One Dark Armor change

Why are you bringing up softcapping?

How about you go back and look at the thread linked far earlier, Arcanaville's scrapper secondary comparison, where it shows that on SOs, Dark Armor is far superior to other sets. Before accounting for OG or CoF.

Again, if you want to be taken seriously, do some math yourself.

Meh, I was refering to JayboH, and you snuck in front of my QR.

Actually I think I've teamed with each of your Dark armor characters but the second tank at some point.

That's a good point and I completely agree. I don't think the recharge would need to be affected at all - the idea is that the heal/end cost/recharge would be in line with reconstruction/healing flames except that it requires a tohit check, which would be the balancing factor. No doubt many players can get away with underslotting for acc since one hit = massive heal and heavily slot for endurance cost. With full end cost slotting, it STILL hits your blue bar hard.

For those arguing about CoF, the same argument could be made - you can easily get around the accuracy and end problems with slotting.

Ah, there's the rub. CoF's end cost and OG's ability to possibly (stressing that word here) requiring additional use of Dark Regen has to be considered, since an empty end bar = survivability problems.

You would only use OG if it prevents more damage than it creates, therefore there is no additional use of Dark Regen.

I suppose that's the rule for everything in the game, honestly. Perhaps we should take a typical scenario for examination, where one would likely use Dark Regen after eating an alpha strike from the majority of PVE. We need to grant time for the animation and activation, and consider time required for enough ticks of OG and CoF to nail most targets.

Not sure for who was the question but:

Scrappers: spines/dark, claws/dark, dual blades/dark, katana/dark, deleted: ma/dark, all 50
Tank: dark/dark (deleted)
Brutes: SS/dark (deleted), KM/dark (deleted), TW/dark as soon as the patch hits live

For what was stated above, Dark regen should not be "balanced" with healing flames/reconstruction because it's not a power - power balance but the whole set that has to be taken into account. DA has nothing in common with regen, it doesn't have dull pain, crazy regen or the ability to hide behing a corner and heal to full, it doesn't have MoG either. It needs a better heal simply to survive. In fact it's a lot closer to Fire Armor for all but one thing: Fire Armor has silly damage, DA doesn't. So DA needs a better heal, and the whole thematic of DA is to stand surrounded by mobs, else it wouldn't have 3 auras, an aoe based heal, and a self rez that needs several mobs around.

Actually DA is a lot more similar to Warshades in terms of how it works, quite like stygian circle and/or eclipse. Against a single mob, it sucks, it's way too endurance heavy, and it has low survivability. Add several mobs around and it becomes the best heal as well as having better survivability with the ability to render minions neutered with auras.

Regen is a set based on the opposite, to be the best against a single opponent. It doesn't have scaling buffs like WP or Invincibility to make up for it. So the smaller but more reliable heal fits well, and Fire armor, well, it's supposed to have less survivability as it offers way more in the damage department with two dedicated powers (burn and embrace) instead of the two auras DA gets.

Is the massive end cost, considering the rest of the set, required for balance with the large heal? Does the end cost of the set keep it in line with the sets you mentioned?

Yes.

And what from your experience with them makes you believe that Dark Armor is not viable?

Lets compare Dark Regeneration to Reconstruction. Reconstruction offers a 25% heal for 10.4 end. That is 2.4% heal per endurance point of cost. Dark Regen offers 30% heal per target for 33.8 end. That is 0.89% heal per endurance point per target. For Dark Regen to have approximately the same heal per end as Reconstruction requires hitting on average approximately 2.7 targets for an average heal of 81%. That is doable.

Dark Regeneration also has half the recharge of Reconstruction. Reconstruction offers 0.42% heal per second unslotted. Dark Regen offers 1% heal per second per target. Its superior to reconstruction in heal per second even if it only averages hitting one target.

So its hpe is better than reconstruction if it hits more than 2.7 targets on average. Its hps is far better than reconstruction if it hits anything at all.

