The Last Two Buffs Regen Needs

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SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
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More Than a Game
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Oh, hell yes. Both Regeneration: Revive and Willpower: Resurgence are just next to useless without untouchable. My characters die within a second of using either.

Resurgence is particularly bad because Willpower is mostly toggles.

I'm ignorant of what your position on it is and your opinions are always welcome, so please elaborate if you will.

I don't think ultra-high regeneration resistance makes sense for the Regeneration set. First because I think the basic argument for it isn't really strong, and second because I think it won't even do what the proponents of the resistance think it will.

First, there is the issue of the argument. The argument tends to revolve around two assertions:

1. Regen is the singular critical component of Regeneration's mitigation.

2. SR's DDR demonstrates that you're supposed to be able to retain such critical components of your mitigation without being significantly debuffed.

Both assertions are false. First of all, regen is not the singular critical component of Regeneration's mitigation. About one third of it comes from healing - reconstruction and the heal within Dull Pain - and only a bit more than a third comes from regeneration from all sources. The rest, a little less than a third, comes from +health and its resistances.

Second, SR's DDR keeps getting held up as "proof" of some kind or precedent of some kind that its ok to basically make something almost immune to debuffing if the thing "relies" on that debuffing. That's utterly false: if I thought that was the reason for the devs adding DDR to SR *I* would have objected to it and asked them to remove it.

The problem with SR is almost unique, especially when DDR was added. SR's damage mitigation is almost completely focused on defense, unlike almost any other set. And if that defense is debuffed not only does it take more damage, it also takes more debuffs, becaue avoidance is its only defense to debuffs (pre DDR). So SR was almost uniquely vulnerable to cascade failure. A *single* debuff landing on SR could kill it, because that single debuff could debuff defense enough to make it so much more likely for other debuffs to land that its entire defensive wrapper could disappear rapidly. For this cascade failure situation to occur, three things must be true:

1. You rely on something almost exclusively for protection.

2. Debuffs have a disproportionate effect on reducing its effectiveness.

3. Those debuffs are both common and increase the ability for future debuffs to land.

Cascade failure was almost exclusive the domain of SR scrappers when DDR was first added, and it was due to the fact that unlike damage resistance which resists its own debuffs, defense avoids debuffs and that avoidance can be debuffed simultaneously with its damage avoidance. DDR reduces, or nearly eliminates cascade failure.

Now, doing so could also eliminate *any* ability for damage to land, but that's also not a problem with SR. SR is still vulnerable to tohit buffs which cannot be resisted (by the target) or avoided. They are, in effect, autohitting unresistable defense debuffs. SR is also vulnerable to non-positionally typed attacks, non-positional psi in particular. So eliminating cascade failure doesn't eliminate all ways to make SR vulnerable: non-positional psi would still hit, tohit buffs would still negate defense, and autohitting damage would still land (i.e. caltrops).

Is *any* of this applicable to Regen? Not really. First, Regen doesn't rely exclusively on regeneration, so even when all of it is debuffed away Regen still has resistances, +health, and healing. Second, regeneration (the mechanic) isn't vulnerable to cascade failure. However, vulnerable Regen is to regeneration debuffs, it doesn't get *more vulnerable* when regeneration debuffs land. Regeneration debuffs also have the exact opposite mechanical effect as defense debuffs. In the same way that defense stacks in an accelerating manner, with defensive buffs being incrementally stronger as they are stacked on more defense, defense debuffs proportionately affect things with high defense more than things with low defense. A 5% defense debuff means almost nothing to someone with no defense, but to someone with 40% defense it means a 50% increase in incoming damage. With regeneration the opposite is true. -100% regen is meaningful to someone with low regeneration, but almost meaningless to someone with 1000% regen. Higher regen dilutes debuffs, while higher defense magnifies defense debuffs.

Basically, using the SR argument is a losing proposition for Regen. Even mentioning it is actually a better argument against having debuff resistance as it is in favor. I can't even imagine why you'd want to include SR in any discussion of getting debuffs: it would be better to pretend SR didn't exist in any such discussion.


Tossing the SR argument aside, Regen might need regeneration debuffs for its own unique reasons, and here the argument is potentially far better. In the past, regeneration debuffs didn't even exist, but as they have been added to the game they have been added at sometimes extremely high levels. At those levels Regeneration's intrinsic ability to dilute them is partially or totally negated. Personally, I'm not fond of such super-high debuffs but that's a separate argument (and I address it below). The question is whether Regen deserves debuff protection because those levels of regeneration debuff are excessive.

