Help with top end soft-capped Katana/Regeneration

Its a fair point, and one I glimpsed briefly when doing the scrapper secondary comparisons. The bottom line is that once you start getting to *extreme* levels of damage and damage mitigation discrete effects start to become extremely powerful. In particular, defense and regeneration become vulnerable to instantaneous effects that do not average out fast enough, while +health and resistance qualitative stability start to have measurable quantitative benefits.

Basically, at some point you have to acknowledge that while you might be able to survive 4000 dps on paper, nothing throws 4000 dps at you as four thousand one-point attacks in a steady stream. You're going to see many hundreds of point and thousand+ point attacks land. It only takes two closely spaced thousand point attacks to kill an SR scrapper regardless of defense and regeneration, and the survivability of that build starts to depend strongly on the mean time between seeing that event and not the actual average damage mitigation of the build. Similarly, you might be able to get Dark Regeneration to the point where it can pump out a couple hundred health per second, but to need that amount of health you have to be *seeing* hundreds of points of damage per second. Can a player react quickly enough to incoming damage that is that fast, and if damage obeys a gaussian distribution curve can the player adjust to a momentary doubling in incoming damage?

Unfortunately, these things are very complex thing to approximate with closed form equations (i.e. algebraic formulas).


Incidentally, the point at which stochastic approximations begin to diverge strongly from average calculations is around the point where the player can theoretically be killed in less than four attacks in less than ten seconds. In other words, when we're dealing with attackers capable of landing attacks that do more than 30% of your total health and can land those attacks every three seconds (collectively), the mechanical differences between resistance, +health, defense, regeneration, and heals starts to become very important.

Definitely Acknowledged, and was... no, is, a founding argument against Regen because of it's lack of inherent defense outside of spending it's own health as a blockade. In fact, I can take a perfect example from current game mechanics. Standard Regen as it exists with just SO or Basic IO slotting, cannot compete with the extremity that many other secondaries are coping with to some degree. To take a very, very specific arrangement, I had my Regen in an AE Mission in a room filled with two 15-Man groups of 54 Bosses, one group being sidelined by a Tank at aggro cap, and the splash pouring onto me as a Regen whom I had just dusted out of retirement to test for this Rebirth Idea. Down to Legacy Fitness, this guy was totally I9 dated with no sets. The level of alpha-damage was impossible for him to survive. Sustaining in between was moderately possible. Perfect situation to match what you said, Arcana.

Now my question is raised on the Value of those abilities in conflict with I20, Rebirth, and Invention Sets. If we can ideally give */Regen most, if not all, of the same level of access that each of it's competing Secondaries have, how big is that impact? Katana and Broadsword have the advantage of DA/Parry and can bring their Defensive levels up to very strong (if not soft-capped) levels. Any */Regen can get 24-29% Resistance to S/L. With just a defense addition and leveraging resistance, this wasn't sufficient (still) to combat to fact we weren't adding these aspects to pre-existing Def or Res for greater benefit.

But now we have Rebirth. This one power is Regen's Golden Ticket, it's like giving Regen toggle-IH again. So now I'm back to thinking: "Is there something there?" My Regen got shelved for a very, very, extraordinarily long time because he just didn't compare to any other set with true mitigation. So now, is it possible that the exchange for HP into Survivability as a form of Mitigation plausible "again"?

P.S.: Should we not be looking at Willpower as well? Functions similarly to Regen on the back-end, Rebirth should have an equivalent impact on this secondary too?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Assuming worst case scenario, and the damage is pure energy against the DA - it gets reduced to (rough numbers) 1200-1300 damage depending on build.

If it were SM/L damage and the DA has cardiac paragon + the 3% res IO it can get reduced to 740 or so.

Neither is enough to kill the DA.

Dark Regen will be on a very fast cycle, and the DA can have all the same tricks like Rebirth/Barrier, Shadow Meld & Eye of the Magus.


So more HP is important but it needs to be compared equally to effective HP, which must include resistances.


There are some situations, like Battle Maiden's patches, where the Regen comes out on top - but I don't think that's the case in the scenario you presented.



I don't think the difference in HP is that drastic in every situation due to DA's resistances.


It does look to me that at best it would be even, but not the same.

Even in terms of some trade offs for each in different situations that might give them turns to shine.

But I see no reason to guilt oneself into playing a character when you already have another that you seem to enjoy more.


*Side note, I remember Werner had asked a while ago if Cardiac boosted the numbers for destiny. It appears that on test (I cant confirm personally) both Cardiac and Nerve now boost Barrier.

I don't think I'll have much time to do much tonight, but I'll clean up and post the spreadsheet when I can. In the mean time, I'll try to explain the basic idea. And it's a long post since I'm short on time. Hopefully that makes sense to some people.

