Help save this BS/Regen

I'm looking to update this character to I20... but frankly I have no idea where to start. I have hundreds of hours of playtime on him but he still faceplants more than any other melee character I have. Much of that is a fundamental playstyle mismatch between Regen and me, I'm suspecting... still, he was my first 50 blueside so I'd rather see him a Can Opener of Doom than at long last deleted (I've stopped at the 'type character name' phase four times with him).

Alpha boost is tier 1 spiritual. Unlike most of my characters I have no 'concept' powers that I can't do without here, including having a travel power - ninja run actually suits him better, so tinker away.

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The easiest way to make any character feel tough is to add defense. Weave and Combat jumping are the most efficient toggles to start with. After that, a 3% defense Steadfast Protection is fairly cheap. Where you go after that depends on your goals.

I have not seen any high defense Regeneration builds that didn't use MoG and Shadow Meld. You give up too much recharge bonus, effectively gimping your DPS, if you try to use IOs for all of your defense. Most Regeneration builds go for very high recharge from set bonuses and rely on cycling between Moment of Glory and Shadow Meld for defense. The Spiritual Alpha makes Regeneration and those types of builds even better.

Your biggest problem: You have 0% defense other than Parry. That means you are taking and trying to heal back 50% of the damage the game is throwing at you. And when you get your defense debuffed by machine gun fire, that goes up to 95% in a hurry.

Your complete lack of defense is probably the biggest contributor to your faceplanting problem. It is exceptionally difficult for a Regen to stay on it's feet when you are getting hit with everything being thrown at you.

I actually had the same problem. My oldest toon (although not my main) is a BS/regen, and I hated him for a long time until recently. Like others have said, it's all in the defense.

I picked up weave and maneuvers, got the steadfast unique, and suddenly my parry puts me at about 38% to lethal and melee. I plan on getting a couple IO sets (currently just an SO build), which will get me to the cap, at least on melee (lethal will be about 43%).

It has definitely made a HUGE difference. Recently I did an ITF with a bunch of other melee toons and some squishies. At the comp fight, I'm not sure what happened exactly, but something went wrong and literally the entire team wiped....except me. Tanks, brutes...all dead. With the comp at like 5% HP, I was the only one left standing. With the 2 AV's and all the robots on me. IH and a couple lucks got me through it, and I finished off the comp by myself.

There is absolutely zero chance that I could have done that without the extra new defense I recently added. It made my scrapper playable again. So like others have said, adding defense should be your main priority.

Two schools of thought on BS/Regen survival: defense and recharge. The school of defense says get as much defense (S/L for certain, E/N after that) as you can. The school of recharge says that with enough recharge, you don't have to worry so much about defense.

Almost everyone builds for defense. It's easy, it's common, and it works for every AT out there. It's a lower-risk strategy, but it'll cost you on a Regen, because you don't have much defense to work with and you'll lose out on recharge that helps everything your powerset wants to do. Parry can substitute to some degree, but non-lethal and non-melee go through you like a bad burrito.

I say build for recharge. Not only will your attacks come up faster, giving you a better attack chain and mitigation-through-death, but your click heals and defenses will come up faster too. Go for perma-Hasten and that will give you perma-Dull Pain and a crazy quick-recharging Reconstruction.

On top of that, you get MoG and you can get this down to 50 seconds or less of downtime. That allows you to run in and eat an alpha strike, plus 1-5 rounds of attacks after that. You take NO damage while that's running. If you're willing to put in the effort, take a trip redside so you can get Shadow Meld from the Soul Mastery pool. Shadow Meld isn't MoG, but it is 30%+ defense to everything (including Psi) when slotted and it'll come up much faster than MoG (less than 20 seconds downtime). Stack a Parry on that and you can softcap Lethal & Melee - all without a "defense" build.

You won't have that perfect MoG defense against every incoming attack. You won't have Shadow Meld's defense against every incoming attack. However, you'll be able to face the worst incoming damage from any spawn and take somewhere between nothing and insignificant damage while you and your team whittle down their numbers to something that your regeneration and click heals can handle easily.

This isn't a "go away and make a sandwich" sort of character, but you made a Regen and that means you get a more active style of play. You'll die sometimes. You'll fall into scrapperlock and click Headsplitter when you should've clicked Dull Pain and you'll howl in futility while the attack slowly animates and your enemies put you down. That's okay - part of the charm of the powersets, really - but it isn't for everyone.

Finally, recharge isn't cheap, but neither is defense. If you're committing to a top level build, there are going to be costs. If you're not ready to commit like that, then you're in a rough spot with a BS/Reg. I would recommend a steady diet of purple insps while you decide what to do. It's what my BS/Reg is doing while I buy his recharge build.

Hmm. Well, I can certain throw a few billion at the poor guy and get that defense up. I know it will help I just don't know if it's worth the investment. Since it starts with no defense like any resist set wouldn't said resist sets with a heal be more effective in the long run? What can a bs/regen with high defense do that a bs/fire, /dark, or /elec can't? (Let alone a bs/wp or /inv with aid self).

But those concerns are ultimately unrelated to the thread. Defense will indeed help out the bs/regen. Anyone have a build example? I've build enough high smash/lethal defense builds to know kinetic combats, weave, steadfast, maneuvers, and combat jump backwards and forwards but haven't played with the other defense types or untyped defense builds enough to know where to start.

Here's a build for my Kat/regen.
Not quite cought up on his alpha, and baring any changes in i20, this is probably what he'll be running around with.

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Now peeps just need to start selling those Glads +def at a cheaper price

Interesting build. I like the six slot integration as a place to dump the numina and get some ranged defense. Very pricey, but undeniably effective. Even just adding a few makos for ranged defense might help my woes a little, as would going redside to grab shadowmeld (Ghost Widow must feel utterly jilted by now by all the scrappers who promise to serve her, learn her tricks, and then scamper back to Paragon).

Food for thought. He lives another day.