Claws/Regen, advice?

I know, i know... Trust me i know what you all thought when you read that.

I'm a returning player and about 4 years ago, when i last played CoH, my main was a claws/invuln scrapper. I got him to about 40 and he was great to play but i always had the feeling I should have taken /regen as /invuln was a bit... boring to my taste. I always envied that seat of your pants style of play that seemingly comes with /regen.

So i'm back and although my main now is a Fire/Rad controller (that i play like a scrapper) i rolled up a claws/regen to recapture that glory and spent a delightful few hours hacking people to bits in the Hollows last night. I died alot, mostly because i took on groups of oranges and reds, and reached lvl 8 when i realized i'm really unfamiliar with regen as a powerset and was hoping for some advice from you veterans on here as to how to play a regen scrapper, what powers are good in the set and maybe some slotting advice... basically your overall feelings about it. I can't find any recent guides about regen so im not entirely sure if any of the more recent issues have affected how the powerset works.

I should mention that i'm set on this character so if your thoughts include something along the lines of "you SHOULD have rolled a ___ " thanks for the advice but I don't care, save yourself the keystrokes.

And yes, when i was much younger and telephones were things that were connected by a cord to a wall, i collected and read Wolverine/X-Men comics and i thought they were awesome.

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Here's my standard Regen boilerplate, quickly modified for I19:

“There are definitely other approaches, but here's what I'd consider a basic plan for the Regeneration secondary using SOs or common IOs:

• Fast Healing at 1, 3 heals
• Reconstruction nice and early, 3 heals, 3 recharges
• Dull Pain when or shortly after when available, as there is a lot to squeeze in at that level, 3 heals, 3 recharges
• Integration at 16, 3 heals, possibly 1 endurance reducer
• Resilience when and if you can work it in, 1 resist
• Instant Healing when or shortly after when available, 1-3 recharges, no heals unless you're swimming in slots
• Skip Revive
• Moment of Glory when or shortly after when available, 3 recharges
• Hasten when convenient, 3 recharges
• Tough when convenient, 3 resists, 1 endurance reducer
• Slot Health when convenient, 3 heals
• Quick Recovery when the default slot in Stamina isn't enough. 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary
• Slot Stamina only after slotting Quick Recovery. 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary

If it were me, I'd also try to get some basic defense, but it will use up even more power and pool choices. Combat Jumping or Hover, but don't worry about slotting for defense. Weave with 3 defense. Maneuvers with 3 defense. The Steadfast Protection unique in Resilience or Tough. With even-level SOs, that will give you 14.3% defense to all. Not great, but not bad."

As for how to play one, that's mostly a matter of experience, knowing which of your clicks to use when. Here are my takes on it.

Using Dull Pain reactively is mathematically superior to using it proactively as long as you have the reaction time to hit it before you're dead or close to dead. Hit it when you're below half, but before you're blinking red if you can. Learn where hitting it will JUST fill you to full, and hit it there. Don't use Dull Pain if you think Reconstruction can get you through the fight. But if you don't think Reconstruction can get you through the fight, Dull Pain will bost Reconstruction along with everything else, so it's better to go ahead and hit Dull Pain.

Instant Healing is used proactively. Click it as you're diving into a tough fight. If you're already dying, Instant Healing won't likely save you. But if you click on another power that will save you, and think you'll still be going down quickly, Instant Healing may be a good second power to hit right after the first.

This one may be controversial, but use Moment of Glory reactively. Yes, yes, it's a great alpha strike absorber, so people want to hit it before diving into a tough spawn. But if you can resist the urge, and hit it fast enough as you start taking damage, you'll likely heal back to full during its duration, and you'll get a few more seconds of invulnerability than you would have otherwise had.

As you might tell, one of the main skills of Regeneration is learning to anticipate exactly how much damage you're going to be taking and how fast during a fight. That comes with experience and careful monitoring of your hit point bar. This isn't a Secondary where you ignore your hit point bar.

But you also need to learn to not overreact to the movements of your hit point bar. Your hit points on a Regen are very pliable, and that green line will be moving back and forth, back and forth. It's not you dying. It's just you breathing. Breath in. Breath out.

You're going to die a lot as your learn your secondary. Regeneration is a school of hard knocks. But it can be VERY rewarding when you get it right. And even the deaths can be glorious.

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"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks

Werner, above and beyond. Thank you. This was exactly what I was looking for.

The advice to take additional defense is one i'm certainly going to follow. I grab Combat jumping for pretty much any character and i'll follow with boxing at 22 and tough at 30 since i don't really want to delay getting cool killing powers like focus and eviscerate. You know, the more i play regen, the more i feel as if I should have taken it back in the day. I was always the kind of scrapper that would pick out the biggest enemy, jump right in his face and shove the claws in his gut. Invuln, while a good powerset, just wasn't a logical fit.

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"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks

Couple notes on your particular combo here.

Shockwave is potentially very bad for Invuln, because it will send things flying out of Invincibility's range and strip away some of your defense (Willpower has a similar problem)

Shockwave is very good for Regen for the saem reason. Anything that is flying across the room is not attacking you, buying you several seconds to heal.

Spin is an awesome power, and is in fact one of the better AoE powers available to scrappers (not quite the best, but it's very good)

If and when you dive into IOs I suggest slotting for recharge first, and then defense. Defense may seem useless to a regen at first, until you really think about it and realize that every hit that doesn't land is a hit you don't need to heal back, which makes your ability to heal that much more valuable. You have a couple choices on defense: positional or typed. I prefer smashing and lethal typed, but a lot of people like melee. Neither way is right or wrong, just personal preference.

Werner hit the basics of regen, I just figured I'd throw you some pointers about Claws/Regen specifically, as I've been playing one for over 5 years now with no significant breaks.

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Claws/regen was the first non-support character I had that clicked for me. It was the most fun 1-40ish I had on a character. It was fun as hell to go into Crey's at 30 and play "I wonder what can kill me?" Somewhere in the 30s I did something like 5 levels of not using clicks to see how much I died while doing missions. I died zero times. 40-50 has me begging for IOs to get some defense in there. The voodoo doll beta tester feel just got too old for my taste. When you are on top of your game playing the build it can be amazing. When you are off of your game, well....

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