Well, the BASIC idea is the old immortality line (the name of which Arcanaville I believe regrets to this day).

I divide incoming damage into a matrix by position and type. I divide that across types by blue side percentages given by Besserwisser a long time ago. I split apart into melee, ranged and AoE by 70%, 20% and 10%. Multiply to get the matrix. In theory you can enter every cell in the matrix individually, but I never have because I'm not sure what I'd change.

Now, your resistance and defense combine to form a matrix as well. Each cell in this matrix is a specific damage type from a specific position. Do the opposite of a mitigation calculation in each cell, a "% damage allowed" calculation based on your typed defense, positional defense and resistance. Multiply that by the percent of damage in each cell from the earlier matrix.

Now, sum up the second matrix, and you have an overall percent of damage allowed. That's one fundamental number, basically 100% - mitigation, though "mitigation" here is not the forum consensus definition. It's not a problem, though, as it just means my numbers will be twice as high as if I calculated using the forum consensus. Since I give no scale for the number, and use them only for comparison with other similarly-calculated numbers, this isn't an issue.

Now you need to look at your average damage recovery per second. No matrix here, since you recover from all types of damage equally. Just time average your healing and regeneration.

Divide this total by the damage allowed, and you get survivability. And survivability here is basically the amount of enemy damage output per second that you can survive. More precisely, it's the amount of enemy damage output (split according to that first matrix) that would produce a random walk of your hit points instead of an upward or downward trend.

What it DOESN'T recognize is that a random walk that takes you to zero hit points WILL KILL YOU. That's a big limitation when you're talking about these survivability levels, which on paper are enough to survive crowds of AVs pounding on you.

Hit points, for instance. The more hit points you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you in any reasonable time frame. Resistance. The more resistance you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you. Ability to match healing to the spikes of damage. The better you can do this, the less likely the random walk will kill you. And so on.

It also ignores other things, like debuffs. That's kind of accounted for by being able to plug in a to-hit number, though. It won't give you one number, but you can get an idea how tough you are when things get nasty.

So, tons of problems. The way around them is to write a program that simulates the entire game. That's beyond my interest, and possibly beyond my capability. Certainly beyond my capability in the time I'd be willing to devote to such a project.

Or I could just say that I already HAVE such a simulator. The devs have been kind enough to provide it. I can take my build, build it, and go test it out in their simulator against an amazingly good recreation of the actual game. Why, I'd almost think I was playing the game when I was using their simulator. Unfortunatly, it only does the calculations in real time, so it takes a very long time fiddling with their simulator to get any good numbers out of it. Ah, well. At least they made it fun to use.

Hmmm, it doesn't explain how I account for Barrier or for the defense and resistance buffs. I basically create a matrix for each, and weight them by the average time each is up. I don't calculate survivability for each, because let's say that once per minute, you had a five second power that gave you 100% resistance. Hopefully it's obvious that wouldn't overall give you infinite survivability, even if it did for those five seconds.

I bring Regens to Hami raids regularly. I've never figured out why it works this way, but Greens can't debuff a Regen's heals, either Recon or DP. (They don't debuff FA's Healing Flames, either.) They do debuff Regen, but it's very small compared to a Regen's normal rates, let alone what we're talking about here, and only seems to happen infrequently.

Interestingly, all the survival-oriented Destiny powers, with their step decay from insane down to modest levels, are just about custom designed to give us fits because of the stochastic model things Arcanaville was talking about. Popping Barrier at just the right time to saturate the living daylights out of your defense and resists is potentially far more effective at keeping us alive than averaging its benefit (and/or just popping it as soon as it recharges) suggests. I'm sure the same is true of Rebirth, though its optimal trigger time will be different.

It's all quite fascinating stuff.

As another data point along those lines, spikes of damage aren't the only problem - my Katana/Dark's resistance and at least decent hit points tend to keep him from getting "one shotted". Waves of damage are also a problem. I can be cruising along fine without even touching my heal, and then there will just be a big, reasonably-long-lived wave of damage. Get pounded down, hit my heal, and get pounded down again faster than it recharges. That which can't kill me in fifteen seconds can't kill me, but there are things out there that can kill me in fifteen seconds, leaving me popping inspirations. And that seems to be common for me in general across a number of toons. I'm fine for a long time, and then I'm not just popping a small green, say, I'm chugging 1/4 of my inspiration tray to stay alive. And then I'm fine for a long time again.

The Regeneration secondary seems made for these waves of damage. During those forever times when everything is going OK, you aren't even touching your heals. Then when one of those massive waves of damage hits, you're sitting on a huge list of powers that will all help keep you in the game and ride it out. On a Regen, you just about never find yourself just clicking when things recharge, over and over, getting the highest average level of mitigation and damage recovery. You're matching your mitigation and damage recovery up to the spikes and waves. Played well, that makes Regen much stronger than measures of average performance over time suggest.

