more.
So, if you finish a fight, but get ambushed soon after, you won't have had as long to recover, so would start not at full. That makes sense for an ambush after a fight already, but if you don't get ambushed, you get time to rest up and fight again another day.

So, thems the proposals then.

1: Reduce Rest to 60/30 Seconds Recharge
-OR-
2: Turn Rest into a Toggle similar to a Travel Power
-OR-
3: Turn Rest into an Auto Power, delivering Out of Combat regen/recovery
-OR-
4: The Above, but have it ramp up over time out of combat.

Now, Fitness would still have a place, for those that want to enhance their in combat regeneration/recovery, or increase their baseline movement speeds.

But maybe, just maybe, it'd take some of the pain out of the situation, and prevent people from taking 3 powers just because they're tired of waiting around to recover.

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Some interesting ideas. And well presented. Not saying they would work/be logical....but I also don't like having to take 3 specific powers in a build..before I even start to plan it. I have builds without travel powers (and no, I don't have the ninja pack, ninja run looks retarded) but I do not think I could handle one without stamina.
Remember though Zortel...those 3 fitness powers, assuming One slot in swift/hurdle, Two in health(for uniques) and Four in stamina (3shifters +proc) also have the effect of 'giving' you slots for your other powers. Sure..maybe if we got a fitness like inherent, that would mean 3 extra powers, but it sure as hell would not be 3 fully slotted powers would it? I actually quite like picking hurdle, and knowing those 2 slots the next level go to something that will be of much much greater benefit.
I like your ideas though. Especially the lower recharge. Granted, I hardly think the lvl 1-20 content is the most played, but one major reason no one wants to do it is because..it sucks. It is damn awful and annoying to have to rest every few mobs cause your running out of end. Sure..you could go and buy lvl 10,15,20 sos and ios, but they will be useless in about 60 mins. 60 mins...thats 20 recharges of everyones fav power..Rest!
Another thing I think would work is....change Walk. Now Walk. what a bleep bleep useless power. Really. As much as I like seeing some scanty *** wander round Pocket D on Virtue (and where else is it used to a large extent??) it does..nothing. Turn it into Zor's out of combat regen/recover buff. Perfect..low level toon..running out of end..turn on Walk and stroll like a catwalk model to the next mob, arriving with (maybe) full end and hp.

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I'm going to say we reduce Rest recharge to 0 seconds and call it a day. Anything beyond that, like a mobile Rest or an out-of-combat recovery buff is no going to fly, but Rest comes with its own cost and investment. It's dangerous, you can't activate it in certain locations and it still takes time to rest. Time, mind you, that the rest of your team will probably use to run ahead or aggro things on you, because people are like that.

I always thought Rest was its own cost without needing recharge to balance things further. If need be, make it more dangerous or make it take longer to activate. It makes no difference. The key point here is for Rest to eliminate the practice of sitting on your hands before you can go into the next battle.

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0 recharge would be a great change. I'd like to see it get a bit faster activation time myself.
The negatives of the power being that a grey con can practically 1 shot you are enough to eliminate the rech and overly long cast time.

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Shows what happens when I got caught up in writing, I'm sure I put 0 Recharge there somewhere, but I think I then rewrote something and forgot to put it back.

Yes, 0 Recharge rest is also good. Tuck yourself out of the way, hit it, boost up, get back to the fight.

On an unrelated yet related note:

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Definitely throwing in my vote for 0 recharge Rest. It avoids invalidating the benefits of Stamina, it doesn't require any new powers work or cottage changes, and it makes a lot more sense to me.

Right now, things work using what I like to call "Inconvenience Balancing". That is, if you want to wait the full minute to recover all of your HP/End (because Rest is on cooldown, presumably), there's nothing stopping you and there's no penalty for doing so, other than wasted time*. And since most encounters tend to be equal due to randomized spawns, there can literally be no expectation of the player's health or endurance, and therefore the encounters must be balanced around the only reasonable constant, which is full HP/End. (In short: This couldn't possibly unbalance anything.)

*Of course, since things tend to break down in CoX as drops, XP, or whatever over time, this is a slightly bigger deal. But considering Stamina allows characters to effectively never run out of endurance, thereby bypassing that downtime entirely, I don't see it as a big deal in letting Rest do something similar, with some clear downsides.

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While I would like to say things like "just make blue inspirations rraaargh" I can't see much reason not to have rest be on a 0 second recharge. The penalty is in the fact that you had to sit your butt down, totally vulnerable, and take a breather. It doesn't really effect combat in any way, it just makes the downtime between the game part of the game less so, which is always something I think we should strive for.

Rest seems like a relic of the EverQuest age of MMO's, and I'd like to see it join the rest of us in "fun to play" world.

Besides that, it doesn't make sense that you can't rest whenever you want. Imagine if the real world worked like that. You might be tired after a full day of paperwork, but damn you if you can sleep, you still got 2 minutes left on your recharge.

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Maybe, MondoCool, not everyone's playing in a team all the time, not everyone's on a hero who has a relatively endurance efficient powerset (TA/Archery I'm doing fine on without Stamina. Ice/Ice Blaster on the other hand is a little more end heavy.) Also, it was never said to make fitness inherent, it was all about rest, so don't know where you got that from.

Saying Fitness is purely optional and you can get along without it is like saying... I don't know, entertainment is purely optional and you can get along without it. True, you can, but time will pass slower and it won't be as enjoyable, and you'd get fairly bored too.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy after all.

I'll go back and sign myself on 0s Recharge Rest.

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I don't see why people whine about having to give up three out of twenty four powers in order to be more physically fit.

Let's see. You have your nine primaries, and your nine secondaries. You probably won't take all 18, but that's 18 at the very most. Let's say you take all 18. That leaves you with 6 completely optional powers to choose from.

Hurdle, Health, Stamina. That's 21. You have three powers left to choose whatever you want from the pools, which are also optional. You could get, say, Boxing, Tough, Weave, which makes that 24. If you don't choose all your powers from your primary or secondary, you could get Hasten/SS or CJ/SJ along with that. Or even both. I know I did.

There is no loss of gameplay value when taking the Fitness pool. Your character is focusing his attention on physically training himself to be more fit and utilize his powers in a more endurance-efficient way. This gives him less time to focus on developing the general powers that all heroes/villains are capable of using. Deal with it.

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Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!

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