Interface Quandary

Okay, I'm dusting off my level 40 Spines/Fire scrapper for 2xp weekend for the push to 50, after which I will be making him an Incarnate.

Now, for me, concept trumps all else. I do min/max and I am a little bit of a powergamer, but I do it all within the boundaries of my concept. That means no taking powers that don't work with the concept (i.e. a completely natural brawler type isn't going to be throwing fire, even if Blaze Mastery is the most powerful APP)

The quandary I have here is that 2 different Interfaces seem to be useful for what I plan on doing (level 50 tips at x8), and they both fit my concept. Those would be Reactive and Degenerative.

I'm familiar with Reactive and that was my original plan for this character, but the idea of the Degenerative -HP debuff sounds interesting and possibly useful against minions (I know it's pretty useless against AVs)

Has anyone tested Degenerative's -HP proc to see if it speeds up minion munching by lowering the amount of damage necessary to defeat them?

If Degenerative is at all useful I'm leaning toward going with that, just so I can not have reactive slotted like everyone and their grandmother. BUT.....I don't want to go through all the trouble of crafting and slotting it only to find out it's completely useless.

I would like some feedback from someone who has actually USED Degenerative on a character, and can give me some insight on its usefulness. I don't need people telling me Reactive is the best because it's the only one they've ever used.

I haven't actually used degenerative, so there's that straight out the window, but here's the conceptual problem I have with it: regardless of the magnitude of its -hp, it cannot possibly be useful unless it reduces the number of attacks that it takes to defeat a foe. The case of minions puts the problem in clear focus: you need to hit them with an attack in the first place to apply the debuff. This is an issue because as a scrapper I tend to want minions to die in two hits, tops. For that debuff to have any effect you must already be a sliver away from beating minions in your desired number of hits. If that is the case however, another problem arises: You know what tends to foreshorten defeat times better than debuffs? Powerful damage over time effects! If you do want to go degenerative, why not just go for tier 3 radial much as one would do with reactive?

With spines/fire in particular this all gets super muddy, though. That is, measuring the effectiveness of something like a -hp effect when you're already throwing around two damage auras, a pbaoe with a chance for additional damage, a low target high damage pbaoe damage patch, two cones that can do bonus damage... Who knows how many attacks it's taking you to defeat minions? Who knows which effect contributed to which minion's defeat? All we can say is that when you stand next to dudes they tend to fall over. In the spirit of that I reiterate my support for pursuing the damage proc as opposed to the debuff. It lets you make more overhead numbers and the more of those you make, the harder it is for your teammates to tell what's going on.

Well, my idea behind it is: It will have a chance to fire on the first tick of both damage auras, and every 10 seconds thereafter. It is a safe assumption that the first tick of my damage auras will occur before I fire an attack (if one also assumes that I jump in the crowd first instead of leading with Throw Spines, which I do tend to do)

If the proc fires on enough enemies when I jump into the crowd, it could potentially reduce the number of attacks necessary to defeat them down to 1. (probably Spine Burst)

The reason I was asking is because I have no experience with Degenerative to have any basis to speculate how well that will work.

This has made me realize that I have no idea how the timing works when you have two damage auras. Do they proc at the same time, based on some kind of server timer? Do their proc chances line up to their activation times, i.e. staggered when you first turn them on but thereafter coinciding once you've zoned once? The reason I wonder is because if each aura's proc chance were staggered then you would, I suspect, get much better results out of the debuff. You'd have two distinct chances every ten seconds, rather than one extra-large chance every ten seconds, for it to apply. This would make it more likely for any arbitrary alpha spawn-dive to contain a proc chance. I must say that I suspect that the auras proc at the same time most of the time for whatever underlying reason, and if that is accurate then that diminishes the proc's reliability of occurrence at any specific moment.

Also unclear: does degenerative reduce max HP by a fixed amount? Surely they wouldn't let you debuff that stat by a percentage. Further, is it affected by the purple patch? Given that things tend to be even when the devs don't want them to be, I would guess that the answer is yes. All of this is adding up to reinforce my suspicion that the damage is better than the debuff.

I don't recall ever reading anyone's post that actually had a high level Degenerative and used it. I have never used one either.

