Breakdown of Blaster i24 Performance

It's a bit of a tricky question, calculating how much more survivable +Regen makes you.

For example if I said you will be taking 10,000 points of damage over a peroid of one minute, but have a regen of 10,000 points of damage over the same period, a damage model might assume I had taken zero damage. After all, I'm losing exactly as many HP as I get back.

But let's change the statement. Instead of taking 10,000 points of damage over a period of one minute, you will be taking 0 damage for the first thirty seconds, 3,000 damage at the 30 second mark, and the remaining 7,000 damage over the remaining period.

What makes Regen tricky is that if you ever hit either max or min HP, it basically stops doing anything extra. The benefit is in returning to Max HP (or at least toward it), not in sitting there.

In the example above, what happens after the 30 second mark is irrelevant, because you are dead. Regen provided no benefit at all for the first thirty seconds of the fight, because you were already capped; it didn't stack its benefits up in preparation for a big HP loss. Because of this, it provided no benefit at the thirty second mark, and after that you are dead. It certainly can add a lot of survivability, but it can also essentially add zero depending on how the damage arrives.

Thanks for pointing out the calculation errors.

Thinking defense was a 95% reduction vice 90% is a clear error in both math and mindset.

I'm sticking to my guns regarding base Health versus a fully slotted Drain Psyche. That sort of thing happens in games because folks use Health to carry things like Miracle +Recovery IO's.

The comparative context is perfectly valid because the first Blaster takes 100 DPS in a lot of situations - two +1/0 spawns can generate and sustain that kind of damage, for instance, assuming you've got a LT in there. Ergo losing 6.25% of your life as a Blaster per second happens quite often.

Regen as an effect is just more amazing if you have less incoming damage and therefore the comparison becomes wider if you're taking less damage than that. I would agree completely with the 70x number if you're using as the comparative the value needed to damage the first Blaster at all, which incidently is about 9.78 DPS. It'd take well over 800 damage to damage the second guy.

I think we'll quibble about the numbers because I get there in a different way - you build the numbers abstractly and I try to figure out the absolute damage required to do 1 damage to the build - but I think we can both agree that the endstate numbers are absurd.

One thing we haven't talked about is that Blaster AOE will rapidly reduce the incoming damage number in a large spawn. Blasters do good AOE typically, Mental Manipulation itself is pretty good at it, so the spawn with the numbers necessary to actually generate damage against the DP blaster will die rapidly, whereas the Health guy will evaporate before he can take most of 'em out.

DS blasters who build for defense don't have any issues surviving the 1.3 seconds of aggro they need to get the full benefit and, typically, they get the ability off before mobs realize that a Blaster is about.

I question how much people play on the edge. I would bet that the majority of players do not alter their difficulty settings and play at +0/x1. They can survive that easily, but they don't know or don't bother changing the difficulty.

I base this on teaming and seeing people's difficulty settings when you look at available missions.

Hmm. Many of the spawns standing around overworld maps are bigger than +0x1 so I don't think it's true most players don't consider it. I think most players probably consider an amalgamation of solo instances, overworld fights, and what it "feels" like on a team. Even if you just mainly run past enemies outdoors you're still likely to notice if you don't stand a chance against them.