What defenses are there against -Regen?

The difference here is that defense and resistance debuffs are directly taking away the mechanism by which those sets provide survival.

Regen is a different animal in that it isn't a direct mitigation; defense and resistance both keep you from taking the damage in the first place, but regen instead allows you to recover from it after the fact more swiftly.

Cascade defense failure is an issue where your actual mitigation method is being shut off and more likely to shut off as you go. Resistance resisting resistable resistance debuffs actually serves to ensure the shift in damage taken is in scope with the actual debuff, i.e. if someone slaps you with a -20% resistance, and it isn't resistable, the net effect is to actually increase the damage you take by significantly more than 20% in some cases.

With regeneration, buffs and debuffs are only moving your sustainable damage rate up/down. The simple presence of regeneration buffs decreases the relative magnitude of regeneration debuffs.

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

Before /WP, /Regen pretty much had the best survivability against psionics as you just healed through the damage being done to you.

Getting back to the point of the OP -regen effects can slap you down as frankly your only defence as a regen is to heal quicker than the damage being hurled at you. Or hit Mog and go practically untouchable while you heal up...

Except longbow sonic grenades which they use 40+ (sonic grenade -resist debuff is flagged unresistable). But longbow are cheating bastards like that.

Not anymore they aren't. Sonic Grenades are resistable now.

You are ignoring the fact that regen is NOT the only thing Regeneration does. Regeneration also has 5 click powers that can prevent a run to the hospital. While even Instant Healing may be overwhelmed by -regen during the duration of the debuff, it will still help you recover quicker for the next fight(s) since it will be active when the debuff fades.

Really? I could have sworn they were not, as I was annoyed at how much my Fiery Aura Tank's resistance dropped when one of those was used. I didn't have Tough running, but I think he lost about half of his resistance... from 49% or something to 27% (it's been awhile right now and I can't recall the exact numbers). I was told then that the grenades were unresistable, as it seemed ridiculous to me (I've only been running defense characters redside, so I hadn't noticed it that much, just heard people complain about it).

Well, it's quite true that Regen has other tools at its disposal, which is a good thing. And you CAN make it through periods where your Regeneration is completely neutered (though it can make things more difficult). However, it is a little ridiculous that this can even happen. I don't think it's completely beyond the pale for someone playing a set called Regeneration, which has a major characteristic of regenerating damage, to expect the set to be able to resist a debuff to that major characteristic.

And mobs that do it can hurt you in other ways with slows, etc., too. Which definitely means Regen is getting hit where it hurts in all ways. Regeneration certainly does need weaknesses (and I think its main one is alpha strike damage), it's more of a question to me where having its regeneration ability completely removed by even one power seems ridiculous. -res debuffs that were irresistible were also ridiculous.

It's obviously a little difficult to argue some of this, since CoX does let you challenge so many foes at once, and Scrappers in particular are quite strong, even with their "weaker" sets. However, I would like to see a design challenge cooked up for our abilities that didn't involve something being irresistible or bypassing a set's major characteristic. When you get into that territory, it's far too easy for people to think it's unfair or lame.

I don't mind Reichsman being undefeatable until you use that one power on him, as we get a tool to deal with him. With how -regen powers work, it's just the way it is. Yes, you can use your click heals still, but it still smacks of as a lame "the computer is cheating!" trick, rather than being an actual challenging foe.

That assumes the game is all about scrappers and the primary reason devs made NPC powers was to counter scrappers.

The Regen debuffs that are so strong are supposed to conceptually STOP all regen. They are not there to just slow you down a bit, they are intended as a dead stop. Therefore they made them so very high to make sure no matter how many buffs you had (AB/RA/IH) your regen was still stopped cold.

IME, this is actually a very good type of debuff. It is strong enough to have a noticeable effect and yet it is not an instant gank on the player once you are hit with it. It makes you have to think about how to proceed, instead of just insta-splatting you (which can happen real fast with defense debuffs).