Here we get into a question of what sort of threats exist for different sets and to what degree those threads should be common or uncommon. Psionic damage exists for many resistance sets that lack psionic protection. Tohit buffs exist for defensive sets. The question is are regeneration debuffs so common and so strong that they stand out as being a materially higher threat than psionic damage and tohit buffs and things of that ilk? So far, I haven't seen an argument that addresses that point, except in the end game which I'm going to address separately. And personally, in the conventional game, I don't think you can make a case that it is.


Setting all that aside, there's the question of whether its even a victory to convince the devs to add ultrahigh regeneration debuffs. And the answer is, I don't think so. You have to ask why regen debuffs exist in the first place? They didn't exist when the game was launched, they were added later. One of the questions I asked Statesman when he was here was "why are there huge amounts of defense debuffs in the game but no regen debuffs" and he said they were specifically working on adding them to the game. They released in the very next issue. And the reason was specifically because debuffs are intended to hurt, and they are intended to hurt different things in different ways. The fact that regeneration was practically impossible to debuff meant the only things that could kill a Regen were things with ultrahigh burst damage, and those things can kill everybody. Having no weaknesses at all was a problem for Regen which regeneration debuffs were intended to address.

So what happens when you add 95% regen debuff resistance to Regen and basically take that away? You prompt the powers team to add more and more regeneration debuffs to compensate. Its inevitable: if regeneration becomes highly to regeneration debuffs, you have to add more of them. That's what they are there for: to hurt Regen. If they can't, they'll get cranked upward until they can. Or more likely, they will become more common rather than more powerful, so they can stack. That's somewhat of a pyrrhic victory, and in the meantime everyone else will just have to deal with being constantly bombarded with regen debuffs, just as they are now constantly bombarded with defense debuffs as a legacy of the last time a game mechanical arms race took place (and is still ongoing).


For the most part, I think Regen is fine in the conventional game, and has been for quite a while. But I'm not saying I think there's no room for improvement, especially in the end game. There's no question that in the end game Regeneration is at a disadvantage. It normally holds an advantage in having its protections split up between multiple things that require different debuffs, and some that can't aren't debuffed much at all. The end game stuff is getting super-saturated with debuffs, and the problem with regen is that it can be simultaneously hit with regeneration debuffs and recharge debuffs and reisstance debuffs and defense debuffs and the combination of all of them can cause Regen to catastrophically fail. But is there a way to address that without overbuffing Regen in the conventional game from level 1 to 50? I think there is.

The one thing that isn't debuffed heavily in the end game most of the time is heal strength. Recharge is, and that can neutralize a heal all by itself, but heal strength is less commonly debuffed and doesn't need to be *because* recharge can be. We can exploit that to provide Regeneration with some end game cover that won't cause an arms race. The secret is to convert some of Regen's regeneration into a Heal Over Time.

Suppose we take Integration, say, and we take the +100% regen that is enhanceable and turn it into a heal over time. That 100% regen would equate to 0.42% health per second. Integration ticks every 0.5 seconds, so what if we converted that buff into a 0.21% heal.

That would give you the same amount of health over time, and ticking every half second you wouldn't even notice it as a heal really: it would look an awful lot like regeneration. Heal enhancements would buff it just as much as they would have regeneration. You'd get the same amount of heal back. But it would be completely immune from regeneration debuffs. What's more, it would also be completely immune from recharge debuffs: you can't debuff the tick interval of a toggle.

In effect, *some* of regen's regeneration would be immune from debuffing (normally: heal strength debuffs would work on it in theory), and the rest would still be vulnerable. This is a lot better than giving huge amounts of regen debuff resistance because no matter how much you ask for, the devs can simply add more debuff strength. Its not like they are unwilling: they are already fine with adding -1000% regen debuff. The thing is, though, that regen debuffs would still work against Regeneration, so we haven't nullified them: they would work, but only to a limit. Some percentage of Regen's regeneration could be lost to debuffs, but not all of it. That makes a lot more sense because this means regen is still vulnerable to debuffs while leveling, but isn't overly vulnerable to debuffs in the end game.

I'd probably do something similar to Instant Healing: some stays regen, some goes heal over time. I'd probably skew the ratio in favor of HoT, just because of the point to Instant Healing which is to provide something close to but not exactly tier 9 class protection.


