Remove the recharge from Rest

I don't believe that would happen. By the 30s you have enough slots and access to health/endurance management that even the downtime of an instant recharged rest wouldn't be acceptable to many.

Even in other game, I find the same to be true. As you move up you get better abilities to move non-stop.

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...and your point is? Just because games X, Y and Z implement a mechanic in a certain way does not mean that CoH should do it the same way, even if there is a common and expected standard. You have to do what is right for a particular game. Period.

I'd still just go for +end and +regen procs/globals in higher levels just to not have to kneel for a sec even with no recharge on it. constanly regaining is still more effective for a steady stream of a**-kicking.

As a guy whose Regen has QR, Stamina, Health, Conserve Power and the Numina proc, I might be the wrong guy to ask.

Yeah, I know how you mean - the fact is, it's very hard to peer through the neck of the bottle and see into the experience of the newbie.

The last time this discussion came up, my suggestion was to actually have rest's recharge time scale up, the higher level you got. I'm reluctant to pursue that kind of design - it tends to leave players feeling like they're losing something, just look at how some tankers still resent gauntlet for not 'doing anything' early on - but it's not an unreasonable compromise... if one is necessary. But you know what Rand said about compromise...

Also, to Matt, I think you misunderstand my point.

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I believe they will.

In my experience in this game, people hate downtime, and that's exactly what Rest is. It forces you in a static position for what? 30 seconds? And while I do believe that I am a good player when it comes to leading post stamina PuGs, you WILL get left behind by the rest of us if you have to stop and rest after EVERY fight. Also, rest is for out of combat purposes anyway, which means it won't do you any good during tougher/longer fights where those endurance management tools will be needed.

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I don't know that. In I11, did you know that the average blaster was half-way to being perpetually debt-capped?

Meaning: half of all blasters were worse off.

And even for my maximally enhanced scrappers, this is not absolutely true. There is still some endurance and health management going on even with both Health and Stamina, when I have both.

Point still being, though, that if players decide to lower downtime with the fitness pool, even if a majority of players choose to do so that doesn't mean the opportunity cost is incorrect. It simply means its an option many players choose to take.

Whether this is something that requires separate action below level 20 when stamina first comes available is at least in part a philosophical question on whether downtime is ever acceptable. If its not, the entire premise of the resource management elements of the game are wrong, and tinkering with Rest would be a trivial gesture in the face of such an incredibly serious design flaw. It also begs the question of the point to sets with downtime mitigators available at lower levels (such as quick recovery). The regeneration set itself was designed to be a low downtime powerset as one of its advantages. That's a meaningless, almost ludicrous statement if the design intent of the game is to minimize player downtime in the first place.

Nor does it mesh with my experience. I might have to rest every several groups of enemies in low levels, and more often than not, it's to recover health not endurance. It is certainly not an every group thing, like some posters portray. Not to say that endurance management can't be a challenge, but the players I see constantly running out of endurance, are the ones that invariably leave Sprint or Ninja Run on all the time, waste AOE attacks on single enemies, etc.

Arcana, I mean no offence here, but sometimes I have to wonder if you don't get so lost in game design logistics that you forget why we're all here in the first place - to have fun and unwind. Deliberately introducing "balance by annoyance" is very, very counter to that. I still stand by what I've always said: a game should not inspire boredom no matter how it is designed, especially intentionally. No mechanic should ever be instituted with the sole purpose of making me bored, even if it's intended to work as disincentive.

Furthermore, you keep hinging on how the game "was" designed, once upon a time. With both Rick Dakan and Jack Emmert gone from the picture, we really shouldn't be holding those original design intents up as gospel. That is to say, holding up regeneration and saying that one of its big advantages is low downtime is disingenuous. You act as if higher regeneration and higher recovery are only ever useful as pick-me-ups after a hard fight. Higher recovery doesn't just mean you recovery faster, it means you can burn more via toggles and still maintain close to the same level of recovery. This means more toggles, this means heavier toggles, this means more interesting toggles. Like Tough and Weave, like Tactics, Assault and Manoeuvres, like Focused Accuracy and so forth. Higher regeneration means more survivability and more survivability means the ability to survive tougher fights, especially at certain levels of incoming damage.

I know you know these things, which is why I'm surprised you would trivialise them in order to extol Regen's virtues as a low downtime set. You act as if Regeneration is somehow inferior to other sets, and so has lower downtime to compensate. That is not true in the slightest. I don't know where it stands on your numerical comparison, but I would bet my metal-tipped tail that it is NOT squarely at the bottom. In fact, I do not believe Regeneration doesn't have anything to "offset" by offering lower downtime, too.

And even if we assumed that were the case, where does Willpower feature into this? Willpower is a set that offers lower downtime, but also has some of the better survivability mechanics out there.

And all of this is based on what I can only describe as a flawed premise - that downtime is a useful balancing tool. It's not. Downtime is anti-joy. Downtime is the one aspect of any game which is irredeemable in any way, shape or form. Any time a game tells you "you cannot play me for this amount of time" is bad. This is balance by annoyance of the highest order. It's like saying "Hey, this character is really good, but playing it causes my PC to randomly reboot as a balancing mechanic." Or, to be more realistic, what was that game where a fighter class was designed to be very strong, but receive less experience from kills, causing people to fall behind their friends when teaming?