I am pretty sure, in the original discussion when Interface first came out, that Degenerative was deemed the worst of all Interfaces.

Looking at Paragon WIKI, and assuming two lucky hits that both Proc, stacking -3.5% of max HP twice (max stack is 4) would only reduce a 430.8 HP Level 50 Minion by 30.1 points. At Tier 3 that would require forgoing Any Toxic Dot for a 75% chance to Proc. To get any chance of the Toxic you have to drop to 50% or less -HP chance. 75% is the max chance for a -HP proc even at T4. I use two hits, as PleaseRecycle did, because two good AoE's will often take down all the minions anyway, without any interface. The effect vs AV's is a fixed -150 HP points per stack, according to Paragon WIKI. I feel the Earth quiver as Reichsman trembles. Even a generic AV will have 28,000 plus HP at Lvl 50. I suppose, in an extended fight vs an Elite Boss, if you could maintain a 4 stack for -750 HP approx. (-14% off 5354.5 HP), that would be useful, as reduced Max HP does also reduce Regeneration somewhat.

Just as with the Flat HP bonus in Rebirth Core vs the amazing Regen Bonus in Rebirth Radial, I think the Regen debuff in Diamagnetic was considered much more valuable vs hard targets. If you really don't want to do the obvious and take the Reactive, thus avoiding stacking conflicts on teams and that cookie cutter feeling, couldn't you consider your Interface Spine Toxin to be an agent that neutralized healing and also reduced an opponents ability to see, to think, or interfered with his coordination, any of which would justify a -To Hit?

Anyway, hope we hear from somebody who has actually used Degenerative, good or bad.

Jak

IIRC, Degenerative's -HP are set such that they mathematically match the effects of Reactive's -DR, except for AVs and GMs, where Arbiter Hawk had what I can only describe as a mental block causing him to relate -HP to damage. He would not allow -HP which removed such a large absolute number of HP, even though, functionally, the result is the same as slapping -DR on them.

I don't know that the -DR of Reactive is particularly noticeable in beating up minions compared to the Radial version's damage component, because their time to defeat is pretty low to start with. Therefore, I wouldn't expect Degenerative's -HP debuff to be particularly noticeable either. It's on harder targets, probably bosses and up, that the effect becomes really noticeable, and unfortunately, it's gutted compared to Reactive on the top end of those targets.

the regen debuff in diamagnetic is actually pretty useless vs hard targets due to their resistance

degenerative on the other hand does flat values for -hp so it does -600 hp on strong targets, while on stuff like reichs thats like a drop in the pool, on most AVs thats a decent bit and will do more -regen than diamagnetic cause diamagnetic will get debuffed into the ground

also, degenerative does some DOT as well while diamagnetic does useless -tohit which is also ineffective against large targets

I am not sure on numbers since no minion live long enough to justify using power analyser on them. However from checking on rikti training drones with power analyser, I know %75 DoT degenerative does around %3.5 max HP (drones have 10000 HP and degen does -350 hp on them for each stack) reduction for each stack. For minions I don't think there will be that much difference even with AoE damage. +4 council minios have around 450 hp so one stack of degenerative decrease their hp by 15.75 hp not much of a difference if you ask me. Now on a boss it would be around 100 hp for a stack.

However max HP reduction is effected by regen debuff protection. Pylon has around %87 regen protection and 30677 hp from normal calculation it should have 1074 hp reduced but it only gets 150 hp reduction.

If we need to compare it with reactive (I assume this is also %75 DoT one) reactive does -%2.5 resistance reduction however resistance debuff reduce this number by its portion. For example pylon has %20 resist to all damages with one reactive stack its resistance drops to %18 rather than %17.5 becuase %2.5's %20 reduced as well. So to get 150 damage out of pylon you need to do 7500 damage while reactives debuff continues.

From this point a lucky hit with degen can kill pylon quiet early (I got this once there was still 1000 hp on pylon and my hard hitter with crit only does 750 damage but it killed pylon with it) however on long run reactive probably stack more (even if one stack keeps half of the time it doubles degen's damage)

A few points to consider. Is dropping max hp also drops current HP if current HP is already under where it should drop? In an easier way is -150 hp on pylon does drops its current hp by 150 too? If not other than effecting regen directly -max hp is pretty useless. Second thing to consider is if it drops current HP too, does current hp restored too once -max hp debuff removed and max hp restored?

