A Thought Experiment: Blaster, IOs and Regen

So with all the arguments about snipes and magic To Hit numbers it's relatively easy to forget the biggest change coming to Blasters in Issue 24: hugely increased regeneration. So this got me thinking, how much could a Blaster supplement this using IOs and how much of an impact would is have on his build? The answer ended up surprising me so I thought I'd post it here to see what others thought.

Power Requirements:
3 Powers that take Ranged Damage sets (AR and Electrical will need to take their Snipe or a power from their secondary but otherwise no problem for most Blasters)
2 Powers that take Healing Sets (Your new Sustain power and Health will work here)
2 Powers that take Defense Sets (For most Blasters this means pool powers but Hover, CJ Stealth and Maneuvers are all pretty popular for Blasters anyway so I don't see this as a huge problem)

Slotting:
In the three Ranged Damage powers frankenslot 2 pieces of Apocalypse, 2 pieces of Devastation and 2 pieces of Entropic Chaos (optionally the Devastation IOs can be replaced with two pieces of Overwhelming Force or Sting of the Manticore)
In the Healing Powers slot two pieces of Numina's Convalescence (including using the proc in one of them) plus slot the Regenerative Tissue: Regeneration into one.
In the defense powers slot two pieces of Luck of The Gambler (probably the +7.5% recharge one and either the Defense or the Defense/End depending on the power).

The Totals:
3 x Ultimate Regeneration Bonuses = 48%
5 x Huge Regeneration Bonuses = 60%
5 x Large Regeneration Bonuses = 50%
Numina's Convalescence: Regeneration/Recovery = 20%
Regenerative Tissue: Regeneration = 25%
Total: 203% Regeneration

Yuo can get it a bit higher but doing so is more Power Set specific. Electrical Blast and Mace Mastery are actually the best since they can use Soulbound Allegiance to pick up another Ultimate Regeneration Bonus. As a more general case a Blaster with a few melee attacks who uses Flight for his travel power could reasonably pick up 5 x Moderate Regeneration Bonuses using Pounding Slugfest and Freebird for another 40% regeneration (heck, for one slot you could always put one in Brawl).

Now for comparison we know that a Blaster with their Sustain power and Health slotted will have about +380% regen (the sustain will give about 320% slotted plus Health is 40%) so a Blaster building for regen could hit about +580% regen.

But what is the cost? Well it's hard to calculate but I'd probably peg the defensive cost at 11.25% Ranged Defense. The Healing and Defense powers aren't really impacted, you do lose the ability to 6-slot a Red Fortune in the Defense powers but I find that my Blasters rarely have the slots for that. So the primary cost I see is the loss of three Thunderstrike Sets in the single target attacks.

Now honestly I have no clue whether the regen or the defense would be better for survivability but I thought it was an interesting experiment.

EDIT: Ok, I had some further thoughts on this. If you have a total of 6 powers that take either Defense or Healing (count powers that take both twice but you need at least 3 Defense ones) you could reasonably drop down to only doing a Regen Frankenslot in two attack powers and potentially get another Thunderstrike set in at the cost of 16% regen. This is a lot more build dependent though.

A blaster with unslotted health starts at 140% regen. My primary blaster, Fire/Fire/Flame has 350% regen. With capped HPs she regens about 23.5 HP/sec. She also has 51% Sm/Le resists.

Another Fire/Fire/Force blaster of mine has 160% regen and falls just shy of the HP cap to regen 10.57 HP/sec. She also has 50% Sm/Le resists, 42% Def ranged/nrg/neg and 18% Sm/Le and most other defenses in the 17% range.

I don't know which I have an easier time running. Blaster B can do some things I would not consider with Blaster A, so I think B is likely the more survivable character. Due to the way regen interacts with other mitigation (including more regen) the changes should be vastly more significant to Blaster B. I took rebirth to fill that gap on blaster B, so getting it in set and earlier should be nice, although I am not sure what to drop for Cauterizing Aura, probably Inferno, which I took just for fluff, but maybe Fire Sword. And I still have to consider picking up Blazing Bolt too.

I'm a bit confused on what is coming in for blaster on I24. But what peaked my interest is your regeneration numbers because all my blasters are build for high regeneration. My Ar Dev posted is at 271 regeneration.

So I am trying to understand how I24 will become a boon for me.

Regeneration doesn't get more powerful the more of it you have though, unlike defense and resistance, so there's not going to be a greater benefit in building for it in the future than there is now.

For those of us that can't understand what 380% regen means, can we have a rough translation? HP/sec doesn't mean much either since I have no idea what a level 50's HP are and I never play there.

