Does anyone have any experience with the Panacea proc in PvE?

How well does it perform? is it a game-changing IO in the same sense as the Numina and Miracle procs? does it make a noticeable difference in your toon? is it worth it? any additional anecdotes?

Thanks in advance for your helpful replies.

I haven't used the Panacea proc but looking at it you get a 20% chance for a tiny heal and a minor endurance boost. The heal is laughably small... about half an unslotted Rad Controller's AoE heal (something like 6% of a squishy's health), so I wouldn't consider it very noticeable unless slotted in an AoE. The 7.5% endurance gain is also pretty minor in most cases... weaker than a Performance Shifter proc and generally going off less often since heals are not normally used every 10 seconds. I can really only think of two cases where the Panacea proc would really be noticeable:

1) In fast recharging attacks that also heal, like Siphon Life. You're already using it as part of your attack chain so a chance for a bit more health and some endurance is handy. Not game changing, but nice when it procs.

2) In Dark Regeneration. Here it is game changing... Dark Regeneration is an AoE with a pretty large radius so if you hit the full 10 targets on average you'll get 2 procs. The extra healing is still pretty minor (and completely worthless most of the time in Dark Regeneration since that usually heals you to full), but Dark Regeneration costs a ton of endurance... if Panacea procs twice you get a good chunk of that endurance back and if it procs three times and you have a lot of end reduction slotted (which you will) you can actually gain endurance.

So basically if you have a power that can take Panacea and you use it as part of your attack chain anyway it's a nice little bonus, and if you are Dark Armor it's a massive boost to your survivability since it lets you use Dark Regeneration pretty much all you want without endurance issues as long as you have plenty of enemies around.

(It might be useful to Warshades too, since Stygian Circle can slot it... but Warshades don't have near the endurance issues that Dark Armor does.)

the end portion of this would prolly be nice when coupled with a performance shifter proc inside of the fitness powers

however, based on how little this actually makes a difference and the fact a theft of essence proc can work the same way in dark regeneration, the panacea proc is not worth it unless you want to supplement dark regeneration with both the panacea proc and theft of essence proc

basically, i would not use it unless i had unlimited resources to splurge on that stuff

Oh, um... those of you discussing slotting the proc in enemy-targeted powers...

I originally had it slotted in Life Drain. And it healed enemies. And granted them the endurance. I got zilch. So if you are going to slot it in an enemy-targeted self heal, have a respec on hand, just in case. Unless you want to use it to work on your healing badges (yes, healing enemies via this proc counts toward the badges).

I have it slotted in my scrapper's healing flames which is up every ~12 seconds, just because I didn't have access to the other Panacea that I needed at the time.

In my experience it is nice when it goes off, in the sense of... "oh cool it went off" but as far as actually being useful or worth the price of the IO... i would say Definitely not worth it

Putting it in Health gives you on average around 1.2 HP / second... on a Scrapper that works out to be equal to around a 23% regen bonus. Considering I've rarely noticed Health (arond 75-80% slotted) in combat I wouldn't consider it worth a slot for that. Even if you are softcapped with no heal it's only going to shave a few seconds off your time to heal from almost dead to full. I don't see that having much effect really... a Regenerative Tissue unique would be twice as effective and cost a tiny fraction as much.

I'd imagine it works wonders in Triage Beacon or any other toggle or psuedo-pet heal/regen power since it hits each friendly within range.

The main reason that I used Panaceas for was that I was already capped on 5% rchg bonuses from 3 sets of Obliterations and 2 sets of Red Fortune so I couldnt get the 5% rchg from Doc Wounds, so I had to go Panaceas to get around that, and I /needed/ that amount of recharge to pull off my attack chain. So there are uses for the set, I guess it depends alot of how much money you want to spend, it is the best healing set in the game even in pve.

Though the proc is still trash.

I had the proc slotted in Health on one of my Brutes for a while. Other than occasionally seeing the floating green number, it didn't provide any noticeable effect. That's not surprising considering the relatively low bonuses it provides.

The way I look at it is it's worth using if I already have all the other uniques/procs slotted and want/need more recovery or regen. In practice that never seems to happen. The bonuses are low enough I usually prefer to use that slot elsewhere. That's not factoring in the cost of the proc since I have a few lying around.

So yeah, I have them available for my use and I don't bother. I'd say that pretty well sums it up, though I am considering putting one back in a build.

One point has been missed and that is that it is a proc not a regen or recovery bonus. This seldom is critical, but sometimes is very handy. The most common example is with the performance shifter proc on any character who uses nukes or end-crashing tier-9 powers. Because it is a proc, it is immune to the -recovery effect. Numina and Miracle become worthless during that time, but perf shifter keeps proccing away. Panacea is the same.

This is most important to characters with regen as a key survival tool (/regen, /WP, some /SR who don't have a self heal, etc) because when -regen effects hit they turn off your regen 100%. Numina's and Regenerative tissue? Worthless during that time. Panacea keeps proccing away.

Now the issue with it being "not enough" may be true, but if you have a very small margin of survivability during such encounters, it may be worth looking into as it is literally the only passive tool that exists to mitigate these effects.

One other area where it is handy: it wakes you up out of sleep. This is most often seen by blasters who put entropic chaos in their tier 1 and tier 2 attacks so they can use them while mezzed. But panacea in health on any character lacking sleep protection is somewhat handy. Definitely not critical, definitely not game changing, but handy.

Is it worth the price? Depends on your budget. In general the set offers the best bonuses of any heal set available (especially that juicy recharge bonus) and they work all the way down to level 1. But are the bonuses so amazing they are worth the price of the proc? Very rarely.