It should sound vaguely familiar, this separating regeneration into a debuffable part and a not debuffable part. Its the same concept that underlies Elusivity, just adapted for Regeneration. I'm not the only one that has suggested it, although I've thought about it since long before Time Manipulation.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

That's fixable. Just make the HoT a Cur instead of an Abs. As a 0.0021 Cur, I believe it would always be 0.21% of total health, no matter how much max health was buffed (or debuffed).

Aww, thanks for the recognition. I guess people do read my posts...


...sometimes

Then it would be too weak to help Regen when debuffed.

Why isn't that how Reconstruction is then? For Brutes and their high HP cap, Reconstruction's effectiveness drops dramatically when a Brute nears the HP cap.

Have the developers given a reason?

Actually this even furthers the question, why wasn't it made based off current HP in the first place?

Almost certainly because they wanted the heals to have fixed benefit in absolute points of heal, and not be scaled upward with +health, because then that would mean all +health powers would have to be balanced around whether that buff to heals would be appropriate.

Keep in mind we players view heals as percentage heals, because that's the way the math comes out the simplest, to be honest almost certainly because that's how I originally did it. But that view of judging the effectiveness of heals is not absolute, and almost certainly not the way heals were viewed when the game was designed. When it was designed, heals were seen in terms of a 500 point heal has a certain benefit, absolutely.

In fact, defender ally heals used to be Cur if I remember correctly, and used to heal a percentage of the target's health, and were switched to Abs after launch to make them absolute. The devs clearly originally viewed heals in terms of points healed, and not percentage of health healed, as being the "proper" frame of reference.

Right but I still don't understand why. The closest thing to a Regeneration is World of Warcraft's Blood Death Knight (Which I played extensively). Its a Tank class that is basically built on self heals and regeneration in a sense. Aside from the powers that boost "resistance" it has two main healing attacks:

Rune Tap -- Which heals 10% of your max hp

Death Strike -- (This has been modified a bit so I may be a bit off) but it heals for 10% of your hitpoints *OR* 30% of the total damage taken in the last 10 seconds, whichever is greater.

The problem I have here, and you said it yourself, is that 1/3 of Regeneration's defenses comes from self heals. No other defensive set's effectiveness goes down as hitpoints increase. Yes you get more survivability in a sense but Resistance (especially resistance) scales exponentially with hitpoints (In how I view it) and so does Defense.

Ultimately, what I am asking is why they viewed it that way? I wonder if it was an oversight because originally Regeneration was 100% Based on Regen and Total HP. No one took Reconstruction when IH was a toggle that was fully enhanceable.

I don't take it right now. If you want a interesting look at the set, skip all of the click powers in the set (except Dull Pain). It's workable for soloing but really rough in a variety of situations.

I don't really want the set to be buffed; I just want to play it as a +Regeneration set. Reducing IH by 75% is fine with me if it were a toggle again.

I doubt that happens again. Its a click set now the days of pure +regeneration are gone. Mainly, one of the problems is either you are dead or unkillable.

As a personal opinion, (and I have problems with this with other things too) I think its fairly boring. If all you have to do is stand there with no interaction on the user's part that will get boring fast.

Imo, all defensive sets should have clicks and cooldowns to be used strategically and at times.

I even have a bit of a problem with how Mastermind pets function. They should be made a lot more survivable (All of them) but on the flip side they should be changed from "Fancy DOTs with unique graphics" to partial DOTs with abilities the user can directly interact with to attack with. IE, imagine if a pet had a stun, the pet would never use it on its own unless the user clicked the power.

In essence, this could give the Mastermind more DPS similar to how someone that works an attack chain can have high DPS.

The Click-Heal set doesn't really change this. You have a survival line... the difference between a bit of extra +Regen and Recon is academic.


I understand your opinion but I don't find it compelling. WP and SR are both very much set-and-forget; I don't see an intrinsic reason for Regeneration to be fiddly. Historically it wasn't.

Aside from that I find all of the click powers in my Primary and Pools keep me plenty busy. Note that I'm not an advocate of Active Play, though.

Hmm. You should make a Zombie/Dark MM. I think you'll find that using the Secondary set well is almost an exact counterpart for your vision of Pet powers. I could be off base there though.

I do know that proper pet positioning is a dark art and possibly the most fiddly thing in the game right now. I didn't originally believe that MM play was prone to optimization. A friend showed me that I was very wrong.

Well I already have a Zombie / Dark actually. Going into more details of pet powers, I also referred to DPS too not just control attacks. IE, you could actually click pet powers at the right time to do more DPS.

