Willpower: Comparing the Heal Sets and Where to Put Them

Hello!

After getting the whole Overwhelming Force set off the Summer Event, I noticed how improved my stats were, and went on a bit of a Set IO binge. It speeds up the game wonderfully when you can 1- or 2-shot anything that isn't yellow or higher. :P I've pretty much stopped doing anything but logging in once a day to play the Summer Event, get the OF, and flip it at WW's for Scrapper's Strike and recipes and salvage to make more enhancements to flip for more Scrapper's Strike. I've got 4 of 6 so far.

So, yeah, bit of a binge.

Which brings me to my present puzzle. I primarily play solo, and Dark Melee isn't a hugely flashy set, power wise. I'd like to maximize the regeneration benefit I'm getting from Willpower, but I'm a bit confused about which IO Sets offer the best healing/HP benefits, and what Willpower powers they should be slotted in for maximum effect.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

AT, Powersets: Level 24 Dark Melee/Willpower Scrapper
Scrapper's Strike: Slotted in Smite
Overwhelming Force: Slotted in Shadow Maul
Willpower Powers (So Far): High Pain Tolerance, Mind Over Body, Fast Healing, Indomitable Will, Rise to the Challenge, Quick Recovery

Right now, High Pain Tolerance has 3 slots and the rest have 1. I was waiting until I had a bit more information before I distributed more slots when I hit level 25.

I've got nine (?) willpower scrappers/brutes/tanks/stalkers in my stable of characters, and all the but the stalker are slotted with healing IO's thusly:

High Pain Tolerance: Numina's Heal, Numina's Heal/End (yes, HPT costs no endurance, but they're cheaper than Heal/Recharge), one generic Heal IO. 12% regen bonus, 111.3% (before ED) towards "more hit points." (And that leaves me 3 slots for resistance IO's.)

Fast Healing: Numina's Heal, Numina's Heal/End (see above), one generic Heal IO, one Regenerative Tissue proc. 12% regen bonus, 111.3% (before ED) towards "max healing" from that power, plus the +25% healing from the RT proc.

Rise to the Challenge: Numina's Heal, Numina's Heal/End (hey, this DOES use endurance! Might as well take advantage of it), one Heal IO. 12% regen bonus, 111.3% towards "I heal faster when surrounded."

Health: Numina's +Regen/+Recovery, Numina's Heal, Miracle +Recovery, Miracle Heal. Another 12% regen bonus, 2.5% recovery bonus, 79.9% towards "more healing."

These 14 slots let me cram in all three of the old (pre-Panacea) healing uniques, maximize the healing/extra hit points from all the powers except Healing (which is the weakest of the four) and use my extra slots in things like defense and attacks. It might not be the best use of slots, but it was the best my friends and I could come up with a few years ago -- I'm interested to see better ways to do it now, too!

For increasing regeneration, although it's somewhat counterintuitive, WP benefits from +hp set bonuses at least as much as +regen. Regeneration is proportional to your max health, and Willpower already has pretty high regen just from powers, so multiplying the regen you already have with +hp is often better than adding slightly to it with +regen.

In short: don't neglect the 3-piece Numina set bonus.

What Hopeling said. Three-slotting Numina in several locations adds a great deal to Willpower's strengths. Of course, that's one of the most expensive heal sets... but you'll notice the difference, I think. ^_^

Further to the above, if you replace the generic Heal IO with the Heal/Recharge from the Numina's set and use three enhancement boosters on the Numina's Heal enhancement then the Regeneration value is back into ED territory. If you boost the Heal enhancement five times then you're within 1% of where you were with the generic.

In Paragon City since June 2005.

Slightly offtopic, but WP generally gets more out of building for additional defense than extra regen. The reasoning being, stacking multiple layers of mitigation is good, and as you already have high regen to start with (especially as a Dark Melee with Siphon Life adding even more healing into the mix), you get a proportionally less amount of extra regen from any IOs, compared to someone who would start from nothing.

So, beyond enhancing your regen powers with healing sets, which tend to have regen and HP bonuses, it's often best to focus on defense bonuses with your other armors or attacks.

Mason, do you have a copy of Mids Hero Designer? It allows you to plan all your builds outside the game, so you can do things like slot the different healing sets and see what benefits they give the character without needing to waste inf or respecs.

Mids Hero Designer.


Also, if you'd like to get some tips for making inf faster, then the Market forum is a good place to look (and is full of lovely, helpful people). Organica has a thread there at the moment about getting a character from 0-50 and fully slotted with IOs in a month that has a lot of great info.

As I mentioned, I was looking forward to new and better ways of doing things, too! Old dog, new tricks, and all that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hopeling In short: don't neglect the 3-piece Numina set bonus.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Organica What Hopeling said. Three-slotting Numina in several locations adds a great deal to Willpower's strengths. Of course, that's one of the most expensive heal sets... but you'll notice the difference, I think. ^_^

Quote:

Originally Posted by Feefa J Further to the above, if you replace the generic Heal IO with the Heal/Recharge from the Numina's set and use three enhancement boosters on the Numina's Heal enhancement then the Regeneration value is back into ED territory. If you boost the Heal enhancement five times then you're within 1% of where you were with the generic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nihilii Thirding that. In any power but RttC, Numina Heal, Numina Heal/End, Numina Heal/Rech gets you more HP and hence effective regen than Numina Heal, Numina Heal/End and a generic heal IO, thanks to the HP bonus. In RttC, the two Numi + 1 heal IO slotting makes sense due to its much larger regen buff.