I still don't understand the amount of resistance to this debuff granted in Fast Healing for WP.

It's something like 32% for tankers and 26% for Scrappers/Brutes.

I have no experience with the Tanker version, but every time I've been hit with it on my WP Brute (LGTF, LRSF for example) that amount of protection seems to do nothing and I'm reduced to 0.00% regen anyway.

It's like getting a cardboard box to protect you from car collisions - no one else but you got a cardboard box, but your cardboard box isn't helping anyway.

That's not what he was trying to assume.. He's saying that the regen debuff is so strong, the only ones that could've ever reached that actual value, if anyone could, would be a /Regen scrapper with Toggle IH. I don't think he meant to imply the game is all about scrappers, or all debuffs are put in just to screw with scrappers.

As for it being not an instant gank, I tend to disagree. If a /WP or a /Regen is hit with a -Regen debuff, you tend to feel it right away and 2-5 seconds of being in the middle of a CoT group with a mage's -regen will drop you fairly fast. Certainly I wouldn't say it takes more time than cascade defense failure causing a death. One is just a single debuff versus an escalating decline, but the total time is about the same.

I think that is unlikely. My recollection is that most of the -regen in the game was put in after toggle IH went away.

The reason -regen has such high magnitude is probably because its not balanced based around magnitude but on duration. And the reason for that is probably for the same reason the devs got into so much trouble trying to balance movement debuffs: the game engine only supports linear debuffs and not proportional ones (at least, most of the time). So a -X movement debuff stops most players dead, but a player with superspeed doesn't even notice because his movement buff is so high that the debuff is small by comparison. Similarly, most players have low numerical regeneration, but some things have ultra high levels of it (on a relative basis). Trying to balance a linear debuff against the levels of regeneration out there would be extremely difficult.

Instead, the debuffs often simply zap the player's regen tick rate to basically zero for X seconds. In effect this removes a certain window of health recovery with each debuff which is proportional to the intrinsic rate of regeneration. Its an attempt at a proportional debuff the long way around. This would probably be too harsh if there existed powersets that relied almost exclusively on regeneration, but there are no such sets. Just like if SR, FF, and Ice didn't exist as powersets, cascade failure would be just an odd trivia observation rather than a game-balance significant phenomenon.

Its really this aspect of regen debuffs that make the notion of regeneration debuff resistance an indirectly futile pursuit. The debuffs are often intended to be balanced around a presumption of debuffing to zero, so the magnitude is set high enough to ensure this. Adding regen debuff resistance to any powerset would be virtually meaningless. The question to ask isn't whether players should resist them partially, because there's basically no such thing as partially resisting something intended to always drop you to zero. The question is whether there are too many of them or they last too long. Those are the only two dimensions of the problem that feedback could likely change. And of the two, I think the stronger argument can be made against the duration of the debuffs, not their frequency.


On the related subject of recharge debuffs, those aren't balanced that way. So resistance to recharge debuffs is on the table from a discussion perspective. But I think people would be generally surprised as to what the actual numbers say. For example, the last project I started with regard to the mitigation spreadsheet (but didn't finish) was adding debuff resistance and debuff analysis to the mitigation spreadsheet. I kinda had it working, but it was an ugly hack and I didn't have the time to clean it up. Perhaps I should. I did get -recharge working on a limited basis specifically to compare powersets like Fiery Aura, Regeneration, Ninjitsu, and Dark Armor. The comparison curves between FA and Regen were especially interesting. I can dig those up, but the bottom line was that at SO-slotting (which is the starting point for any powerset balance discussion) Regen outperformed FA's mitigation from 180s windows down past 60s windows for all levels of -recharge debuff. It was only at 30s windows that Regen crossed FA's mitigation line, and it did so somewhere around -70% recharge. In other words, Regen outperformed FA until both were experiencing the equivalent of -70% recharge debuff constantly on average. Then FA outperformed Regen.