WP and SR are both broken IMO and are outliers. When you have two sets, one that is completely fire and forget and the other that relies on user interaction and clicks, the set relying on clicks should outperform a set that is fire and forget. Thus, IMO Regen should be buffed even more to where in the hands of someone really good it will outperform the other sets or the other sets have powers added they have to click at the proper times too.

Numerically the sets might be balanced with one other but when one set requires you to play the keyboard like a piano vs the other set you can play blindfolded and just hit attack keys thats not balance.

Overall, IMO I think all defensive sets should be proactive. It should require you to use powers at the correct time and never fire and forget. I think this is part of the reason StJ will be such a popular set (And why DB is also pretty popular) is because rather then just hitting attack keys you get bonuses based on timing things correctly together.

For you maybe. I have crap reflexes and for me that's not only what I want, it's what I need. I have one regen and will never make another until they pull the clicks out of it. /WP for me going forward every time. I'm glad both exist because it means both of us can play how we want.

I'd rather have a mix. Some with some without.

[uqote]I even have a bit of a problem with how Mastermind pets function. They should be made a lot more survivable (All of them) but on the flip side they should be changed from "Fancy DOTs with unique graphics" to partial DOTs with abilities the user can directly interact with to attack with. IE, imagine if a pet had a stun, the pet would never use it on its own unless the user clicked the power.[/quote]Again, I'd rather be the other way round. I had to stop playing RTS games because of this tendency in the industry to expect players to micromanage every power of dozens of troops in multiple locations.

Personally, I'd like the training powers to become toggles rather than clicks and to hit the summon at the moment of summoning. then make the T1 and T2 pets weaker with half the cooldown on the resummon and the T3 pet stronger. Be that archetypal villain who tries to bury your enemies in a mountain of dead minions with one dangerous henchman.

but we're off on a tangent. Anyway, I'm glad there are options and I hope they remain with different sets having different feel and playstyles.

Regen *vastly* outperforms SR until you start stacking the tons of power pool defenses and invention bonuses that exist on top. If you don't, particularly when leveling, anyone who says SR outperforms Regen is literally insane.


I would be more sympathetic to this line of thought if it wasn't the latest in a long line of arguments that have been put forth to argue that Regen has *always* been somehow disadvantaged. When SR had non-existent defenses and Dark Armor didn't stack, Regen was somehow the disadvantaged scrapper set. When you consider that SR has actually been nerfed more times than Regen Regen still is the unjustified target of the devs balancing. And now apparently the fact it has to click more often when operating at maximum efficiency is a priori evidence that its underpowered, and things like having far more endurance than most other sets is not mentioned as a material factor.

It particularly galls me because in fact that Regen *isn't* the set that spends the most time rooted in defensive clicks, which makes that argument an heir to the throne of those kinds of arguments. The privilege of being tied up in clicks the most goes to a virtual tie between Fiery Aura and Dark Armor. And Fiery Aura is *supposed* to be an offensive set. FA has a much more solid complaint about rooted time than Regen does.

I have some compassion over the fact that Willpower in many ways trumps Regen itself in healing, and the fact that the debuff-happy endgame has a significantly harsher effect on Regen than many other melee sets. Both of those are problematic and both I tried to speak against, particularly Willpower. But as soon as someone tells me that the fact that Regen has to click more often hurts it from level 1 to level 50 I'll be honest they lost me. I shot that argument down the moment it first reared its head about year or so ago, and the fact it hasn't actually realized its dead yet and still shambles around does the people looking for Regen attention no favors.

To be honest I refer to the end game and with IO's Arcana. Granted I come from games like Everquest where the end game was what mattered. I'm not saying that the leveling up game doesn't matter, but I tend to focus on the max rather then the inbetween.

Nothing wrong with that. But this game isn't balanced for the top at the expense of everything before. At least, it hasn't been in the past, and that goes against the expressed intent of the devs. If they want to explicitly state their priority switch to balancing for the end game at the expense of the leveling game, then that would be a different situation.

But then Regen would have to stand in line. A whole bunch of things from Stalkers to Masterminds to Blasters as entire archetypes would have a greater claim for attention before the Regeneration set itself did. There's currently a wild west presumption in the end game where everyone should be able to participate, but not everyone will achieve the exact same performance levels under the highest levels of progress. That's how it always tends to be with top level performance and min/maxing: usually we presume min/maxers can take care of themselves, and its the average players playing conventional builds leveling in the core game we have to worry about.