Now, with Barrier on the incarnate trials, I don't pop it the moment it's recharged, but I don't reserve it for when I'm in trouble either. I just look at my defense, figure it's similarly buffed to the people around me, and I buff it when it I think the group could use a buff. In solo play, it would probably be best to hold it in reserve, as having both Barrier and Dark Regeneration available should get me through one decent wave of damage. Then with any luck, Barrier will be recharged by the time the next hits.

Yes, I suppose in the same way that I underweight hit points, I underweight resistance. Both are functionally equivalent in many ways. So my Katana/Dark functionally has more hit points most of the time. And then I could argue that I also underweight defense in a different way, which is in its ability to prevent debuffs and other secondary effects that challenge your survivability. And I underweight regeneration, because it helps keep your hit points topped up, which gives you more hit points when you need them, so is functionally kind of like hit points. And I underweight healing, because the ability to heal allows you to respond to spikes of damage in ways that average regeneration does not.

So if I'm underweighting all of the important factors, perhaps I should stop worrying about all the underweighting going on. I'm sure they're not all entirely in balance, but I've never thought of a good way to account for all the issues. I just keep them in mind when looking at things. They're all "yes but".

Ooh! Cool! That'll help my Katana/Dark even more since I'm running Cardiac. I'll need to recalculate.

No kidding.

I have an ollllld pre-I1 kat/regen concept toon that just might have to come out of a five year retirement.


But man, these are some BUSY builds..... Not sure I'd be up for that much timin' and clickin'.

Sometime a while ago, Issue 13ish, primary and secondary self heals like reconstruction and healing flames were made unresistable. Those heals used to be resistable, which provided a mechanism for the game to reduce the strength of those heals (i.e. MoG). Hamidon mitos apply heal resistance to the players which is how they make heals reduce in strength.

You should notice the regen debuff though, even on a regen. If I remember correctly, it should be a -300% regen debuff for 15 seconds.

I love it.

-50% damage for 30s is an amazing thing.

Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward. I don't remember how I researched it initially, but I couldn't figure it out at the time. Maybe I couldn't find the unresistable flag for some reason.

I certainly only notice my Regen rate go red on non-regen characters. Maybe I am not noticing it happen unless it drives me to zero. Even on characters that happens with, it doesn't seem to affect me often. It seems like something they may only do in melee range, or something. I don't think I've ever noticed it on my FA Brute, though, and because of the strength of HF, I haven't intentionally accumulated any +regen bonuses on her.

That's certainly my plan. I haven't included that in the survivability calculations because I'm not sure how we'd say what the average enemy resistance to the debuff would be. I'd probably apply AV resistance to it, and it wouldn't have much effect on my numbers. But it can have more effect in the game as a whole.

You won't be doing much of that, don't worry. You have solid defense, passable hit points outside of Dull Pain, passable resistance for a Regen, and some pretty decent passive regeneration. Most of the time you'll be cruising along, barely touching your clicks, even against content that most people would describe as nasty. It'll only become an insane clickfest if, say, you find yourself suddenly soloing something really nasty that won't die fast. But doing the dance of the Regen clicks is probably more fun than a visit to the hospital in that situation.

As we used to say back in the days of perma-elude: better zero endurance than zero health.

... It'll take time to back peddle through your Excel Short-Hand there. Happen to have a Cliff Notes? XD

I do have a new Claws/Regen build I'll attempt to throw in there as well to see if I can figure that sheet out.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

I suppose the best explanation is the first part of the earlier post where I try to explain the basic idea. In terms of the flow in the spreadsheet, I should probably highlight the inputs in some way, but they're the numbers to the top and left of the various matrices, and then random bits and pieces here and there. You enter enemy to hit at the very top of the thing (B1). The matrix above the freeze line feeds all the matrices below it.

Oh, and there's a little bit on tab 2 to plug in some recharge numbers for the regen builds to figure out how much down time you have without Shadow Meld or Moment of Glory. I don't think I have it quite right, as doesn't Moment of Glory take effect very early in the activation time? How early? Is Shadow Meld the same way? That could significantly improve the numbers on these builds.

I know it's not user friendly. It grew over time. It was never something I sat down and designed for use, and now I'm so used to it that I have no motivation to make it easier.

I swear that at work, my code is tight and elegant, my GUI is clean and beautiful, and the users have all the information they need at their fingertips, understood at a glance. I swear that my professional output looks nothing like this.

I'm sure once I figure out where everything is pointing to and what all the numbers mean I can transpire it into something like...

where's the link...

Here

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again.

Just random, for a while after they were made unresistable, Hamidon could still debuff them. Then they were quietly fixed.

All the dull pain type powers are unresistable, though outside the scrapper realm.