So lets look at slotting. Suppose we slot both with SOs, and we ignore other outside bonuses. We would likely slot reconstruction 3heal/3rech, and end up with about 50% heal every 30 seconds (for our purposes, I think this approximation is good enough). Dark Regen would likely be slotted something like 1acc/3end/2rech, and that would give us 30% heal every 22.5 seconds, with reasonable accuracy in most situations. Recon's end cost would still be 10.4, Dark Regen's cost would be closer to 17. That's not a huge difference. Lets assume DR hits two targets on average under this slotting. That would make Dark Regen heal for 60% every 22.5 seconds and cost 17 end. That's a stronger heal than Reconstruction as slotted above, and its hpe would be 3.5%/end compared to Reconstruction's 4.8%/end.

That's better than Reconstruction's heal over time *and* its heal per endurance point. And that's using the heal assuming it will only average hitting two targets, and assuming no more than 60% heal per use, which does not require doing anything weird to "bottom out" health to maximize the return of Dark Regen.


But is there any downside to cutting the heal in half, the endurance cost in half, and the recharge in half? Yes: there are two deficits. The first is that you'd need to use it twice as often to get the same result. And that means more activations, and more time spend rooted in the heal. It seems to be common knowledge that regen is the most "clicky" secondary in terms of time spend executing clicks. That common knowledge is wrong. Suppose we take the case of two scrappers, one with Regen and one with Dark Armor, both using their clicks as fast as possible, and slotted with SOs. We imagine the Regen 3-slotting Dull Pain, Reconstruction, Instant Healing, and MoG all with three recharges. That's going to be a lot of rooted time. In arcanatime terms, that will be 0.924s for recon and Dull Pain, 1.32s for Instant Healing, and 2.772s for MoG. Three slotted with recharge the cycle times for those powers are 31.5s recon, 185.3s dull pain, 334.5s instant healing, and 125.6s MoG. The total percentage time spent in those clicks if they are cycled as fast as possible is 0.06, or 6%.

The time spent in Dark Regeneration with its current numbers slotted with just two recharge (as the example above) would be 1.32s root over 19.2s cycle time, or 0.069. 6.9%. Dark Regeneration with just one click spends more time rooted than a regen scrapper would if it 3-slotted every click for recharge and used them all constantly as fast as possible. Its actually more "clicky." Cutting everything in half would mean Dark Armor would be spending even more time casting Dark Regen than it does now to get the same result - a whopping 12.9% in fact. You could mitigate that by making sure to hit more targets and saturate the heal even at lower numbers, but not all players will be able to do that consistently, and especially at lower levels which are more problematic for Dark Armor. It would be a penalty on the players that have the most likely chance of having problems playing Dark Armor, while benefiting only the advanced players that already have no problems, and would now have an alternate way to optimize Dark Regeneration.

The second deficit is a little more subtle. Because recharge begins when cast time ends, recharge isn't a linear benefit: you can speed up recharge but not cast time, so you cannot reduce total cycle time proportionate to your recharge.

To wit: using the same slotting pattern of 1acc/3end/2rech, the current Dark Regeneration has a recharge of 30/1.666 = 18.0s and a total cycle time of about 19.2 seconds. Its heal per target is thus 30%/19.2s = 1.56%/s.

A variation with half the heal and half the recharge would have a recharge time of 15/1.666 = 9.0s and a total cycle time of 10.2 seconds. Its heal per target is thus 15%/10.2s = 1.47%/s. The current DR is 6% better per target.

As you stack recharge, the discrepancy only gets worse. Suppose we look at the case of having total slotted and global recharge of about 150% (Hasten, some bonuses, and slotting combined). The current DR would have a cycle time of 13.2s and a heal over time per target of 2.27%. A theoretical half-value DR would have a cycle time of 7.2s and a heal over time per target of 2.08%. The current DR is 9% better per target.

Get out.

Ps. Don't say 'Oh, it's for the freebies!' I used Dark Regen on SOs and it was fine - if you're saying Ogloom is doing a serious number on your HP, you are not trying anything that SOs should be allowing you to do.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Nothing of what I've said has been any more offensive than your own comments.

I only asked for you to put some concrete evidence up to support your lack of argument.

The problem with only choosing reconstruction for comparisons is that nowhere did Quick Recovery get factored in.

I never targetted you with that reply, but ok then.

Fair enough; that's my argument against regen for brutes. You have to play them a little differently than most sets.