Clearly, Regen did "suffer" from recharge debuffs more than FA, but its also true that the amount it suffered more than was irrelevant for the most part. Only at 30s windows (the lowest I even acknowledge as balance-significant) does it play a factor, and only at very high levels of debuff. And for bonus points, when I factored in FA's recharge debuff *resistance*, that curve shifted so that the breakeven point was closer to -30% debuff, which made a lot more sense.

Interestingly, the only counter to this analysis is that FA shouldn't be balanced solely on the basis of mitigation, because its presumed to have compensating value in its offensive and utility powers, which is true. But when you toss in Burn and Consume, you end up with the converse situation where you can no longer make the case that Regen's performance curve is steeper than FA's under recharge debuffs. Regen's is basically a product of its recharge-dependent heal(s) and its recharge-dependent +health mitigation, which means its dependent on the square of the recharge debuff. But the coefficients are so small that the curve is almost linear. Not so for the coefficients of offense to recharge. Recharge has an almost direct proportional effect on the offensive output of Burn (and consume) and the endurance recovery of Consume. Quick Recovery basically beats Consume (even with the new buffs) under recharge debuff, greatly increasing the recharge dependance of the utility value of the set. And likewise Burn for offense. The proportionality as so much stronger that even if you heavily devalue offense relative to defense (and most people are inclined to do the opposite) the recharge dependancy swings over to FA.

So either FA is more dependent on recharge than Regen, or Regen is more dependent on recharge than FA but outperforms it by more than the dependency. Separate from the threshold requirements for recharge resistance, there's the separate numerical argument that Regen doesn't actually suffer relative to peer sets in this regard by enough to make it significant except in extreme cases. And no powerset is balanced at those extremes, even if melee players enjoy throwing themselves into them.


I'll see if I can dig up those numbers: this was a while ago. Maybe I can google docs the numbers and the associated charts this weekend if I can find them and correctly excerpt them.

This seems to be changed a bit now with the new Praetorian Clockworks, whose attacks do have some -regen debuffs in them, but won't necessarily floor a /Regen scrapper's regen rate. I noticed on a lowbie MA/Shields scrapper that my regen was repeatedly getting zeroed out against these things, though the minor defenses at the time was enough to provide some mitigation. Then I run into some of these Praetorian Clockwork on my IO'ed out level 50 MA/Regen. I did notice that my regen rate did drop a few times below standard Integration levels, which made it uncomfortable during that time before I would hit Instant Healing. Once IH was up, those -regen debuffs didn't matter so much as the actual damage coming in, but when IH is down, those smaller -regen debuffs can hamstring a Regen scrapper without actually flooring its regen.

These new attacks seem to be how -regen can be used within the game without having to always resort to the -1000% debuff that will shut down anything. Now whether this might be a glimpse of later enemy design or just something that has popped up coincidentally, I'm not sure, but it seems that there is some deliberate thought on introducing more -regen attacks against players, which might then impact on powerset design.

Those *are*, if I remember correctly, magnitude debuffs (with fixed duration). Because the devs seem to be rewriting some of the critter balance rules for Praetorians, it will be interesting to see how all of that plays out, and not just for -regen debuffs specifically.

So wait, you mean those debuffs are working on a different mechanic that most of us are usually familiar with? How are magnitude debuffs different from kinds of debuffs?

I believe the difference is that with a Magnitude debuff, -Regen resistance applies to how much -Regen is applied, rather than how long it lasts.

I think this reality interacts badly, at least in some cases, with the design of enemy groups. We still have a few groups that have, in my not-so-humble opinion, too much homogeneity. Sometimes they are just always highly homogeneous, and sometimes only in certain level ranges. That means that if you run a mission or story arc against those foes (at least in some level ranges) you are faced with either high stacking of the same effects (in the case of pervasive but smaller debuffs) or fairly consistent reapplication (in the case of less frequent but very strong debuffs). For an example pertinent to the -Regen discussion, consider level 45+ Circle of Thorns, where every boss is a Death Mage.