More hit points = more healing! Oh yeah!

Er...wait a second. So I swapped out my 2-Numina's/1 Generic in HPT and in Fast Healing, went with 3-Numina's [Heal, Heal/End, Heal/Rech] and this is what I got (with RttC turned completely off for number crunching*):

Old setup: 482% regen, 2.01% health/second, 39.54 hp/sec, total hit points 1967, 49.74 seconds from 0 HP to "full."

New setup: 479% regen (but of more hit points!), 1.99% health/second, 40.11 hp/sec, total hit points 2010, 50.13 seconds from 0 HP to "full."

Builds below if anybody cares to check my math, but I personally don't find a paltry 43 hit points and less than half a hit point per second anything close to the "earth-shatteringly better" that I was kind of hoping for. (Actually, somebody PLEASE check my math -- I'd love to be wrong on this one and have done something stupid on the new build!)

Yes, I'll probably do it for my "main" but I'm not sure I want to throw 25 or 50 million (recipes today, crafted IO today) per slot out there for that sort of performance -- I think this is definitely into "diminishing returns" territory, which if there's any sort of budget involved, might be skippable.

Edit: I'm wondering if this boost from triple Numina's might not be more noticeable on, say, WP brutes or tanks, since they've got more hit points?

Also, this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nihilii Slightly offtopic, but WP generally gets more out of building for additional defense than extra regen. The reasoning being, stacking multiple layers of mitigation is good, and as you already have high regen to start with (especially as a Dark Melee with Siphon Life adding even more healing into the mix), you get a proportionally less amount of extra regen from any IOs, compared to someone who would start from nothing. So, beyond enhancing your regen powers with healing sets, which tend to have regen and HP bonuses, it's often best to focus on defense bonuses with your other armors or attacks.

When I first IO'd my scrapper above, I focused on what I thought were the basics, like improving inherent things such as the already high regen, and wound up getting some decent defense bonuses along the way -- and my survivability went up a couple notches. Then I started reading these forums, started trying to focus on defense first, regen second, and my survivability went up SEVERAL more notches!

WP's base resistances plus regen make it a pretty good set just with SO's -- start adding that third layer of defense and they can get VERY strong indeed!

Old setup:

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New improved setup:

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(*There's no "standard" for posting WP builds, and I'm constantly looking at someone else's builds and gasping at how awesome (or miserable) their regen rate is compared to mine -- until I realize they've got RttC turned off, or set to "max." I like to leave all mine at "1 enemy" but seem to be in the minority.)

Thanks for all the responses. I'm really going to have to study these more before I make a decision.

Is there a reason no-one's mentioned the Panacea set? Aside from the fact it's horribly expensive?

Also, Mids appears to be Windows only, and the web-based one on that page says it's only current through Issue 16. Is it still usable? (I'm on a Mac.)

My guess would be that the 3 slot bonus from Miracle (+HP) is considered better than the 3 slot bonus for Panacea (Regen).

A good, generic melee set is Crushing Impact, it ranges from 30-50. Good enhancement value, not too rare or expensive, decent set bonuses. Many people prefer to use some of the other sets and try to stack defense. That can be pretty powerful, but it is kind of expensive.

Does no one six-slot any of the Heal enhancement sets?

Numina's isn't bad for the Ranged defense. For the most part though, a lot of the sets don't have super 6th bonuses. At best I usually 5 slot like Doctored Wounds or Regenerative Tissue for the Recharge bonus

My top tip for boosting survivability for /WP and /Inv scrappers is to run 2 trios of the scrapper ATIOs, catalyzed to purples, which gives +10% vs. smash/lethal. That, combined with a couple 4-piece Kinetic Combats, the Steadfast Protection unique and the (with judicious shopping at WW and converting) the PvP +3def IO can send your toughness in most situations through the roof.

Edit: Just noticed you were in your mid-20s. I wouldn't start worrying about final build slotting until you hit 50. Getting powers like tough and weave and frankenslotting Siphon Life for max heal and damage will be big difference makers. Ultimately, building for smash/lethal def bonuses will probably yield much more than targeting health and regen.

My two cents, having leveled a Willpower/Fire tank and spent about 4 billion on IO sets:

Put in standard IO's while leveling. Level 30's will last you all the way to 50.

Once you hit 50, go to the scrapper forums. Find a build that has all typed defense soft capped and respec your character to match the build. Build a set of generic level 50 IO's and slot them up. Add the Set IO's that are specified by the build you selected as you can afford them while playing.

Play the character as much as you can to build influence along with selling everything that drops. Do the alignment missions, task forces and the WTF to get merits to trade for the more expensive IO's.

It takes time to build a great character, but Willpower is a wonderful power to base it off from. I wish my scrapper had been able to start off as Willpower. I would enjoy him a lot more than I currently do.

I emphasize E/N over S/L myself.

Reasons:

-WP has decent S/L resistance already, but very little in the way of E/N resistance. If you focus on S/L first, you're going to find that pure Energy or Negative Damage is going to tear you up.

-WP has no End Drain resistance, and the majority of pure Energy attacks come with End Drain as a secondary component.

-Heightened Senses gives you a good amount of E/N defense to start with, and very little S/L defense. It is easier to build up E/N defense early and work on S/L defense later.