Well honestly, if it had a more manageable end cost, Dark regen would be OP like that. As i said, it's a drawback required to balance the set overall goodness and potentiel. Because no other set, even regen, can go from bottom to full health so often in a single fight with a single power.

Dark Regen gives pretty much infinite health as long as the mob doesn't kill you before it's recharged. The whole challenge is to stay alive in that timeframe, and on the other hand, to manage the endurance. I like to see Dark regen as an endurance => life conversion on low levels/slotting more than a heal, that's why it heals such a stupidly large amount.

The whole set outside of Dark regen is quite heavy on endurance but nothing too bad as the auras aren't mandatory and can be managed. Dark regen on top of that adds the trick of hitting your blue bar a lot but giving you another life. So i'd say that it is indeed quite balanced. Don't forget that the end cost has nothing in common with regen or FA: both get end recovery tools. Their strong points are exactly to have infinite amount of endurance, while DA strong point is to have infinite amount of health on top of having already decent resists/def and CC... it has to have a huge drawback to balance that, and that is endurance.

Now just consider all the endurance tools available in the game: that's why i think DA is on the very good side of the food chain. There are plenty of tools to help with the endurance, more than there are to help with the health. DA scales very well with buffs, epic powersets, incarnates, procs, even accolades or temporary crafted buffs. So i think it's quite normal that if you consider the absolute worse setup (SO, low level, no buffs/outside help) it's bound to have it worse than other powersets with endurance. Though you might consider it has endurance drain resistance which helps a lot vs some ennemies out there.

One last tool, DA has a built-in self rez that can bring you from dead to full health/endurance with enough mobs around. That's effectively a full health/endurance heal if you happen to fail because of the endurance issue, and it works the same way: it needs mobs around, it's less effective with a single one, but it's the best self rez in the game if all conditions work. And dieing is nothing wrong, at some point i actually liked to rush in with my spines/dark, take alpha, dark regen, die on second volley, then self rez and stun everything so my team could take safely on a very hard spawn. I was used to suicide at some point and rez as well so i could get a full endurance heal when it was rough otherwise. That was during the leveling, years ago.

That should be an argument for regen for brutes. If sets all play the same, what's the point of having different sets?

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I still do both of these. I love having a full heal/end recovery tool like that. And the Mag 30 stun is flat-out awesome. I used it recently on a lamda on the last crate when I know that the two of us there couldn't take it out fast enough. I go in first, die, stun everyone, and I'm back to full. The brute follows and he and I get the crate before any but the bosses recovered. few seconds later we're outside watching a cutscene.

Factored into what?

If you are attempting to claim that there is a problem with Dark Regeneration holistically compared to every single powerset that has a heal good luck with that. Most of them have different maximum mitigation limits, different secondary features, and different design intents. Dark Armor, for example, has far more mitigation potential than Regen. So while Regen has lower damage mitigation, it has far higher endurance management control (by virtue of higher recovery). If you have a case to make to claim that Dark Armor pays too much for its much higher mitigation, I haven't seen it yet.

And the reason I picked Reconstruction to compare to is because you did:

Of the two, reconstruction is the better candidate because Healing Flames used to be identical to recon until it was boosted explicitly because Fiery Aura was seen to slightly underperform defensively. You can't buff HF and then demand everything else be balanced against HF for that reason.

In any case, Dark Regen is still by many measures the strongest heal in the game, which means as a heal its fine. Dark Armor as a whole is considered a very strong set, so the set as a whole is fine. The little problems in the set are just that: little problems in the set just like all sets have little problems. Part of playing sets is to leverage the strengths and handle the weaknesses. Of all the mitigation sets, Dark Armor has among the least significant sets of weaknesses out there, which means I see no explicit balance problem which would then propagate down to needing to adjust Dark Regeneration to address such a problem.

Heh that's awesome.

Excellent post. I actually forgot about the end drain part since I rarely run into that.

1. Factored into your reply.

2. I wasn't.

The main weaknesses are low resistance, nearly zero defense, massive end costs, no knockback protection, and requiring death to use the tier 9 stun/recovery/heal.

Strengths are already listed in your old guide, so I don't need to repeat those.