This isn't just an annoyance for debuffs, either. It can also apply to things like their resistances (when they happen to be highly resistant to your attacks), their damage types (when they happen to deal what you are particularly weak against) or their use of some types of mezzes.

This isn't necessarily a pure balance issue, assuming it can be called a balance issue at all. After all, one could always try to forgo facing those foes. For me it's an unpleasant interaction between the more numerical analysis of performance and the desire to experience content or the RP notion of feeling like my characters are hiding from foes they're weak against.

As obnoxious as foes like the Tsoo and Arachnos can be at times, I usually feel like I can pick out particularly obnoxious foes in their ranks. They aren't all uniformly obnoxious to me. I like that, because it allows/forces me to make important tactical decisions as I go if I want to succeed. This is in contrast with how I sometimes feel about more homogeneous foes, where I feel compelled towards a more up-front, binary choice of whether avoid and entire enemy faction or not.

Sorry for the moderate thread-jack there. I found the rest of your post quite interesting, but only had something specific to say on the part quoted above.

What about debuff resistance in the same sense as the debuff resistance from IO set bonuses? Meaning, make it wear off faster instead of reducing the impact when it happens. If the duration is the penalty not the degree of the reduction, then let us turn off the debuff sooner. Against a Stun, I can ignore the magnitude, or I can unstun faster. Against -regen I can do neither. If ignoring the magnitude is too difficult, what about shorter durations?


From a purely annecdotal perspective, I find this plays out almost identical to psionic resistance. Either it doesn't exists, or it exists is such high quantity that fun is removed. Regardless of the math of the scenario, the fun is removed.

Most enemies do not have -regen. Those that do have it, sometimes have enough duration and/or frequency, to keep it going non-stop until you kill them. To me, that is either too high a duration, or too fast a recharge, or giving it to too common an enemy (minion instead of lieutenant for instance).

An example are the nemesis Jaegers. The duration on the -regen is long enough, and there are enough jaegers in any mission featuring them, that my /regen has almost no protection from my regeneration at all. I'm surviving or not based on clickies and inspirations and kill speed. From the miniute the debuff kicks in until the spawn is gone (or all running away because the AI is annoying like that) I have no regen. The fact that I can regen at all only matters outside of combat, ie while resting. That's too much for me. It's not a challenge, it is no longer fun. And I find it hard to believe it was the intent of the encounter.

And I dunno about the new praetorians using smaller amounts, I'll have to rerun the arc and watch more closely. I was getting so frustrated that after a while I stopped bothering with IH since I was below zero with or without it. But I did only run part of the arc one time, so I do not consider my experience at all definitive.

Two groups where I find the -regen works very balanced are the Carnies and Longbow. There is a -regen in the fire attack of the seneschal. And I really notice it. Makes me want to get the hell out of the burn patch. Longbow has the same with the flamethrowers, but not every longbow minion is a flamethrower. And yet there are few enough of them, and the effect wears off before the next application, that during battle my regeneration matters, but their -regen also matters. This works for me. It is more of a challenge, but still fun.

So I guess the real question is, how many groups have too much of it? Are we focussing on the negatives, or is it an issue?

Broken Voltage (War Mace / Electric Armor Brute) Main Toon

That is an interesting concept, but I am not sure I can agree with your observation. Outside of the old Praetorians, the enemy groups seem to have decent variety of effects and damage types. Even 45+ Crey, as boring as they all look, do different things. There is also concept to consider, as it would not make a lot of sense for Malta to suddenly be shooting negative energy beams.