I remember Hawk saying that Sustain was going to be in the lines of 1% of the health bar per second, half of that slottable, so I'm thinking 1.5% of my health bar per second. I think this way of presenting things are easier for the math-illiterate.

Sure. So with no regeneration you regenerate 5% of your hit points every 12 seconds or on average 0.41666% every second. Regeneration scales linearly so every +100% in regeneration bonuses will increase your average regeneration by an additional 0.41666% per second.

So +380% regeneration means that you will regenerate an average of 2% of your maximum hit points every second (which is pretty close to the 1.5% you quoted).

Now the only caveat I will add here is that the actual in game mechanic doesn't actually restore hit points every second. Regeneration always comes in pulses of 5% so at that you will actually be Regenerating 5% of your hit point bar every 2.5 seconds.

Thanks. I know 2% per second doesn't sound like much and we'll still die in alphas, but I've been soloing my level 27 blaster that only has common IOs (and a Kismet) and I've found myself thinking that that noticeable regen would come in handy with downtime. The problem is not killing a spawn, its the bruises you're left with that makes the next one too much of a threat.

And conceptually, I like it better than def, res, and mezz protection.

Still not sure if it will be enough, but there's Beta for that.

EDIT: so 2% max HP/sec means a whole new health bar every 50 seconds. And the bonuses you mentioned adds up to 203% regen or 0.83% max Hp/Sec for a total of ~2.83% max HP / sec which translates into a whole new health bar every 35 seconds.

Not sure I like the idea of giving up Thunderstrikes for that, but I like the general direction.

Just had a quick look at this, as I built a fire/fire blaster with Regen when IOs first came out. It then got deleted pretty fast because survivability was still awful. My gut feel is that Regen on its own won't help much because of the speed at which a blaster (certainly my fire/fire) takes damage.

However, that was before Purple sets, so with that in mind...

My current Energy/Energy blaster is sitting at +90% regen from sets & uniques. This equates to a tick of 60hp every 6.32 seconds. I also have 40% to S&L as well as 43% to ranged, so "almost" soft capped. I also have 5 spare slots in Conserve power for slotting whatever Conserve power ends up looking like, so I'll have the additional benefits of that on top.

You mention below that this will equate to "320% regen, slotted". If I add that to my 90%, I end up with a tick every 2.35 seconds for 60hp when I24 hits. This is a massive improvement on its own.

If I were to max out regen, I would drop my defences to 38% S&L and 36% to ranged - still soft-cappable-with-a-purple. I'd also lose 3 force feedback procs. I'd boost my regen to +248% which would equate to a tic every 1.8 seconds (for 60hp). Without "Sustain", this would be a tick every 3.45 seconds

I think each person is going to have to look at it individually, but my gut is saying that I don't want to lose my defence and my FF procs as well as the +Recovery & +Accuracy in the 5 slotted thunderstrikes for a tick of health half a second sooner.

An interesting post though!

-H

This isn't related to the rest of the thread, just an aside I've been meaning to make about Regen as a survivability tool overall.

IMO you have to be careful with Regen models because they often leave out a risk of death factor that isn't directly present in either Resistance or Defense. Essentially, any time Regen is working, you are more vulnerable to death than if you were at full HP. How much more vulnerable depends on where you are on the scale. Most of Regen's benefit occurs within a "risk range"--for most people, probably at about 30-50% HP loss. If you lose any more than this, you start pushing your luck, and at that point an alternative HP restoration option (like popping a green) is ideal.

What's interesting about Regen is that since its partly based on placing yourself at risk, at least part of what is working against it is psychology. Any sudden, large loss of HP is likely to send the player scrambling to quickly restore the HP bar, even if the next chance for a big hit is low. Sometimes this restoral actually results in filling the HP bar by itself, cancelling the contribution from Regen.

In other words, what would IMO very rarely happen is for someone to take a lot of damage and actually let their HP bar slowly recover. Most would be more likely to be pro-active about trying to stay relatively full most of the time. It can thus be shown, in a sort of weird way, that Regen is less effective against burst damage. While this is understood implicitly, its impact on survivability models is difficult to project. Specifically, an enemy with a small chance to hit the player, but who is able to cause very large losses of HP when hits do land puts the player in a different survivability mode than if the damage arrives steadily.

I don't even know how absorb actually works, strictly speaking, but it seemed like it might be wise to go water/ice to diversify the mitigation even further. Is absorb protected by resistance but not by defense or something?

Thanks for the explanation, that is going to have a huge impact on the direction of my build!