If current HP restored with max HP upon end of debuff than this is also bad news since on a long attack it would be like not having an upper hand at all unless you can make last few hits debuff your opponent.

If current HP does not restore with max HP than it means each time you stack this debuff it does 150 hp damage to pylon.

Unfourtunatly I don't know answers to these questions but either way degen is only useful against boss or higher opponents with a low regen debuff protection.

EDIT: Just tried degen on a rikti EB at RWZ and it had 5.6k hp degen did -187 hp to him.

I have it on my crab. On level 50 AVs and Pylons each proc hits for about -1000hp so at 4 stack you're looking at about -4000 max hp. That will effect regen and overall fight duration as that last 10% hp is already taken care of for you when you get there.

I posted screenshots about this on a degenerative thread a few weeks ago since some of the info floating around is incorrect. Not sure if it's been buffed from its original introduction but as it is now its pretty decent. I don't know the exact formula behind it though.

Edit: here's my post w/screens from the thread I mentioned. Also note that while AV screens are not shown, I tested against a 50 Tyrant AV and the results were similar to Pylon. - http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...8&postcount=11

That suggests it is now granting near the -3.5% MaxHP even against Pylons and AVs. -3.5% MaxHP against a Pylon would be 1073.7 HP.

It definitely did not work that way at its release. The data at RedTomax concurs.

I wrote my post after my run to a pylon a 54. AV and an eb in RWZ. It was definitly doing -150 max hp debuff on pylon and AV last night or at least that was what power analyser was showing to my scrapper.

I tried both on just now at live and beta these are the results
Live https://sites.google.com/site/emeral...2-11-32-36.jpg
1 stack on beta https://sites.google.com/site/emeral...2-11-41-00.jpg

3 stack on beta https://sites.google.com/site/emeral...2-11-41-11.jpg

So my bet is both buff on i22 and a simple code correction of how stacks shown (both total debuff added correctly and instead of from self it properly says character name) in power analyser as well :P

Nice. AFAIK, that's hasn't been in the Beta patch notes.

Perhaps not an actual buff to the amount it does, but instead they just made it so the debuff is unresistable?

But with the amount as low as it is, it sounds like Reactive will be a better bet for my purposes. I didn't realize the amount was quite that low.

Pylons have 87% debuff resistance, though, so I don't think that's it.

Just checked on live with I22, the 'buff' did transfer over. So each proc knocks off -1000 on pylon for a max of -4000. Regen on a pylon drops from 102 hp/sec to around 89 hp/sec.

Interesting result from my current pylon run.

T4 radial reactive 4m 19s this is close to my usual results from pylons which is 4m 22s.

T4 radial degenerative 3m 31s. Now I need a few more run to see if this is just a lucky number or an avarage one but my best with T4 radial reactive was 3m 50s so even if this is a lucky one it still beat my best wit reactive by almost 20 second. I think this is becuase of not only max HP debuff acting like a DDR (as UberGuy pointed out earlier in the thread) but also -max HP is dropping regen as well.

EDIT: Second run with T4 radial degenerative is 3m 40s so I guess previous one although beinga lucky one it is still granting more DPS than T4 radial reactive.

I remember when I was screwing around with it on beta, I was testing on PI giant monsters. When I had Degen slotted I wittled it down pretty easily without paying a whole lot of attention.

In terms of minion munching, the DoT isn't THAT much weaker than Reactive's and I can't imagine the -Res is going to make a huge difference versus -MaxHP. Also, with the new trials being higher level mobs, I think degen's -MaxHP may shine a bit more against those sturdier mobs. If anything, I'll know my DoTs aren't going to waste since everyone's using Reactive.

The night before I22 I finally got a T3 Radial Degenerative on my DB Scrapper.. I can tell you that 75% chance of Toxic DoT fired... A LOT! I noticed a big boost in my damage.. no.. not Reactive numbers but quite good!