And, to be honest, I don't see how you can make the argument that the game isn't "designed" to allow for little downtime. What does lowering or removing downtime break, exactly? I want to know. Does it make the game too easy somehow? How is it doing that when Rest does nothing to lower power recharge? If I rest, I get my hit points and endurance back, but Dull Pain doesn't recharge any faster, Unstoppable doesn't recharge any faster, Build Up doesn't recharge any faster. So what, exactly, does lowering downtime, and still at the cost of time plus vulnerability, really break? Are we seriously going to say that forcing people to sit on their hands, watch TV, Alt-Tab to forums and suchforth is a legitimate and positive part of game balance? Because I don't buy it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Huh? What does that have to do with people either surviving OR NOT surviving a single encounter?

Are you saying that because some folks run into spawns with less than capped levels of health/power that making Rest instantly recharge would allow them to not do that? Well, folks have the option now to be careful. It's just whether they're going to learn from their mistakes or not.

Actually wouldn't that only be true if the median blaster was debt-capped? Outliers would skew the average, no? I mean if 33% of Blasters completely sucked at it and were debt capped. And the other blasters had about a quarter of that, then the average would be 50%, but most blasters wouldn't be debt capped. No?

Within encounters? Or between encounters?

This is taking the argument to the extreme. Downtime should only exist if by its existence it offers gameplay options that wouldn't be there otherwise. So if the resource management game is fun, then SOME downtime is acceptable.

I actually agree that a minimal amount of downtime is acceptable. I think Rest's "time-out" where you have to make sure you're in a safe place and then wait until full meets all the requirements of downtime. There's simply no need to force low level players to stand around for up to 3 minutes waiting for their health to recover. That's not fun, and really serves no legitimate purpose other than to make the Fitness pool a complete no-brainer.

This I can support! I'd be worried about removing it entirely, as it might led to some weird results but with this set-up it'd still function in it's intended role without being abused.

That's kind of what I've always said. I don't expect the game to be 100% non-stop action like I were playing a spastic Brute on speed dial, but I also don't believe that three minutes of dead air is acceptable as the other "extreme." Rest is already a form of downtime, and mind you, a severe, irritating form of downtime if you ask people, from what I've gathered. So what I want is not the removal of all downtime in any way, shape or form, but merely its reduction into something that's more controllable and less about empty waiting.

Just as an idle point of fact: 9Dragons has exactly that - instantly-recharging Rest. They don't call it Rest, they call it Meditation, but that's what it is. You sit down, and your health and energy recover at a very fast rate. The catch in 9Dragons is you can't actually STOP resting until you are fully-recovered, and being attacked while meditating causes you "internal wounds." It also begins to take a somewhat long-ish amount of time as your health and energy increase, though in classic MMO fashion, it can be replaced with better, faster forms of meditation.

9Dragons sucks, but it does not suck because of meditation. In fact, meditation is one of the few GOOD things about the game. For me, it opened up the ability to do team content solo. I was ordered to kill stuff and look for drops, but the stuff in question was strong and came in large groups. So I'd kill one, high-tail it and be almost dead and exhausted. I'd meditate, recover fully, go kill a few more, run away again and meditate some more. Were I forced to walk away from the computer after every fight, I would not have lasted a day in 9Dragons. Instead, I lasted about a week, which is still more than I've lasted in most other MMOs, namely Champions Online.

And 9Dragons is DEFINITELY designed around resource management. Believe me, it is. It has those "experience boost" books, it has various forms of buffing food and potions, it has limited-use medicines which heal wounds of all kinds and it has a HEAVY reliance on money. Even a game that's about as classic Korean resource-driven grindfest as they come without having Lineage in its name STILL offered an instantly-recharging form of rest that was built into the engine. And even at the worst of times, I've never seen meditation take more than 10-20 seconds from zero to full.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Typically no (depending on what range you stop qualifying someone as a "lowbie.") And TBH I don't find myself relying on rest that much - but the times it does come up needed and isn't there, well...

Rest's usefulness tends to fade more in the upper levels (being an "after a particularly hard fight" power) thanks to more powerful End reduction and Endmod IOs, the availability of powers such as Stamina, Powersink variants and Fast Recovery as well as team powers such as Speed Boost, AM (I know, rad gets it early,) Transferrence and the like. It's already got a sort of designed obsolescence. Plus, threads come up about - what, once every four months? - about how "Stamina shouldn't be needed." Aside from the fact that it tends not to be, having constantly (or near constantly) available Rest would give those people more options.

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I'm a little baffled at this. You don't find yourself relying on it much, so how often do you actually hit the situation where you need it and don't have it? It has a 3 minute recharge base; A TO shaves off about 12 seconds, a DO twice that.

For me, throughout the entire career of my characters from 1 to 50 (with the vast majority of my playtime to date being pre-20), rest is just that: An 'after a particularly hard fight' power.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Late teens tend to be the worst, if any point.

That said, I'm not against making it more available for others. It really doesn't make much sense to be "too tired to rest."

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