I too would love to see a new high-level boss type for CoT, but power-wise, a spawn of them are anything but homogeneous. Off the top of my head, Negative, Fire, Cold, Lethal, and Smashing damage types. AoE Stun, single target Hold, and AoE KB for controls. -Recharge, -to-hit, and -regen debuffs. Some enemies fly and they have a decent mix of those who prefer range and melee.

That is how regeneration debuff resistance would work for the duration-based debuffs. The problem, as has been mentioned above, is some of them are duration based and some are magnitude based.

Every effect is either duration based or magnitude based. This means the "strength" of the power either determines the duration of the effect or its magnitude. When the effect is magnitude based, the duration is hard coded, and vice versa. Damage is always magnitude based, so buffing and debuffing damage increases or reduces its magnitude. Mez effects are almost always duration based, so buffing and debuffing mez effects generally increases or reduces its duration.

Some regen debuffs seem to be coded as magnitude effects, which means regen debuff resistance would reduce their strength, but their duration would be constant (and unaffected by anything, including combat modifiers). Some are duration based and debuff resistance would only reduce their duration, not their magnitude (which no effect would be able to change). It is unpredictable what resistance would do for a random attacker unless you know how that attacker works.

Its actually probably something the devs will have to resolve at some point, because its a potential cause for undesirable complexity. But it would probably require, or rather should require, a rethink of a unifying design principle for those debuffs.

• Example already given: Level 45+ CoT - every boss is -Regen. It's not uncommon for a 45+ Scrapper (or other melee) these days to play on settings where there is a boss nearly every spawn. I find the result to be that I commonly end up with zero regen for the majority of a CoT map unless I'm playing a high defense character.
• Circa-Level 15 CoT: Extremely heavy presence of Spectral <something>s. On hero side, this tends not to be diluted by Nerva Spectrals. Spawns of nothing but Spectral entities are very common. Extremely high lethal/smash resistance and extremely high stacking of -toHit debuffs. Villains get Nervas, which tend to mix the -toHit with slows, which I prefer. At later levels, there are more "fleshy" foes. Ruin Mages tend to reinforce the -toHit debuffing with their own and with force bubbles.
• Level 20-25/30? Arachnos. Extremely heavy robotic presence, with spawns containing nothing but robots quite common. Noticeable and very painful if you deal mostly Psi damage.
• Banished Pantheon - every minion has very high negative and Psi damage resistance.
• My favorite: Longbow, level 15-50. Lethal/Smash resistance, all the time. -Defense debuffs, all the time.

The point is that even when there might be many ways in which these foes may be varied, there are ofen some ways, usually their resistances and sometimes their debuffs, that are very "monochromatic". If your character happens to align with this, it becomes highly noticeable. The fact that the spawns may be doing an interesting variety of other things takes a back seat to the fact that suddenly they're taking a less damage than you're accustomed to dealing, dealing you more damage-over-time than you're accustomed to taking*, or consistently doing something to you that's bad for how your character is built. When this state of affairs with a mob faction spans 5-10 level ranges (or basically never goes away), I get pretty tired of dealing with it.

In my opinion, level 30+ Arachnos are one of the most difficulty NPC factions to fight in the game, because they do lots of different annoying things. But because they do really do lots of different annoying things, how dangerous they are to any given character of mine varies widely from spawn to spawn, depending on its composition. This is not the case when I face, say, Freakshow, Banished Pantheon or Longbow. (Longbow bosses have a nice variety, but their minions and LTs are amazingly uniform, almost literally).

Basically I'd love to see more factions do more different things or have more different protections so that a given character didn't risk being so consistently affected by them. Even Arachnos, IMO, needs to be cleaned up in the 20s.

* I used to include how some sets have pervasive weakness to Psi damage in this, but these days I find that it's less of a problem, due to various changes in powers and powersets, plus IOs. It used to affect Invuln and Fire Armor a lot, and they're certainly still weak to Psi, but the degree is such that I usually find it manageable, even facing strong Psi foes, like Carnie bosses (which are certainly common in Carnie missions and arcs.)